The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Conversations with Leaders and Founders of Marketing Agencies, sharing wisdom on how they built their company, lessons they wish they knew when they started, and marketing and agency strategies for the months and years ahead.

Growing Relationships With Key Clients To Build Your Marketing Agency 04/24/2024

Becoming Inspired to Build a Cybersecurity Business To Support Other Businesses 04/10/2024

From Merger to Mastery: Transforming Into a Comprehensive Digital Partner 03/27/2024

A Journey of Growth and Learning With Jon Morris 03/13/2024

Insights From Jon Tsourakis on Navigating Success in the Marketing Industry 02/28/2024

Building Success, Overcoming Challenges, and Harnessing AI for Growth 02/14/2024

From Co-Workers to Agency Owners: The Story of Little Hands of Stone 01/31/2024

Expert Advice for Agency Owners: Rob Kischuk on Business Growth and Scaling Teams 01/17/2024

On Generosity, Integrity, Raising the Goal, and Doing it NOW! 06/08/2022

On Generosity, Integrity, Raising the Goal, and Doing it NOW! Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH) Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.” Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing. Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client’s hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific. Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don’t fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it’s important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.” Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words, I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don’t want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don’t want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency’s franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community. Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years. When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business. Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency’s DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency’s “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members’ personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.” Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business’s equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise. Joe can be reached on his agency’s website at , by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe. JOE: Rob, great to be with you today. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm’s specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it. JOE: We’re the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that. When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We’re the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We’re one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards. ROB: Wow, congratulations. There’s a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let’s peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What’s a typical engagement look like? JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we’re talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them. Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today’s world, and particularly within the franchising space. ROB: That’s a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that’s interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What’s the mix of touchpoints there? JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there’s different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there’s also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they’re looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel, and then we can from there figure out their cost per quality applicant by channel and then develop a marketing mix that’s going to allow them to continue to grow. ROB: There’s a lot going on there. Over time we’ve seen different platforms that have tried to jump to the forefront to help, I think, organizations like ChoiceLocal, handle marketing for multilocation, for franchises. What’s the state of the tool ecosystem for this? Has any tool that tries to help with this problem and actually create a library of content to push out to different locations worked? Or has it not worked and you end up building some of those solutions yourselves? How do you look at dozens of locations, different local needs, some shared content, that sort of thing? JOE: There are a lot of agencies that will come in and sell franchise systems, their own proprietary tech in order to bring that about. What we’ve generally found is when these marketing agencies bring in their proprietary tech, it’s more in the agency’s interest and less in the interest of the franchisor and the franchisee. Essentially, it’s “Here, take this marketing solution. Take our proprietary tech, and then it’s impossible for you to leave us.” That’s how they set that up, and it can create some difficulty and a lot of angst within these different franchise systems. When working in the franchising space, what you need to do is build a win-win ecosystem where the franchisor wins, the franchisee wins, and as a byproduct of that, as the agency you win as well. There’s a whole host of various tools in this, from Rallio to WebPunch to SOCi. There’s a lot of others. Yext. These are all various powerful tools that can be used and deployed. There’s other powerful tools in the call tracking space, too. You have companies like CallRail who do a really strong job with this, with call analytics and those types of things. The job of the agency is to find the right tools that are right for that franchise system while also using their agency buying power to leverage economies of scale and do what’s in the best interest of their client partners. ROB: If I hear you correctly, there’s not a one-size-fits-all best franchise management tool. It is a little bit of a best of breed, it’s a what are the needs of your particular brand/set of stores, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is Yext, maybe sometimes you bring CallRail to the table. You’re the experts, and you’re prescribing the menu that you recommend. JOE: Yeah, that is right. One thing, too, as you follow these companies – depending on how much they’re investing in R&D, how much they’re willing to listen to their customer, how much they’re willing to allow their agency partners to fuel their product roadmap and guide their product roadmap – that’s really how you’re going to pick your partners, in large part. There’s a lot of these SaaS companies that are not very customer service minded. They’re more like “Get in, sign up for a product, and then leave us alone” kind of deal, and as an agency, that’s not the kind of partner you’re looking for. You’re looking for ones that will invest in making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers. Why I say that is that’s something to look out for in the beginning. And the other reason I say that is the companies that are willing to invest in their customer service also tend to invest in their product development, and you’ll notice there’s ebbs and flows of who’s good and who’s bad when they do this. And things change, so you’ve got to find a partner that’s always looking to change and adapt with the market as it changes and evolves. ROB: It’s interesting how the cast of characters has changed. When I google for this problem space, Hootsuite is out there, Content and Sprout are out there contending for just a small slice of that franchise deal. But you know they’re chasing every other vertical in social as well. I can certainly appreciate – we’re in Atlanta; CallRail is a neighbor company here. Do you know their roots a little bit? It’s an interesting background on them. JOE: It’s a really neat company. ROB: The founder started off with a site to help people with BMWs that were out of warranty to find a local repair shop. My understanding is if you have a BMW that’s out of warranty, you need a local repair shop. That’s what I’ve heard. So, he started off doing lead gen for these local shops and then built call tracking to help prove the value of his BMWershops.com website, and ended up building CallRail from it. JOE: What’s neat about CallRail, too, is they really have come in – there’s a lot of companies that historically have played in that place, and they really trounced them. Some of their advanced features and some of their call analytics, listening to calls, transcribing calls, turning them into qualified leads, or basically saying what’s a qualified lead, what’s a hot lead, what’s not a lead, and how they built some of that technology – it’s pretty cool stuff. ROB: Yeah, there’s a tremendous customer focus there. I do want to shift gears for a moment; I want to get to the origin story of ChoiceLocal. What led you to create this firm? What led you to this point of focus, of all the areas you could have focused on helping and niches you could have served? JOE: I served at a company that served multibillion dollar companies. I was a Vice President of Operations of Product Development there. We served Fortune 500 companies – FedEx, CBS, other multibillion dollar publicly traded companies. That’s where I spent my day and that’s who I served. We built a team of 180 full-time digital marketers. Kind of a neat story. Started as employee #8, within a few years worked my way up to VP of Ops and Product Development and did that. It was cool. I learned a lot and I had some really great mentors while I was there. The owners there have done some really amazing things outside of agency, just building multimillion dollar companies and multibillion dollar companies and taking some of them public, like NCS Healthcare and others. So, I learned a ton while I was there over that 10-year period. Then in 2012, we had a pregnancy. Went into an ultrasound room with my wife and there was no heartbeat. So we lost our son, Ben, pretty late in the pregnancy. I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don’t want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don’t want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” That’s actually how ChoiceLocal got started. In its simple form, our mission always has been – our mission and our core values were written prior to even having a business plan – our mission is help others. We help our partners succeed, our franchisor and franchisee partners, help their dreams and aspirations become a reality. We help our teammates’ dreams and aspirations become a reality. We’ve been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio five years running. We have a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s, which is unheard of high. You ask people, “What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?”, the answer is 30. We’re hanging out in the 70s. So, we really work to live that mission and really care about others. Working in the agency space, a lot of agencies will bring in talent, they will work them like crazy for like five years until they burn out, and then they leave and they go in-house. Having experienced that and have friends who’ve experienced that in other companies, I wanted to do something fundamentally different. That’s why we founded ChoiceLocal and built it the way that we have. But our mission of help others is also giving back. We take 10% of the profits out of the company and we use it to help kids in need. Our big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year. We created the Benjamin Isaac Foundation, named after our son, Ben. We just gave a home to a single mother with three kids. Her name is Brie; she’s got three beautiful boys. We just had their house dedication two weekends ago, and that was through Habitat for Humanity. We were the sole sponsor for the home. Got to meet her beautiful boys. We helped them move in, had the housewarming and a dedication. It was so cool. It’s just so cool. We do tons of other stuff like that. So far this year – it’s now June, and we are at a little over 6,000 kids that we’ve helped through various charities that we partner with. ROB: Well, 4,000 more to go and then another goal. JOE: Yes, raise the goal. ROB: There’s a depth in that origin story. I think something that is interesting to think through – when you have a team, when you’re giving to causes, how do you connect the day-to-day of what the team is doing to the causes that the company is giving to and really ensure that there’s an authentic connection there? I think it can be very disconnected sometimes. Here’s the owner, here’s the team, we’re building this stuff, some money got shot out over here – to a good cause, but maybe it doesn’t feel relevant to the day-to-day. So how do you think about connecting the team to the cause? JOE: That’s a great question. It’s a really great question. The first thing is we hire for people that have the core values that we have. Family, giving, integrity in all things. There’s certain ways that you can interview people to make sure that they have those. And if you actually study some of the psychology behind it, if you study various hiring techniques that are used in books like Topgrading and WHO and those types of things, there’s ways you can interview for those core values and competencies to screen people out that don’t have that. So, you’re hiring people that believe what you believe and then you’re coming into a culture that celebrates those core values and celebrates those things. For example, we have a team meeting every single month where we update on everything that’s happening in the agency, what’s going on with business strategy. We’re transparent on financials and performance and all of those things so everybody can see what’s going on. We have a part where we talk about help others and core values. In core values, people nominate teammates and they celebrate how they live those core values out, and we tell those stories. A lot of those core values are how we help our partners and internally, but it’s also how we give back. And then we tie in our financial performance. We then say, “Because we were able to do this, we were able to give Brie and her three boys this gift.” We make it very personal. Along those lines, we also have quarterly volunteering. We try to get every teammate to volunteer once a quarter so they can see, feel, and touch the work they’re doing. My personal favorite is when we go to the Boys and Girls Club of America. Those kids need love, they need support, they need good mentors, and when you go there, you feel fantastic afterwards because you’ve been able to deliver some of that for them. So that’s really powerful. And then we also do this BHAG walkthrough. BHAG stands for big hairy audacious goal. We have this roadmap, and then we say, “Here’s three kids that were helped because of this. Here’s 1,600 kids that were fed for a year in a place of education.” We did this charity giveaway through our annual thing at the International Franchise Association called the ChoiceLocal 10k Charity Giveaway. People enter a drawing giveaway. There’s a really cool story – there’s a woman who served as a board member of the International Franchise Association; today she owns about 20 Taco Johns franchises. Very successful businesswomen. She picked the Great Harvest Heartland as her charity, and she ended... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/23360258

How to Bring the “Little Guy” to the TOP 06/16/2022

How to Bring the “Little Guy” to the TOP Rafi Arbel, President, Market JD (Chicago, IL) Rafi Arbel is President at Market JD, an internet-based advertising that focuses its work on “increasing visibility” for small law firms specializing in personal injury and workers’ compensation cases. With the kind of clientele the agency serves, the written content has to be extremely precise and accurate. That’s why the firm currently employs 3 attorneys. Rafi is one of them. The agency provides websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, reputation management, and content production. The work split is about 65% to 70% personal injury and 55% (overlapping) worker’s compensation legal firms. Rafi says, “Everybody can build a website and everybody can claim they do SEO or pay-per-click well.” Because this work is so labor-intensive and the details are numerous and critical, Rafi believes that those “who do it well” are not only those with knowledge, but those who have built a process to ensure consistent, high-quality outcomes. People have to know what they are doing, set an end objective, figure out the tasks to get it done, assess and respond to feedback, and do it “consistently over and over again. Because Rafi practiced law for 6 years, he has represented people. Following a passion for selling and “engaging people,” he worked for Thompson Reuters and spent a number of years selling for Findlaw and Westlaw. Then, he went back for his MBA and again, and decided to change course, this time to become an entrepreneur. With this varied background and because he has been promoting small law firms for over 20 years, he understands what lawyers do, “how they do it, and how to position them.” In this interview, Rafi notes how SEO has changed over the years, that searching for broadhead terms, “Chicago injury lawyer” or “Nevada workers’ compensation lawyer” renders a lot of paid ads at the top of the page so that even if a firm organically appears below that in the map section or even below that, the likelihood that SEO will produce much traffic is negligible. Or the firm’s won’t show well because Google’s Local Service ads take up the top of the page, followed by Google Ads below that. A big portion of the top of the screen gets taken up by all those paid ads . . . especially on mobile. So, broadhead SEO is not of great benefit to lawyers. What does work are longtail searches. Rafi says the great race now is to “capture the longtail searches’ to find “the corners that the big guys don’t see.” As an example, Rafi talks about a Nevada client . . . a personal injury lawyer who, unlike his big competitors, does not have$40,000 or $50,000 a month to spend on SEO. What the attorney does have is a lot of experience representing people who have suffered sepsis and whose doctors failed to treat it correctly. Medical malpractice? Not many Nevada lawyers work in that area. By building comprehensive content to cover sepsis and medical malpractice, Market JD is carving out a unique niche for the lawyer’s business and building a moat around the lawyer’s business as well. Few competitors in that specific area will be willing to invest the resources to match this project. Rafi says the best way to contact him is to call him at: 312.970.9353 or email him at . (Market JD like Juris Doctor) ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Rafi Arbel, President at Market JD based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Rafi. RAFI: Thank you, Rob. Nice to be here. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about Market JD, and what is the company’s superpower? What is your specialty? RAFI: Market JD is an internet-based advertising firm. We only work for small law firms. People think that we work for lawyers; it’s much narrower than that. We really don’t work for the big firms. They have their own marketing needs that are very different. We really focus on small law firms. We do everything that they need online to increase their visibility, which means we do websites, we do search engine optimization, pay-per-click, some reputation management, and of course, the content production. Your question was what is our superpower. What I have learned over the years is that everybody can build a website and everybody can claim they do SEO or pay-per-click well. What differentiates those who do it well from those who don’t is not just knowledge, but process. Because each of these things is so labor-intensive, and because there are so many details that have to get done right, you have to build a process behind every one of them. The process should really dictate the outcome. If you are making sure all of your t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, then you should get a consistent, high-quality product every time, assuming you know what you’re doing. Over the years we’ve gotten feedback, like everybody else, of what works and what doesn’t work, and where Google has rewarded us and where Google hasn’t rewarded us. We’ve taken those lessons, and those have affected what we want in the sites and what we don’t want, and how our sites need to be built and the content that we need to create. Then we convert those objectives into tangible tasks that can be assigned to every person in the process. So, our superpower is our ability to take an end objective, figure out how to get it done, and then do it consistently over and over again. ROB: Got it. You mentioned smaller law firms. Are there any particular practice areas or geographies that you focus on? Are there any that you do not do from a practice area or geographic area? RAFI: Historically, we’ve focused primarily on workers’ compensation and personal injury law firms. I’d say 65% to 70% is personal injury, and probably overlapping, I’d say 55% workers’ comp, because some firms do both. But we have criminal law firms, divorce law firms, business law firms. Really, generally speaking, it’s a business-to-consumer law firm – those people who don’t just have a few big business clients that they get all their recurring work from. These are people that help the individual consumer, that constantly need a new flow of cases coming in. Those are the people that need us most. It’s not that we can’t help those that just need a law firm brochure, but what we’re really good at is improving somebody’s visibility, not just creating a brochure. We might be overkill if all you want is something that validates your existence. ROB: As a consumer, when you mention some of those practice areas, it certainly rings to me – my perception would be that that’s largely a reflection of the marketing budget of the different types of law firms. In other words, I certainly see a lot more personal injury and workers’ comp advertising than I see let’s say business law. Is that some of the alignment between your focus and the market? RAFI: Absolutely. Although I do find it a little – I don’t understand why some of the other practice areas don’t spend more. Yes, it is true that the potential payout for a personal injury lawyer is much greater. But what I will say is that I think the estate planners and a lot of the transactional attorneys that have the potential – or even maybe especially the civil litigation lawyers, they have potential to make a huge amount of money from a civil litigation case. If they’re representing the manufacturer that bet the business on litigation, the attorney’s fees can easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So why those attorneys don’t want to spend a few grand a month to promote themselves is beyond me. But that’s beyond probably the scope of this conversation. At the end of the day, it’s really the personal injury lawyers who are spending and who are programmed and understand the need to spend to bring in a constant flow of high value cases. ROB: As someone representing smaller firms in this space, how do you think about tactically going to war and finding the client for some of these firms? I don’t even know, and you might know, what the national advertising budget is for some of the national firms, but it’s got to be quite something to go up against. How do you think about giving your client the edge and the best bang for their buck on somebody who can spend almost unlimited amounts of money on out-of-home advertising, on SEO, on pay-per-click, on all of your keywords? RAFI: That’s a really good question. We get this from time to time from personal injury or workers’ compensation lawyers who say just that. They say, “Look, in my marketplace there are four big competitors and they’re spending enormous money. They’ve got a 10-year lead on me. There’s no way I can compete, is there?” The truth is, they can compete. But we have to be careful in what we promote. Oftentimes when you start to dig a little deeper into their practice areas, you find that not all personal injury lawyers and not all workers’ compensation lawyers focus on the same things. For example, I have a client in Reno who has never really done any significant online advertising. He doesn’t have much of a presence now, and he doesn’t have an enormous budget to compete against the huge Nevada advertisers. And there are certainly people paying $40,000 or $50,000 a month on SEO. So, he asked me what we can do, and we had a conversation about the nature of his practice. It turns out that in Nevada, not many lawyers want medical malpractice cases. It turns out also that this particular lawyer had a lot of experience representing people who came down with sepsis where the doctors didn’t treat it correctly. That’s a very niche field. This is something he was very good at, had a lot of experience in, and very few people did, and cases that he wanted to attract. So, we decided to build out, and we’re in the process of finishing, a lot of content around sepsis and medical malpractice. And even if others come in to compete, they’re certainly not going to invest the same resources into that field as he will. We’ve already started to see some success with that, and leads are starting to come in the door. It’s that sort of focus on the client, the real micro focus on what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. You have to understand their practice. I’m also a licensed lawyer in the state of Illinois, so I understand their practice in ways that somebody who’s not a lawyer may not understand. ROB: That experience you have as a lawyer, your licensing as a lawyer, is that what has kept your focus on law? Have you ever been tempted to – there’s other local advertisers, whether it’s air conditioning, basements, plumbers, etc., who have I think similar battles. What has kept you in the legal lane? RAFI: That’s a really good question. The truth is that I don’t bring a distinct competitive advantage outside of the law. If I were to go sell to a plastic surgeon – and they certainly have a lot of money to spend on their advertising – or sell to HVAC guys or plumbers or any of them, I don’t bring with me any inherent competitive advantages that my clients don’t have. Obviously, I know the technical end of it, and we have the coders and the designers and everything else, but so does everybody else. Only in the law do I really bring something that few other people, few other agencies have, and that’s an intimate knowledge of what they do, because I’ve been doing it for 20+ years. Because I’m a lawyer and I’ve represented people, I really understand what they do, how they do it, and how to position them. So yes, while it is tempting, and maybe I could make more money if I did websites for people other than lawyers, it’s just not my comfort zone. I really understand the law so well that it doesn’t make sense to do much else. ROB: Rafi, to understand a little bit – it’s not entirely a typical path. Most people don’t go to law school to start a digital agency. What is the origin story of Market JD? What took you out of the day to day practice of law? What made you want to learn and build a team around you that understands things like SEO and SEM and everything else you have to do to make things work? RAFI: That’s a really interesting question. I didn’t go directly from the practice of law into running an agency. I practiced law for about six years, and then I had a real desire to sell. I’ve always loved working with people, and I just love the selling process and I love engaging people. So, I took a job with Thompson Reuters and I sold for FindLaw and Westlaw for a number of years. Then I decided to go back and get my MBA, and then when I got my MBA, I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and it was at that time that I started Market JD. We do largely the same things that my former employer does, FindLaw. We do the same sort of things that they do; we just like to think we do it better. ROB: Got it. So somewhere along the way, between some growing coincidence, between having practiced yourself, between competing in the market, you saw a set of ingredients, you made a little bit of a bet on yourself – and then who were your next coupe of hires? Who are the first couple of people that an attorney goes out and hires to build a firm like this? RAFI: I think if I could do it over again, the one thing that I would do differently is I would’ve hired more people quicker. I was a little too conservative in who I hired in the initial years, and potentially didn’t grow as fast as I could’ve if I had hired more staff. I think I wasn’t as confident as I am now in my ability to succeed. I was always worried that I would run out of money, and it never happened. I had more clients than I had necessarily people to do the work. So, I certainly would’ve hired people quicker. I think what happened was it was a lot of on-the-job training. I hired people as I saw the need. I knew I couldn’t design, and I knew nothing about design, and I knew nothing about coding. So I surrounded myself with the best people I can and the people I need to get the job done. It was need-based hiring. ROB: Got it. That certainly becomes an interesting path. In terms of running out of money, I have done that; I don’t recommend it. It’s not the most fun. We did make all the money back and then some, so it’s okay. When you look at yourself now – you said you’ve learned a little bit about hiring more. Obviously, you can’t hire unlimited, so how do you think about, now, with experience in mind, when is the right time to hire? RAFI: I think that story has changed as the labor market has changed. At this point, where I find great talent in an area that I know I’m going to need, I hire for that even if I don’t necessarily have enough work to fill that person’s plate. It just so happens that when you hire great people, you find work to give them, and it’s often profitable work because when they’re good, it enhances your service and you tend to sell more of the things that you can do better. I think the question you asked me was, how do I know who to hire. I’m always looking. We recently hired a Head of SEO. I wasn’t initially planning on hiring her, but I did find an article that she had written, and I thought it was so well done and it was so technically complete that I reached out to her and I asked her if she’d be willing to do some consulting. One thing led to another, and she’s now our Head of SEO. So, it’s more about availability than it is about necessarily our needs. It’s becoming very hard to find the right people, and I know I’m not the only employer to say that. ROB: For sure. It’s hard to find the right people. It’s hard to find sometimes the sorts of versatile people who can and will wear multiple hats. I think that’s interesting; you’ve probably had some choices as you’ve grown. SEO probably has not been a choice. You’ve probably had to do that for a very long time. How have you considered, though, which service areas you should engage in? Are there some that you haven’t? Are you in television? Are you in out-of-home? How deep do you go in social? How do you think about those kinds of decisions? RAFI: The traditional media is not something I had experience in or knowledge in. I’ve thought many times about doing it, because oftentimes the people who sell traditional media add digital services to their menu of choices. So I’ve often thought of adding traditional media to my set of choices, but I haven’t, largely because it’s out of my comfort zone. I would have to bring in people, and I would be doing it just for the sake of growing. I have enough troubles in my life without taking on something that I don’t know particularly well, so I’ve chosen just to be a digital agency and do that better than my competitors. And I think it’s that laser focus and doing one thing well that’s been a great recipe for us. It’s worked for us. ROB: Sure. There’s a certain discipline to knowing what segment you play in. I’m sure many firms have started in the legal world, and many of them really have that appetite to go as far upmarket as they can, as fast as possible. They want to buy the side of every bus, the front of every billboard, all of those things. How do you think about what firm size is too big for Market JD right now? How do you think about that decision? RAFI: When it comes to digital advertising, I don’t think there is a firm that’s too big for us in our space. It’s when they have needs beyond that. Now, certainly we have partners we can bring in, but I don’t pretend to claim that they’re part of the Market JD business. They’re just our partners if they need them. But when it comes to digital advertising, this is what we do best. If the largest PI firm in America came to us, I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t help them with their needs. We represent people, or we do the digital advertising for solo practitioners, and we do it for 75-people personal injury firms, and everything in between. ROB: That’s certainly a range. Once you have 75 attorneys, I don’t want to pay those bills, I know that. That’s a sizable firm there. You mentioned a little bit about perhaps a desire to have hired a little quicker. As you think about other lessons you may have learned while building the firm, what might something else be that you wish you’d done differently if you could rewind the clock a little bit? RAFI: Yeah, definitely hiring quicker. Most certainly it would be also doing more internet marketing for Market JD. It was always ironic, I thought, that I’m selling lawyers internet marketing, but I’m not promoting my own wares on the internet. We ignored it because I had such a nice base of connections from my years working as a lawyer and my years selling as a salesman at Thompson Reuters. I had such a great base of people to call on that I really didn’t need to do a lot of internet advertising. In hindsight, I think that was a mistake. I probably would’ve more aggressively done it, and that’s what we’re just beginning to do now. But you know what? In some regards, I always thought it was better to have fewer clients and do a better job for fewer clients than it is to grow as fast as I can and see the quality diminish. I’ve seen too many of my competitors with fantastic salesforces, far better than anything I have, that win the business but don’t have the resources to put into each client, and the mistakes that they made were just embarrassing. I never wanted to be that guy, so I never wanted to grow any faster than I had the capacity to do a great job for them. ROB: Your team is so focused. When you’re out there marketing for these firms, you know who their ideal customer is;... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/23300558

Why Citizen Branding? 06/09/2022

Why Citizen Branding? Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director, Citizen Group (San Francisco, CA) Inspired by Marc Gobé’s book, Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brand Culture in a Consumer Democracy, Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group, started his agency in 2006 to work with entities committed to meaningful and measurable pro-social impact. His agency’s proposition is that organizations build brand value when they “walk their talk” and operate in ways that enhance society for their employees, shareholders, and consumers. Robin notes that the rise of social media has created a window on organizational operations . . . companies have a harder time projecting a “corporate mirage” that “everything is okay” when people can now see what is going on, assess practices, and ask the tougher questions. Clients today include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, municipalities, cities, and trade associations. Working with Amnesty International and other NGOs while he was at Chiat/Day early in his career, Robin became aware of two operational economies: “the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around (half a million for a 30-second spot)” and the $15k budget for creating a nonprofit PSA environment. Gobé’s book identifies the trend toward citizen branding as a convergence between these two economies. At his agency’s inception, Robin worked with Walmart’s sustainability effort and explored how big-box retail stores needed to change their operational practices to support sustainability, creating “a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, (and produce) less waste” and a model for future initiatives with other organizations. Brands get a lift from doing the right thing, he says, both for society and for the environment. In his early adulthood, Robin says he didn’t know that people had human rights. He says the 30 articulated in the United Nation’s post World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights made a big impact on him. Citizen Group is involved in a diverse range of projects. It is working with: Sports apparel retailer Lids on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative (They Gave Us Game) to recognize and honor early Black sports leagues. A group called Leading Age on the Keep Leading Life campaign to showcase the variety of caregiving and expert services available to people who are aging. With close friend Jordan Harris, Robin shares a concern about the need to promote electric vehicles. Citizen Group commissioned a study to investigate the feasibility of shading California’s 4,000 mile aqueduct system with solar canopies to reduce evaporation, conserve water, reduce algal growth, and generate power. Annual water savings for a complete end-to-end system were estimated at 63 billion with the solar array along the aqueduct system’s existing utility corridors rather than taking up working land. A spinoff company, Solar AquaGrid, will be working Audubon Society to study environmental impacts and with the state and irrigation districts to plan the first demonstration project, and break ground on the pilot (proof-of-concept) project this fall. Robin can be found on his agency’s website at . ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group based in San Francisco, California, with some other fascinating interests as well. Welcome to the podcast, Robin. ROBIN: Good to be here, Rob. Thank you. ROB: Excellent to have you. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Citizen Group, and what is the firm’s superpower? What are you all known for? What do you do well? ROBIN: Well, I started Citizen Group in 2006, and it was really inspired by a book of the same name called Citizen Brand. This is where I can give a shout-out to an author by the name of Marc Gobé. I was really moved by the book, written in about 2003. The thesis of the book is: sooner or later, all brands will have to behave as citizen brands. That really caught me because it was like the spear in the chest moment in terms of the societal challenges we face and the responsibility brands and corporations and civil society have. It also predated, presaged, the rise of social media that has made the rise of citizen brands possible. We expect more from the brands we purchase and are loyal to. If they’re not walking their talk, it can be a liability versus when they can really take the initiative and operate in a way that enhances society for their employees, for their shareholders, for their consumers. Then that builds brand value. That was the proposition. So I started Citizen Brand, and we’ve been working since that time with a variety of entities, for-profit companies, nonprofit orgs, municipalities, cities, sometimes, trade associations. But what they all have in common is some commitment to have pro-social impact that is meaningful and measurable. ROB: Let’s pull into that a little bit. Give us maybe an example, if you can, of a client, of the sort of work you’ve done together, of what this looks like in action. ROBIN: Well, in the early going, roundabout 2005-2006, I had the opportunity to work with Walmart’s sustainability effort. Those were two words that didn’t necessarily go together at the time. It raised a lot of legitimate skepticism. But in fact, under the tenure of their CEO at the time, Lee Scott, they really saw the future as it pertains to big box retail and how they would have to change their practices, be it in terms of packaging, creating a packaging scorecard – they created more of a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, less waste. And many other initiatives. In fact, they formed 13 sustainability committees in their transportation, their energy, their seafood. That’s been the model. I’ve also done a lot of work with what is now called the Great Sports Alliance, but it started with the nonprofit NRDC and the interest on the part of professional sports – the venues, the arenas, the teams – adopting sustainable practices, again, throughout their supply chain. Energy, waste, water, transportation, how they procure goods. That story needs to radiate through their internal supply chain to their external stakeholders to their consumers. So having meaningful initiatives that then you can start to develop stories that really show the impact and the lift that brands can get from doing the right thing – that’s the common denominator. And those were two stories, ongoing, that started around the time we started Citizen. ROB: That’s early, and I feel like some of that has not even arrived yet. Something I feel like we’re starting to hear a little bit about is measuring the environmental impact of a business and the different layers of measurement. You’re probably the expert on this and not me, but some people will say, “All of our power consumption is green energy.” It’s like, okay, but – you mentioned the supply chain, you mentioned suppliers, you mentioned up and down the organization. So outside of the stick that may be coming on that, whether it’s in public markets or whether it’s regulatory, how do you get businesses to think about the carrot when in their own initial reaction they might say, “We do the right things here,” and it’s true in maybe the first or second order effects, but when you get to the third order effects, there’s a lot more to work on? ROBIN: No doubt there is. And it can be challenging. But creating an initiative that you can build the sociopolitical will for, and then building on that, creates the momentum. Creating a coalition of the willing that this is the trajectory that the company or the organization wants to take is fundamental. And it’s not just environmental, by the way; it’s social impact, fundamentally. ROB: Yeah, which now we have acronyms around, again. But there’s a material difference, I think, between – you can check a box, you can have an ESG statement, you can have committees. It’s something else entirely, I think, to not just have a committee and to actually execute. How do you think about ensuring that those committees, that those initiatives have meat to them and are not just window dressing or greenwashing or whatever else we want to call it? ROBIN: So much of it is susceptible to greenwashing, and perception is a whole other thing in reality between half-empty and half-full. Walmart took a lot of spears early on, but people have seen the credibility that has come from meaningful adoption of practices. And it’s happening across the corporate world, albeit not fast enough. I’ll give you a case in point. There was a vote taken yesterday on compulsory board diversity – in other words, more women, more people of color on boards – struck down because, ironically, it was perceived as discriminatory. [laughs] Here in California, where we lead, we’ve gone in recent years from like 17% to some 30% women on corporate boards. That’s a good gain, but it ain’t anywhere near 50%. We’re a country that doesn’t like regulation. It’s something I struggle with a lot because we can talk a good game about law and order, but law and order requires rules of the road, and it requires a well-governed society to be a healthy, functional society. In the meantime, corporations run the roost. The common good is crippled under the weight of corporate good, which quickly can curdle into corporate bad. I’m talking about Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Plastic – something I’m very concerned about. That implicates Big Beverage, the Coca-Colas of the world, the plastic, the fossil fuel industry, that has a responsibility to take care of the crap they put out there. Not to mention the downstream health effects. So, you need to look at it all, and we don’t have claim to the answers writ large, but we take on initiatives where there’s bounds and outcomes that we can point to. ROB: Right. Sounds like you’ve got a lot of work to do, is what it sounds like. ROBIN: There’s no shortage of work for all of us to do. ROB: That’s right. ROBIN: I guess it may sound kind of schoolmarm-ish, but I really believe that – we talk about the experience economy and this and that economy; what we need right now is the responsibility economy. It’s time for grownups to be grown up. ROB: Robin, you did mention the genesis of the firm. Let’s talk for a moment, though, about the pre-genesis of the firm. How did you decide to start in the first place? You’ve mentioned the inspiration, you’ve mentioned the book, but what made you jump off the cliff and start Citizen Group in the first place, coming from where you were? It’s not always the easiest way to live. ROBIN: No, it was a reckoning, but it was a convergence that I’m really grateful for. My story was I came up as a copywriter, a writer. Came out of journalism, music. Went into advertising and had the privilege to work at some excellent shops – Hal Riney here in San Francisco and Chiat\Day. As a writer and creative director, learning the potency of storytelling, visually and verbally, in short form commercials, and even pre-internet, before we had branded content – but it was still getting you to read the printed page, telling a story on television. I had done a lot of work since the 1980s when I was in New York at Chiat\Day with Amnesty International, a leading human rights organization. I got exposed to Amnesty’s work because of the rock events they were putting on at the time – the likes of Springsteen and Sting and Peter Gabriel doing world tours, promoting this concept of human rights. As a twenty-something, I didn’t know from human rights that we have human rights, and there’s 30 of them that are articulated in the International (sic., Universal) Declaration of Human Rights created after World War II. It really struck me. I continued to do work on behalf of Amnesty and other NGOs, and I realized that two economies were operating. There was the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around. Half a million for a 30-second spot was not an uncommon thing at that time. And you might have $15k to put against creating a PSA on behalf of a nonprofit org. Really two different economies. And what was more important just didn’t follow in terms of where we place our value. The Citizen Brand book really said there’s a convergence going on here. Like I said, I had no idea that a few years later, the rise of social media would accelerate it to such a degree that companies had to walk their talk. They couldn’t simply put on a corporate mirage and pretend everything was okay; people were going to look more closely at their practices and interrogate, in a healthy way. And that created the impetus for what we see more of today. ROB: You’ve been doing this thing for a little while. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned in the process of building the firm? What are some things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you had that chance to talk to yourself? ROBIN: Lessons learned. I might’ve applied more focus to social impact earlier, even though I’ve been doing it for a while now. I think about years – I won’t say wasted. They were not wasted. Great experiences, and learning the craft of advertising is part of my skillset. But having the lightbulb go off sooner in terms of applying more of my working years to making a difference in terms of social outcome is something that if I could rewind the clock, I would put more years in that quadrant than the fun and games I had when I was youthful and indiscreet. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You wouldn’t have been as youthful and indiscreet if you had done otherwise. But I hear you. There’s those corners we turn where we realize in some way or another – we get more serious; we discover a path that we can run well on, and we certainly wish we had found it sooner, had started that impact sooner, because we get so much better as we keep going. So I completely understand that. As we mentioned at the top, you are a man of many talents and many thoughts and many ideas. Something that I wasn’t really aware of that you mentioned was the Solar AquaGrid. Tell us about that. I don’t think those words naturally go together in most people’s minds, so unpack this for us. What’s going on here? It’s intriguing but momentarily confusing, and I think it’ll all make sense through your words. ROBIN: Yeah. One of my closest friends and dearest collaborators, Jordan Harris, we’ve done a lot of work together for Rock the Boat and other social causes in relation to promoting the rise of EVs, the EV revolution. It was his genesis – we both travel up and down the state, from Northern California to Southern California, seeing these open aqueducts that convey our water, and year on year, the increasing drought we have here in California. It got him scratching his head because he lives part of his time in France, where the canals are tree-shaded. They’re tree-lined and shaded canals, whereas here our canals are open and exposed, and we couldn’t help but think: how much water are we losing each year in terms of evaporative loss? Because heat rises. ROB: How much? ROBIN: Well, we commissioned a study. We started a project first at Citizen to commission a study. We sought out the best researchers we could find, and they’re based in UC Merced, which is the home of University of California- UC Solar and UC Water. We commissioned a study that said up to 63 billion gallons of water could be saved annually if all 4,000 miles of California’s canal system, aqueduct system, were covered with solar canopies. And many other compounding advantages, because when you cover the canals, you’re producing obviously clean energy, renewable energy that can be used locally by the communities. We’re going to need a lot more renewable energy on tap if we are going to shift towards an EV-driven economy. And then there’s the avoided land costs, because rather than taking working lands, farmlands, to put solar farms, solar arrays, why not have these existing aqueducts, these existing utility corridors do double duty for us? The more we got into it, we discovered that there can be reduced maintenance costs because the solar shade over the open canals, the open rivers, reduces aquatic weed growth. So there’s less dredging up of the algae underneath. And it has waterfall implications, rather than dumping more chemicals into the water. Long story not so short, one thing led to another and we started to examine holistically all of the potential advantages of such deployments. We developed a company, a spinoff that is called Solar AquaGrid, where we’re consulting with the state and working directly with irrigation districts – most notably with Turlock Irrigation District in the Central Valley – planning the first demonstration project. We were successful in getting state funds to do pilot. So we expect to break ground in the fall. I’m quite excited about that because now we can really put these premises to the test. The whole idea is to study in order to scale, because you only gain the advantages of this idea, a big idea, a rather obvious idea – we weren’t the first to come up with it – but now we’re on a path where we are very fortunate to be able to study and build on the findings. ROB: California is a big state, lots of people, lots of opinions; are there any particular groups you’re concerned about having concerns about this? Are there impacts on wildlife? Are there impacts on other things that people would worry about? It probably can be mitigated, probably a net positive, but what’s the group that’s going to fret about these? ROBIN: We talk about that a lot. We are inviting naysayers to come with their questions because the whole purpose is to interrogate this proposition and learn, where are there holes? We want to be mindful not to replace one problem and create others. That’s not our intention. We set Solar AquaGrid up as a for-benefit company that is predicated on public, private, academic cooperation. To that end, you raised the issue of wildlife; we have enlisted Audubon Society as a research partner because we do want to learn, what are the effects, the unforeseen potential consequences of covering large swaths of the canal? So we’re going to learn all this. If you want to do another podcast in about – call it 24 or 36 months, we’ll have more to talk about. ROB: That’ll be fascinating. The next thing that comes to my mind also is, you talked about France, you talked about their waterways. You get into some interesting questions. They have waterways. They’re tree-shaded, so you could cover them with solar panels, but the trees are going to make not as much solar. Is it potentially beneficial enough to where you take down trees to put the solar over it? Because the trees are there, they keep it shaded somewhat, but it’s still uncovered. It’s still evaporative. ROBIN: Beautiful. There’s beauty in complexity. These are the questions in terms of net positives and net losses regarding, in that case, biodiversity. By the way, we here in the U.S. are not the first to deploy solar arrays over canals. It was first done in Gujrat, India, where there are projects we’ve actually gone to school on and have learned from those past deployments – both what to do and what not to do. ROB: That’s fascinating. We have a business partner whose primary office is directly in Gujrat, so I am familiar with it. I have looked at it. In their case, they chose to set up there because what I’ve learned is that India’s all one time zone, and Gujrat is the farthest west you can get, just about, so you get the best overlap with the U.S. if you’re there. So that... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/23169332

A Colorful Review of the Possibilities of Paint 06/02/2022

A Colorful Review of the Possibilities of Paint Susan Britton, Owner/ Principal Creative Director, Britton Marketing & Design Group (Fort Wayne, IN) Susan Britton is Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group, a branding boutique agency that focuses on strategy, design, and helping its color-trended consumer goods clients better brand and market themselves. Sue started her career at Vera Bradley and rode a 9-year growth boom where things changed so rapidly the company had to reinvent itself every six months. (Revenues increased from $10 million to $400 million.) She left Vera Bradley on such good terms that they provided her with furniture for her new company and stayed on as clients with Britton doing catalogs and marketing for them for the next 10 years until Vera Bradley went public. Sixteen years after she left her position at Vera Bradley, Sue says the experience “gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion” – Britton’s niche market. She believes that brands “really take off” when a brand is distinctly “nuanced” in a way that shows the brand is special and the agency builds a “very highly descriptive visual expression” reinforcing the brand identity and couples that with a “strong strategy.” Done right, the created assets can be amortized over time, broadly used, and will promote a “more devoted following.” As an example of a typical client, Sue talks about working with a number of paint companies, the importance of tracking color trends and building brand uniqueness, and the challenge of reaching out to “the do-it-yourselfers and the do-it-for-mes and then the pros.” Some changes Sue has seen over the years are “a reluctance to invest in creative because it’s changing so quickly,” the need for lots of online (and often transitory) creative assets, and the flux of brands vacillating between bringing their creative work inhouse . . . and seeking an external agency. Sue’s agency has deleted some staff positions over the years and today outsources to partner vendors such less-frequently used services as building website backends or videography. Sue is a strong believer in work-life balance. Before Covid, her agency interviewed people to discover what they valued . . . and came back with these results: “Their family, whatever that looked like. Their community. Their spirituality, whatever that looked like, or wellness. And then their environment.” She says, “They’ve circled the wagons around their family in a really, really big way.” She describes this as “the new American middle.” Sue can be reached on her agency’s website at: (for Britton Marketing & Design Group), send an email off the site, or email Sue directly at: Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Susan Britton, Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group based in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Susan. SUE: Thank you, Rob. You can just call me Sue, that’s fine. ROB: We’ll go with Sue. Yeah, it’s excellent to have you here. I want all the Fort Wayne stories that the audience might not want to hear. But why don’t we start off first with a little bit of introduction to Britton Marketing & Design Group, and what is the firm’s superpower? SUE: Well, we’re in Fort Wayne, Indiana because my education happened when I went to work for Vera Bradley, which is located – their headquarters are here in Fort Wayne. I joined Vera Bradley when they were about $10 million, and nine years later they were about $400 million. We tried everything, we experienced everything, and growing at that fast rate, we were reinventing every six months what we were doing. So that was a real privilege, and like I said, a great education. Then I jumped off after about 10 years, and owner/founder Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and her partner, Pat, were really supportive when I left. They gave me furniture from the merchandising department and helped me get set up because they appreciated that they were female entrepreneurs and I wanted to be one again as well. Then we continued to work with Vera Bradley, doing their catalogs and some marketing for the next 10 years until they went public. It really gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion. We worked with Peter Millar as well for a few years, getting them on the map. So really, our superpower, I would say, is design. It sounds very typical, but I think it’s sometimes underappreciated. I guess it’s hard to define sometimes, but when you have a brand that is really nuanced, when you have a very highly descriptive visual expression of what that brand is coupled with a really strong strategy, that’s when it operates on all cylinders and when we’ve seen brands really take off. I think people talk about it a lot in this industry – the form and function, the art and science – but it has always been true and will continue to be true. ROB: I assume on Day 1, you were the one designer. Is that the case? SUE: Yes. [laughs] I was sitting there looking out the window on a rainy day, at my desk. I had two other family members involved with me, and we were like, “Oh my gosh, what did we just do?” But the work followed, and we worked really hard. It all worked out. We’re here 16 years later and still figuring out marketing in the world today, which has gotten very complicated as well. ROB: I was going to ask, because design in and of itself can be a little bit tricky to define, but then the definition has even probably changed on you. How has the nature of the work you do, the services, the deliverables – what has shifted in those 16 years? SUE: I think it’s how fast everything – the kind of creative assets that people need constantly, day in and day out online – in the past, when we started out, it was print. Catalog work, and you would do two-week photoshoots. Well, that has really changed because of the tentative nature of the imagery that people need and the quantity of it. But I think what happens today is it’s easier to rely more on the science, which is more memorable – how many click-throughs – as we look at the success of an email campaign or whatever, a social media campaign. I’ve seen a transition for a couple of things. One, a reluctance to invest in creative because it’s changing so quickly. But when they don’t do that, then you could put anybody’s logo on a picture on Instagram, like fashion or even home goods. It really needs to be nuanced in a way that you know when you look at it that that is a special brand. And it takes a little investment to do that, but there is a way that it can be done where you’re really creating assets that are amortized over a certain period of time and used in every area. I see when companies do that, they really have a more devoted following. People respond so well to the uniqueness that that brand represents. Secondly, I think I’ve seen a change where in order to save costs many brands will bring their creative in-house, and that can be very successful, too, if they find the right people. It can also be easily unsuccessful just because of the complacency or the repetitive nature of the work. Focusing on one brand, day in and day out, I think sometimes people lose a little bit of edge. But not necessarily. ROB: There’s definitely a lot to consider there. The pendulum of in-house versus – not outsourced, but out of house, working with a creative services firm. That pendulum seems to swing both industry-wide and then some clients really swing that pendulum back and forth as well. You certainly mentioned Vera Bradley as a foundational client; what does your mix of clients look like? Are there typical industries, other key clients you’re able to talk about that you’ve snapped up since then? SUE: Yeah, what’s happened since then is we really have honed our expertise in mostly color-trended consumer goods – I can say primarily purchased by women, but sometimes not. We’ve really worked into a lot of different paint company work. When you think about paint, it’s kind of like chemicals in a bucket. It’s really all marketing to talk about what’s special about that particular brand of paint and to do it in a lifestyle way, but sometimes with humor. It’s very color-oriented, so we’re always working on trends, looking at trends, trying to look ahead to what’s coming up that the consumer is looking forward to seeing. Also, we asked ourselves when we were getting into especially the home goods market, what makes us successful in Fort Wayne with these kinds of customers, the color trending customers, home group customers? We saw that it was like the everyday person. It’s you and me, and so many percent of their consumers were everyday people. It wasn’t the super high end or super low commodity end. It’s really right there in the middle. So we’ve done a lot of research on that and have built an expertise around that particular consumer. That helps us work with these different companies. ROB: Paint’s a really interesting one because nobody looks at your wall and can tell what kind of paint you have, and you probably don’t know either. There’s not a lot of word-of-mouth there, I don’t think. Any paint could be any color. But you have an industry buyer – we’ve had somebody helping paint our house; I don’t even know what they’re picking. They know, absolutely, what they’re picking for us, and then there’s “What do I pick up when I wander down the aisle at Home Depot or Lowe’s?” It’s anybody, for sure. SUE: Right. And then they also have their pros that they’re trying to respond to. They have the do-it-yourselfers and the do-it-for-mes and then the pros. ROB: Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at with the pro that we work with. I don’t know what they’re picking. I don’t ask for anything. They tell me where to go pick my colors. They say, “Go to this store and pick a color.” And I listen and I do it. SUE: Right. They have undue influence. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You got ahead of us on the origin story and where the firm came from, and you mentioned, of course, that you are still the principal creative director, but I’m sure you don’t do it all now. What did it look like to bring in let’s say the second design creative, and what did it take to get over the hump of you not doing it and letting them do the work? SUE: It’s probably a variety of things, but I think what’s really important is to not only mentor but provide room for mistakes. We had a saying early on; we bring in interns and grow our own. We would bring someone in and explain the level of quality that our clients expect and then coach them on how to get there and make sure they were getting there. Then they would embrace it. And we really provided a non-threatening environment where people could really grow, we could really mentor them, and give them their own work to own and really work at. That’s really what they’re doing today. Some people that are here have been here over 10 years, and probably the last group we hired has been for 7 years. So we’re probably getting ready to add another couple. But I think the important thing is respecting your team and allowing them to be different from you, but just making sure that the expectations are really clear and the goals of the company are clear too. But we also wanted to create an environment where they could have a life beyond work. I think we’ve all worked places where we just worked way too many hours and we couldn’t have a personal life. Even before COVID, which I think has really brought that whole situation to light, we wanted to create an environment where family also comes first. So, if you’re taking care of the people that are working for you, they’re your human resources, and respecting them as much as you respect the work I think has been really key to our success and to having a well-oiled machine where everybody has been here a while and keeps it all humming. ROB: Do you think that sort of autonomy is partly – you mentioned people who’ve been there 7 years, 9 years – do you feel like there’s a degree of autonomy where they get to do the work they would do even if they were out on their own, without the headache of being out on their own? Is that some of the mix? What’s some of the secret sauce on that kind of longevity? SUE: I think it’s very close to what you said. I think it’s a way that they feel ownership in the work that they’re doing, and as a team, we might group critique something so that it’s not really threatening, but we’re always looking at improvements so that they can grow into their work and they can own it, and I don’t have to look over their shoulder. Because I don’t think people really like that. Especially creative people. They have their own expression within a certain frame and having them hone that and be able to do that I think is what creatives really want to do. ROB: Certainly, with the amount of time you’ve had the firm up and running, I’m sure you’ve had to make some choices of where to grow and maybe some service offerings and lines of business that you’ve perhaps decided intentionally to not add. What are some things that maybe you have chosen to not do, maybe you keep partnering on them, maybe you refer them, maybe you say you don’t do that? Have there been decisions like that along the way? SUE: Oh yeah, for sure. We used to have a videographer on staff and some photography, and we decided a few years ago that our expertise is a branding boutique agency where we’re helping our clients brand themselves better and have a better marketing strategy and better nuanced creative. So we have partners that we use for website backend building or videography or some even just video editing, those kinds of services. We don’t always need them consistently, or even photographers, because for every particular job you want to customize the right vendor to that particular project. They all have different levels of need, from high quality to a lower quality maybe, depending on budgets. It’s nice to be flexible and then just plug in and play with those other vendors as needed. ROB: Got it. That makes sense. There’s an element even where maybe you have enough work to keep a videographer busy, but you really need half or a quarter or a tenth of 10 different videographers rather than ten-tenths of the same person. SUE: Yeah, exactly. That’s definitely true. ROB: Sue, as you reflect on the journey so far, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned in building the business – things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were starting over? SUE: That’s a good question. I think building an expertise is so important. I learned that from a fellow that was helping with us, consulting with us on our business a few years ago, and it’s the best thing that we’ve ever done because it helps us focus on what we’re really good at, what we have the right to win, and not try to be everything to everyone. I’m sure many agencies go through that, because you really do want to reach. You want to do something new and exciting. And sometimes that’s fine, if it’s not too far from your expertise, to stretch. But sometimes if you overreach, you get yourself in a difficult position. That’s not really good for you and not good for your client, and it’s not good for your team. So, I think really understanding what you’re good at and owning that is key. In the past, we may have hired people that we thought, “Oh, we’re going to build this whole department,” but that really wasn’t going to happen. One thing is, people didn’t always trust you to be able to do it. They would look at what you were traditionally good at and they would not trust that you could go that far the other direction. So, I do think you have to really focus. ROB: I can see that. It definitely helps you know how to talk to your clients as well, rather than being everything to anyone. But it’s hard to get that conviction. You mentioned in some notes as we were getting this scheduled something about the “new American middle.” Tell me about the new American middle. What is that, and what is that expertise? How does that play into the firm? SUE: As we all know, marketing is really about values. If you’re in lifestyle marketing, it’s really about values, and it’s a pretty complicated, noisy world. You’re not going to get a chance to remember much about a brand with everything going so quickly, so it’s really important that when you’re marketing, you’re really connecting and resonating with your consumers’ values. As we looked at, again, who we were in Fort Wayne, why anybody should work with us, the kind of projects that are a good fit and companies that we could align with, it came back to that everyday person. As we dug in and we did a lot of research, we did some primary research, it was really illuminating to us that – and this was before COVID – we realized that the world had become less certain, and while maybe in the ’90s or some of the more consumer-driven decades, things had really changed. When we interviewed people, the most important thing to them was their family, whatever that looked like. Their community. Their spirituality, whatever that looked like, or wellness. And then their environment. Those are the things everyone was really concerned about. They’ve circled the wagons around their family in a really, really big way. For example, if you’re featuring maybe a woman with a handbag and that’s the product, so many companies feature it as a product on a person. But if you would reflect them doing things with their family, they may relate to that photo more quickly on a social media post than a single one. It’s just an idea of blending and taking your brand and looking at, with your competition also, what are the values that you compete over? What are the values you share? And what is the open space that they’re not owning? Many brands are not owning family. If, for example, when you do your research, it pops up as a top important consumer value to those customers, then you can really reflect that through your digital expressions and your copy, etc., if that makes sense. ROB: Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned also – we talked a little bit about family. I understand that family’s also important to how you operate the firm. How have you thought about setting up the work environment, setting up the work, setting up roles in a way that is compatible with families, in a way that maybe other services firms have a hard time with? SUE: I think one thing we do is, for example, with the creative team, we have three different creative directors so that when we’re working with a client, usually there’s one that’s assigned, but they help each other out. So if one’s going to be out for a week, they’ll double up a little bit and do some handoffs just to get by through that week. And they know each other well enough that they can do that smoothly. In the past, I would say it was not the case. Early on, we had creative directors that were very specific about their work, which was great, but they didn’t really overlap. But I think as we’ve worked into trying to be more flexible in our schedules, we’ve overlapped with each other so that we can help each other out when the other person’s not in, and also, again, the work from home has really helped. I think it’s helped many companies realize that, oh, we didn’t lose productivity, and oh, this gives us more flexibility to have more work-life balance, and we haven’t seen a drop in... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/23158502

Making Small Business Personal and Successful 05/19/2022

Making Small Business Personal and Successful Amanda Parker, President and Owner, Collective Alternative (Indianapolis, IN) Amanda Parker is President and Owner at Collective Alternative, a full-service agency that focuses on growing small, mostly local businesses. She started her agency 14 years ago to bring together her background in strategy and development, experience as the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and passion for Mom-and-Pops, new home construction, and small, home-service businesses. Typical agency clients might include a local plumber trying to compete with bigger plumbing competition. In this interview, Amanda explains there are a number of differences for successfully working with small businesses as opposed to mega-brand clients. Marketers typically work fast. With small businesses, she has found that it is important to slow down, communicate with the client, and let them know what the agency is trying to accomplish, the end goal/objective, and the benefit of the end goal. They require a lot more “hand-holding” through the process, she explains, and they can’t “afford to waste a single dollar.” Amanda feels it is also critical to “protect” these smaller clients, to watch both the market and the economy. She also believes an “it’s just business” approach does not work. Larger companies have the resources and resilience to “experiment” with marketing strategies. With smaller companies, errors bleed through to the bottom line and can affect an organization’s survival. With smaller companies, It is so personal. It doesn’t get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They’re working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It’s personal. Amanda says she is quite cognizant of her personal weaknesses. In building her agency, she focuses on hiring people who can bring complementary strengths, identifies potential areas of growth, supports continuing education efforts, and brings in experts to help her team “accelerate” their careers. Some of the agency’s local clients go national. One client they are currently working with provides rehabilitative and mental health care for first responders (fire and police). The client will soon launch a national first responder mental health platform called Shield, which excites Amanda because it facilitates open discussions of mental health. Amanda can be reached on her agency’s website at: or , or by email at: . Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Amanda Parker, President and Owner at Collective Alternative based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda. AMANDA: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. ROB: Absolutely. Great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Collective Alternative, and what distinguishes the firm? What is your superpower? AMANDA: Oh, our superpower. Our firm is unique in we focus on small business. My background with agencies and things like that, I was on the larger accounts, but I really fell in love with the mom n’ pops, the small businesses of the country, and wanted to give them an opportunity to compete and gain some market share. So, we really focus on those mom n’ pop businesses. I love home services. When I did work on the client-side, I was the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and I fell in love with it. It got in my blood. So, we love home services and new home construction and all of that. But I just love my small business clients and to see their growth. It’s just amazing. ROB: That’s excellent. Those businesses, you say small; are they largely local? Are some of them national in scope? Is it heavy into services? Are you helping the local plumber go up against the big guys, or what are the industry specialties? AMANDA: The majority of our clients are local. We are definitely helping that local plumber go up against the big guys. Even the bigger guy in the area, right? Which I just love. But we do have some clients that are national, or they’ve started local and they’ve grown nationally. We have one client that started here in Indiana, and they provide rehabilitative care, mental health care, all of that kind of thing for first responders – for fire and police. And they are growing on a national scale, especially with a new product they’re taking to market this month. So, it’s really cool to see that growth and be a part of it. ROB: That’s really exciting to be able to help with that. What is it that you think changed as the firm grows that makes it maybe a different firm specialty? How do you define small as in small business, and what is it that really makes the scope of what they need a great fit for you? AMANDA: My background is strategy and development, so I really focused on when you’re a small business, you cannot afford to waste a single dollar. I really focus on the strategy behind everything that we do. We don’t throw things at the wall to see what sticks. We are very focused, hone in on – we may do some A/B testing, but for the most part it’s planned out. We know what the payoff is going to be. We know we’re going to deliver the right ROI for our clients, and we really focus in on that strategy to make sure that every dollar they give to us is working for them and paying off. ROB: There’s definitely a certain pressure. They don’t have a lot of extra dollars for experimental budgets when you’re talking about a small business. And I can imagine there’s probably a range of services you can engage in. How far across the range are you going? You can do anything from SEO, you can do SEM, you can do paid organic social, you can do media, TV, billboards, out-of-home. How far does the rabbit hole go with these clients? AMANDA: We’re actually a full-service firm, so we do everything that they need. One issue that I always heard from my small business clients was they felt like they had to repeat their initiatives over and over again to a number of different marketing partners. At one point they’re talking to a PR person; then they’re talking to a digital firm; then they’re talking to an SEO firm. It was just all over the place, and they never felt like they had the unity, so they couldn’t tell if their dollars were really working for them or not. I brought all of those different expertises in-house with different people leading those different areas, and now everything is under one roof and we all collaborate and talk together. So, they don’t have to repeat and they can really see the benefit of it. ROB: Some services, it’s pretty straightforward; you can show somebody “You’re a plumber, we ran this ad, we tracked the phone numbers, here’s your calls.” Maybe if they’re really detailed, they can see what they got from that. How do you look at something that can be a little bit of a longer term investment? Let’s say you’re looking at – whether it’s an awareness campaign on a digital billboard, whether it’s maybe something where the outcome – sometimes it’s not 100% certain how well you can do in SEO and what keywords you can optimize for. How do you think about helping them through that process of investing over time? The outcome is a little bit unknown, but directionally, you know because it rhymes with plenty of other clients that you’ve seen. AMANDA: I think it’s more a matter of educating them and almost holding their hand through the process so they understand what it is that we’re trying to accomplish, they know what the end goal or objective is, and they know what the benefit of that end goal is. A lot of times as marketers, I feel like we go so fast – and we know it, and we know the acronyms and everything else, so we just keep going and going and going, and we don’t slow down enough to communicate to the client and let them know, “Okay, here’s what this means for you, and here’s why I’m doing it, and here’s what I’m hoping to see out of it or I expect to see out of it, and here’s what that means.” So just really overcommunicating that. ROB: Got it. I can certainly see that. And then there’s I think also a challenge, then, of equipping more and more of your team to walk clients on that journey. How do you help give your team the playbook that is needed so that – you can’t hold everybody’s hand anymore, right? AMANDA: I can’t. But I want to. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] All these nice little small businesses. They need somebody to hang out with them and help them and hug them, yes. AMANDA: Yes. I so want to, but I can’t. So, it’s really making sure that my team understands our culture, understands our mission. And if they do and they believe in it and they buy into it, then I know that they will continue to communicate that and advocate for the client. And that’s what I’ve seen. It really comes down to educating the team on what our mission is and then making sure that they believe it in their soul and then get out there and do it. ROB: Excellent. You mentioned a little bit of your past life and some of the work you’d done for clients before, but that’s still a long distance from actually starting your own agency. So, what was it that pushed you across that boundary and led you to start your own firm? AMANDA: I constantly heard that I was too vested in my clients and that “it’s not personal, it’s just business.” That kept me up at night. I struggled with that so much because, for a small business, you’d better believe it’s personal. It is so personal. It doesn’t get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They’re working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It’s personal. I could not get that to settle with my soul, so I remember coming home one day and I told my husband, “Yeah, I’m done. I’m going to do this on my own and I’m going to make it personal.” And our tagline is “Making business personal.” He was like, “Okay, girl, go for it.” And that was 14 years ago. ROB: Wow, so 14 years. What have been some of the step functions, the inflection points on the journey? Whether it’s key hires, whether it’s service areas, whether it’s a certain degree of scale or things that you don’t do anymore that you used to, what have been some of those key points in the business? AMANDA: I feel like I have had this rollercoaster journey as a business owner. I’m sure a lot of business owners feel that way, but I have made some doozy mistakes where you hire the wrong person and they don’t buy into the mission, but you just liked them so much, or you felt they had such potential but they don’t want to realize it. I don't know. So, some bad hires along the way. But I’ve had some really great hires. I created a leadership team around me of some magnificent, magnificently talented people, and they are just incredible. I am so blessed to have them. As you know, this industry changes on a dime. Today it’s one thing, tomorrow it’s another. You have to stay up on that. So, making sure that we hire people who want to change with that and want to realize what’s new – I mean, five years ago what was TikTok? Come on. It’s just really making sure that we’re staying on top of things, that we know what’s coming, that we’re watching the market, we’re watching the economy. We have to protect our clients in ways that other firms don’t. ROB: Have you found some local business clients for whom TikTok makes good sense and resonates well? What have you seen there? AMANDA: It’s funny; because they’re home services – and I will say, in Indiana compared to maybe where you are or California, we seem to be a little bit behind some of the coasts. Several of my clients, their big thing this year was getting on Instagram. It is what it is. And now I’m trying to talk to them about influencers and “let’s get in with an influencer, let’s do an influencer campaign.” It’s harder for them to understand what that is or see the benefit of that, but they’re coming around. We’re doing some cool experimental things for them to see what that looks like. I know it’s their trust in me that’s pushing that, which I appreciate beyond words. But they’re getting there. [laughs] That’s all I can say. ROB: Sure. And I wonder also, not so much even for anything to reflect on you or your clients, but also as I think about the intersection of the businesses that you work with, simply put, the TikTok feed is not really optimized for local. That’s not an axis that it tends to revolve around, so I could see it being a tricky investment just from that part alone. The dynamic isn’t getting followed. The dynamic is showing up in the algorithmic feed and blowing up there. And TikTok would rather have somebody telling a joke or doing a dance or falling on their face or cute animals than “Here’s how you prepare for freezing your pipes in the winter, and here’s my dance for doing that.” It’s a different thing. AMANDA: [laughs] Yep, exactly. ROB: You mentioned, and I’ll pull on it a little bit – we don’t always get a chance to talk through the thinking that goes into exec team, who’s on that boat, what roles, what structure. How have you evolved and emerged and thought about this executive team around you and who’s on it? AMANDA: I think pretty uniquely in the fact that I have tried to be very self-aware of my weaknesses. My skillset does not include design. It does not include website creation or even brand management, for that matter. So, I knew early on I need very strong people with me on that side that can see the strategy in that and really support me there. So having a creative director, a VP of Creative, was really important. She was my first hire, and she is still with me today. I have a designer that has been with me for 12 years. It’s treating them like family, but filling in where I know that I am weak and I need to surround myself with strong talent. I think that has been so beneficial for me because then we’ve grown together. We can collaborate together, and together we do some really amazing things. ROB: It’s interesting when you have someone involved who excels in an area that you need them. You need them to be stronger there. How do you think about continuing to develop those team members in areas where you’re not more of an expert? There are places where you have your expertise and it’s your job to equip and cast vision, and then there’s stuff that you don’t know how to do, and that’s why people are there. How do you help your team grow with the firm? AMANDA: They still want to grow. They want to accelerate their career, they want to learn other things. We do a lot of training. We do a lot of bringing experts in. If they want to go to a conference or something like that, all of that is on the table. We do a lot of sharing newsletters, articles, videos. We do a lot of that back and forth so we all have that knowledge base, but they’re still learning. And then it’s constantly giving them a challenge. “Here’s an area of growth that I see,” and getting them to realize that, see that, and then jump in and participate in it. ROB: It’s always an interesting challenge, especially when you get outside of your wheelhouse a little bit, so I do appreciate that thinking. As you reflect on the journey of the firm, Amanda, what are some things you think about? What have you learned along the way? What would you go back and tell yourself “Don’t do that, do it this way” if you could? Reflect on those things you might’ve done differently if you were starting from zero. AMANDA: Oh, my goodness, that list is lengthy. There have been a couple times that we were primed to grow, we knew we needed help – this is where I learned this lesson – and instead of hiring for culture or fit that way, we hired doers that could just support the work and do the work. It just didn’t work out. It was a huge influx of people all of a sudden that we weren’t ready for. We didn’t train them appropriately. We did not set them up for success. That was a big lesson for me to learn, that I had hired the wrong way. I always try to leave people better than I found them, and I know those people I did not set up for success, and that was really tough for me. It was tough for me to get over that and move on to, “Okay, I had perhaps a negative impact on their life. I still need to take care of my clients and continue to build, so I need to reset. What does that look like so I don’t do that again?” That’s tough. It’s tough as a business owner to know that you have that kind of impact. ROB: Yeah. But it’s personal. You said it from the start. That part of the business is personal for you as well, so it’s consistent. It pulls through. Even the wrong decisions aren’t just like, “Oh, forget that person, they should’ve known better.” You see that in business, and some people operate that way, and that’s personal. That gets taken very differently, personally. It’s a different lane. AMANDA: It really does. It’s kept me up at night. And then there’s those things that if I could go back and tell this person “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what I should have known” or “I hadn’t learned that lesson” – you want to, and then at the same time, you’re the boss, so you’re always going to be the bad guy. [laughs] I mean, where’s the line, right? ROB: Yep. We’re in an interesting spot, an interesting turning point. We’re coming into the summer of 2022. Everybody’s done their different versions of office and no office, “how is my team structured, where is my team?” How are you thinking about the location and gathering of your team in-person as we’re going through 2022? AMANDA: That’s funny. When COVID came – and that was another lesson in and of itself – but when COVID came on, I was watching the news. I sent all my team home early. Before the mandate even rolled out, I had sent them to work from home. In the middle of May, my leadership team called me and said, “We’re going back to the office with or without you.” And that was May of 2020. I was like, “Um, there’s still a mandate.” I’m trying to talk through it, and they’re like, “No. We need to collaborate. This is what we do for our clients. We’re going back to the office June 1. You do whatever you need to do to make sure that happens, but we’re going back to the office.” It just so happened to roll with the timeline; they had lifted some restrictions at that point, so we could. And we’ve been in the office since June 1st of 2020. We’ve been very fortunate with – we try to stay healthy. If somebody’s sick, stay home, that kind of thing. But yeah, they want to be here. They want to collaborate. So that’s where we are. ROB: It sounds like you didn’t have to pull them into it. Did you have anybody who tried to move somewhere or tried to go remote first? Or that just wasn’t your lane? AMANDA: We did lose two people. One person had to move to Texas to take care of her family, and then another person was just not comfortable coming into the office and she actually quit. That was unfortunate, because we liked both of them, but this is where we do our best work, and we have to perform for those clients. ROB: I’m sure you’ve had to, whether it was those folks and you had to backfill them or new roles you’ve had to hire – have you found that there are people who are ready to be in an office? That’s a lane you’ve chosen and they’re like,... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/23084024

Page One or You Don’t Pay 05/05/2022

Page One or You Don’t Pay 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: .or on his agency website at: . 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... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22874174

Nonfiction Dreams: Science Fiction to Reality 04/28/2022

Nonfiction Dreams: Science Fiction to Reality Mardis & Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors & Founding Partners, Nonfiction Design (San Francisco, CA) Mardis and Phnam Bagley are Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design, a company that started originally as an industrial design firm but morphed into a future-focused studio. The studio works with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and governments to solve huge, complex problems and “change the world for the better.” Phnam says all of their clients are long term and come to them “to solve huge problems about the future of education . . . living on Mars . . . food . . . neuroscience.”. The studio strategizes with a lot of these leaders in innovation, technology, and science to help them get their products “into the hands of people that need them.” The studio pushes clients “into extremes” to solve technical, experiential, and design problems “through ergonomics, through human factors, through thinking about behavior change.” Mardis explains one of the challenges of this work – that people have to “fight the biases of the past.” A recent project was with Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning, which wanted to rethink the future of education. Nonfiction set up two teams, one that dug into white papers from the past, and the other, a group of creatives unexposed to this data, that freely brainstormed the future of education. In the end, both groups came to the same conclusion . . . but the creatives had actionable solutions for moving forward. What did this exploratory discover about education? In this interview, Phnam outlines a few conclusions – one, that children would benefit from letting them “be and stay absurd.” She says, “Not everything in life needs to make sense, needs to be efficient.” She adds that life would be better if we sometimes spent time “doing things that don’t make any sense.” She believes today’s society schedules too much of children’s time. Teens, especially, need “time to rest physically, to rest the brain, to talk to other people, and to be bored” in order to grow to be healthy adults. Mardis says, “Developing a solution that’s completely individual to the client’s needs is really, really important to how we conduct business and how we keep satisfied clients.” With an eye to the future, the studio has started working on a “more circular economy model,” where design not only takes into consideration recycling, but also repair and remanufacturing. The Nonfiction Studio team is diverse . . . from “many different cultures, many different countries.” Mardis, with a background in industrial engineering and branding, says they don’t look much at résumés or portfolios. Phnam, an industrial engineer with a master’s degree in (aero)space architecture, says the studio hires people “because they have something very interesting, and most likely that thing has to do with their past – what kind of career they’ve been through, what kind of country they come from, what kind of past they’ve had.” The husband-wife team presented “Designing the Future of Everything” at South by Southwest 2022 two times due to demand. Mardis, Phnam, and Nonfiction are available on Twitter and post future of design videos on Instagram. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mardis and Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design based in San Francisco, California. We have a special two-guest episode because we had two speakers and they like to spend time with each other. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Nonfiction Design, and what is your superpower? PHNAM: Sure. Phnam here. I’m the wife of the Bagley duo. Nonfiction is a design firm based in San Francisco. Originally it was started as an industrial design firm because that’s both of our backgrounds, and it turned into this future-focused studio where companies from startups all the way to Fortune 500 companies to governments come to us to solve huge problems about the future. When we say huge problems, we’re talking about education, we’re talking about living on Mars, we’re talking about future of food, and we’re talking about neuroscience. This is what we do. ROB: That sounds like a wide range of things to solve. How do you go about knowing how to solve all these things? PHNAM: We are an extremely curious group of people. There is not one subject in the world that we don’t want to tackle because, in the end, what we want to do is change the world for the better. Impact is really at the core of everything that we do, whether it’s thinking about the future of future humans or what we need today in the medical industry. That’s what drives us. That gives us the motivation to work and make other people’s lives better. But also creating the foundation of a future that we want to live in, because when you look at the news, for example, a lot of things are not going according to plan. And I believe, and we believe, that designers have the power to change that. That’s why we started this company. ROB: Is there an example, maybe, of a future that you have had to recently think through? And what did you think about it? MARDIS: Hi, this is Mardis Bagley. Great question. I think one of the things we like to do is shake up the status quo. When we’re thinking about futures, we often have to fight the biases of the past. Stepping out of this entrenched thinking. One of the projects we worked on recently is called Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning. Thinking and rethinking education is a very, very complex problem. One of the things we did right off is we said that we don’t want to step too deep into research and repeat all the past, or even bias ourselves in thinking about the opportunity of the future. So, as we do this, we’re a number of creatives from all over the planet; we’re a very diverse studio of men, women, many different cultures, many different countries. But we all have some sort of experience. We have a certain amount of intuition. We all have been through school on many different levels. How do we redesign education in the way we think? What we did is we started designing it straight out of the gate. We pushed research to the side, which sounds kind of crazy. We totally avoided research in redesigning this school and this education system, and we came up with these really unique ideas about how to approach school and expand the minds of young children in a way that spoke to their wellbeing. It spoke to future generations. When we’re talking about designing education, we can’t design education for jobs that we don’t yet know what they’re going to be or the technologies that are going to empower them using the thinking of education that is well over 100 years old in the process. While we’re doing this wild ride of creativity and exploration on one side, we had a secondary research track talking to leaders in education from MIT and Stanford. But we never let them talk to our creatives on the other side. We let them have independent paths as they explored forward. What happened is after a few months, we ended up at the same exact location in terms of knowledge, in terms of understanding education, and how to break the norms – except for we were reading whitepapers that are decades old on one side, and on the other side is purely months of creativity. We got to the same exact location except for the creatives came out with solutions that are actionable, solutions that are ready to change young people’s lives. ROB: It might have even been hard to get to those solutions starting from the whitepapers, right? You started from another place and maybe even went some places you would never go. Part of brainstorming sometimes is proposing the impossible, the inappropriate, the unacceptable, but then bringing it back in bounds. So, what’s a solution that we didn’t know to a problem? PHNAM: Letting children be and stay absurd. The fact that not everything in life needs to make sense, needs to be efficient, and sometimes spend your time doing things that don’t make any sense. That’s part of being a child. So, reintroducing that in the way you interact with yourself, you interact with others, and you interact with the architecture of a school – that’s what we wanted to bring in there. There are certain aspects of the school that don’t really have a means. So that’s very much part of it. Another thing is that when you look at the schedule of children today, it’s a lot of going to school and going to after-school, activity, activity, activity. Their schedule is packed, and their parents are just driving them from one place to another. Really spending the time to rest physically, to rest the brain, to talk to other people, and to be bored – that’s very much part of human evolution. It’s a need that we have that we’ve taken away with all the screens and all the activity. We want to integrate it back into the lives of the kids so they grow up to be healthy adults. ROB: Are they allowed to be lazy at the same time, or can they do that at different times? Because structured lazy time seems like it would still be kind of in the pattern, but somebody’s going to go crazy thinking about letting each kid be lazy when they want to. How do you pull it off? PHNAM: Laziness is something that we know of. We call it laziness, but really it has a lot to do with physiological changes – in teenagers, for example. When you grow, you actually need to sleep more. You actually have to rest more. We’ve been forcing a schedule that’s extremely unnatural onto growing young adults, and that’s not really working. What that does is teaches humans to learn how to read their own body and to give their body what they need. That’s very much part of growing up and learning about the world. ROB: I think adults could learn that, too. We still need to learn how to accept that permission. I’ve done the audience a disservice; I’ve failed to mention why you have a loud fan club behind you. The reason is that we are live at South by Southwest at the interactive portion of the conference, primarily, this big old festival of people getting together in Austin, Texas for the first time in three years. You both are here to present a session. You presented it twice. What people don’t know if they have an event is you sign up for the session, and if it gets a lot of popularity, they schedule you for it again. So, you presented this twice because probably some combination of reputation, a good sizzling headline and summary, a following, and all these things. Your session was “Designing the Future of Everything.” What content, what frameworks, what ways of thinking – or was it more examples? What did you share with the audience? What did you want them to take away? MARDIS: I would say that at the foundation of our company, we like to say we turn science fiction into reality for a better future. If you step back and start to ask yourself what does that really mean, we as a company, Nonfiction, work with a lot of leaders in innovation and technology, technologists themselves, scientists. Oftentimes these technologies have a hard time getting out of the laboratory. They have a hard time getting into consumers’ hands, into the hands of people that need them. We come in and make these technologies available to people through ergonomics, through human factors, through thinking about behavior change. Very much so, as the title suggests, we do it for everything from medical devices to consumer devices. We work in aerospace and we work on-planet and off-planet. Recently, we’re happy to say that we won first place in the Deep Space Food Challenge with NASA as well as the Canadian Space Agency. ROB: Congratulations. MARDIS: Yeah, that’s very exciting. We’re building things that will hopefully leave planet and make future astronauts’ lives better as they travel two and a half, three years into space to Mars. ROB: What’s needed differently on that three-year journey? What did you have to design for in that context? MARDIS: I’ll let my partner, the outer space architect, answer that one. ROB: I like that job title, too. Wow. PHNAM: Yeah. I actually went to school for that. It surprises a lot of people. 15 years ago, I got a master’s degree in space architecture from the University of Houston. Back then, space architecture was very based on systems engineering, like what volume is necessary to help astronauts survive in space? But when you look at space today in 2022 with the SpaceX and Blue Origins of the world, it becomes clear that people like us are going to be part of the space industry in the future, whether as tourists or as people going to work up there. The reason why it’s so important for designers and architects and creatives to be part of all of this is because we understand humans. We know how to ask the right questions and to turn these answers into solutions that actually mean something to humans. So far, we’ve been designing space interiors very much like spaces for survival. When you look up the ISS right now, it’s not really a place you want to hang out in. So really thinking about making space more human is one of the models that we go after. We want to invite more designers, more architects, more creatives, more artists to really help us with that change. It does take a lot of disciplines to design for space because not everything works the same way. Here on Earth, opening a door is like you put your hand on it, you turn the knob and you’re done. Up in space you have to hold on to something else; otherwise you’re going to be pushed back. You have to think about food the same way – eating – what can be sent there, what can be safe to eat, what can protect you from cosmic radiation and things like that. What is the long-term effect of microgravity on your body? There’s been the famous twin project, Mark and Scott Kelly. One of the twins went up to space and one stayed on Earth, and we saw the difference physiologically and psychologically, what’s been happening between the two. So, based on that type of knowledge, how do we design better interiors and better products and better medical support for us to see ourselves in space? ROB: That seems like it must’ve had so many constraints to it, but also some constraints that maybe weren’t actual – that you were told were constraints but weren’t. What did you find was a constraint that helped you be creative and get to an unexpected solution? And what was something you were told you couldn’t do that you found out you actually could? Was there anything like that? PHNAM: We believe that without constraint you can’t design. You’re just going to come up with something that – ROB: “Let’s just put a five-bedroom house in space and call it good, we’re all happy,” right? It doesn’t work that way. PHNAM: The constraint is space, of course. If it doesn’t fit in the payload area of a rocket, as of today we can’t bring it up. One thing that’s very different between designing for space and designing for Earth is weight. When we design something for Earth, weight is limited by shipping. In space, weight is money. I think it was in 1981, bringing a kilogram of mass up in low Earth orbit was like $81,000 or something. Now it’s less than $2,000, depending on what it is. So yeah, we have to think about things like this even before we design anything. ROB: Let’s rewind a little bit. Where did this whole thing start? What made you all decide to bring Nonfiction Design into existence rather than just having a job? MARDIS: Well, Nonfiction has been around for six years. Phnam and I have been in the industrial design industry for well over 16 years now. I’ve had a previous career in branding, and Phnam in aerospace as well. But what really brought it into existence is we were contracting, working in many different agencies over the years – all the big names you might recognize. We felt like there was a culture, there was a style of working that maybe could be refined. And I’m probably being kind. [laughs] We just felt like we could do it better, or at least let’s say different. We felt so compelled to give it a try. Some of the things that we wanted to fight against is we didn’t see enough diversity or inclusion. I mentioned that earlier. We have a very diverse crew, and that’s part of our secret sauce – listening to everybody, being very inclusive. But also breaking away from the norms of what we call industrial design now. It’s not just shape development or form development. That is part of it, making beautiful things, but we’re well beyond that. We’re into user interactions. We’re into designing for impact. We put a lot of things on the planet. Our efforts put a lot of things in people’s hands, and many of them go to the landfill. It’s a very linear model. We’ve started doing a more circular economy model where we think about designing not only for recycling, but for repair and remanufacturing. We’re thinking about our impact and we’re thinking about that lifecycle of a product along the way, and how can we do less negative impact and more positive impact? Positive impact would be impacting the planet in maybe an upcycling way or a regenerative way, but also impacting people’s lives along the way. ROB: How much of what you do is somebody coming to you knowing they want that whole package, and how much of it is them coming to you having seen something you did and they want one thing, and you have to bring them into the bigger picture? PHNAM: A lot of our clients today come to us with a question. They’re like, “How do we solve this endemic problem?” Then we strategize together on how to solve that problem, whether it’s a hardware solution or a software solution or whatever. Then from there, we build this relationship. Every client we have is a long-term relationship. We push them into extremes. One extreme is hypercreativity. They came to us as a design studio because they want us to show them what they can’t get themselves, number one. Number two is that we as a design firm are extremely technical. We’re not afraid of going very deep into the mechanical engineering, electrical, firmware, all that stuff because it’s necessary. We need to be part of the process. So really solving the technical problem at the same time as solving the experiential and the design problem is what we do well. As we do that, we take the hand of the clients and show them how it’s done. We don’t have a recipe that we apply to all projects. That’s actually a question we get asked all the time, “What is your process?” We probably have a different process for every single client we have. ROB: Wow. PHNAM: Because each of the clients has very specific needs in time and space and in industry, so we have to craft something very specific to each of them. ROB: I heard you say that a little bit when you were talking about not wanting to look at the whitepapers when you’re designing a solution. It’s not your process is always to put blinders on and not look at what’s out there, but sometimes it is, and it depends somewhat on the solution. It’s also an interesting positioning because a lot of creative services firms are out there – it’s almost like if you need some more of this work than you have capacity for, then go call these people. “I need somebody to do a little bit more paid marketing than I can do internally.” You all are positioned in a way where they probably don’t have the technical knowledge, and they are literally saying, “We don’t know what we don’t know. Please help us.” How do you communicate that when everybody wants to put a... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22812974

Engaging Experience Design through Technology 04/21/2022

Engaging Experience Design through Technology Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO, Blue Cadet (Philadelphia, PA and New York City, NY) Josh Goldblum is Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet, an experience design studio with around 30 employees in Philadelphia and 15 in New York. Twenty-odd years ago, Josh worked in-house at the Smithsonian Institution, producing digital products and integrating technology into physical environments. Unfulfilled because big projects only came around every few years, Josh left and freelanced for a number of museums, doing single-touch Flash design and development. As his on-man Blue Cadet operation became a growing team, projects expanded to encompass touch tables, touch walls, and projection; technology evolved and became increasingly more sophisticated; and the organization’s internal systems had to be more formalized to meet the needs of the larger business. Today’s experience technology is far more powerful, interesting, and relevant than that in the past. Flash has been replaced by Real Engine, Unity, and JavaScript. The Blue Cadet studio continues to design large-touch surfaces and build immersive experiences but now works with augmented reality, haptics (touch-related communication), and using technology and digital products to make cultural content in physical spaces more immersive, engaging, and “magical.” Although much of the firm’s work is for museums, it has recently expanded to provide these immersive services for executive briefing centers and such brands as Nike and Google. Josh says it’s important that the studio creates a “content experience that’s not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space.” In working with clients, Josh finds it helpful to carve out a little paid research at the beginning of a project to prepare an ideation spread where the studio can research client needs and present ideas. At the end of this initial period, the client can either work with Blue Cadet or take the ideas Blue Cadet developed and work with another studio. Josh says, “It’s better to carve off a little space to redirect (the project) than to get into that death march of implementing something that’s just not going to be that great.” That time upfront also helps Blue Cadet discover what it is that a client really wants, whether they can provide what the client wants, whether they want to do the project, and whether the parties can develop a solid working relationship. Josh participated in a panel session discussion of Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture at the 2022 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. He says he is most active on LinkedIn, where he shares a lot of concept prototype material. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined live today at South by Southwest Interactive Festival by Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet based in Philadelphia and New York. Welcome to the podcast, Josh. JOSH: Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Blue Cadet and what is your superpower? What is your calling card? What do people come to you for? JOSH: Blue Cadet is an experience design studio. Most of us are based in Philadelphia. There’s about 30 in Philadelphia, another 15 up in New York, and then actually, when I say “us” based in Philadelphia, we just moved out to LA. So my family moved to LA. We’re the only ones out there. We’re mostly known for experience design in the cultural space, and also really a lot of technology in physical space. Twenty-odd years ago, I was inhouse at Smithsonian doing digital product work, but also integrated technology into physical environments. So we’ve been in that experience design space, figuring out how you marry technology into public spaces, how you take cultural content and make it interesting. That’s what we’ve been doing, and we do it across physical space; we also do it across digital products. ROB: Got it. It rings of museums or themed places, but I can also imagine a building that wants to have something and not just be a hollow shell. What does a typical space look like for you? JOSH: We do a lot of work in the museum space, like the traditional museum space. All the big museums are generally our clients. We’ve worked with a lot of them. Everything from like science centers to history museums to art museums. We did a Van Gogh projected experience with the Art Institute of Chicago way before they were doing all these projections. ROB: All the immersive experiences. JOSH: Yeah, we’ve been doing that for a long time. But then recently we’ve been moving more into brand work. We’ve been doing some work with Nike, which has been really exciting. We’ve done work with Google. trying to take a lot of that museum flair, which is an obsession with content and making sure that what we’re saying is true, and trying to figure out what’s interesting about a brand and giving it that treatment where you’re elevating the personalities, elevating the science. You’re making something that’s smart but also engaging. ROB: Where are they doing those things? JOSH: These are executive briefing centers, sometimes. These are museums or brands. Some of these are online. And then we started doing a little bit of work for real estate companies, just trying to – it’s not for me. [laughs] Just to activate some of their public spaces as well. Again, trying to bring in content experience that’s not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space. ROB: When I think about this space, I start off thinking about the sleepy old kiosk that became a touchscreen and the keyboard is broken. Did it start there and proceed from there? JOSH: Yeah, I would say when we started out – Blue Cadet was my freelance handle. I was at the Smithsonian; I did a pretty cool project there that got a lot of attention. The Smithsonian being what it is, they only had big projects every few years. I was getting kind of bored, so I left and I started going around museum to museum. I was essentially picking up jobs doing Flash design and development. When we first started out, it was a lot of those single touchscreens and those things that were kind of cheap. No one was going to lose their job if we really screwed up. But we overdelivered. We did really great stuff, and we grew on the backs of those reputations and then started doing touch tables and touch walls and projection mapping. These days, we still do a lot of large touch surfaces and things like that, but a lot more thinking about the technologies that are more interesting or relevant. Now we’re doing a lot more with AR, things that are haptics, camera vision. Also just trying to figure out how to make an environment more engaging and magical. ROB: Some of the advantage, even, of the march of technology is that probably some of those early Flash things you were doing were still rather expensive and still took a big commitment. I think some of this has allowed the technology to come down into simpler spaces. My team’s done really simple electron-based kiosks with a little bit of sound, a little bit of animation, and it makes it more available to more places. JOSH: Yeah. It’s interesting because Flash was an amazing tool. Flash really allowed you to do a lot of very, very cool things. When Steve Jobs killed Flash, essentially – which he pretty much singlehandedly did – there was actually a little bit of a lull in experience design where the tools had to catch up. But now you see things like Real Engine, Unity – but even what you can do with JavaScript. You can do everything that you used to be able to do in Flash now to the nth degree. And it’s much better. Flash probably should’ve died. ROB: How often does as client come to you with an idea of what they want? How often do they come to you with a topic – “Here’s this topic, here’s what we want to show people; surprise us”? Or is it more “We have an idea and a direction”? Do you know how much space you’re dealing with? It seems like there’s a lot of variables in there. JOSH: A lot of times if we’re dealing with a museum client, they might have a big exhibit or something like that. Or even a brand, they have their stories, they know what they want to convey, they have the space. But then they come to us and they’re like, “How do we tell the story? How do we do this?” A lot of times even if they come in with very, very fully baked ideas, we’ll roll it way back into strategy and be like, let’s create a little bit of space to figure out what you can do with contemporary technology, with contemporary tools. What can you do to make sure that content or experience really shines in a way that’s not been done in the same way with different content six months before? ROB: It sounds like it’s really a consultative opportunity, right? To show them – maybe they start somewhere, but sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know, in a very good way. You have a broader span of the industry. That’s why they come to you. You bring some extra ideas to the plate. JOSH: Yeah. And usually what we do – we’ve been doing these things called ideation spreads. Sometimes someone will come to us with a pretty big budget and we’ll be like “Hey, instead of having to sign the SOW for this real big thing, give us 10% of it and give us three weeks, and let us do a bunch of sprints where we reconceptualize it and see if we land in a better place.” Sometimes it’s better, particularly if you get a brief that you’re like, “This is not going to end well. This is not something we want to be working on for the next six months.” It’s better to carve off a little space to redirect it than to get into that death march of implementing something that’s just not going to be that great. ROB: Right. Do you ever engage in that competitive sales process where you’re competing over the big pie and you take the little pie? Does that happen? JOSH: Absolutely. I would say particularly as we were earning our market position and earning our reputation, we weren’t always the safe choice. We were always known for doing the creative thing and for doing something cool and new, but there were a lot of people who had done it a million times. And it was riskier for them to work with us. So that was a great way. We’d come in and do these ideation spreads and say, “Look, you don’t have to trust us with this giant thing. Bring us in here and let’s see if we can set the vision. You’re not even obligated to work with us after that.” ROB: Right, “You own the work, go ahead and take it.” I think every creative firm benefits when they find ways essentially to get paid for discovery instead of trying to do all this guesswork upfront. But there’s always the tension between “How much are we spending on this?” versus “How likely are we to get the work?” Nobody wants to be in that tension. So, the 10% strategy there makes a lot of sense. JOSH: Also, I’d much rather do that than do spec on RFPs. You don’t know anything about the client and really what they want. You don’t really know what the problem set is. So if you’re doing spec on an RFP, you’re really just shooting in the dark. Whereas if you carve out a little bit of space where you can actually collaborate with a client, you usually come up with better creative; you’re actually solving the problem. But then also, you get to build that relationship and the rapport, and that’s usually what carries you forward. Or you sit there and you’re like, “Okay, there’s not great relationship or rapport here.” ROB: You can dodge a bullet. JOSH: Yeah, you can be like, “Okay, you really did want that thing. God love ya, go on with it.” ROB: We talked a little bit about the origin story, about you going around to museums. When did you realize it was a thing and you said, “You know what, this is my job now”? What was the inflection point? JOSH: For a while, Blue Cadet was just my freelance handle. I was living in D.C. because I was still at the Smithsonian and I was picking up odd jobs. It was fun. I enjoyed it. The projects I’d get weren’t huge budgets, but I was actually making way more money than I was at the Smithsonian. But I finally got a project – a couple friends and I got this grant to do an interactive documentary, like a Flash-based documentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This was something where we came up with the idea, we went to a foundation, and we were like “Hey, can you pay us some money to put this thing together?” The timeline was such, the budget was such that I kind of had to hire a team. We had videographers, we had professional sound people. We were basically following this high school class – it was the only high school class to reopen after Hurricane Katrina. We were down there basically weeks after the hurricane. It was decimated. But when I was on that project – it was called Yearbook 2006 – I was like, oh man, if I bring in other people, it works way better. I was still doing the stuff that was too expensive to outsource, but I outsourced some other things and it ended up being really successful. It became really popular. I was like, okay, I want to start a studio. So that was the first point where I wanted to do a studio. Then that same team, we got another project the year after that for the Pulitzer Center and we ended up winning a News and Documentary Emmy, which was a pretty big deal at the time. We beat Wolf Blitzer or something. That put us on the map, and that snowballed to where we started getting a lot of work, and I was able to start building the team from there. ROB: It seems like something in that documentary space – of all the things you can fractionalize and take some people, do a project, get done with it, it seems like something in that video space, people are kind of used to it. That’s the drill; that’s what you do. You film something, then you move on to the next thing. JOSH: Yeah. Basically what happened was I was living in D.C. but I was from Philadelphia; I was turning 30. I was like, okay, I’m getting to an age where maybe I’m ready to settle down a little bit. I didn’t really want to settle down in D.C. So I moved up to Philly and I made my first hire. It was someone straight out of college. She actually still works for me, 15 years later. ROB: Wow. JOSH: But that was the thing. We were hiring junior people and training them up, and then we grew very linearly, 20% year over year. There were weird inflection points along the way, but yeah, that’s how we got to where we are now. ROB: What’s a weird inflection point? JOSH: As you’re growing a studio, there are always these different points where the wheels get real shaky and the systems that were working fine in this phase don’t really work as well in the next phase. There’s a point where you have to get really professional about bill pay, about HR, benefits. You just have to start layering in a lot of systems at various points. And those are the points where you start getting more professional and you start having to have an org chart. You can’t just have a bunch of super creative people scrambling around all over the place. ROB: How have you digested that change? Is it something that comes well to you? Is there somebody, or many people, maybe a role that’s been integral to making the jumps? JOSH: Yeah, my partner Troy. We both worked as new media specialists at the Smithsonian. He was like my sixth hire or something like that at Blue Cadet. He was living in Denver quite happily, and I sort of dragged him across country to move to Philadelphia and start things. But I love Troy. I’m one of these people who can talk a really good game and I can set a vision or get really excited about the idea and what this thing can be. Troy’s the kind of guy who can sit down and actually make it happen. He can actually do it. So, he’s invaluable. Over the years, we’ve been very selective. I spend a lot of time recruiting the people that I want into the team. Very few people necessarily applied to Blue Cadet, particularly at the leadership level. I always sought out people that I thought would really fit into the studio and scale out our capabilities. ROB: That’s a great opportunity, because those strategic roles are also the ones where you could actually justify bringing a recruiter to, which you can’t always do in the services world. But to find those people and recruit them in . . . . JOSH: I never used a recruiter. Where you find the best people is just like here at SXSW, you’re meeting people. Or you meet clients. One of the people I recruited to Blue Cadet, who actually left to take over digital at the Obama Library, was client side, and she left midway through the project and everyone was like, “Oh my God, this place is going to fall apart without her. She is so instrumental to the studio.” This was a studio I was working with, and I was like, “That sucks; the project’s going to go sideways.” But then I was like, “I’m going to poach her at some point. I’m going to get her on my team.” And she was fantastic. So, I’m always looking for people that I’m like, “Wow, that person’s way smarter than me or better that me at these things.” ROB: That’s excellent, especially when you know the capabilities you don’t quite need yet, or you don’t need another person in that capability yet, and you can keep your head on the swivel, keep the mental library going of who’s next. It’s a fun journey to have that wish list and then fulfill on it. JOSH: Yeah. ROB: So, you’re here and you have a session coming up. It is “Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture.” What are you looking for people to get out of that? JOSH: Obviously, I’ve been speaking about experience design for a very, very long time. I was talking about how things were getting completely disrupted with physical space pre-pandemic. I was talking about Meow Wolf and Museum of Ice Cream and the changing face of retail and also some of the things that were happening with museums, and this was like 2018-2019. I was like, man, stuff’s really going to change. I saw the trends, I saw this stuff happening. And then obviously the pandemic has accelerated everything. Who knows where the chips are going to fall, but one of the things we’re seeing is a lot of people wanting to get back into physical space. Places like SXSW are now filling up again. People want to be around each other. But what are the spaces that bring out the best in us? How could those spaces operate to create better connections between people? That’s the sort of thing we’re really interested in. And then also, how do you discard the old stuff that doesn’t work anymore? Honestly, I love museums but I also kind of hate them. Also, I know for my kids, they’re not dying to go to the old-fashioned museum and read a bunch of wall labels. They’re really interested in culture because they’re my children, our children, but they want to consume it differently. And I want to make sure that they’re consuming culture in a way that feels good to them, that’s enjoyable and interesting to them. ROB: What do you think they’re going to want? Where is it headed? JOSH: It’s so funny; my kids like Roblox, they like all those things. I’ve taken them to a million museums. I’ve taken my son to Epcot and Disney and all the different – sometimes the things they like are the cheesy, colorful, fun Museum of Ice Cream rip-offs. But also, they would eat candy all day if I let them do that, too. So, it’s figuring out, okay, what are the things that have a personality, that are fun, that are interesting, that are enjoyable, but also are not just mind-numbing... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22707824

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion . . . Why? No . . . How to Make it Happen 04/14/2022

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion . . . Why? No . . . How to Make it Happen Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, NY Jennifer Brown founded her namesake Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consulting agency 20 years ago. The agency develops top-down DEI strategies and training programs for medium-size to large companies; sets up effective, well-aligned affinity groups within those companies; and promotes inclusive leadership through educational initiatives. Jennifer is a frequent keynote speaker, both virtually and live. She presented Beyond Diversity: Building A More Inclusive World at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference and followed that with a book signing of her third book, Beyond Diversity: 12 Non-Obvious Ways to Build a More Inclusive World, which she co-authored with Rohit Bhargava. Jennifer is the bestselling author of Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace & The Will to Change (2017) and How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive (2019). The second edition of the 2019 book will be released in October 2022. Jennifer says there was “a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020” after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent and still-ongoing social movement for cultural change. Jennifer feels that today’s workplace is “not built by and for so many of us if we . . . don’t fit a certain demographic.” Jennifer explains the importance of this “sea change”: “If people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably . . . they do better work . . . and they stay longer.” Jennifer says she is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community” who has “been out for nearly 25 years.” She believes half of her cohorts “are still closeted in the workplace,” but that, finally, people are no longer talking about “why” inclusion is important, but “how” to make it happen. She believes companies will be challenged in setting up equitable workplaces as they rebuild “post-Covid,” particularly with managing blended teams of hybrid (virtual and in-person) employees. Jennifer warns that managers need to be vigilant in supportinging inclusivity. “Harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace,” she says. Why? “There are no witnesses,” she explains. People are “cut off from information” and don’t know their options on how to escalate a complaint and whether they can trust their employer to handle the issue. Jennifer Brown Consulting facilitates the establishment of corporate affinity groups, which are often comprised of people who tend to be “overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias” in hiring practice, promotion, advancement, and talent reviews.” Even smaller and medium-sized companies are adopting affinity groups to serve as workplace “sources of intelligence about cultural experience,” tap into what is working and what is not, and provide support and “community” to employees who may have, in the past, felt “marginalized.” Jennifer can be reached on Instagram, @JenniferBrownSpeaks; on Twitter, @JenniferBrown, on LinkedIn, and on her agency website at: , where those interested in DEI information can find the agency’s DEI foundations program. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk. I am joined live at South by Southwest by Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer. JENNIFER: Thank you, Rob. ROB: So good to have you on here. Why don’t you start out by telling us about the firm, about Jennifer Brown Consulting? What is your calling card? JENNIFER: The firm I founded 20 years ago. It’s a DEI strategy and training company. We work with companies, medium-size and large typically, to help them build their diversity, equity, & inclusion strategy from the top down and help also set up what’s called affinity groups and make sure they’re effective and well-aligned. We also do a lot of education around inclusive leadership. I have an amazing group of consultants who are, at any given time, working on client projects. And then I do a lot of keynoting – virtual, but now increasingly in person, I’m glad to say . . . as we come out of this into a new variant, I just read yesterday. [laughs] ROB: Last night, yes. JENNIFER: But anyway, I also love writing books. I just co-authored my third book with Rohit Bhargava, Beyond Diversity, and then I have a second edition of How to Be an Inclusive Leader, which was my book from 2019. I have a second edition of that coming out in October of 2022, which I’m really excited about. ROB: Congratulations on the book. Rohit was a guest three years ago, the last time we were recording live at SXSW, and then we all skipped a couple of years because of that COVID thing we were just talking about. As you’re engaging with these firms – you mentioned medium and larger firms – at what point are they coming to you these days? What do they know? What are they doing right? What are the blind spots? JENNIFER: There was a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020 on multiple levels. I think the big one for us, obviously, was George Floyd murder and the social movement that occurred and is still occurring. A massive shift in attention and prioritization of the fact that the workplace as it is currently is not built by and for so many of us, if we basically don’t fit a certain demographic. Finally – we’ve been talking about this for many, many years – finally there was attention and resources available. For the last couple of years, our firm has doubled in size and number of companies, and we’ve been incredibly busy. We were ready for this. This is the conversation we’ve been having for many years. I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I’ve been out for nearly 25 years – I’m dating myself. ROB: Early. JENNIFER: Early, early, when we were still arguing for domestic partner benefits with big companies. Those were the early days of my own activism. Then we grew Jennifer Brown Consulting to be a full-service DEI firm. So, they come to us now and say, “Okay, Jennifer, we get it. We know that it’s important. But we don’t know how to tackle this, and we don’t know how to equip our leaders with the skills and also to awaken their motivation to care about this.” But really, Rob, I’m so excited that it’s not a “why” conversation; it’s a “how” conversation now. We all are a little bit worried that the urgency is flagging as the world continues to be so chaotic and business priorities shift around, so we’re trying to really make sure the burning platform of this remains on fire in people’s minds. We know it’s on fire, but it’s easy to move on and say, “We got this. We’re doing enough.” But I can tell you no company is doing enough. ROB: Right. You have two lanes. A lot of companies are going to install somebody with a title in DEI at some level, and then there’s actually integrating it into the cadence of the firm. How do you make sure it sticks? How do you keep it from regressing to “business as usual” plus somebody with a title? JENNIFER: I think the way we speak about why this is urgent really matters, and how it can drive business. It drives innovation. Literally, if people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably – which means those day-to-day support mechanisms, resources, pay equity, all that good stuff – they do better work. And they stay longer. We’re in the midst of a talent crisis. Literally, it is the Great Resignation, and I can tell you from my point of view, it has a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is toxic workplaces – workplaces that feel like “I go through my day and I don’t see anyone that looks like me. I don’t feel trusted or trusting of others. I have one foot out the door for something better.” So, culture can be a differentiator, and belonging can and should be a differentiator to keep great talent. But I can tell you, the workplace needs to be overhauled to be a welcoming place for so many of us. I mean, just LGBT people, half of us are still closeted in the workplace. That is a statistic from 2019. And even in the virtual world, I wonder how it’s changed; I don’t know. But we are not bringing our full selves to work. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the identities that aren’t bringing their full selves. ROB: For sure. There’s part of me that says, what company wouldn’t be welcoming in some way? But that’s the tip of the spear of the question, I am sure. You mentioned even the structure of the workplace. As we’re resetting and coming back and a lot of companies have been virtual, what opportunities to set up an equitable workplace can companies do as they’re rebuilding what it means to be in an office from scratch, what their work expectations are from scratch? What are the opportunity points? What can they do today that would’ve been hard for them to do two, three years ago, and now it’s like “No, don’t do this again when you come back”? JENNIFER: Well, let’s see. So many things. We went to an open office plan for a while. That was the thing. But now data has shown that actually, that’s really hard for people to be productive in. Also, the physical office was not a comfortable place. So, virtualizing ourselves actually opened up a sense of safety for a lot of people who found the physical workplace unsafe. I think we have to carry that with us and remember that that is a critical thing to leverage. But then new diversity dimensions are opening up, like who’s on site? Who’s able to get face time? Who’s able to get on somebody’s calendar or bump into somebody? There’s the haves and have-nots that’s opened up. In some companies, the virtual employees are the haves, actually, that are getting the flexible arrangement, and then the people who have to come into the office – but you can actually see it in the reverse, who has access to leadership. If leadership’s in the office, that could benefit you. It really depends on the company. I tell managers, we have to up our inclusivity vigilance. When we are managing blended teams, hybrid and in-person, we’ve got to ensure inclusion constantly and be checking in with people who are virtual because we may not know they are on the bubble in terms of their own engagement and loyalty. And what we don’t know can really hurt us, and often when it comes to diversity dimensions, what you don’t know can make the difference between keeping that person and having them leave and being surprised. So virtually, we just have to be checking in, asking how people are. The most powerful question is something like “Do you feel included and valued in the way that we’re working right now? Is this working for you? Do you feel you can thrive? Do you feel there are barriers? What can I do as your colleague, as your leader, as your manager, to address any barriers that you’re experiencing so that you can do your best work? I think asking that often will build the trust and tell us what we need to know so we can architect a better situation for people. ROB: This is the second conversation I’ve had this week where what you’re describing sounds like being a good manager. JENNIFER: Doesn’t it? Strange, that. [laughs] ROB: It doesn’t sound like anything to do in some ways with particular topics of diversity, equity, inclusion, while at the same time I think what’s underpinning there is there’s an assumption of commonality that allows people to get by without managing well. Is that fair to say? JENNIFER: Yes, fair to say. Intersectionality speaks to all the different diversity dimensions that live in a human being. And there’s multiple things going on. I’m a parent. I identify as queer. I’m caregiving. I’m wrestling with mental health challenges. I’m Latinx. All of those things have an impact on our belonging. In most organizations, there’s some angst and some difficulty there because, like I said earlier, workplaces are biased. Period. Any one of those things or a combination of those things may be going on for someone. They may be hearing microaggressions. They may be being harassed virtually. Unfortunately, I hate to say this – harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace. ROB: Wow. JENNIFER: There are no witnesses. Think about this. There’s a lack of understanding of how to escalate a complaint and whether you trust your company enough to handle the complaint. When we virtualize employees, they’re cut off from information, often, that may have been available and they would’ve known what sort of avenues exist. I found this harassment data really disturbing, honestly. Anyway, there’s a lot of risks. Like I said, as a manager and a leader, to have somebody’s identities in mind and be able to anticipate, “What’s going on for this person? How can I get them to trust me enough to share with me so that I can help?” – and even if that means suggesting that somebody go to HR, suggesting that somebody seek out the EAP for mental health support. I mean, just connecting the dots is so much of our job these days, and it’s been made more difficult when we’re out of the loop with each other. That’s a dangerous place to be. ROB: Absolutely. You mentioned affinity groups as a key component. What does that look like, building from scratch? How do you get from zero to something there? JENNIFER: It’s funny; back in the day, only large companies had affinity groups, and they’re like the LGBT Network, the Women’s Network, the Black Network, the Asian-American Network, Disabilities, Veterans. In big companies, there’s a lot. But since two years ago and everything crescendoing, even the smaller and medium-size companies now have affinity groups, and they understand that these groups are literally sources of intelligence about cultural experience in our workplace – what’s going well, what’s going wrong, what needs to be supported, resourced, which talent exists. Sometimes people in affinity groups are the ones that are overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias in our hiring, promotion, advancement, talent reviews. So, affinity groups are really important mechanisms to enable people to find community, especially virtually, to share what’s going on and not feel so alone, to strategize about how to be heard in a workplace that is maybe not conscious of its own bias, and then also provide that identity intelligence to the employer to say, “Hey, this community is feeling this now.” For example, Stop Asian Hate wasn’t just in 2020. It’s actually been increasing and getting worse over this last year and the year before. And yet employers aren’t prioritizing it. If it weren’t for the affinity groups that are keeping it top of mind and saying, “Hey, this is a problem” – our employees are bringing this into the workplace every day and walking around with this, if they’re commuting or in their communities or in their families. People are afraid, and they expect their employer to address it and to know that it’s happening and to say, “What can we, the employer, do to support you, to raise awareness, and to make a statement?” Honestly, employers also, by the way, need to be making statements about a variety of social issues right now. Otherwise, silence – look what happened to Disney not saying anything about the Don’t Say Gay activities in Florida. Their employees have been so upset and writing letters to the CEO and agitating, and finally the CEO wrote a memo and it just broke yesterday on Twitter. But it took a long time, and it shouldn’t take a long time. Companies should have their employees’ backs. Period. ROB: And then it’s even harder when you do actually say something – the rubric against which it is measured at that point is so much harder. JENNIFER: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of issues, granted. But this is the world we live in. Certainly, I hear from leaders, “Jennifer, where does it stop?” I’m like, “This is your new normal. It doesn’t stop. But by the way, this is an opportunity to connect with your employees on a deep” – when I feel seen and heard and valued, this is what it means. If my CEO is silent on a harmful bill to me and my community, I am out the door. I can’t describe – it’s like a visceral thing. Like “I can’t work here anymore. This company doesn’t see me, doesn’t care about what’s happening to people that identify like I do.” Employees are finding their voice in a way that I have been waiting for for a really long time. So really, the problem is leadership is really behind. They don’t have the competency. They’re not able to pivot quickly. They’re like, “I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” I’m like, no, this needs to be your new leadership skill. You have to be able to know, to be scanning your environment all the time and saying “What do I need to make sure our employees know that we’re not okay with?” That needs to be the first thing you wake up thinking about every day. ROB: This sounds like it ties into some of the dimensions of the book, so let’s go over that direction for a moment. Talk about the book, how it came to be – the book is Beyond Diversity with you and Rohid. How did this happen, and what should we know about it? You had a session here talking about the book. What should people know? JENNIFER: Yeah, we did. It was so great. It came out of a five-day Beyond Diversity Summit, literally, with 200 speakers. Rohid approached me. I was one of those folks part of organizing it, and he’s like, “This needs to be a book.” I was like, “Oh no, 200 speakers, hours and hours of footage. How do we boil this down into a book? It’s terrifying. My team will never forgive me.” However, we said yes, let’s do it. We organized all of this footage into 12 themes, and those are the chapters. They’re not identity themes. We could’ve gone that way. We could’ve done “This is the chapter on LGBTQ+. This is the chapter on Asian-Americans and AAPI folks.” Instead, we did education, media, workplace, storytelling, government, family. It was so cool to take all of that wisdom from a wide array of diverse storytellers in every way and figure out, where do we tell this story, that story, that story? I loved the challenge of that. I think also, “beyond diversity” to me perhaps means, yes, identity diversity, but let’s look at how this plays out in these domains of life that really touch our lives every single day. We can all relate to education. We can all relate to what’s happening in media. I hope the book reaches people who have dismissed this topic maybe in the past, but they pick it up and they’re like, “Oh, this book makes sense to me. This is relevant to my life holistically.” And it’s such a positive book. It’s not a “shame and blame” book. It is full of celebrations of where innovation is occurring and how exciting it is and how it’s going to better our world. I think it’s a really different kind of book, and I hope it finds all kinds of audiences. I think it should be in curriculum in schools. Professors should be assigning it. My parents, in their eighties, tell me it’s the best book I’ve ever written. They love it. They’re reading it and they’re able to understand it. ROB: It is very, very approachable in the structure. It’s just made so that you can come in, engage with it at whatever depth you want to – not that you want to treat it like a dictionary and shop by topic, or an encyclopedia, but there is that ability. There’s skimmability. There’s summary. But that facilitates approaching it easily, but also the education context. You open it up, and it’s... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22501439

Virtual Influencers – How to Grow Gen Z Followers with Tech 04/07/2022

Virtual Influencers – How to Grow Gen Z Followers with Tech 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, , 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,... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22629455

Designing Organizations for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 03/31/2022

Designing Organizations for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Minal Bopaiah, Founder and Principal Consultant, Brevity & Wit (Silver Spring, MD) Minal Bopaiah is Founder and Principal Consultant at Brevity & Wit, a strategy and design firm dedicated to “designing a more equitable world.” The original focus of Minal’s agency was on graphic design. Today, the agency provides full-scale, full-service, human-centered graphic design; strategic marketing and communications; and the application of behavioral change science and organizational development to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Typical clients are mid-size companies of 200 to 3,000 employees, but Brevity & Wit has also engaged with public media work, non-profits, and tech and government agencies. At South by Southwest 2022, Minal presented “” with the intention of moving people to ask for observable behaviors that support diversity, equity, and inclusion (which Minal refers to as “DEI work”). Accessibility is another issue, addressed as needed. Minal is the author of Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives, which, as of the date of this publication, has excellent reviews and 100% FIVE STAR RATINGS on Amazon. In this interview, Minal explores equity issues. She says, “Time is our most finite resource. We all only get 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week.” The system is designed for people who “don’t have any caretaking responsibilities.” Most women have about 20 hours of unpaid labor at home,” and a “culture of overwork” is the reason women are less frequently in leadership positions. When Minal recruits consultants, she strives to disrupt this system by making it “possible for them to earn what they need to live in 20 billable hours a week.” Instead of paying 30% of billable hours to consultants, the agency pays from 60% to 80%. Minal says, “The margins are small,” but, “the point of Brevity & Wit is to get money in the pockets of people of color and people from marginalized identity.” She believes this model is more trust-based, transparent, and partnership-focused than the traditional employment model, where employers “own” employees. Transforming organizations starts with a “power analysis” and an assessment of leadership engagement. Understanding how organizations work, how power works in organizations, and organizational life cycles is critical to restructuring workplaces to be more inclusive and equitable. Minal is available on her agency’s website at and as Minal Bopaiah on internet platforms. Her book, Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives can be found in major bookstores, at , and on Amazon. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am live at South by Southwest 2022 – yes, conferences are a thing again – and I am joined today by Minal Bopaiah, Founder and Principal Consultant at Brevity & Wit based in Silver Spring, Maryland. Welcome to the podcast, Minal. MINAL: Thank you, Rob. Thank you for having me. ROB: It’s a pleasure to meet you here. We are live in the middle of the Four Seasons in Austin, so we have a lively crowd around us. But that kind of adds to the festivity; we can prove we’re actually somewhere in person. Minal, you are here speaking this week, which is extra exciting, but why don’t you start off and give us the picture of Brevity & Wit? What is the organization, what is your calling card? MINAL: Sure, I’d be happy to. Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm dedicated to designing a more equitable world. We do that through a number of services, from full-scale, full-service graphic design to strategic marketing and communications to organization design. That’s the more intensive DEI work – DEI meaning diversity, equity, and inclusion. We also add accessibility at points. We have a really unique approach that combines human-centered design, behavior change science, and organizational development. So really understanding how organizations work, how power works in organizations, the life cycle of an organization, and then working to make sure that we can transform those organizations into more equitable and inclusive workplaces. ROB: If there’s a typical client, is there a typical size, scale, industry? Who knocks on your door? MINAL: Right now our typical client is medium-sized companies, so about 200 to maybe 3,000 employees. We do a lot of work in public media, but we also work with nonprofits. We’ve worked with tech agencies. We’re starting to work with some government agencies. It can really vary in terms of the industry. ROB: Some of the organizations this size are going to be growing, but a lot of them seem like they might be a little bit more mature and established, at which point, if there’s work to do, there’s probably a lot of work to do. And whereas they might have come to you at one point just to say “Help us with this messaging we’re trying to get out in a certain area,” when you really get to organizational design, you’re saying “How do you be the message you’re trying to put out there and not just buy it sometimes?” What does that look like when you’re coming into an established organization? MINAL: The first thing if we’re really talking about organization design is being able to identify power, like do a power analysis. What we find is in organizations you really have to start with leadership. If leadership is not engaged and fully bought in, it doesn’t work. What often happens – in the post-George Floyd world, a lot of people started doing all-staff trainings. Those are usually counterproductive because it’s very easy for staff to get on board with the principles of DEI, but leadership needs a hot minute. They’re like, “Wait a minute, if this is how we’re supposed to be, how do we do accountability? How do we do performance management? You’re saying that everything I’ve been taught is not right; how do I unlearn that and learn new behaviors?” So, they need a minute to catch up. If you don’t do that, what happens is staff is fully on board with an all-staff, and then you find out that they feel that the leadership is not living up to their end, and they think it’s a bait and switch. So, we want to really start with leadership, especially when we’re working with seasoned organizations that have an established culture. ROB: Sure. Especially because even if someone’s onboard, when you talk about accountability, when you talk about performance management, your low and middle managers are taking their cues from the organization as a whole anyhow. If they need to do something different, they don’t have the tools to do it. What needs to change? What are people not aware of when it comes to those topics – accountability, performance management, and so on? MINAL: There’s a whole thing. There’s everything from how to run an inclusive meeting – which is not that hard; it just means you need to spend 10 minutes prepping, understand what the purpose of the meeting is, make room for everybody to look at the agenda, make room for everybody to talk and reflect and contribute, and then be clear about action items. ROB: That just sounds like a good meeting. MINAL: Yeah, right? If everybody just did that, workplaces would improve. So, it can be something as basic as that to understanding how we embed this in performance management and tie salary and bonuses to it. And it depends where we’re working. Really, the first part is to understand the problem we’re solving for. There are a lot of initials in DEI. Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Do you have a diversity problem where you need to recruit more diverse talent? Do you have an inclusion problem where you’re able to get people with different backgrounds through the door, but they don’t stick because they don’t feel included or feel they don’t belong? Or do you have an equity problem where maybe you’re able to get a lot of diverse talent and they stick, but you look at your proper management and it all looks the same? So, there’s no real pathway for promotion for people who have different strengths. ROB: Right. Even to break that down, I feel like we might need to start every conversation there because people don’t know the problem they’re trying to solve, and they think they’re trying to solve a problem that starts with appointing a person to watch over it. And maybe it’s good to have someone who thinks more deeply about it. I guess that’s an interesting question. Are organizations better served having an officer who is looking at DEI, or is that a copout sometimes? MINAL: It depends how you’re doing it. One, it’s always great to have somebody held accountable for a business function. But if you don’t give that person a budget or the power to do what they need to do, then it’s – sorry, I’m not supposed to curse. I’m going to stop. This is hard for a New Yorker like me to not swear. [laughs] But it’s not a real job, then, right? If you don’t have any resources behind it. It’s fine if you want to have somebody who is manning the shop, so to speak, but you really want some heft behind it, and that heft is going to come from the CEO. ROB: Absolutely. This kind of thing has to start there. I had a little debate – we had a little book club and we were reading this book about engineering leadership. Someone made the assumption that the author was a guy, and it was not. I joked with our COO – I’m kind of telling on my team, and I probably shouldn’t do that on a podcast. MINAL: No. [laughs] ROB: But these folks mean well; we didn’t bash anybody over the head about it, but I kind of riffed with her. I joked and I said, “Camille? Is that a guy?” [laughs] We kind of laughed about it, and I think the point was made. I asked our COO, “Would you rather I said it or you said it?” She’s like, “I saw your eyes light up, so I knew you were going to talk about.” I just felt like it helps to come from the top, and maybe even to not put – I mean, anybody can say it, but to not put her in the position of having to be the one that said it felt helpful, is all I can say. MINAL: Yeah. Really, when we say it needs to start with the top, what we mean is that the CEO or the head of the company has to be fully bought-in. But the skills to do the work should be distributed across the company. Because we’re on a podcast, just looking at you, when a white guy says something like that, the messenger matters in these messages. It means a lot. That’s like an act of true allyship, when somebody who doesn’t have any skin in the game is willing to say, “No, I’m going to put some skin in the game for this because it matters.” As opposed to if I were to say that, it might look like I’m taking it personally. ROB: Right. MINAL: Which doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be able to, but… ROB: Yeah, the inference from that is a topic all unto itself, but you have to deal with that any time you’re making a comment, so it’s a big deal. MINAL: That’s sort of the politics of work, right? The messenger matters. And this is why we say that talking about identity matters, because if I’m in a leadership position, how people perceive me affects how I lead. So, if I’m not aware of my identity and not aware of the unconscious biases people might have based on my identity, I won’t be able to subvert those unconscious biases. I don’t talk about it because I think we should reinforce biases; I talk about it because the more you’re aware of how people may be perceiving you, the more power you have and the more choice you have in how to play that situation to be effective. ROB: That makes sense. Let’s look back at Brevity & Wit. Where did this firm come from? What made you decide that this needed to exist, that you were going to start it? How did it come to pass? MINAL: I had the name for many, many years, and I think I always wanted to start it. I think I’m naturally – my father really encouraged me to have an original mind. That makes me a bad employee, I think, in a lot of ways. [laughs] It’s good to be a founder if you have an original mind, and you are a bad entry-level employee if you have an original mind. ROB: The unemployable factor, yes. MINAL: Yeah. So, I think that was part of it. But honestly, I couldn’t start it for a number of years because I was single. I was living in New York and then Boston and D.C., because if you’re single, first of all, living in a city helps. Secondly, if you’re a person of color, being able to get access to the sort of foods or culture that I would feel are home for me only happens in cities. Being single in those environments, the cost of living really impeded my ability to start it. We don’t have any VC funding. It was totally scrappy and just me starting it. But what changed is that I got married, and when I got married, I was able to get on my husband’s health insurance, and there was a second income. It wasn’t much – my husband’s a firefighter and paramedic; he’s never made that much money. He’s not independently wealthy or anything. But it was the three-month buffer I needed to go from zero to being in the black and being able to support myself. That was impossible when I was single. ROB: Wow. So that became that moment. Was the focus always in this direction from the start? What was the founding thesis of the firm, and what were some evolution steps along the way? MINAL: The focus originally was on graphic design and communications, but then my last job before I started it was doing marketing for a DEI firm called Cook Ross, which is a pretty big firm. That’s where I met my mentor, Johnnetta Cole, who wrote the foreword for my book. Dr. Cole is just a luminary in the DEI space. She and I have been working on a book. Basically, I just sat at her feet for like a year and a half and wrote everything she told me to write and asked every question I had and learned everything I could about DEI. She was really eager for me to move into the field more intentionally and more directly. I was already sort of doing it in the design and marketing and comms arena, like how you do those jobs with a DEI lens, but through that apprenticeship underneath her, I was able to move into this more directly. ROB: That’s excellent. You’ve been able to grow it, build it. Have you found it natural to recruit additional people into the firm? The right people know your focus when you meet them? Is it pretty natural? MINAL: Yes and no. It’s really interesting because what I think I’m good at is I can spot talent. But we are very scrappy. We have a very interesting structure. Everybody’s a 1099 right now because I didn’t know how to make it work. But the point of Brevity & Wit is to get money in the pockets of people of color and people from marginalized identity. While most firms might give 30% of the billable rate to the consultant, we give anywhere from 60% to 80%, so our margins are small. Our ability to salary is poor. But what that means is that people who might already be seasoned and be able to consult will get a lot more, and I’m handling marketing and business development. But what that also means is that I have a high tolerance for risk in entrepreneurship; a lot of other people who I think are exceptional talent do not. The diversity angle for me is having those conversations to help them understand a different model, understanding they’ll never be as comfortable as I am in terms of risk, but I can get them to a point that there’s so much trust that they can enter into this. But it has been sometimes a long courtship to get people to join us who I know would be good, and I know they would love it, if they could just allow themselves to imagine a world where they’re not relying on a salary and then getting squeezed out in terms of productivity. One of the problems right now in our world is that – I’m going to say something heavy. Just stick with me. ROB: I’m here. MINAL: The legacy of slavery in our workplaces is this idea that companies think that if they pay somebody a salary, they own them. ROB: Right. MINAL: A more integrity-filled way of looking at it would be to say if you pay somebody a salary, you are renting their time and talent for 40 hours a week, no more, no less. I don’t care what level they are, whether they’re exempt or non-exempt. The reason I say that is because time is our most finite resource. We all only get 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week. Most women have about 20 hours of unpaid labor at home that they don’t get paid for. There’s a Harvard Business Review study of why women aren’t in leadership, and the reason is the culture of overwork. Because only men who either don’t have any caretaking responsibilities or have wives who take care of that – or if they’re gay and they have a partner that takes care of it – can overwork. The whole system is designed for them. So. when I’m recruiting people, I’m trying to say, “Listen, that’s the system we’re trying to disrupt.” So not only do we give our people 60% to 80%, we also try to make it possible for them to earn what they need to live in 20 billable hours a week. ROB: Wow. Do some people just choose 20 with you? MINAL: Yeah. ROB: Does anybody choose more than 40? Is that something somebody can choose with you? MINAL: They could. They might be working with other agencies as well, so they might be doing that. I don’t encourage that, and that’s also why we pay a higher rate. I was like, if we’re going to cap this at 20, then you need to make 60% to 80% in order to make what you live. Then the assumption is that there’s maybe 5 to 10 hours a week of stuff you can’t charge clients for, and then if you decide to be a community member, you’re also going to give back to the Brevity & Wit community a ratio of like 1:5. So for every 5 billable hours, you would give an hour back to the community or something like that. That’s like a 35-hour week right there. There’s a substantial amount of work, but that was the equation that needed to shift in my head if we really wanted to run an equitable startup. ROB: Right. In that case, there’s no ownership vibe when everybody’s on that – it’s freely engaged on both sides. MINAL: Yeah, it’s a partnership model. It’s very transparent, it’s very trust-based. It is very much like “You win when I win, I win when you win.” ROB: You mentioned the book; I do want to go there. A book is a labor and a labor of love, and your book is Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives. I’m sure the book is aligned to who you are and what we’re talking about in a large way, but tell us about the book and the path of that story. MINAL: The book started actually because of my husband. This guy that I married to start my business is a firefighter and paramedic, which we joke is the opposite of what I do. If you could imagine the opposite. [laughs] ROB: You’re both helping people. Just the skillset is very different. MINAL: Yeah. I come home with my ideas for DEI and he’s like, “That won’t work with my people.” He told me this story once of a conference where these three firefighter captains went to a diversity conference out of state, and the facilitator used the word “LGBTQ.” One of the captains was like, “What does ‘Q’ stand for?” The facilitator said, “Queer.” The captain was like, “Are you kidding me? I literally got called onto the carpet at the firehouse for using that word with somebody.” I’m sure the facilitator explained how queer had been reclaimed by the LGBTQ community. Fell on deaf ears. This captain returned from a three-day conference on diversity and inclusion and his takeaway to the firehouse was “Guys, we can say ‘queer’ again.”... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22501175

Marketing Long-Cycle B2B Tech 03/24/2022

Marketing Long-Cycle B2B Tech Mike Maynard, Managing Director and CEO, Napier Group (Chichester, England) Mike Maynard is Managing Director and CEO at Napier Group, an agency focused on marketing technical products to technical audiences. Clients include major companies selling semiconductors, industrial automation systems, cellular communications infrastructure, complex software, and even a baggage-handling system manufacturer. The customer “audience” for these products is “super-targeted, super technical, and . . . demanding.” A disillusioned engineer who loved talking tech, Mike stopped designing products and re-engineered himself as a tech salesman. In 2008, he bought out the tech-focused marketing agency his company had been using – two weeks before the dot com crash. With ALL of his money invested in the agency, Mike had no choice but to make the venture succeed. Today, the agency is a mix of geeks – engineers or technical journalists who understand the technology – and marketing experts. Based in Chichester, England, the agency works with a good number of American companies to target their American customers . . . and is in the process of adding a U.S. office. Some of Napier’s clients have products with fairly quick purchase/sales cycles. Others, such as the airport baggage handling system manufacturer, may have cycles ranging from seven to twenty years. When the sales cycle is long, a client is not “trying to think about closing a sale all the time.” Multi-year sales cycles require marketing to build relationships and rapport. The objective is to keep the product long-term on the minds of “future” customers by helping them stay apprised of industry trends and leading-edge developments. Mike explains that, when a product is technical, “people shortlist a very small number of suppliers.” While the customer journey for a consumer product is usually short and straightforward, marketing technical products takes a “very long time,” “involves different stages of research,” and “requires “very different information.” Mike says you have to understand your customers, what they need, and the information they need; “take this really complicated thing and then narrow it down to clear reasons why somebody should consider the product;” “keep talking to the client over a long period of time because of the long sales cycle”; and make their decision and customer journey as easy as possible. In this interview, Mike discusses TURTL, an in-Beta, analytics-rich, flipbook style content platform that tracks audience engagement – whether a document is opened, how long a reader looks at it, and how far through the information the reader gets – which allows document owners to optimize their content, enrich relevant and eliminate irrelevant information, and customize the material to the needs of individual prospects. Instead of following “vanity metrics” (click-through rates, numbers of clicks), TURTL helps answer the questions, “What does your audience care about? What do you need to give them more of? What do you need to stop talking about? How can you optimize your campaigns?” Mike says, “It’s a phenomenal superpower,” being able to “learn from the behavior of your audience” particularly when you’ve got the long, complex documents typical in tech industries. Mike can be reached at his agency’s website: , on LinkedIn (Mike Maynard at Napier), or by email at: . ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mike Maynard, Managing Director and CEO at Napier Group based in Chichester, England. Welcome to the podcast, Mike. MIKE: Thanks for having me on the podcast, Rob. Appreciate it. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start us off with an introduction to Napier Group? What is the firm’s expertise? MIKE: Basically, what the firm does is we get geeks and techies excited. Our business is helping people market in the B2B technology space. It’s all about selling technical products to a technical audience that’s making a technical decision. ROB: Got it. How technical are we talking here? Is it gadgets, is it software, or is it heavy-duty engineer cloud platform kind of software developer stuff? MIKE: It’s pretty geeky stuff, Rob. To give you an idea of some of our clients, we work with one of the leading semiconductor companies in the world. We work with companies that sell industrial automation systems. We work with people selling cellular communications infrastructure. We even work with the world’s largest manufacturer of baggage handling systems. ROB: It sounds like these are not Super Bowl ads, right? This sounds like pretty targeted audiences. MIKE: These are super-targeted, super technical, and generally speaking pretty demanding audiences, yeah. It’s definitely not Super Bowl ads. ROB: It seems like whether you’re talking about semiconductors, whether you’re talking about communications, this is pretty technical stuff. I’m imagining you’re largely a firm of marketers; how do you equip your team to be prepared to speak this language? Are they reformed geeks, or what is the secret here? MIKE: I’m not sure I’m reformed, but I certainly am a geek. I started my career as an electronics engineer and spent years in design and then in technical support for semiconductor companies. So I’m certainly very technical. And actually, just over half the agency is very technical, typically coming from either an engineering or a technical journalism background. So how do we equip people? The answer is we mix together people who understand the technology with people who are really good at marketing, and that’s how we get the results. ROB: Got it. I am also a computer engineer by education, but now wear all the hats, much as you do in some seasons, I am sure. How, then, do you think about how to reach the audience, where to reach the audience? How do you find these very specific buyers? And these also sound like probably longer purchase cycles while we’re at it. MIKE: Yeah, two very insightful questions, Rob. Talking about the purchase cycles, we do have a range of purchase cycles. With some of our clients’ products, we can actually get fairly quick turnarounds, and indeed, a couple of our clients actually sell online, so they will be able to sell particularly things like development kits (the things to start a development process going) online fairly quickly, although there’ll then be a development cycle involved for the engineers. But if you look at, for example, selling a baggage handling system into an airport, if you want to sell a baggage handling system, someone’s really got to be building an airport terminal to buy a baggage handling system. They need somewhere to put it. Actually, you look at those sales cycles, the fastest turnaround they can get is typically about 7 years, and the sales cycle goes up to 20 years for these systems. It really is a case of not trying to think about closing a sale all the time. With a multi-year sales cycle, that’s ridiculous. It’s about building that relationship, that rapport through marketing, and basically staying top-of-mind, staying the product that the customers want to choose. ROB: How do you stay top-of-mind for seven years? MIKE: The answer is you have to do interesting stuff. It’s really simple. In all our industries, if you look at it, there are people buying who are making very technical decisions over a long sales cycle. What these guys and girls want to do is understand what’s going on in the market, because they may go for a long period of time without making any specific purchasing decision. If you could be helping them, educating them, telling them about the trends, and hopefully introducing developments that actually are leading the industry, then you’re going to get them engaged. It’s about presenting that kind of information in a compelling way that really gets the techies excited. It’s about helping them as well as marketing to them. ROB: I’d imagine at least you have plenty of time to pull together a case study. It’s not a quick turnaround, necessarily. MIKE: The problem is everybody wants case studies, and case studies are notoriously difficult to get done. We’re forever trying to get case studies. Actually, the case studies are one of the fastest things that happen because typically they happen once a sale is completed and you’ve had a product, for example, go into production. Then you can turn around the case study really quickly. So you wait for it for a really long time – it’s like being a kid waiting for Christmas. You think it’s forever till it’s going to happen. You know that the client’s got this amazing project they’re working on, and then finally you get the opportunity, and suddenly Christmas is there and it’s amazing, and you get a fantastic case study. ROB: Yeah, that sounds like Christmas all over again. If we rewind the clock a little bit, what led you into this business? How did this whole thing get started? MIKE: It’s a very unplanned story. I used to be an engineer, and I was designing electronic systems. I designed everything from systems that could engrave printing rollers using big industrial lasers through to recording for music studios. Then I decided I wasn’t very good at the engineering part. I actually quite liked talking about the technology, so I went into technical sales. In the UK at the time, you used to get a company car, a car provided by the company, if you were in marketing. I kind of liked the idea of moving into marketing because my car was getting old, so I moved into marketing because of that and spent a few years in marketing, running European marketing for a semiconductor company. Then I went on a course. It was a residential management course, and there were a few glasses of wine on the last night, and we got into talking about what people’s ambitions were. Someone said to me, “You should run your own business, Mike.” I think they were really polite and they were saying, “Oh, my God, I would hate to be your manager, Mike,” but they presented it in this lovely way of . . . “You should run your own business.” About two months later, my main contact at the agency I was using said, “The two founders are looking to retire and sell the business, and I think you should buy it.” I thought, how hard can it be to run an agency? I’ve done marketing. An agency’s got to be basically the same as being on the client side. Let’s just try it. And then I learnt. ROB: Purchasing a business can take on a few different forms. What did the purchase process and structure look like for you? I imagine there’s enough distance between here and there that you can probably talk a little bit about it. MIKE: The approach actually was really simple. There were some technical issues; obviously, companies structure very differently. In the UK, you can have a partnership or you can have a limited liability company or you can have a listed company. At the time, the current company was a partnership. I basically bought the assets, put it into a limited liability company because I had no money, and certainly after the purchase, I had no money. I never really added up how much debt I’d run up because I think I would’ve never done it if I’d realized that. But it was a relatively straightforward process. Frankly, buying businesses is nowhere near as difficult as it sounds. But I do have one great bit of advice for buying businesses. If you’re going to buy an agency that is 100% focused on technology clients, buying that agency about two weeks before the dot-com crash is a really, really bad idea. That’s my advice to anyone: get your timing right. That’s probably a bigger challenge than actually the whole process of buying a business. ROB: Yes, timing would seem to matter a great deal there. But perhaps then also part of going through that season has probably helped along the way. How did you make it through the downturn, the dot-com crash? That’s certainly a baptism by fire, if you will, into the privileges of business ownership. MIKE: That’s a great question. I think making it through was not really the problem, because I’d taken all the money I had, I put it into the business – there was no option. I had to make it succeed. I think a lot of agency owners will relate to this with COVID and typically having to leave the office, work from home – you get through that. I think the biggest problem is how that impacts you in the longer term. For me, after buying the agency, it really made me overly cautious. We were always wanting to have cash in the bank. We always wanted to be safe. We wanted to have runway. We didn’t go out and invest as much as we should. We didn’t actually take advantage of the cycles when there were upcycles. It really had a long-term impact on me. Agency owners who’ve been through COVID, a lot of agency owners have really struggled; the one thing I’d say is these exceptional situations are exceptional. And yes, there’ll be problems. There’ll be bumps on the road. It won’t be an easy route. But I think as we come out of this horrible pandemic, we’ve got to look back to building our confidence as agency owners and being prepared to go back to taking the risks you were taking before the pandemic. ROB: How did that experience, and maybe the learning from that dot-com crash, affect your reaction to however much 2008 impacted you, and then what sort of footing were you on heading into COVID? You saw it. You clearly saw, “Here we go again”; how did your mind and your attitude react differently in that case? MIKE: That’s a great question because I think the two are very different. 2008 obviously had a big impact on us, again, being a technology agency with a big tech downturn. But we were still running the business very conservatively. We were still, in my opinion, being a little bit overly cautious. We had cash, we were safe, we got through the downturn, and it was okay. By the time we get to the pandemic and COVID, we changed our philosophy. We were investing more. We’re still running the business with cash in the bank rather than running it on an overdraft, so to some extent keeping safe. But honestly, for us – and we were lucky in the business we’re in. There are other agencies that have been hit far harder. For us, we came through COVID and it was like, actually, the impact to the business was pretty small. I mean, yes, we had to move everybody, make them remote, we had to do that in virtually no time, we had to deal with communications issues. We had all these problems. But basically, the money kept coming in, and that was great. Some of the clients cut back, but nobody really pulled out. It was actually so much easier having been through financially what were far worse downturns. ROB: Yeah. Some of these products you’re talking about – I think any marketer, any client, any seller, any buyer is expecting the entire conversation to last longer than any downturn, so I can see how that makes sense. I am curious as I think about it – most of what you’re talking about, these things sound like they are more sold than bought, if you will. They’re things where, as a marketer, you’re not just trying to get somebody to check out and buy a bunch of things to outfit all their cellphone towers for their entire country network buildout. In some ways you’re equipping and supporting a salesforce, I would imagine. So. what are the channels that you’re reaching, and how do you come alongside when the actual purchase is probably with a human and maybe an RFP and a whole bunch of other things? MIKE: That’s a great question. If you look at the research with these highly involved decisions – and I know LinkedIn has published something recently about financial purchases – actually, people shortlist a very small number of suppliers. Typically a couple of suppliers. What you have to do is really understand the customer journey. People talk about the customer journey, and you can look at a customer journey for a consumer product; it’s very short, and it’s probably not that involved. A customer journey for the kind of products we’re taking, it takes a very long time. It involves different stages of research. They need very different content, very different information. It’s about really getting into the head of those customers, understanding what they’re doing, understanding what they’re going through, what they need, and then delivering the right information. I can’t change our clients’ products, and I can’t make our client always have the best product in the world. But what I can do is present the product in the best light, and I can make it as easy as possible for the customer to choose our client’s product. A lot of it is about removing these roadblocks that make it difficult to choose and just making that journey as smooth as possible. ROB: It’s such an interesting journey along that way. You did mention, as we were getting you lined up to be on the podcast, you’re going to be at the B2B Expo in Los Angeles at the start of April. How does that fit into your mix of operating the firm? And that’s a little bit of a journey for you. MIKE: Because we’re in technology, most of our clients are American, or certainly most of our revenue comes from clients that are ultimately headquartered in the States. Silicon Valley is a big area for us, but also we have some industrial technology companies we work with who are based in the States. So, we’ve always got a lot of our business from the States. At the moment, we’re looking for creative things to do. We’ve recently signed a partnership with a content platform called TURTL. We’re looking to promote that as well, both in Europe and in the U.S. And then lastly – and this is news that very few people know outside of the company – we actually have someone who’s moving out to the States in the next week or two to begin opening a presence in the U.S. We’re already working for American companies to target some of their American customers, and now we’re building that out. That’s the next stage. All of these things came together, along, frankly, with a 50% grant from the UK government to go to the show. So it made a lot of sense to go and see if it works. It’s very much an experiment for us. It could be a complete disaster, but I think like every marketing tactic, if you don’t try it, how do you know whether it works? ROB: Sure. That’s actually a topic that’s been very near and dear to us as well. When you talk about these conferences, the decision of how much to experiment versus how much to commit – when you come to thinking about going to a conference like that, how do you think about what an experiment looks like versus a strong conviction that it’s the right place? What do those different investments look like? MIKE: That’s a great question. I think you look firstly at the cost in terms of money, and then secondly at the cost in terms of time. For us, we’ve got a number of clients in the States, and I can combine a meeting with probably three of those clients as well as the event. I can actually get these client meetings that I’d probably want to fly to the States for anyway included. That makes it very much more compelling. There’s not much for time cost involved. As I say, we’ve signed this new technology partnership; we really want to promote that. We think there’s a lot of opportunity. The company is UK-based. It’s just launching and trying to build in the States. Again, it’s perfect timing. You look at everything and you go, “Does my gut feel that the amount I’m investing is a small amount compared to the potential return? Yeah, I need one client from this show and I’m... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22385756

Public Relations Power Plays 03/17/2022

Public Relations Power Plays Annie Scranton, Founder and President, Pace PR (New York, NY) Annie Scranton is Founder and President at Pace PR, a media relations shop that partners with its clients to discern and achieve goals through getting its clients “featured in the media.” Annie believes that traditional media (television) is still strong and its real-time immediacy “brings credibility to a person or a brand” in a way that “holds a lot of meaning and is different from a newspaper article or a digital article or a podcast.” Pace PR works with a wide variety of clientele, but its three “pillars” are business (B2B, tech startups, corporate clients, climate sustainability initiatives), lifestyle (nutritionists, authors, fitness instructors, products, and brands), and thought leadership (political pundits, financial analysts, attorneys). Annie says her firm selects clients they find interesting and exciting . . . ones that will interest the media and have something “meaningful to say.” Clients need to “have a presence and be compelling,” to be able to explain their thoughts in a way that audiences can understand, and to provide “takeaways” for viewers. The agency “preps” clients by providing media training. In pitching, timing is important . . . media is more interested in working with clients who can speak to current relevant issues. Credentials are also important. “Did the client work in the industry under discussion? What was their exact area of expertise? How did they touch the current topic that (the agency is) pitching them on?” Get to the point as quickly as possible and clearly state the payoff so producers can easily formulate the case for doing the story. Annie says producers get hundreds of pitches in their inbox and delete 99% of them. In this podcast, Annie provides some basic interview tips. “First,” she says, “Do no harm.” Answer the questions the interviewer asks in a way that is “as concise and clear as possible.” Annie says it takes a certain level of skill to be able to bring in your own message in a way that is “natural and organic” and not too “transactional.” If it’s not going to “flow,” Annie advises holding back and waiting for the next time, giving a great interview, and “playing the longer game,” knowing that, if they like you, they’ll invite you back. in 2021, after 11 years in business, Pace PR brought in a consultant to finally put some structure in place: “an operating plan, an organizational chart, and a lot of other tools.” Result? More growth and a better workflow. Annie can be reached on her agency’s website, or on Twitter @anniescranton. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Annie Scranton, Founder and President at Pace PR, based in New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Annie. ANNIE: Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Please start us off with a rundown of Pace PR. What is the firm’s superpower? ANNIE: Our superpower is getting our clients on TV and featured in the media. There’s a lot more that we do, obviously, and that goes into it, but at our core, Pace Public Relations is a media relations shop. We partner with our clients to figure out what their goals are, and then we help them achieve those goals by securing really meaningful, great placements in the media. ROB: I’m sure a lot of people really want that. What does a typical client look like for you? Is there a particular stage of firm, size of firm, industry? You name it. ANNIE: We’re pretty wide-ranging and generalist and agnostic when it comes to the industry that our clients are in, but we do have three main divisions. We have B2B division, where we have everything from tech startups to corporate clients to climate sustainability initiatives and projects; we have a robust lifestyle division, so we have nutritionists, authors, fitness instructors, and products and brands; and then our third division is thought leadership. That’s a lot of our political pundits and financial analysts, attorneys, folks that really have a vested interest in opining on cable news about whatever the topic du jour may be. ROB: Some of these are some pretty big placements, I would imagine. In client selection, how much of it is people who are interesting innately, how much of it is preparing them, and how much of it is just finding the area where they’re more interesting? ANNIE: I think there’s got to be an innate interest at least somewhat. It doesn’t have to be a passion project or something that I personally necessarily follow, but I have to feel interested and excited when I’m talking to a prospective client because without feeling excited and having that interest, it’s not going to come off as genuine when we’re pitching to the media. So definitely vested interest is important. But also, we have to make sure that we feel like the media is going to be interested as well. It could be the most interesting thing ever, but if it doesn’t fit into the news cycle or, as you were saying, maybe they haven’t secured funding and they’re super, super small . . . timing is important. We want to make sure that when we’re talking about that sort of preparation, our clients are coming to us with an already established presence and a lot going on themselves where we can feel comfortable and confident that we’re pitching a product or an organization or a CEO or a company that has something meaningful to say. And then we do a lot of work with our clients to get them prepped and media-ready by doing media training as well. ROB: That’s a whole topic we could go down right there on the media training side. I’m recalling some conversations I’ve had on the topic. But let’s pull in for a moment on what makes people interesting. How do you think about understanding and figuring out – obviously, there can be some subjectiveness to “This person is interesting,” but how do you think of scaling up the idea of “Is this person interesting and who are they interesting to in the media world?” ANNIE: I think interesting is a little bit individualistic, but for me, doing a lot of TV bookings for our clients, they have to certainly have a presence and be compelling just in the tonality of their voice, and be able to explain what they’re saying in a way that’s going to be digestible and make sense and have some takeaways for the viewer at home. Something that’s really important is to make sure they have the goods to back it up. Did they work specifically in the industry that they are discussing? What was their exact area of expertise? How did they touch the current topic that we’re pitching them on? Then we put our pitches together where we are highlighting our client’s expertise so that way, when a producer is looking at it, they say, “Oh okay, this guest would be really great to have on air because of this specific background that they have.” ROB: Media training is such a deep and interesting topic. I’ve had a couple of times where, for whatever reason, I ended up on CNBC and I had to phone a friend and figure out what the heck I was going to do with this and how to do it well. There’s an interesting balance. Depending on who you listen to, some people are going to talk about knowing what you want to say, and then sometimes you can very clearly tell when someone is on television and they’re trying a little bit too hard to touch on their three talking points or something like that. How do you think about striking the right balance of being prepared and knowing your message, but then delivering it in a way that isn’t forced, inauthentic, or just tone-deaf? ANNIE: In my opinion, I think first do no harm. What I mean by that is if you are fortunate enough to get booked on CNBC or a major TV network, answer the questions that are asked of you. I think weaving in your own specific messaging point is a skillset. It’s something that may take time for some to be able to do where it feels really natural and organic. But if it doesn’t flow off your tongue in a really germane and relevant way, my advice would be to wait for the next time you’re on air, because first and foremost you want to develop a relationship with that producer, with that anchor, with that network. If you are too transactional on the first interview, they’re going to see right through that and you’re never going to get invited back on. So in my opinion, it’s better to really give them a great interview and realize that there’s a long game here. It’s not just for a one-off interview. ROB: That’s so important to remember. I think it can feel like you’re playing in the Super Bowl or something when you get that TV placement, and you feel like you have to win it all at once. You make a great point; so much of business is the long game, and I think it’s illuminating to people that media is not different in that regard, and you really can do this a lot if you serve the audience well and make the host’s job easy. ANNIE: You totally can. I think it’s also on the publicist or on your comms team to strike that balance for you. It’s very rare that you’re going to look up and see what would in effect be a commercial for a company or a product or a brand. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the CEO or the founder is talking about a news story that is relatable within their industry, within their area of expertise. But a publicist should be able to ask the producer, “Hey, at the end of the segment, can we have one question where we ask about the initiative that my client is offering?” or something along those lines. Generally speaking, they’ll play ball with you – and if they don’t, that’s when the publicist needs to go back to the client and say, “Listen, I really advise that you do this interview because it will lead to other opportunities in the future.” ROB: You certainly speak with a lot of expertise, so let’s uncover some of the background here. What led to you starting Pace PR in the first place? What’s the origin story? ANNIE: I was 28 and working at CNBC for Donny Deutsch’s show, and it got cancelled. I found myself suddenly without a job because everyone on the show got laid off. So I sent an email to everyone in my orbit and said, “I lost my job today and I need a job. If you hear of anything, let me know.” I got an email back that really changed the course of my life forever; it was from a publicist who I had worked closely with and developed a relationship with booking his clients on Donny’s show. He emailed me and said, “I don’t think you have any formal PR training, but I have a client. He’s a broker. He just wrote a book on the market. If you know anybody on any show at CNBC that would have him on, I’ll pay you $500 bucks.” I sent it to my friend who was working on the one o’clock hour and she’s like, “Oh, he looks great. Can he come on tomorrow?” And that was my lightbulb moment. That’s what spurred everything to happen. ROB: For sure. I of course skimmed through your LinkedIn before we hopped on here, and you can see the DNA of some of your career, and probably number one, I would imagine part of your eye for talent comes from being on the other side. Do you feel that the people you’re booking with know that you have that background? Or is it more evident to them by how you probably approach the entire process with an empathy for their job and what they’re looking for? ANNIE: A lot of them do, because a lot of them I’m still friends with or have a relationship with. But I do think the way I construct my pitches, the way my staff does by me teaching them, is to really cut right to it, for lack of a better phrase. Producers are getting pitched hundreds of pitches every single day. Every single day, they’re getting hundreds of pitches to their inbox, and they delete 99% of them. So, it’s really important to reference what is happening in the news today. You don’t need a long preamble; you don’t need to say, “Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which was supposed to encompass X, Y, and Z…” No, just say “Biden’s plan got shot down. If you want commentary on if it’s going to resurrect itself or where they go from here, here is the expert. Here is what they say. Here’s why you should book them.” Just make it as concise and clear as possible. I think if you do that, it’s evident that you have an understanding of how TV news works. ROB: You make it sound so easy – and of course, I couldn’t come up with that pitch very quickly at all. But that’s why you are the professional. It’s worth highlighting – I feel like it’s pretty common to see a lone gun solo artist or a superman or superwoman with a couple of assistants, but you have managed to scale up the firm a little bit more. Not everybody has your experience booking; not everybody has that network. How have you gone about equipping new waves of your team to grow and scale and replicate an experience that – maybe you’re able to hire a bunch of people who used to book for shows, but I imagine that’s not everyone on your team. ANNIE: No, definitely not. A couple people, but not everyone. In early days, certainly pre-pandemic, I had a very small office for a number of years, and my more junior team members would sit right next to me and I would try as much as I could to use opportunities as teaching moments, as I’m putting together a pitch. I also was very much a part of the editing process and trying to have them understand how to get right to the point as quickly as possible while also clearly stating the payoff. Why should the person on the receiving end care about what you’re sending? That’s not easy to learn because most people, I think, think of good writing as long writing and having a lot of flowery explanations. But when you’re pitching for TV, it’s really different than that. Now we’re at a stage of the company where we can invest in our staff in other ways, through writing courses or webinars or seminars that they may want to attend. But we just try to have a lot of visibility in terms of our pitch writing just so that the junior staff can see how we’re doing it and then learn from that experience. ROB: I see. I can certainly see some proximity, some room for coaching, probably some roleplay, even, in there. Have you ever had younger staff write some pitches and have someone respond in more of a roleplay mode? Is that common? ANNIE: I guess I do that when I’m editing and writing back to them, because oftentimes I will say, “What are you trying to sell me on here?” Sometimes we have complex, complicated clients, and it can be really hard to say succinctly in the approximation of 20 seconds what point it is you’re trying to get across. So yes, because when we used to work together in a small office, I would say, “Hey, Natalie, why should the producer care about this?” or “Hey, why should the viewer at home really care about this topic or this idea?” I think just making it as real as possible was helpful in those ways. So I guess so. I guess roleplaying in that way. ROB: It’s interesting because there’s a direction – as I was saying with the talking points – there’s a point to where I think some coaching makes you sound really overly robotic, and it’s almost like there’s the other side of the mountain where you’re talking about getting more concise, more human, more to the point. Maybe there’s some New York in there, but there’s a lot of media in New York, so I’m sure a lot of media talk is “Get to the point. We’re busy here. We are inundated with pitches.” ANNIE: Yeah. You’ll see even, if you start developing relationships with specific producers, a lot of times producers will email me one sentence. They’re not worrying about capitalization and punctuation. If you work in cable news, you’re producing every single day. It’s a talking art, it’s not a written art. Most of the times, the way they’re communicating with the executive producer or the senior producer where they’re pitching a story or they’re pitching a guest is when they’re having their meetings, so they’re actually verbalizing the pitch and the guest they’re getting. So they need to be able to take from the written pitch and use that language to formulate in words how they’re making their case for why they should book this guest or why they should do this story. It’s something that people may not have a knowledge base on if you haven’t worked in TV, but that is how it works. ROB: It’s such an interesting look behind the curtain. Annie, when you think about the journey so far in building Pace PR, what have you learned lesson-wise that you might wish to go back and tell yourself to do a little differently, or things you’re doing differently now? ANNIE: This past year, in 2021, we started working with a consultant for the first time in 11 years of business, who helped me develop an operating plan and an organizational chart and a lot of other tools. We sort of joke around saying that we grew up this year at Pace PR. We could’ve done that earlier, for sure. I think I held on to that startup scrappy mentality for a little too long. It didn’t hurt us, but I think it impeded our growth, because since we’ve invested in some of this work, we’ve all noticed not only more growth, but also I think an ease within the workflow in the company. So. I would say to think even bigger earlier on than I was. I mean, on the one hand, I’ve always grown slowly and methodically. Most startups, the reason they fail the first year is because they spend too much money, they grow too quickly. So there definitely is that balance. But I think I would’ve put on my business hat a little bit sooner in the duration of the company. ROB: Yeah. Did you start the firm by yourself? ANNIE: I did. I started it by myself and kind of just asked for help. I knew an attorney who I used to book on TV, so he incorporated the company. I asked a friend, “Do you have an accountant?” and they introduced me to my current accountant. A lot of it was trial by fire, and when I started it was just me, so obviously I didn’t have to worry about staff and a million other things. I could take risks and do things a little bit haphazardly and it was okay. ROB: Right. Some people have that partner, that co-founder, someone who comes in operationally minded, and sometimes, as you’ve done, you get by on the strength of your strengths. I think it was probably a year and a half ago I hired a coach to come in and help me figure out some of these things, and it felt too early. I thought, “This is a big investment; should I really be spending this money?” But I haven’t talked to a lot of people who hired a credible consultant or coach and regretted it. ANNIE: Yeah. At least where we are in the business, it just got me thinking differently. When you live and breathe your business and you started it and it’s your baby, it’s very hard to see the forest through the trees. It’s like you only know one way of doing things. So when you get that outside perspective, at least for me, it has been illuminating. I do think the timing is important, but it’s never too soon to at least start thinking about that and thinking about what the future will hold and how to scale and how you might see a growth path forward. ROB: What are some of the scale points that may have gotten in the way? ANNIE: Staffing has always been – not an issue, but it’s something that’s so critical to a small business. And I think time management, meaning all of us, from myself all the way on down, are very involved in the client work, in the client-facing aspect and the media pitching aspect, so it doesn’t leave a lot... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22249217

Small Businesses and Nonprofits Win with Organization, Strategy, and Personality 03/10/2022

Small Businesses and Nonprofits Win with Organization, Strategy, and Personality Emily Heck, Owner and Founder, Evergreen Strategic Communications (Indianapolis, IN) Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications, started her agency in the fall of 2019. With no job in sight and no career plans, she started meeting with people, chatting over coffee, and trying to figure out her next chapter. Emily picked up some freelance marketing projects from a former co-worker and networked more intensely. Her business, helping nonprofits and small businesses organize their marketing, establish processes and systems, and more efficiently engage their audiences, grew. Although in-person networking dropped off during the pandemic, Emily is now finding contacts she did not see during the “isolation time” of Covid eager to meet and “catch up” and more interested in re-connecting face to face. Potential clients are responding to her cold-call invitations to explore partnership opportunities a lot more quickly and with a lot less requisite “relationship building” than before the pandemic. In this interview, Emily talks about the importance of LinkedIn, “the place for silent scrollers,” for building connections. She says people may scroll through your feeds and read them, but do so with no likes, shares, or comments. Think nothing is happening? Emily says she often gets comments when she meets with people six months later, “I’ve really liked your content.” It‘s important to “keep posting.” Emily says small business owners and nonprofits have the same marketing struggles and are “behind” the big companies on lead generation emails, getting conversions on emails and social media, and on figuring out how to “pump that up.” “Getting there” requires guiding clients to build marketing model proficiency and effectiveness and scaling larger company processes down to something that works to help “small” grow. When Emily first started working with clients, she spent a lot of time figuring out their processes, the location of their social media account login information, and establishing what they were trying to achieve through their marketing. Client websites, often a “mess,” may fail to “tell their story well.” “You can’t really be effective in your marketing if you don’t have a good base of organization,” Emily explains. So, she cleans up client websites and SEO first, as a base to “push everyone back to” from emails and social media efforts.” Email has changed a lot. Today, Emily says, “You’ve got to have some personality in your emails.” She recommends “changing the sender name from the organization name to a person’s name” to improve open rates. Emily can be contacted on her agency’s website at: , or on LinkedIn as Emily Hack in Indianapolis. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Emily. EMILY: Thank you very much. I’m so excited to be here. ROB: Good to have you here and talk some Indiana connections here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Evergreen, and what is your specialty? EMILY: Evergreen started in the fall of 2019. I started my own business right before the pandemic; I’m not sure if that’s smart or adventurous or whatever word you want to fill in, but it is our origin story. We focus on nonprofits and small businesses, which may seem like two very different clients or types of clients, but they have the same marketing struggles. We help nonprofits and small businesses get their marketing organized, get processes in place, systems in place, and then work to help start engaging their audiences more efficiently. ROB: Got it. Is that organization the common struggle of where they’re starting from? EMILY: Oh yeah. That is 90% of what I see. It’s interesting; when I started my business, you’re so excited, there’s so much energy, and it’s like, “I’m going to do social media for small business” or “I’m going to do email and marketing for small business,” and I found I was spending a lot of time figuring out their processes, figuring out where the login information was for their social media accounts. I spent a great deal of time doing that because you can’t really be effective in your marketing if you don’t have a good base of organization. ROB: I’ve certainly seen that. They may have worked with somebody; that person disappeared into the wilderness or just wasn’t very good or whatever, and they were the only person that knew the logins. Do you end up starting from scratch? Are you trying to figure out how to recover those logins sometimes? Even that part, what are you scrapping together? EMILY: A lot of times I try to scrap it together, as you said, and find those logins. Just recently, last summer, I went through an appeal process with Facebook to get access to a client’s business suite. So I’ll go that route if I need to. A lot of times it’s just an email to an old coworker or something like that, trying to find those logins, but sometimes you have to get out the heavy-hitter techniques and tactics to get access to stuff. ROB: I’m sure, Emily, sometimes you start with a client and they want to do one specific thing; sometimes they want to do everything. How do you help them come to the conclusion of how to do what is the right thing, what is the right thing to do first, and what’s the right thing to do next? EMILY: This is a tough conversation that I have quite a bit. I do have a lot of clients that come to me and say, “We want an email newsletter” or “We want a blog started.” It’s more about “Okay, but what are you trying to achieve with this?” I take a step back; let’s have that conversation, let’s talk about what you’re trying to engage with your audience. And a lot of times the business owner or the nonprofit executive director is right. They know their business and their organization better than I do at that point in time. So, the project usually evolves from what they originally thought. Maybe they were thinking a traditional-style email newsletter, and I start to throw out some ideas – because email’s changed a lot. Even I would say just in the past two or three years, how you’re communicating on email has changed so much, and they may not be up-to-date on those new strategies and tactics. That’s probably the second most common conversation I’m having behind “Where are your logins and what are your processes?” [laughs] ROB: How would you characterize some of that transition on the email side? Because there’s certainly this historic idea of “Let’s get a good template, let’s curate some content, let me dump something in there that I think makes sense, and maybe I’m going to try to close some business too.” How does that evolve into what works in 2022? EMILY: What I’m experiencing with a lot of my clients and a lot of the emails I’m sending out is you’ve got to have some personality in your emails. Gone are the days of just throwing together some content, a blog preview or something like that. You’ve got to have some personality. I have several newsletters that I’m making come from a specific person within the organization – just as simple as changing the sender name from the organization name to a person’s name has helped open rates. It seems so simple, but when you’re flying through, trying to get that monthly email out, it’s easy to forget. I’m always talking to my clients about “Let’s add some personality in this. What are things that you can really connect with your audiences through on your email?” People don’t want to see this endless scroll of boring content. [laughs] ROB: Boring content, company names. When I think about getting a bunch of stuff in Gmail across a bunch of different accounts – and I have the tabs; I don’t know how many people have the different tabs set up for the updates and the transactions. I don’t remember what all the things are. But it’s almost like when you get to the tab where the newsletters tend to sit, when you get over to that updates tab, there’s a certain curiosity to a person, a human, versus a company there. It’s almost intriguing on its own versus organization name and “Here’s my receipt from this other thing.” EMILY: Oh yeah, it’s a total marketing trick when you really think about it. We’re tricking you into opening it. [laughs] Which you could argue is marketing in general. But yeah, you are intrigued by it. I want to take it a step further that it’s not a trick of “This is the same old newsletter that we’ve been sending you for the past five years, just we put a different sender name on it.” Let’s also take the content and make it more appealing for the reader so it isn’t an endless scroll. ROB: That certainly makes plenty of sense there. Emily, you walked us through part of the journey. You mentioned in the tail end of 2019, you started the firm. But what led up to that? What led you to take that particular plunge to say it was time to start your own business, and what led you into that? EMILY: I was working for an organization, and I’d only been working there for about two years, so I wasn’t looking to leave when I departed in fall of ’19. But I got into a very toxic situation that was not good for my mental health, physical health. I was deteriorating as a professional because of it. I left without a job lined up. I just went in and resigned one day because I knew this wasn’t the future that I wanted. I reached out to a colleague who had actually left a few months prior to myself and said, “Hey, do you have any projects?” I knew she was freelancing. And she did, and the rest is history. I started with a couple projects and then picked up a couple clients and really started to network within my communities. The snowball just kept getting bigger as it started rolling. An interesting ride. There’s a huge conversation right now on a societal level about the Great Resignation, and I feel like I was a couple years ahead of that. So, I totally identify with those individuals that are departing their jobs; that’s what I did two years ago. ROB: Sure. Even then, it’s an interesting shift, because you mentioned networking. In late 2019, you had one form of networking for a few months, and then that changed. What did networking look like? Was there a pause in networking in early 2020, a regearing, or just a dramatic shift in what that needed to look like? EMILY: Oh yeah. It’s funny; probably about a month ago, I had coffee with the person that I had coffee with in March of 2020. He was the last person that I had coffee with right before everything shut down. It was kind of crazy – this was in December of 2021. We had gone two years without seeing each other. When I quit my job and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I was setting up coffee appointments and networking with people. It was interesting. It was a little bit of a slower process because you go and just chit-chat and have coffee, whatever. And now I’m experiencing where I’m emailing people, I’m reaching out to them, total cold calling, or cold emailing if you will, and I’m getting responses back quicker. So, I think there’s definitely been this shift in networking for sure. ROB: Is that for connecting in person now, or is that connecting digitally? Is the coffee meeting back, in your view? How is it spinning? EMILY: I’m picking up more coffee dates. I’m reaching out to people. Indiana just went through a little bit of a surge – a pretty significant surge – so everything’s been virtual lately. But yeah, some people want to do virtual coffee chats, some people want to do in-person. I’ve actually experienced more of just emailing someone or sending a LinkedIn message and saying, “Hey, this is what I offer. I think there could be a partnership here,” and they want to chat – which would never happen before. You had to work on building that relationship. So, it’s definitely shifted. ROB: Yeah, there seems to be, kind of like your newsletters, a human connection desire that’s going on. It’s been a discipline that we started since the beginning of the year. Every week, I’m contacting five people I haven’t seen in a while and saying, “Let’s do coffee, let’s do lunch, let’s do whatever.” The hit rate is tremendous because all of the meetings and recurring events we used to go to, none of the organizations feel confident having them. I was kind of a chicken – not chicken. My level of caution was I met people for outside lunch during COVID. Until I got my shot and my booster, I was an outside lunch, outside coffee – I was that person. Now I’ll meet anybody anywhere. Some people won’t. I respect what anybody wants to choose to do, because it’s a hard time to know what to do. But the hit rate on in-person meetings has really been amazing to me. EMILY: Yeah. Do you find people are just wanting to chit-chat and catch up? Or is it more business-related? Because a lot of mine have been catching up because I haven’t seen these people for two-plus years. ROB: That’s right. I think those people probably might’ve seen on – the other secret weapon to me is LinkedIn. It’s a real secret if we’re talking about it on the podcast, right? [laughs] EMILY: Right. [laughs] ROB: But, basically, every once in a while, saying something about what we’re doing. I’ll see people in person – I saw people at football games in the fall and they’re like, “Oh, I’ve been following everything you’ve been doing for the past two years.” I’m like, we haven’t talked. I posted on LinkedIn and you never ‘liked’ it. I don’t say this to them, but they never engaged with it at all. But they’ve been reading my biography through LinkedIn. The people that I meet, most of the time it’s chit-chatty, but I will also say that it tends to echo. Somebody I had lunch with a month ago last week says, “Hey, here’s this person you really should talk to.” So it comes back around in that very open-handed, low expectation kind of way. That’s what I’m seeing, I think. EMILY: Yeah, that’s what I’ve experienced. It’s funny that you bring up LinkedIn because just recently I came across – it may’ve been on Instagram or something that said, “LinkedIn is the place for silent scrollers.” You will have so many people who will scroll right past your stuff, read it, but not engage with it. They’re not liking it, they’re not sharing it or commenting or whatever. But then you will hear six months later, “Oh, I’ve really liked your content lately.” The purpose was to keep posting, even if you’re not getting engagement. So, it’s funny that you bring that up too, because that’s the second time I’ve heard that recently. ROB: I don’t have the discipline on LinkedIn that I do on my in-person meetings, so I wish I could tell you I found something worthwhile to publish every week, but I have to work on my personal content calendar there. EMILY: Yeah, it is definitely tough. ROB: Emily, as you’ve looked at how you’ve built things so far over the past couple years, what are some lessons that you have learned? If you could rewind two years, what would you tell yourself? EMILY: I’d probably tell myself to slow down. This is really hard – whether you’re going out on your own in marketing or whatever your field is, your first thing is “I have to start figuring out how to make money. I’ve got to get money in the door. I’ve got to get clients. I’ve got to get work.” I wish I would’ve told myself to slow down a little bit because that would come – and set things up the right way. I’m in Year 2 of business, and I’m going back and having to re-set up some structures within my business that I probably should’ve been doing 18 months ago. That’s been the biggest thing for me. It’s hard. I started a business, and however many months later, a pandemic hit – and at the same time, I was also pregnant with my first child, so I went on maternity leave during that first year of business. I really wish I would’ve slowed down and not been in such a hurry. Even now, a couple years in, I’m like, okay, slow down. If I get a “no” from a client proposal or whatever, it’s not the end of the world. Slow down. Be really purposeful. Be really mindful in what you’re doing. ROB: I can’t imagine trying to plan parental leave into that early moment of a business. How did you think about doing right by your clients but also giving yourself that time to enjoy a season of life that is unique and needs to be embraced? EMILY: I mentioned earlier my colleague that was also a freelancer. She and I work together a lot. I always tell people who are going out on their own, find a partner. You don’t have to go into business together, but find someone to partner with on client projects, because business ownership is a lonely world, and it’s good when you have someone you can collaborate with. So, I had someone that was picking up some of the work I was doing. The other thing was it was a weird time. My daughter was born in July of 2020. In 2022, July 2020 still seems like early COVID days. I was actually itching to get back to work because I was tired of sitting in the house. [laughs] It’ll be interesting, as our family grows, what my approach to leave is next time, because I’m actually already thinking about it. How can I put structures in place now that I can have a full leave next time? But yeah, it was a weird year. Baby, new business, pandemic. I don’t tell anyone, “Use this as an example of how to start a business.” [laughs] ROB: No, it rarely turns out that way, especially on this podcast. Many, many accidental entrepreneurs in different ways. As you think about the clients you work with, the small businesses, the nonprofits, we’ve talked a little bit about email and how that is changing; when people have to make the choice of what to activate first, what are some of the other things you see them needing to activate first that might not be what they expected in terms of how they need to be marketing? EMILY: Website is a really big thing. A lot of times people are thinking social media, email, website in that order, but I like to focus on the website first because that’s your homebase. That’s where you can push everyone back to from your emails, from your social media. We need to get that cleaned up and really telling your story well. Some people, their website’s a mess because – kind of like I was a couple years ago – you’re just trying to throw something together so that you can get out there and get your name out there. So, it’s about going back and really looking at it. The other reason that I really want to look at websites is for SEO purposes. I think SEO was really big there in the early 2010s or so, and everyone was talking about SEO. Then it died off a little bit and no one was talking about it, and it seems to be a real buzzy word right now, about how to get your organic content situated correctly so that you can be ranking high on Google and you’re providing good content. That’s what I tell my small business owners especially: making sure your content is optimized appropriately and written appropriately is free. You’re not having to create paid ads for it. That’s probably the other thing. Social media is actually the last thing I look at. ROB: And then organic and paid social, those are two different conversations as well, right? EMILY: Oh yeah. With these clients especially, organic is where we’ve got to start, and then we work up to paid. It’s so hard. Every social media... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22189001

Marketing to Keep the Kitchen Open: Profitable Hospitality in a Pandemic 03/03/2022

Marketing to Keep the Kitchen Open: Profitable Hospitality in a Pandemic Robin Blanchette, CEO and Founder, Norton Creative (Houston, TX) Robin Blanchette is CEO and Founder at Norton Creative, an agency focused “narrow and deep” on restaurant and hospitality branding. Their primary client base includes multi-unit operators, mid-size and larger chains, and franchises. They also work with independents . . . but never with conflicting brands or direct competitors in the same time frame. Over the eight years of its existence, the agency has worked with over 150 different restaurant brands, developing strategies, doing creative work, finding whitespace, differentiating positions, and designing brand standards that allow room for franchisees to “own their businesses” while maintaining what Robin calls “brand purity.” Clients have included Buffalo Wild Wings, TGIFridays, Bob Evans Farms, Mellow Mushroom, Friendly’s, Fuddruckers, Sonic, and Luby’s . . . . Robin started her career on the client side and said that the agencies she worked with “didn’t get it.” She makes sure that the creative her agency produces not only works on the marketing side . . . but addresses questions such as: “What is your business problem you’re trying to solve?” “What is your objective?” and translates the creative solution into business results in terms of sales, traffic, and profitability. Norton Creatives architecture and interiors team helps develop brand architectures that will be scalable to two or more locations so that a single site operation can seamlessly “grow.” When the creative team designs menus, the layout is engineered for profitability. The firm also provides carry-out packaging design and merchandising services, which have increased in importance during the pandemic. In this interview, Robin talks about the challenges restaurants face . . . and what successful restaurants have done to succeed over the past couple of years. She reminds us that restaurants have very tight margins and notes that the number of restaurants in the US is down 100,000 from pre-pandemic days. Those that have succeeded are those that are willing to do “whatever it takes.” In particular, Robin says many have developed new ways to deliver to their customers, reduced the number of selections on their menus, and gotten more efficient in their operations. Robin can be reached on her agency’s website at , on LinkedIn, and on Instagram. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Blanchette, CEO, and Founder at Norton Creative based in Houston, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Robin. ROBIN: Thank you for having me, Rob. This is great. ROB: Great to have you here. Why don’t you give us a focus in on the superpowers of Norton Creative? I think you have a pretty distinctive story for us. ROBIN: Absolutely. We say we go narrow and deep. We’re focused really only on the restaurant and hospitality industries. We do creative work, find whitespace, differentiating positions, ways to bring the brand to life in this industry. We’re experts in hospitality. To be honest, I just have to say that this industry versus any other industry is really one of service, and that’s what we love about it. It’s really about the people. I mean, you could see through the pandemic, the restaurant owners/operators, independent chains, they all rolled up their sleeves. They’re completely open and humbled to be in an environment to serve people, and that’s what we do at Norton. That’s why we focus solely on this industry. ROB: It’s fascinating. I’ve known some very small agencies that try to focus in on very mom n’ pop restaurants. You see really small clients – and sometimes they have bigger restaurants, too. Where is your sweet spot? Are you working with local, single location? Are you looking mostly at multi-location or franchise or chain? How does that fit your mix? ROBIN: We really are in both, but I will say our primary client is multi-unit operators, mid-size and larger chains. We do independents. We have an architecture and interiors team, so anything the guest really sees from a restaurant perspective is what we focus on. Architecture and interiors, we do large chains, but we also do a lot of independents. Chefs that have been maybe working for a brand and then they want to create their own brand. We’ve got a client that wanted to start a cookie shop, and we created a cookie shop. She’s got one location; she started as a virtual brand and she was like, “Now I want to open an actual, four-walls place.” So, most of our clients are large chains and mid-size chains, but I will say we’re a creative group of people, and if you know creative design type folks, they want some really unique and independent stuff to do. So we like to balance it out for them, for the team, because they like to do unique, niche-y kind of stuff too. You know what I mean? ROB: Absolutely. To that point a little bit, when you’re talking about a restaurant that is investing in architecture and design, it’s still somebody thinking a little bit bigger than someone who took over a lease, someone else moved out, they’re moving in, they want to sell their mom’s favorite sandwich. I mean, maybe there’s a good place for it, but I hear you talking about investing in a brand architecture that might be able to scale out two more locations, even if someone’s starting with one. ROBIN: Absolutely. I think right now, too, certainly during the pandemic and what we’re thinking of as post-pandemic – let’s put out the positive vibes there that this is post-pandemic – there’s a lot of folks that are looking to take their one-unit, two-unit, three-unit and franchise. There’s a lot of franchise development agreements happening right now. We work with a regional chain out of Houston called Shipley Do-Nuts, and if you’re a Texan, you know very well what that brand’s all about because you’re born and raised with it. But they’re franchising rapidly across the country. To be able to get brand standards and get your box right, get things lined up so a potential franchisee, or even a potential buyer for that matter, can look at it and go, “Yeah, I can expand this, it’s obvious” – Wahlburgers is one of our clients based out of Austin, and they’re doing the same thing. It’s like, let’s create a brand position, a story of your standards so that we can now execute this in multiple ways across the world and across the U.S. ROB: Franchisees seem like a particular challenge. A lot of times you’ll see some really well-run restaurants, even gas stations, tend to not be franchised. So how do you think about the design of the brand, the design of the collateral in a way that is easier for a franchisee to succeed? That seems like quite a challenge. ROBIN: I think some of it has to do with development agreements and how the franchisor decides to set up the boundaries and rules and how they also might hold franchisees accountable for those. From a franchisee perspective, there does have to be space – I worked for Applebee’s corporate for many years, and we had an incredible group of franchisees and business owners that owned lots of different chains, lots of different restaurants, and we would have local walls that they could interchange their own local flair, if you will. So, there are ways for franchisees to make it their own, but you’re buying the sign and paying royalties towards that brand. For us, when we create pieces or brand standards, there has to be some sort of give and take there for a franchisee. It’s their business, it’s their livelihood, it’s their company. My philosophy is around brand purity. I believe that individual brands should take up their own space – not that nobody has a competitor, but in terms of creating a brand from scratch or even trying to differentiate one – look, there’s lots of wing places in this world, but Buffalo Wild Wings are the only people that do it their way. They’re the only one that focuses on a gathering place for sports and the best wings, or whatever. So I think about it as brand purity, and franchisees think of it that way too. That’s why they’re buying in. ROB: Yeah, Buffalo Wild Wings you mentioned is a client of yours, I believe. ROBIN: Yeah. ROB: It is a fascinating thing; there’s kind of a hole in the market to an extent. You say, what is the national sports bar chain that is actually going to deliver on something you expect to receive from it? It’s not quite there. We have a couple local chains; some of them die, some of them come, some of them go. And then there is the big yellow and black sign that you can see from the highway. I think it’s interesting to turn a corner here and talk about the origin story of Norton Creative. You mentioned your own background on the brand side. I think it’s very credible. What led you to move from the corporate side and the brand side and take some risks by starting your own shop? ROBIN: It’s very scary. [laughs] I’ll say that. It was a very scary proposition. I joke when people are starting their own restaurant brands or whatever; I’m like, I was googling how to start a company. I’m not going to lie about that. That’s the God’s honest truth. “What forms do I need to fill out?” or whatever. But the impetus for it was – if you’ve spent any time at all on the client side – I hired all the big agencies and many small agencies. I’ve gone through the formal pitch processes that take months and I’ve hired somebody out of the blue. I’ve been on that side primarily. So I really knew what was missing, I think. That was part of it. Gosh, I had great agencies and really talented creative people, and certainly all the major consulting companies, too, come in, like the big decks from the Big Three or whatever. What’s missing is I could never find anybody that could solve my creative conundrum out of the gate. They didn’t really get it on the agency side. Now that I’m on the other side, we work really hard to get it, like “What is your business problem you’re trying to solve?” Not just your marketing problem, not just your creative problem, but what’s your objective? We come back to that every time. And every agency I ever had would bring beautiful work, but it didn’t actually go to work. I hear other people say that all the time, like “Our creative works,” but ours really is about sales, traffic, and profitability. It’s even hard to train creatives a lot of times in that, but think about it; when we’re doing a menu design, we do not do menu design without engineering, which is profitability work. Where do the items go? Where does the eye go for the guest? Where’s the heat of the person? We do all of the backend stuff on that because I don’t want to design a menu, roll it out, and then your best-in-the-world item fails because we’ve shoved it someplace. That’s a long way of answering your question in that we really understand, I really understood, what was missing. We have a tendency to say things like, look, I am not going to give you a 100-page deck to answer a very short question of “What are we best in the world at?” Let’s write a paragraph. It’s born out of some sort of truth, right? If we’re going to have to explain this to the guest for two hours, it’s never going to work. What is it in its most simple form? What’s your brand about? I think what has made a difference – we’ve been around eight years now. Somebody told me when I first started Norton, “It’s like owning a boat. The best day is the day you get it and the day you sell it.” [laughs] The in between is all the work. It’s just hard work. And that’s where we are now. We’re in the middle of the work. And it was born out of “We get you because we’ve been there. We understand.” ROB: You have a very deep experience in the industry. How do you go about taking somebody who may be very talented, and they may have even delivered a very good quality of work across a range of industries – how do you bring them into the restaurant world? How do you build that into culture, build that into training, build that into process? ROBIN: First of all, we’ve all eaten at restaurants, so it’s not a stretch to be like, “Do you know what it’s like to be a restaurant guest and read a menu?” That’s the first point of contact for the most part. So that's not a hard hurdle to overcome. It’s not like I’m teaching somebody about the pipeline across Alaska or something. It’s not something hard to teach. People get it, and they get the restaurant experience. In terms of the underneath of it all, some of it’s just teaching and getting in there, being thrown in and saying, “Look, here’s how we engineer our menu. Here’s how we build a box to make the customer journey be the best. Here’s how we create stories.” Some of it is just teaching, and we really do like to hire more junior folks and train them into the industry. Again, I’m really focused on our leaders. In the restaurant industry, we talk about “train the trainer.” We train the trainer a lot here, and we use a lot of the way that restaurant operators train somebody who is a 16-year-old host and how they greet the guests and how a server might greet somebody, how a kitchen might move quickly but still provide quality food. We use those same fundamentals for what we do every day. I don’t want a piece of work that goes out that is not the best it can be. We’ve got expo. If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you know what expo is. You’re checking the plate before it goes to the guest. So, we have folks in place that get it, and we also hire a lot of people who’ve been on the other side. There used to be a thing where it was like in-house creatives are maybe not that great. They haven’t worked across a variety of industries of whatever. But in-house creatives on the restaurant side get it. They know they’ve got to turn it quick. There’s somebody standing over their shoulder saying “Make that blue, make that purple” or whatever. They understand the language, too. So, we hire people like that as well. ROB: Got it. You mentioned packaging; are you also even in packaging design and takeout? Has that been part of your world for the past couple of years especially? ROBIN: Oh my gosh, yes, and long before that, you can imagine. One of the very first projects that I worked on when I was at Applebee’s was creating Carside To Go. You might remember it back in the late ’90s, when that all started for some of the bigger casual dining chains. All the pitfalls that go into that are the same ones we have today, which is like the guest doesn’t want to get out of their car, and how are we going to be of service to them? So yeah, we do full to-go packaging. Again, it’s built out of the brand. With Buffalo Wild Wings, we’re super flexible. They have a lead creative agency, which is the Martin Agency, which we’re huge fans of – huge fans – and we do all of the menu and merchandising work for them. So we all work together. When it comes to things like packaging, we’re working on packaging along with other folks, many times, working with operations, working cross-functionally with either other agencies or also working within the organization cross-functionally. Lots of different teams. We’re not just working with the marketing teams; we’re working with the development teams and real estate teams, things like that. ROB: Right. A challenge that strikes me – I think this is a challenge brand side as well – when you talk about something like package design, that’s kind of an intermittent need. Same thing with internal architecture. Some people – maybe you’ll tell me differently – don’t tweak their menu that often. So how do you juggle having these capabilities that are not a persistent need, but it’s a recurring one? It’s kind of that challenging “usually but not always” need. How do you juggle some of those specialties? ROBIN: First of all, the way we’re set up, we certainly have retained clients that we work on stuff every single day. We’re in and out all year long, and those are transformational partnerships where we are in it. Everything they need, they call us. And then we also do a lot of project work. When somebody has a need – when Smoothie King needs menu design and engineering work and profitability work, or Red Lobster – we just finished doing some work for Red Lobster – they will call us and say, “We need this work. We’re not ready yet” – especially right now in the middle of the pandemic, the government shut down our industry, in effect, in 2020. What’s happening right now in the industry is we have lots of folks that are calling and saying, “Hey, look, I’m not ready yet for the full package of services because I just can’t. We had 50 people in our marketing department; now we have three. We can’t do it yet, but hey, can you do this for us right now? Can you build this campaign? Can you do this for the next six months?” or whatever. And of course we can. Again, we’re of service. We’d like the transformational partnership because obviously – and you understand – when you have those retained relationships, you can really add more value long term, and certainly it helps from a resourcing perspective internally and the P&L. But from just how we can handle the intermittent needs, we do. We just say yes. ROB: What are you seeing when it comes to – some places have probably reopened pretty well, but some places have probably reopened hoping that they’re going to be able to keep doing exactly what they did before. What are you seeing change in the actual function of restaurants, the marketing, the design? There’s obviously this mobile and pickup version of things, but are people going to be able to relaunch these big box, large format restaurants with crowds? How are they having to adapt their space for the new reality? ROBIN: Fortunately and unfortunately, we’ve got hundreds of thousands fewer restaurants than we did before the pandemic. You’ll have to check me on the number, but I think it’s 100,000 fewer restaurants in the United States from before the pandemic. For the restaurants remaining, the ones that fought, rolled up their sleeves, did their best to try to survive – PPP and ERC and all the ways in which – those chains are I would say healthier than ever. They reduced menu skus in terms of number of items, because menus were getting really big. It’s hard to delete stuff because you’re like, “Ah, I have that one guest that likes that item.” It’s like, well, let’s figure it out. So, menus got smaller. Restaurants had to be much more efficient in terms of how they were utilizing their supply chain. Obviously there are labor issues and all of these things. I would say from my purview, restaurants are more efficient than they were before, and there’s people hungry for eating out. They’re hungry for entertainment. My husband went to a car show/boat show thing this weekend and he’s like, “It was like a mob scene.” People are like, “We’ll take whatever, just to walk around and find something to do.” But people are back in restaurants again, and they’re saying, “We want that.” In terms of the large chains, I think it’s gotten some guests back. People are spending maybe a little less money. They’re saying, “Maybe I was eating at the high-end fine dining before; now, you know what? I’m good. I would love to eat at TGI Friday’s. I miss my potato skins.” ROB: It certainly makes sense. I’ve seen all over the map – one of our favorite pre-pandemic places, I think they still don’t know what they want to be post-COVID. Their... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22073255

When It Ain’t Your Grandma’s SEO 02/24/2022

When It Ain’t Your Grandma’s SEO 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: , 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... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/22034231

How to Apply AI to Email at Scale 02/17/2022

How to Apply AI to Email at Scale Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer, Rasa.io (New Orleans, LA) Erica Salm Rench is Chief Operating Officer at Rasa.io, a company that supports marketers, business owners, and large associations by applying AI to generate automated, smart, personalized email newsletters. Rasa’s mission? T0 better inform the world through relevant content. Clients import their subscribers. Rasa plugs in subscribers’ super-relevant content – their own blogs, their own LinkedIn company page, their Facebook page, their Twitter profile – plus relevant external sources. From this rich pool of content, Rasa automatically selects which stories go to which subscribers . . . and refines that selection process as the system learns more about the individual subscribers. Articles are first selected from sources a client trusts for content, then filtered by trusted keyword and topic. Through an editorial review window, the client can scan the engine-selected articles and deselect those that s/he does not want the AI to “potentially select for one of (its) subscribers.” Using much of publishers’ original metadata/article descriptions eliminates the need to rewrite introductory material or reformat content, saving time and a lot of headaches. From the Rasa dashboard, a client can see in aggregate its audiences’ interests . . . across any period of time and range of articles and then drill down to see the click-responses of an individual. Rasa provides a way for clients to pull those insights into their own corporate systems. A couple of years ago, Rasa launched a self-service model that allows companies to try the platform and “DIY the newsletter themselves.” In addition to large and small companies, Rasa works with largescale association organizations that often rely on events as important revenue streams. These need focused personalized email communications to optimize member engagement. Erica can be reached on her company’s website at or by sending an email to or Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer at Rasa.io based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Erica. ERICA: Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you give us a glimpse into the superpowers of Rasa.io? What do you all do? ERICA: Sure thing. At Rasa.io, we do AI for smart email newsletter generation. In the same way that, for better or worse, your social media feeds know what content to recommend to you based on your prior engagement, we recommend relevant stories to you in your emails. We work with organizations large and small – anyone who needs a newsletter, which is pretty much anyone. They import their subscribers, start to plug in content sources that are super relevant to your subscribers – their own blogs, their own LinkedIn company page, their Facebook page, their Twitter profile. They plug all those things in along with some relevant external sources – maybe Harvard Business Review produces great business content that’s relevant to their space. That content starts flowing in, forms a rich content pool, and then from there we automatically choose which stories go to which subscribers and we get smarter as we learn more about those subscribers. It's not only personalized, really engaging content, a great way to engage with the organization’s brand, but it’s also automated, so it saves people a ton of time on the newsletter process. Newsletters can be a really unsexy task, so it makes that unsexy task a lot faster. [laughs] ROB: I’m sure this exists on an entire spectrum. A lot of AI type work reminds me of self-driving cars and that sort of thing. There’s sort of a ramp-up of trust. First of all, getting somewhere is a lot of work. Writing a newsletter is a lot of work, to the point where people don’t want to do it. You might not walk somewhere that you drive, but you might not trust the self-driving car to get you all the way there. What is this on-ramp for a marketer or maybe a business owner to grow with trust in this system that’s going to send I-don’t-know-what to my customers? What’s it going to say to them? How do you build trust, and what’s that ramp look like? ERICA: That is such a great question, and we get it a lot. AI is one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it. It’s the same with newsletters. It’s the same with a chatbot. The chatbot is only going to be as good as the training that’s put into it, and it’s the same with newsletters. Essentially, the first level of trusting that the newsletter is going to be great is the fact that you get to put in your own sources. The AI is not going to go out and do a Google search query to find articles. It’s going to first draw from sources that you’ve said, “These sources produce content trusted to this space.” So that’s one thing. Furthermore, you can take each of those sources and filter them down by trusted keyword and topic. To use the HBR example again, you might say, “I really like Harvard Business Review as a source, but only if HBR hits on the topic of marketing,” for example. From there, we’re pulling in the most relevant articles from your relevant sources. After that point, you also can include an editorial review window where you can just scan the articles that have come in from the engine and deselect anything that you don’t want the AI to potentially select for one of your subscribers. So, there are lots of levels of control. The AI is selecting stories, but only from the list of stories that you’ve said, “These are okay for my subscribers.” ROB: I see. At times am I picking the articles? Or have I done that just by picking the keywords and everything else? Can I mess with the newsletter before I send it just to make sure I like the articles that are in there? ERICA: Absolutely, and most people do. Maybe you have 50 articles coming in from your preapproved sources; you might deselect a few of those that aren’t perfectly on brand. Or some people do reverse-engineer it and say, “These are 50 great articles, but I’m going to choose the 5 that I want everyone to get.” So, you can override the AI in that way. We don’t recommend it, but you certainly can use the system to your benefit because the curation aspect of our system is also really powerful. ROB: Got it. Talk to me about the copy a little bit. What goes into the newsletter to describe the articles? If I’m fearing the Terminator and the machines taking over the world – ERICA: [laughs] Killer robots, right? ROB: Yeah, I’m afraid of the article summaries too, and the headlines. How does that part get decided? What’s going to show up in the newsletter, what’s going to get clipped, what’s going to be linked out afterwards, that sort of thing? ERICA: That’s another great question. We look to the publisher. We’re going to take in the publisher’s metadata or their published description of the article. In a lot of cases, that is a rich description that the blog publisher writes themselves, or sometimes by default it might be the first couple sentences of that blog. It’s going to be the publisher’s title that they assign, and it’s going to be the publisher’s primary image that comes along with that blog. We’re going to pull in all of that great data, and, obviously, the publisher is going to want their article to look great, so we’re pulling from data that is really carefully thought of. And you can make tweaks to that if you want. You can impact the description of the article and have it be your own commentary on the article if you want, but you certainly don’t have to. So, it eliminates a lot of the newsletter production time that goes into rewriting article descriptions and resizing images and redoing a lot of the data that already can be done for you. ROB: Not that we want to play around with the product all day, but I kind of do – when we get into the user, the recipient, clicking on the article, do we know what they clicked on? Do we even get a sense of how much they read it? Are we launching the article in a way where we can track what they do with it? ERICA: To a certain extent you can do that within the dashboard, and then we also have an open API and several integrations that allow you to draw those insights into your own systems. What we’re doing with each article when it comes into the system is using natural language processing to “read” it and conceptualize it and say, “Okay, this Harvard Business Review article is about marketing and SEO and brand management.” So then when Erica or Rob engages with that article, we know that Erica and Rob are interested in those topics. From there, in the Rasa dashboard, you can see on the aggregate what your audience is interested in across many, many, many different articles, across whatever time period you want. Then if you want those insights on the individuals, you can look up the individual and see what they’re clicking on. But if you want to say bring those insights into your own CRM, you could fire off a campaign based on everyone who’s interested in marketing. ROB: Got it. Let’s get into the origin story a little bit. How did you come to be involved in Rasa, and where did the platform come from? ERICA: There’s definitely a story around that. When I was in business school about 10 years ago – I can’t believe it’s been that long – Amith Nagarajan, who is the Chairman of Rasa, came to speak to one of my business school classes, but about his former company. So, I actually had engaged with him and talked to him about working for his former company called Aptify, a really popular association management system among many, many huge, largescale associations out there. I still had school to do; I had another job that I had to finish out. So that opportunity didn’t quite work out and the timing wasn’t great, but then about four or five years later, he was spinning up this exciting Rasa opportunity, and he engaged me and talked to me about the potential of getting involved in email. For me, I was actually working at a digital agency at the time. I worked in a kind of agency that probably a lot of your listeners are working at, where we did everything online – SEO, front- and backend web dev, paid online ads. We did everything online. But the one thing that we didn’t touch was email because email is so hard to do in a quality way and at scale. That’s why I thought to myself, “Oh, this Rasa.io thing, there’s some meat to this, because if you can do email at scale and personalize it without a ton of effort, there aren’t many people doing that.” ROB: What role did you come into the business in, and what does the journey up to COO look like? ERICA: I came in in more of a customer success and marketing capacity, and then as we grew, I really focused in on that customer success and helping our enterprise-scale customers succeed. We put in a lot of time in those campaigns. Something that’s interesting about AI tools is that, like you mentioned earlier, you really get out of them what you put in. We wanted our early customers to do exceptionally well, and I worked with my team on that. As we grew the business, I evolved eventually into more of a business development role, and then more recently even more of a leadership role, and that’s what brought me to COO. ROB: As you’re unlocking the COO role, what are you learning about the business and how to make it function well that might’ve been harder to see from elsewhere in the organization? ERICA: Oh gosh, that’s such a great question. In my prior marketing agency role, I worked much closer with the developers. When I first started at Rasa, I didn’t work as closely with the developers and the engineers, and now, in this evolution to COO, I’m working again closely with developers and engineers, which has been really great. It’s allowed me to connect the dots – when I’m talking to a prospect or when I’m supporting one of my team members talking to a prospect who’s interested in the tool, there’s more of now, in my head, a direct connection with “Oh, let’s go talk to these folks who can directly impact the development of the product.” Being able to more easily connect those dots for me has been great. And then of course all the financial stuff. It’s what I went to school for, so now I’m doing the nitty-gritty of the numbers. [laughs] ROB: Sure. To pull on a little bit of a thread, since you are a product company, a lot of our guests are certainly on the services side; they talk about the pride of bootstrapping. That’s mostly the option you have as a services company. It’s not like a lot of agencies are – there’s some interesting stuff going on in funding and acquisitions, but mostly not the case. How are you and Rasa.io thinking about funding growth in the business? Do you have investors? Will you have more investors? How does that look? ERICA: We are privately funded. We had the resources we needed to get off the ground, and now an exciting engine for growth is a self-service model that we launched a couple of years back which allows folks to come in, try the platform, DIY the newsletter themselves. So that’s another revenue stream for us, and then we also have the largescale association organizations that we work. The revenue from those has really fueled our growth as well. ROB: That’s such an interesting market, those associations. I’m sure they’ve all needed email; now they just might not have as many events to talk about as they used to. ERICA: Yeah. If you’re familiar at all with the space, you know that the events for associations are really important revenue streams, so they’ve had to look to outside tools, to digital tools like email, like personalized Rasa.io emails, to make sure that member engagement is still optimized. ROB: What are you seeing from that vantage point? I know I certainly greatly valued our local marketing association, some of those meetings, some of those speakers, some of those conferences. They seem to be coming back slower than almost anything else out there. What are you seeing from your vantage point in when these associations are firing up? How many of them are doing events, how many of them are not doing events? What’s the trendline looking like? ERICA: That’s a great question. The majority of the organizations that we work with who did virtual events in 2020 are now either doing hybrid or entirely in-person events for late 2021 and now 2022. Obviously, with the ascent of first Delta, then Omicron, there was a lot of uncertainty, so I think that’s why people still hung on to the dual virtual and in-person. We did also see that doing both is really hard. It’s like running two entirely separate conferences at the same time. I think the evolution is slowly but surely back to in-person events for folks that those were important revenue streams and tools for member engagement. ROB: It’s been interesting. I’m in a dues-based membership organization where I think they feel the pressure to keep some sort of event going to drive value for members. They were doing hybrid for a while, and then they stopped. We have a distributed team, so some of my distributed team wasn’t getting their content anymore. I asked them why they killed the virtual option and they said that people were not showing up in person at all, and they were just coming in – if it was a two-hour event, they’d pop in for 30 minutes and disappear. So, it’s interesting seeing some of the hybrid stuff go further back than I ever thought it would, and go away in some cases where I thought we would continue to have an online option. ERICA: Right. Yeah, they’re not just making their revenue from people paying fees to come join a conference, but they’re also making a lot of money from people like myself and other vendors who are interested in working with their members. Doing that virtually is much harder than having vendors come in person and share their services and have a booth. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of reason to eventually migrate back to in-person for the big associations. ROB: Erica, with some time on the product side, with some time on the agency side, now with an ever-rising level of responsibility, if you were to go back into the agency world, what are some tools and some lessons that you would bring to bear in running a services organization, knowing what you know now? ERICA: Oh gosh, that is such a good question. This is going to sound – this is very biased, but I would include something like a Rasa newsletter in all of our online packages because there just wasn’t a tool to do email well back in the day when we were developing our packages for clients. I would also have wanted to be one of the earlier adopters of lots of those integration connectors. We use Zapier at Rasa. There was just a lot we did – we processized things really well at my agency, but I think that if we knew more about Zapier earlier on, or an Integrate leader or all those awesome connecting tools, our processes would have been so much tighter than they even were. So yeah, I think that would’ve been a major game-changer for us too. ROB: Do you think that’s been more a matter of timing, or was some of that also being in more of a product mindset and maybe more of the team is more technical in a software company versus an agency? ERICA: That’s a good question. I think it was both. I think it was a matter of timing because we developed a lot of our processes before tools like that were more mainstream. And I think you make a good point; even though we did have a bunch of developers on the team and we did have a bunch of technical analysts and technical SEO folks, we did still have a lot of content and graphic design and creatives who might not have been as comfortable with the integrator tools. But I think once those integrations are set up, then it becomes looped. Then anyone can use them. ROB: Talent is always hard – you’ve mentioned working with developers in both roles. Competition for developer talent may be among the hardest of jobs to find people for, to keep people for. How do you think about creating an environment and a pattern of success for talent in general and software developers specifically? Because I have been one, and we’re a bit of a different breed. ERICA: It’s so hard. We try to be really purpose-focused at Rasa. We try to really focus on our greater mission of better informing the world through relevant content. When people are rallied around that, it becomes much more exciting than getting emails out the door. So, we try to align our values to that greater purpose. We try to align a lot of the decisions we make to that greater purpose. It allows everyone a really good framework with which to make big decisions. I think that’s definitely helped at Rasa. We have a really good average employee tenure. ROB: Very interesting. Email has been such an interesting channel over time. I think it falls in and out of fashion almost seasonally like the color white. It’s really something. Where do you think we are in the ebb and flow of email? What do you think it is that keeps us coming back to email? ERICA: Oh, that’s such a good question. Email is not the fancy new car. It is not the Tesla of the digital marketing world by any means. But time and time again, it shows up as one of the top channels for encouraging transactions, for driving people to a website. Landing in people’s inboxes is a completely separate conversation, but your chances of landing in someone’s primary inbox as an email versus catching a glimpse of their eyes on a social media channel when... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/21972764

Structuring for the Personal Touch 02/10/2022

Structuring for the Personal Touch Flynn Zaiger, CEO, Online Optimism (New Orleans, LA; Washington, D.C.; and Atlanta, GA) Flynn Zaiger, CEO at Online Optimism, started his agency on a laptop in 2012 by reaching out and offering SEO services to the 6 companies where he had interned while he was in college. Today, his remote, across the country staff of 23 supports businesses with “everything they do online” – social, search, SEO, SEM, and website design. Clients are small- to medium-sized businesses (5 to 500 employees) that are either startups looking to rapidly expand or more traditional family businesses, that, in the process of being passed down to the next generation, are looking to expand. The agency strives to contribute to the communities surrounding its three offices. A cadre of interns maintains a networking calendar, tracking the activities of fifty chambers of commerce. The intern program, built internally from the ground up, is the source of many of the agency’s new hires. In this interview, Flynn discusses some of the key strategies he has used to build Online Optimism. He recommends that anyone starting a business: Figure out the revenue streams that are available immediately. Set a good safety net of six months to allow you time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Recognize that, as your agency grows, you will not continue doing all those things you love . . . you will be managing other people who are doing those things. Understand the importance of knowing how to manage people. Build processes so new staff can get “up to speed” quickly. Never burn bridges. Flynn hired a business developer as the agency’s seventh or eighth employee. He says it is important to work closely with new sales staff, not to expect sales in the first three months (because that’s how long it takes to train and understand the proposals), and to build a solid sales process to facilitate onboarding. He did not have processes in place for the first five years and admits, “It was a mess.” The agency’s language around the sales process is pretty traditional. The language around marketing activities . . . not so much. Flynn and his early staff had no prior agency experience, so they built and “named” things with their own terms. No “agency of record” here . . . it’s a “partnership.” Flynn finds it interesting that other agencies are dropping agency of record accounts and hourly billing in favor of project-based billing and flat rates. He says, “That’s what we did in 2012 because that’s what I made up when I was coming up with how we structured our pricing.” The agency is not organized in the traditional way, either – there a no account managers. Flynn explains, “Every one of our employees is both doing services and handling account executive stuff.” He says this is a challenge for his employees (they have to be good technically and also skilled at customer/account management), less efficient than an agency where functions are more “separate,” but far better for clients who can directly contact the person who will fix their problems. Flynn says, “People want to feel like there’s humans behind it.” He continues, “People want to know who they’re working with. They want to feel that human connection in the business relationship. That’s helped us grow.” Flynn can be reached on his agency’s website at: Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Flynn Zaiger, CEO at Online Optimism with offices in New Orleans, D.C., and Atlanta. Welcome to the podcast, Flynn. FLYNN: Great to be here, Rob. Excited to be with you and talk. ROB: It’s good to have you here. Why don’t you give us an introduction to Online Optimism? What do people know as your expertise? FLYNN: I started Online Optimism in 2012. It felt like this internet thing was going to be pretty big. I seem to have lucked out on that guess. It was just myself and a laptop. I had graduated college, and 10 years later we have 23 employees, we have offices in three states, we have remote staff across the country, and we help businesses with everything they do online – social, search, SEO, SEM, website design. We usually say if it touches a screen, we can help you market it better. ROB: Got it. Did you start with such a wide aperture and then expand on the types of clients you could serve? Or did you start in one of those more core areas and grow it from there and add capabilities? FLYNN: When I was just starting, I always felt that I was pretty good at SEO. I had a sense that SEO is really a game where you don’t know the rules and you’re just guessing what Google wants. So, I started a digital marketing agency, telling people that I was great at SEO, and they’d say, “Wonderful. I have a Facebook page that needs to be managed.” I was like, “Okay, that’s close enough. I’ll just do some social media on the side.” [laughs] Then I’d be like, “Yeah, but I really want more SEO,” and they’d be like, “That’s so great. We need a website.” So, I would learn to build websites. I think that’s what you do when you’re starting out: you expand and see what works and what doesn’t. Now we do everything digitally. At one point we even did events. When we were starting in New Orleans, I threw a second-line parade. We threw a block party and a barbeque. As someone who started an internet marketing company, I should not be the person running a block party. But it went pretty well for a year or two. Then we decided it wasn’t for us and we still focus on these main services where we feel people are constantly investing. We do social; we’re not on any specific network. The networks are going to change, but at this point, people are going to be found on social media, they’re going to be found on search, and we help them appear in both places. ROB: Social has certainly emerged, at least many people’s expectations, much more around consistency than around creating huge spikes of activity, so that probably lends itself to some sense of normalcy. Flynn, paint for us a picture – is there any typical client, a typical vertical, a typical size, a typical buyer profile? Who comes to you most regularly that you can serve well? FLYNN: We work great with what we consider small- to medium-size businesses. It tends to be anywhere from 5 to 500 employees. Above that, usually you have a bigger in-house marketing team; below 5, you’re usually not ready to work with an agency like us. We’ve found a niche with two things. One is with startups who are looking to expand rapidly, so they need quick testing and making sure that social strategies are working and social content is working before scaling it up. Our other expertise is these more traditional companies who have been around for 15-20 years. We do really well with family-run businesses where the son or daughter is taking over the business. This company has been successful for a few decades, they have great word-of-mouth, and you log onto their website and it’s built on GeoCities or something, there’s GIF animations all around, there’s music playing. These are businesses that have done well enough, and now they go to the next generation, and these are people in their twenties, thirties, and they’re tired of running a family business. They want to grow and be more successful. That’s when they usually bring us in, and we have a first meeting where we all make fun of their family’s website and how terrible it is, and then we help them. They still run the day-to-day, but they trust that we’re a digital agency that knows the business and has that sort of relationship. We still try to meet face to face with people – obviously more pre-COVID than now – but we really believe in the power of a handshake. One of our values is “Screens will not replace handshakes,” and I still think, especially in the digital world where SEO/SEM can be sketchy, people want to know who they’re working with. They want to feel that human connection in the business relationship. That’s helped us grow. ROB: That leads me into something that was perhaps a little bit self-evident – having offices in three places, is that largely centered on that ability to be close to a customer, to go shake their hands? You’re cultivating relationships in those places and nearby? FLYNN: Absolutely. We started off just in New Orleans, and we had ideas always to grow beyond. We started getting more national clients around the country, but a lot of those relationships were based off of connections that we made in person. Then COVID happened, and all of a sudden everyone was reconsidering what they wanted to do, some of my staff was moving, and we couldn’t meet anyone in person. As a digital marketing agency, for the first time, we were on a level playing field with everyone who was down the street from bigger companies. D.C. and Atlanta are much bigger regions; they’re much bigger economic centers than New Orleans. Not that New Orleans is tiny. It’s a very large port city. It has a lot of deals there. But Atlanta and D.C. are much bigger. We had staff who wanted to go to these cities. They were willing to put in the time and investment to do the work of starting an office there. That’s going to networking events, helping to recruit interns, going to colleges to recruit more staff, and really trying to make a name for ourselves, producing resources in each city. One thing we do is keep a networking calendar. We mostly do this internally because we have interns that will help us track 50 different chamber calendars and pull them together. We try to make sure we’re actually contributing to these cities, each in their own way, rather than just having an office that happens to be located in them. ROB: I hear you saying there’s a set of capabilities you expect from an office. There is a local engagement, there is an outreach on the business side, there is a recruiting component. A lot of a services business, a lot of an agency, is sales and talent. If you can do those and manage the accounts you have well and grow them, that’s a pretty good formula. Do you have somebody who then runs each office? Or how have you structured that part? FLYNN: Yeah, that’s pretty much how it’s going so far. We’ll send someone who leads the thing, and then we try to have exactly what you said: one salesperson, business development. Our team is really good at digital marketing, so our salespeople have never really had to do much outbound. We certainly go to networking events, but we’re not pushing sales. They’re usually busy enough with the leads coming in, and it’s mostly qualifying and creating proposals that are custom-crafted. So, it’s a salesperson and then usually an account executive or two that can handle the different work in the cities. I will say this is something that we’ve only been doing for about a year and a half now, so we’re still learning and still building out these channels. I think, long term, what we see is that each office will kind of function together, but they’re going to help us by if one city has a downturn, which unfortunately will inevitably happen, the other cities can pull up the slack. And honestly, this was a lot because our main headquarters is in New Orleans. There’s Mardi Gras and the whole city shuts down for a week. We needed people to work that week for our national clients. [laughs] So now we added Atlanta and D.C., who are thankfully sober and not at parades for that Wednesday through Tuesday. That helps keep the business going. ROB: [laughs] And you cut the other people off of Slack that week. I understand. FLYNN: Yeah. [laughs] ROB: It’s interesting; that story is still largely unwritten, then. Over the past year and a half, here in Atlanta, I’ve been very engaged in the marketing community. Most of the events, most of the local engagements that we used to do before COVID are not back yet for the most part. But on the flipside, I might say that most clients are more eager to meet in person than at any time in the two years before COVID. It’s an interesting split of where the opportunity is and where maybe it will be. FLYNN: Yeah, I completely agree. I’ve been seeing that especially in 2021, since the summer hit. There was a small decline from Omicron, but not as much as I think you’d expect. A lot of business leaders, business owners hit the summer, they said, “It’s been a year” and – you can’t just be done with a pandemic. My partner works in medicine and she’s very much working in very intense situations this week, actually, which is wild to do that and then I’m sitting in a coworking space. With a mask, but still. It’s such a weird environment that we’re both in at the time. But I agree. We still meet people outdoors as best we can. We’ve all upgraded our winter coats on our team. [laughs] But it is certainly something where people want to meet in person. This is where you’re seeing those conversations all around the world right now, which is most leaders feel that they want to see people back in the office, and they can’t really give good reasons. There’s collaboration and brainstorming, and to be frank, I would love to be able to turn around and ask a question instead of asking someone if they’re free to have a Slack huddle and dealing with that. It’d be so convenient to just be able to turn around – and I haven’t been able to do that in two years – and ask people. I miss that. But we try to prioritize our individual staff’s feelings and comfort. I think that’s more important than anything. So, we’re letting everyone do whatever they want, essentially, and trying to be the most supportive environment we can. ROB: That makes a ton of sense, and there’s a lot to learn there. You mentioned some of the early engagements you did with clients. It seemed like a natural evolution of the services. But what led you to take the jump in the first place and decide, “I’ve had jobs, but I don’t want to have a job anymore. I want to make my own job. I want to build my own business”? What was that transition that led to the start of Online Optimism? FLYNN: One of the first things we always tell people, especially our entrants when they’re job searching, is never burn bridges. It’s been 10 years and I feel like I can say I didn’t particularly love the job I had after college. I was pretty good at it, but it was a very corporate environment. They had those motivational “Teamwork” and “Hang in There” posters. I was like, “Haha, very ironic decorations” on Day 1, and they were like, “These are serious. These are our values.” I was like, great. It was just very corporate, so I didn’t love it, but I was good at it. I reached out to all the people I worked for in college. I’d done six internships. They were like, “If you had your own thing, we could probably hire you and keep you afloat.” So, I got lucky. After 10 years, I’ve learned I know what I know, but more importantly, I know what I don’t know. But when you’re 22 and you’re like, “I could start a company,” you really have no clue how little you know. Someone should’ve shaken me and been like, “Flynn, what are you doing? There’s no plan. You have a domain, but you don’t know how to” – there was no plan. But I got lucky. The companies that I worked for trusted me because I’d done work for them, so I got like two clients from them. Then the company I was working for out of college, I increased their sales online by like 800% or something like that. So they became Client #3. So, I had three clients on Day 1, which was great because I didn’t sign Client 4 until Month 7 or 8 because it took me seven or eight months to figure out how to actually meet someone and convince them to trust us with their internet presence. That was the most helpful thing, I think. If you are starting a business, you have to figure out what revenue streams you have immediately and then set a good safety net of six months. It’s going to take that for you to learn what’s working and what’s not and figure it out. You have to be ready to – it helped that I was in New Orleans with three roommates, so my rent was $400 a month. That’s also the key. If you want to be an entrepreneur, I highly recommend $400 a month rent. That’s the way to go. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Where can you find that now, I wonder? Maybe nowhere, I don’t know. FLYNN: Not New Orleans, actually, now. I think you’ve got to go somewhere else. ROB: It makes sense not to burn bridges. I’ve certainly had interesting experiences where I’ve had former clients and coworkers who couldn’t talk to each other, and I’ve always enjoyed being Switzerland. I’ll talk to both of them and I’ll be doing business with both of them concurrently while they keep talking trash about each other like a divorced couple. I don’t even know. But that’s certainly a good option. As you started to build, how did you think about who you brought on the team, when? What were the next couple of roles? What were some of the inflection points in hiring, where you maybe had to make a hire you weren’t sure of? From a necessity perspective, not the person. FLYNN: Hiring is the most important and hardest thing about running a business. We always drill that into people’s minds. Our interview process should be careful because it is incredibly difficult to terminate someone if you make the wrong choice or train them to get them up to speed. When I started off, in the services that I wasn’t the greatest at, I added on additional staff in different digital marketing services so I had more time to bring in clients. We actually didn’t bring in biz dev for a while. They were Hire 7 or 8. So my first three or four were designers and strategists and people to do account work. Biz dev was a major jump. One thing that we waited way too long for was operations. I was running an 11-12 person company and still basically running – if we were a normal company, that might’ve been okay, but we were always employee-first. That meant every weekend, I would go to Costco and get like $400 worth of snacks for the office and come back. We were on the second floor of a building. It was a three-hour Costco run, which is such a waste of my time as CEO that I would do every week. Sometimes it’s hard to convince yourself that your time is valuable, and that’s really what I think about when we hire. Once you or someone else on your team becomes more valuable – that’s what we always tell the staff. You should be working yourself out of your job. Whatever you’re doing today, if you can teach it to someone else so you can do more important things, that is the most valuable thing you could do. I know a lot of times employees think “I want to keep this process just me so there’s more job security,” but I’ve always felt like if you have a good environment and they see that you’re able to teach this to someone else, that makes you way more valuable to the company, because then you could help them scale up much quicker. I always try to teach that to our Optimists. ROB: Those sound like some brutal Costco runs. There’s an element where, when you’re doing that Costco run, it can feel – and I’m sure it’s even felt by your team – that you are, to an extent, intentionally serving them in that. I’m sure they can see that and appreciate that. But it probably needs to have its limits also. There’s a point where you’re serving them less by serving the business less by doing this other thing more. We had a team retreat back in December, and I spent an hour making people steaks. I wouldn’t take it back for the world, but I’m not going to do that every day,... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/21928256

Thought Leadership and Case Study Niching 02/03/2022

Thought Leadership and Case Study Niching Erik Jensen (Salt Lake City, UT), Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer, Predictive ROI (La Crosse, WI) Erik Jensen is Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a remote-first firm that helps “agencies, coaches, and consultants plant their flags of authority and monetize that position.” In this interview, Erik addresses the difficulties service businesses may encounter in developing a “position of thought leadership”: Poor discovery and development processes. Failure to treat themselves as a client. Failure to understand “what it means to plant their flag.” When agencies try to be everything to everyone, their messages will be inconsistent and unfocused. True thought leaders do not have messages that lack clarity and strength. Erik emphasizes that it is dangerous for an agency to assume it knows why a particular potential client approaches the agency for help. Customers may come because: They know you, don’t understand their problem, and are looking for a safe sounding board. A client gave them a referral – but the client may be sending “bad fits.” They saw your marketing efforts/work and have “nothing better to do” than to ask to see if you can solve their problem. Saying “yes” to work that is not in your sweet spot often means the work will take more effort and fail to be profitable. That’s why, Erik says, it is important for agencies “niche down” to a well-defined target market . . . and to niche down fast. There are a number of ways to find this “ideal” market . . . SWOT analysis, an addressable audience audit, an assessment of past client successes and profitability . . . but Erik recommends asking three questions: What’s your superpower? What are you really good at? What do you love to do? Who do you love to do that work for, and why do you care about serving that audience? Will you be able to make a great case study off of that client? You want the opportunity to do great work that you can leverage into future work. If an agency serves multiple industries, Erik says, they’re like the legs of a stool . . . not stable and not comfortable. He provides a solution: “Find a common problem that all of those industries share that you’re really good at solving. That’s the top of the stool.” Erik believes the case study question is pivotal in supporting agency success and that it facilitates agency growth by: Filtering and focusing business development efforts at the very beginning so that you only take on those clients for whom you expect your efforts will provide excellent results. Forcing you to document your work to build a “body of evidence.” Providing social proof from past clients that says, “We’re great, and we don’t have to say it about ourselves. Here’s what other people say about us.” Erik also provides a detailed overview of how to effectively bring on a business partner. Predictive ROI offers a free book on niching down, leveraging authority into a monetization stream, building great content, and clarifying purpose at . Erik can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, and his agency’s website at: . He invites people to join the agency’s free weekly Q&A sessions, where 10 minutes of teaching are followed by an open-forum business problem discussion. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Erik Jensen, Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a remote-first firm – but he’s based in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Welcome to the podcast, Erik. ERIK: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me on the show. Actually, the agency is based in La Crosse. I am way over in Salt Lake City, Utah. So, we’ve got folks all over the place, which is actually kind of fun. For anybody that does or runs a remote company, you know what I’m talking about. For people that don’t, that maybe gives them heart palpitations. But it works well for our team. ROB: That’s pretty great. I’m sure they would like to come visit you. We did a family road trip out to Salt Lake City and back in summer of 2020. ERIK: There you go. ROB: We had some fun. We saw the great outdoors as a family but spent the better part of a month on the other side over in Midway. ERIK: Oh, fantastic. ROB: Love the area. ERIK: Yeah, there’s some really cool things. I’m actually a native of Minnesota, so I’m a Minnesota boy, and I spent a lot of time living in Wisconsin as well, where I met my business partner, Steven. But yeah, it’s been awesome moving out this direction and seeing all of the amazing things. It’s just crazy. There’s state and national parks everywhere. You throw a rock and you hit one. ROB: Yeah. But there’s no humidity to be found. ERIK: No, which is amazing again. I think I still brag about the fact that there are no mosquitoes here to all of my friends and family that still live back in the Midwest. ROB: [laughs] You’re not making any friends there, but we’ll make some friends real soon. Erik, when you think about Predictive ROI, how would you hone in on the superpower of the firm? Where’s the strength of the business? ERIK: We help agencies, coaches, and consultants plant their flags of authority and monetize that position. That’s what we do. ROB: Dig into that a little bit. Tell us some more. ERIK: What happens most of the time when someone attempts to go through that process of developing a position of thought leadership, they have really poor processes in place. Everything takes a lot more effort, a lot more time, and a lot more energy. They struggle sometimes with the cobbler’s kids, so they don’t actually do their own stuff. They don’t treat themselves as a client in a lot of ways. And for many of them, they don’t really understand what it means to plant their flag. They kind of throw spaghetti at the wall and hope that something sticks, and what ends up happening is they try to be everything to everybody, which leads to a really inconsistent message, and not a great way to be seen as a thought leader or to hold that position. ROB: You’ve certainly planted your flag, so that’s a good starting point. That’s the opposite of the cobbler’s children. That’s good. ERIK: This is true. We put a lot of effort into our own stuff or try to – although I’m not going to say we don’t struggle with that too, just like everybody else. ROB: That’s right. Sometimes you do need that voice outside of yourself to really help discover that journey. Help crystallize this picture for us, apart from yourself, apart from Predictive ROI; what does this look like? Maybe there’s a good example of a firm that you’ve worked with, what they found their authority was, and what it looks like to project that out into the market. ERIK: I’m going to use Agency Management Institute as an example because that’s a pertinent example for anybody within the agency space. Agency Management Institute is run by a fellow named Drew McLellan. Drew has done a phenomenal job of staking his claim within that agency space to be a guide, to be helpful. His stance, his flag, is that most agency owners are accidental business owners. They were really good practitioners; they eventually got asked to do some work, and they’re like, “Yeah, I could do that.” And then they got asked a little bit more because they did a really good job, because they’re good at what they do, and before long they go, “You know what? I can totally do this. I can run my own agency.” So, they put out a shingle, and they don’t realize that being a practitioner and being a business owner is different. ROB: Sure, and there are plenty of scaling hazards along that way. But along with that, I think, coming from an individual practitioner perspective, you know that people ask you to do something; you don’t always know why. Often, it’s because they know you and they know what you do, and they know what they want out of that. How do you start to turn the ship and help someone who just stumbled into this business to realize – I think there’s an element of why the customer is coming to you that is necessary to figure out where to find more of them. How do you start to flip that conversation? ERIK: Customers can come to you for a variety of reasons, and it’s dangerous to make assumptions about why they’re there. A customer might come to you because they know you, and they don’t really know the problem they’re dealing with. So, you’re a safe place to be able to talk to them and guide them on where they may need some help or some advice or some work done. The other possibility is that you’re getting them from referral sources because you’ve done a really good job. Again, depending on if you’ve actually planted your flag or niched down, the story that’s being told might be vastly different. For instance, we get asked all the time, “Hey, do you know somebody that does this?” Yeah, we do. But we only recommend people that have been really clear that that is the problem they solve. But oftentimes people will get recommended just in the general sense of, “Oh, you’re struggling with that? I work with this marketing agency and they might do something like that. How about I introduce you?” What we’ve done is made it so that our referrals are uncertain about what we do, so they might be sending us bad fits, and they may not realize it. They may think they’re doing us a favor. The other option is that someone comes into our ecosystem because of our own marketing efforts or because they’ve heard of us somehow through sales efforts, etc., and they have a problem and they want someone to solve it, and they’ve got nothing better to do than to ask. Why would they not ask? The challenge comes in when we say yes to all of those things. When we say yes to all of those things, we’ve made the decision to take on work that is likely not our sweet spot. We’ve decided to take on work that is probably not going to be profitable, and we’ve decided to take on work that is going to take more effort than if we were to stay in our sweet spot. ROB: What does the journey look like? Sometimes we intuitively know our sweet spot, and if somebody says it back to us eventually, it’ll sound right. But sometimes we don’t know how to say it. How do you help people uncover what they should tell someone else their sweet spot is that’s actually going to make sense, going to fit, going to be the right engagement, going to be profitable, going to be the business that they can actually build and scale? ERIK: There’s a lot of different ways to go about this. There’s one that I prefer. When it comes to finding a niche or a target market, there are lots of folks who will do a SWOT analysis. They’re going to do an addressable audience audit. They’re going to go and look at past clients and see what it is they’ve done really well. They’re going to see which clients are profitable and all that. I love those. Those are great opportunities to be able to educate yourself. The problem I see most often is that at the end of getting all that information gathered, someone is still sitting there going, “I could go 18 different directions. I could still serve all these different audiences in all these different ways with all these different pain points.” Yes, you should do that information gathering, but I would recommend asking a couple of questions instead. Number one is: What’s your superpower? What are you really good at? What do you love to do? Number two is: Who do you love to do that work for, that you actually care about doing that work for? That’s your “why” in many instances. I was going to use a more adult term for how to look at it, but I want to make sure that this remains friendly for everybody. [laughs] Anyway, I would approach: What am I really awesome at? Who, and why do I care about serving that particular audience? Then the third question which I think is really important is: Am I going to be able to make a great case study off of that client? If the answer is no, then you’re probably not going to be doing great work and you’re not going to be able to leverage that work into future work. It should act as a really great filter of “Can I make a case study from this client?” If you can do that, for most people, that clarifies a lot of where their niche and where their flag needs to be. There are some other analogies which I can also recommend. One is if you serve multiple industries, each one of those industries is like the leg of a stool. But it doesn’t have a top, so sitting on that stool is going to be pretty uncomfortable. Really what you have is a series of sticks. What you want to do if you serve multiple industries is find a common problem that all of those industries share that you’re really good at solving. That’s the top of the stool. That’s what you actually sit on. If you have one and not the other, it doesn’t really serve you to be able to narrow down who it is you’re serving and how it is that you’re serving them. ROB: That case study question – is that more important simply as a mirror that you hold up and look at? Or do you have a held belief that case studies are a key part of growth? I think that would be my question off of that. ERIK: I do think case studies have a really interesting position in an agency’s growth. One, they put a filter on your biz dev efforts at the very beginning so that you’re not saying yes to everybody. Because if you don’t believe that you can do great work for them, you’re not going to take them on. That already changes most agencies in a pretty significant way. The second piece is it forces you to be documenting your work in a meaningful way to be able to tell a story. That’s useful both externally, which I’ll get to in the third point, but it’s also really useful when you’re talking to your client to be able to say, “This is the work that we did; here is the evidence for that work.” Which is, again, uncommon for a lot of agencies to want to have that conversation, that are excited about having that conversation because they’re prepared for that conversation. The third piece is, what better way to be able to present the sort of things that you do than to be able to use social proof from others to say, “We’re great, and we don’t have to say it about ourselves. Here’s what other people say about us.” ROB: That definitely makes sense. Erik, if we rewind the clock a little bit, how did you get here? How did you end up being the co-owner of Predictive ROI? What led you into the business? What led it to grow? What’s the journey here? ERIK: I had an unusual upbringing. I won’t dive into all of that stuff, but I was fortunate enough to be around a lot of business owners throughout most of my life. My family own their own business; my brother and I started our own businesses fairly young. We had several of those. I was really fortunate to run across excellent mentors at the right time in my life, and I had the tremendous fortune in finding the right business partner. For anybody that has worked alongside a business partner, it’s a really important relationship to get right. If you don’t get it right, I cannot imagine how much stress and frustration that would cause on a daily basis. So, I was really lucky. I actually met my business partner, Steven – I was going to school at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse; he was working in small business development at the time, helping with businesses and their business plans. I had a question about a business plan that a friend and I were doing through Duke University, and he helped me do that. But he did it in a way that really impressed me. He actually sat me down with potential investors. He tapped his relationships in order to be able to say, “Hey, here’s a student who really needs help. I’d like to get him in front of the right people to be able to give him the right feedback.” From that day forward, I was really impressed with what I saw from him, as far as his ability to step above and beyond for those who he was helping. And he was apparently impressed with the way that I handled everything as well. He likes to tell this story; he went back and later talked to his wife that day and said, “I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but Erik and I are going to do something together.” Fast forward a couple years, and he had just started to get Predictive off the ground. He gave me a call and he asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. He and I had some good conversations. I specifically asked him to start off as an intern within the agency and to grow with it, and we developed a five-year path for me moving forward that led to ownership, and the metrics that I needed to hit, and the criteria and the milestones that needed to be met. So that was the journey. It’s been closing on 12 years now. ROB: Wow. That’s a lot of trust to put in someone else, to say you’re going to start it together, but to start from a position of non-ownership and have to earn it. I guess you’d had a chance to get to know him a little bit, because if you didn’t know somebody, there’s a lot of ways to get messed over that way. ERIK: Yeah. I wouldn’t suggest that it’s the only path forward for people to consider. [laughs] But I do think for anybody that currently owns a company and is looking to bring on someone to step into an ownership position, that’s risky on their part too. So there has to be skin in the game on both sides, and depending on how you want to structure that – it’s completely up to you. There’s great advice on that from a lot of folks. I wouldn’t consider myself to be the best person to ask about that. But I would say there is a critical factor in that both parties need to have skin in the game on it. If they don’t, it’s easy to go, “I want to be an owner!” and not really understand what that means, not really understand the impact. There’s been times when Steven and I have made the decision not to pay ourselves and make sure the team gets paid. ROB: That’s part of the owner’s job. That’s not the attractive part of it. ERIK: But if you have someone that doesn’t understand that and hasn’t been part of the agency in a meaningful way long enough to know that that is part of owning it, when that decision comes, they’re going to rebel against that pretty hard. ROB: Yeah, they’re not going to be thinking like an owner in that moment. It is very notable. I’m sure that Steven had plenty of choices of people he could have – he was seeing a lot of people in their businesses, so it’s a very special position that you hold. You also highlight it’s an interesting thing about services businesses apart from others, where you have this progressive path to ownership. You have your startup world where there’s vesting of equity over time, it caps – it’s very different from the way that people can grow into a partner role. Do you have any insight? What is it that’s special about services – even law firms, consulting firms? What changes in that world that makes it make sense to tip over and grant partnership? Because that’s not always the case in let’s say an air conditioning firm that scales or something like that. ERIK: Yeah, absolutely. Anything to do with the service industry is all about relationships. Now, that’s true to a certain extent in all businesses, but more so. When we think about agencies, agencies live and die on their relationships, whether that is the relationships they have with their team, the relationships they have with vendors and partners to be able to provide certain products or services, the relationships they have with their referral sources or the ponds they fish in... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/21843155

Media Relations for Technology: Marketing the Science Fair 01/27/2022

Media Relations for Technology: Marketing the Science Fair Donna Loughlin, is President and Founder at LMGPR, a public relations agency that works with “emerging market players and visionaries” to help them build out their Leadership (the “L” in the agency’s name), Momentum, and Growth. Key to this effort is researching the client’s “story” and the drivers for the client founding the business. The client/agency relationship typically takes a minimum of a year to launch and continues, in some cases, for up to 8 years until the client goes through its IPO. Media relations initiatives include earned content – “talking to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and trade publications” – and/or “creating original content” (such things as whitepapers and podcasts). Donna began her career as a journalist, working with Reuters, BBC, and Washington Post, and migrated into doing PR inside technology companies going through IPOs during the dot-com bubble. Donna, in her role as a “corporate person,” deflected phone calls from investors in other companies who were seeking her help by referring them to her friends . . . until the day she realized that she had sent away “$1.8 million in revenue.” It was time to start her own agency. Initially, she worked out of her home and consulted with smaller, venture-backed companies and VC firms directly to launch these new companies before they had any marketing, or even, in some cases, a product. Within 90 days, she found she needed to add media and PR talent. She searched online and built a network of independent consultants, working mothers taking time off to have children, who became another (internal) iteration of LMGPR – “Loving Mothers, Good PR,” and then brought on people as employees. Today’s clients are widely varied in their needs. They may want to raise funds to start manufacturing a new product, bring a product to market, prepare for a SPAC or an IPO – or be looking to be acquired (as an exit strategy). In this interview, Donna explains the discovery process the agency uses to find a client’s authentic story, exploring such things as: What is the company product and strategy? What is the genesis and the genius behind the product? What are the six components of success? Are you relevant? Are you bold and fearless? (If you’re not, what can you capitalize or own that would make you stand out?) Do you think out of the box? Do you listen to the market? Are you a disruptor or are you changing an entire category?) Donna has found that the founder’s passion is often still in a company’s narrative for early- to mid-stage companies but the purpose of the product or solution may be missing. Hence: Why did you bring the product to market in the first place? Donna mentors college students and younger associates in her agency. She emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong network throughout a career. She can be reached on LinkedIn under Donna Loughlin, by email at . Her podcast, Before It Happened (), focuses on visionaries and the future they imagine. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Donna Loughlin, President and Founder at LMGPR based in San Jose, California. Welcome to the podcast, Donna. DONNA: Thank you so much for having me on the show. ROB: It’s great to have you here. Why don’t you give us an introduction to LMGPR and the firm’s superpowers? DONNA: Absolutely. First of all, LMGPR stands for Leadership, Momentum, and Growth, and that’s exactly what we do. I think that’s our superpower: we work with emerging market players and visionaries and we help them build their leadership and their momentum and their growth. That obviously doesn’t happen overnight; our relationships with our clients typically are a minimum of a year to launch and then going into, in some relationships, 7 to 8 years till they go through their IPO. ROB: Got it. You are focused in, obviously, a key technology hub. People are starting sometimes from nothing, and they may not even know how to think or speak – I’m assuming “leadership” is largely a marketing leadership/ thought leadership perspective. Is that where people are coming from? DONNA: It’s a combination of things. Obviously, curating the authentic story of the visionary and the founders is a key component, but also really dialing back and looking at why they even began to want to bring a product or a service to market – those epiphany moments where they decided, “I need to solve this problem, I need to bring this market, and I am the chosen one. I’m going to be the one that’s going to trade in the dog for a cat and put all my chips on the table and make it happen.” Oftentimes those conversations start on napkins before they even make it to a whiteboard, or over a quick cup of coffee or my favorite sparkling beverage, Topo Chico. That’s about as raw as it can get. ROB: Got it. For some people, I think starting a firm can almost be more instinctive. How do you take someone who might not even be able to tell you why they started the firm and get to the core truth of where this impetus for the business came from and decode that in an authentic way? DONNA: It was actually almost a happy accident. I was a journalist before I became a professional public relations agent, so to speak. I was with Reuters and BBC, and I also did internships with the Washington Post. So, I had really deep editorial, journalistic roots that migrated into working with technology companies and working inside and doing a number of IPOs and very fast-paced IPOs during the dot-com bubble. All that experience formed into this factor that started bringing me into more firsthand discussions with the backers, the investors themselves, the angel investors, the venture capital investors, which is huge in the tech sector. So, I started getting a lot of phone calls from them asking for help when I had a full-time corporate job, and I kept referring the business to friends. Then I realized one day, wow, I just referred X amount of business – I think I calculated it was something like $1.8 million in revenue that I could’ve put on my own plate. And I was referring it to people because I was a corporate person. So, I stood back and thought, you know what? I actually think I have the makings for an agency. And that’s exactly how it happened. I started working and consulting with the venture-backed smaller companies and going in-house and working with the VC firms firsthand to get the companies airborne before they had marketing, before they had, in some cases, a product. ROB: Got it. For someone who’s maybe not as deep in the tech industry, how would you explain what a typical client looks like? What’s a particular client that you could maybe drill a little bit into their own narrative and their journey to market? DONNA: First of all, there’s no one-size-fits all. There’s no typical client. Each client is a very specific need. Sometimes clients come to us because they need to bring a product to market; other times, they need to raise funding because they have a product, but now they need to go to manufacturing. Others, they’re looking for an acquisition as an exit strategy, and others are getting ready for a SPAC or an IPO. So there’s no one-size-fits-all, as I mentioned. But the process is the same. We like to take them through what I call a discovery process of looking for their authentic story. What is the company product and strategy? What is the genesis and the genius behind the product? And then being able to craft a story, looking at what I call six components of success, which are: Are you relevant? Are you bold and fearless? If you’re not, what can you capitalize or own that would make you stand out? Thinking out of the box, listening to the market. Are you a disruptor or are you changing an entire category? Then as you mature and grow, it’s being agile and also gaining speed. Once a company comes to market – I just came back from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, last week, and it was really interesting to see what was hot. Every year, analysts forecast what’s going to be hot. A lot of the companies that launched this year were virtual. They didn’t go to the show itself. These are mega companies, big companies that are public-facing – transportation, robotics, and consumer electronics companies. They didn’t show. But what did show well were the smaller companies that were a little more nimble and a little more scrappy in some ways and didn’t necessarily have the big funding. They introduced products to market. So, you can still go to venues like that and see a little bit of a science fair. That’s something I particularly am always intrigued with when it comes to the tech sector. There’s always a little bit of a science fair, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or it’s in Atlanta or it’s in Carolina or it’s in Washington State. We have all these different belts of technology – Colorado, around the world, Portugal, parts of the UK, and even parts of Los Angeles have these gulches, so to speak, of innovation and technology. I think we’re really lucky that we constantly have this cycle of newness in the industry. ROB: Absolutely. I heard a lot from CES this year where even some major exhibitors didn’t show up at the last minute. You walk into a main hall, there’s supposed to be a big booth and there’s just like a QR code of what would have been there at the booth. It really seemed like a different experience, and maybe some embryonic companies whose stories were quite early. When you see someone who’s maybe not as polished and hasn’t been through your process, what are they missing from their story? What’s a common founder error when they’re thinking about communicating to market? DONNA: I think the one great thing about early-stage companies particularly, and even as they evolve and become more mature and ultimately public, is the founder’s passion typically is still in the narrative and in the soul of the company. I think the part that oftentimes people miss is the purpose of the product or the solution. Why did you bring it to market in the first place? If you think of something as common as a paperclip, a paperclip is a pretty low-tech product, but it actually adds a lot of functionality. I can clip it, I can clip papers, I can use it to fix my iPhone, I can use it to pick something out of my teeth, I can use it to also do basic IT to my computer. Pretty low-tech. But I think one thing about a paperclip – and I’m dumbing this down to literally a flea and a tick – is that a paperclip still has a purpose. I think companies oftentimes lose sight of what their purpose is. What is that authentic component that you’re trying to get a consumer or business to adapt or adopt? I think as companies get bigger, sometimes they lose track of that. You’ve got to keep a pulse on what customers want. You’ve got to keep a pulse on, if you’re in a reseller channel, what does the channel need? What do the consumers want and what can your partners advocate as well? ROB: It is always a challenge to keep the spotlight off of yourself and to, as many would say, make the customer the hero. It can be challenging to remember sometimes, especially when things thrive a little bit. You have given us, Donna, some of your origin story and how you went from some of these news outlets and reporting to seeing an opportunity that was crossing your plate regularly. When did it become evident that this was going to move from single-player mode at first to multiplayer mode and you had to start thinking about maybe not doing everything, maybe training other people to do things that you felt like you’d been the best at over time? DONNA: Your best IP is your talent, right? Going from literally working from my coffee table and my kitchen table and whatever table in the house I wanted to work from as an independent consultant – it happened pretty quickly. Within the first 90 days, it was clear that I needed to find some other media and PR talent. So, I went online and found some great stay-at-home working moms who had taken time off from having children, and I created a great network of independent consultants. The working name for LMGPR internally was “Loving Mothers, Good PR,” because I had these amazing women that were working for me, and they had small children, and some of them are still with me to this day. Their kids are in high school now, and off to college. Quickly I went from an individual to a network of independents to employees, and when I hit that employee mark that first year, that was a scary milestone move. It was like having more children. I was then responsible for the caretaking and the creation and the mentoring of their careers and their finance and really being instrumental in that. I think that was a big business step for me. At the point when I made that migration, I think we had about 10 clients, and those were 10 retainer clients. I myself, the same year that I started the business, adopted two kids from Russia. So, I not only had an infant startup at home, I was managing and working directly with a lot of infant companies and taking them to market. I don’t recommend anyone do that, but I’m a multitasker, so it seemed to allow me to thrive and focus. It was like the AM/PM type of scenario. As we’ve grown, we just celebrated a 20-year anniversary. I look back at the portfolio of companies that we worked with in the market – I’ll take security as an example. Cybersecurity was huge when I first started my business. Now we have security and artificial intelligence and the security of intelligence and blockchain and the need for security in blockchain, and then we have all the different nuances of security that’s built into the cars and the robots and all the IoT objects we have in our home. Watching the security world mature has been really interesting because all these products once upon a time were a la carte, and now we have all this integration. ROB: There is so much going on in cybersecurity. I looked on your roster of clients; I recognize one of our Atlanta favorites with Bastille, so congratulations on working with them. Some would look at your timing – and congratulations on 20 years, by the way – and argue that you might have started the firm at perhaps one of the worst times to start a marketing firm in Silicon Valley. DONNA: Absolutely did. [laughs] ROB: What made that not the case for you? People who weren’t around or don’t remember, I was working for a venture-funded startup in 2000 and 2001, and going into 2002, we had three rounds of layoffs. We cut the firm size down by two-thirds; eventually had to compromise on a sale to an EMEA firm that bought this company. With that retraction in tech at that time, what made it work? Because there weren’t as many clients as there were two years before that. DONNA: What made it work was a lot of the bigger national agencies – and I have respect for the big ones like the Bursons and the Edelmans, and I’ve actually done work for them in the past – were closing up their regional offices in the Silicon Valley to San Francisco, and there were a lot of boutique agencies. So, my competition had shrunk. In terms of working with emerging market companies, their retainer rates were typically around $10,000, but in some cases there were maybe projects that were three month stints for $15k. Their budgets weren’t quite as big, but if you did the calculations and you brought in thirsty clients and you were hungry enough to make a difference, you could build a business. And I wasn’t the only one at that time; there were other advertising, marketing, and branding firms that also had the opportunity to pick up the slack, so to speak. Because the venture capital firms were a big funnel for me, I was getting venture-backed companies that had gone from scrappy to a little more of what I call the happy mode. They were probably six months to a year from bringing products to market. I think that was really a sweet spot, because you’re absolutely right; the market was not – I personally know a lot of people who lost jobs and were moving out of the Valley and cashing out of their houses. And you know what happened in the housing market; it was just nuts. But I think it was using my own philosophy of being bold and fearless, and I never looked back. I think the only time you really want to use the rearview mirror is when you’re driving, and I clearly was not going to look back. I could go work in another corporate job and cycle through that and do some great things but having the variety and being able to choose exactly the innovations and the technologies – you mentioned Bastille; recently FireEye was acquired by McAfee, and I worked with that company for their first five years, taking them from literally 3 and then 5 and then 10 all the way up to 1,000 employees. So, I’m known for being able to scale and grow the business, but also scale and grow with that business. ROB: That seems like a theme that would carry across from the venture side to the startups they work with. It’s a very interesting customer acquisition channel. It makes sense. I think some of the venture firms would project into the market that they are increasing the array of services they can provide. They may purport to have a PR arm. How much of that is a trend? How much of that is still smoke and mirrors, where they may still be cobbling together services underneath the umbrella of the firm, so they provide it, but it’s partnering with people who are focused practitioners? What’s that mix look like? DONNA: I pride myself in that we do one thing and we do one thing only, and that is media relations. I don’t do social media. I don’t do product marketing. There’s a whole list of things that we don’t do. But there’s a lot of great people in the marketplace that can do brand positioning, meaning the physical. I feel like our core strength is the written and spoken word and taking that and turning it into the narrative that then helps churn the media, whether it be earned content, owned content, or digital content. At one point we did have a social media team, and nobody really wanted to pay for it. I can’t give away those services for free. Social media for a period of time was considered to be something really inexpensive that you could offshore, and there were a lot of offshore services. So, you were competing not necessarily with other agencies, but you were competing with this offshore – Fiverr and those types of services. You can’t compete with that. The margins are too low. That’s when I realized, let’s do what we do best and what we’re known for, which is creating the leadership, momentum, and growth editorial content, whether it’s the earned content – talking to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the trade publications – or it’s creating original content such as whitepapers or podcasts or those types of things. That I feel is the most valuable for our clients. ROB: You mentioned upfront a couple of things. One, you mentioned the duration of a client engagement being on the longer side, and then you also mentioned retainers. It seems like that’s potentially a very instrumental tool in thinking about how to grow the firm. You mentioned having 10 retainer clients and how that potentially would embolden you to be able to bring on an employee because there’s a little bit more certainty than a bunch of little projects. How, though, should a client think about the value of PR over time? I think a lot of times people get that splashy placement, that earned placement, and they don’t know whether money’s going to fall from the sky or whether it’s just going to shore up... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/21791672

Strategy Rules! 12/30/2021

Strategy Rules! Avi Kumar is Founder and CEO of Kuware, an almost 14-year-old business that bills itself “as a full-service agency, but a little bit more focused on strategy than actual implementation.” The shift away from “traditional marketing services and taking customers as they came” started 5 years ago. Today, the agency works with clients who want to put some strategy behind their efforts and are less concerned about the agency providing implementation. Avi says it was very difficult when the agency first made that transition to, while it was trying to grow the business, turn away customers that did not have a strategy focus. Current clients not only need be willing to work with Kuware’s fractional CMO to develop a strategy . . . they also have to be ambitious about “big growth,” have funding or be ready to move to the next level, or to be invested in brick-and-mortar with a solid, fixed budget. When all the pieces are In place, the agency can say, “Get the whole package. We can really move you to the next level.” If a prospective client is not yet serious about their business, they are not ready for Kuware. The planning process takes a few months. Although written for a longer period of time, the agency contract allows a client to fire the agency within the first month. This tasks the agency to provide enough proof within that first month to gain a client’s trust that the value that will come. In this interview, Avi describes the challenge for a growing agency of deciding “who to turn away.” The agency does not “fire” its small, established clients . . . but once a new monthly billing threshold Is set (based on its 50% billing “midpoint”), it will not take on new customers that fall below that threshold. The agency keeps developing processes to meet client needs and raising that threshold as more clients come onboard. Avi addresses in detail the impacts of hiring in changing an agency, managing its expenses, and determining people’s perceptions of an agency’s capabilities. Avi started his career as an engineer, a microprocessor architect. On sabbatical from Intel, Avi decided to try ecommerce, did very well at it, and used it as an “on-ramp” to marketing. To ensure controllable costs and fast client service, the agency maintains a salaried development team in Avi’s home-country, India. He pays everyone 20% over the market, so that in the 11 years the company has been in India, “nobody has quit.” The agency recently acquired a white-label PPC service which helps small agencies provide reasonably priced PPC for small niches in local markets. The PPC service is separate from Kuware’s agency operations, but the agencies which use it are the same small agencies to which Kuware refers clients that don’t fit its criteria. Avi can be found on LinkedIn, on his agency’s website at: , or at: . ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Avi Kumar, Founder and CEO at Kuware based in Austin, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Avi. AVI: Thank you, Rob. Thank you for inviting me to this. ROB: It’s good to have you on. You’re from one of those popular cities where everybody’s moving to in Austin, Texas, but let’s focus on Kuware for a moment here. Why don’t you tell us about the firm and where you specialize? AVI: Certainly. Kuware is now coming up on its 14th year as a business. We right now bill ourselves as a full-service agency, but a little bit more focused on strategy than actual implementation. We do do the implementation, but what we found is what was lacking for a lot of businesses is they needed to figure out what kind of marketing they should do because just saying, “Just do Facebook ads” or “Just do this or that.” So we added that layer five years back, and we service it through a fractional CMO or a part-time CMO who comes on board and helps guide the strategy, and then go to the implementation. That’s what, in five years, we have evolved to. Before that, we were more traditional, just taking on business as it came in a sense. If somebody wants ads, okay, we’ll do it. Need websites, being full-service, we’ll do that. But now we only take clients who want the strategy as part of it and who want to spend time figuring things out before implementing it. So that’s what we have evolved and started specializing that way. ROB: That can be a pretty difficult transition. Lots of people start an agency as the order-takers, the people who can say, “What’s your budget? We’ll do our darndest with it. What are you trying to do? You want clicks, here’s your clicks.” How do you take someone who comes to you and they think they know what they want – there is this challenger sale moment where you’re like, “Hey, wait a minute, let’s take a step back. What do you really want?” Sometimes they’re like, “No, I just want this ad. I just want to spend this budget. That’s my job.” AVI: That’s an excellent point. For us, I discovered this process along the way. We had some clients that had a few people in-house who were doing social media. We did their website and we managed the ecommerce and we were trying to do that. Then slowly, as I got to know the client for a while – and this client was with us for almost 10 years – after a few years, I said to them, “You know that person you keep hiring for social media and they keep quitting after six months? Why don’t you give us that, too?” They said, “Okay, you got it. Makes sense.” Then I said, “Who’s planning your marketing?” They hired somebody, a new person, young, assuming that they knew what they’re doing, and in a year and a half they quit. So, I said, “What if we manage the whole thing for a fixed price for you? We’ll do the strategy.” So that’s how we started. This was a company, a brand of sunglasses, prescription glasses. They created the category. In this case, being a single owner business, but a pretty good-sized business, we fine-tuned this, and then we convinced them, “Hey, you should sell direct. Don’t just sell through opticians only. Why don’t you sell direct also?” They said, “No way. Our retailers would be mad.” So, we figured out a strategy, convinced them, and they almost doubled their sales without losing any retailers. Then I learned that this is what they needed – a little bit of the business side, but marketing-centric. If I go and build myself as a business consultant, it’ll be hard to explain that. Most marketers do give some business advice for free and some marketing strategy for free. So, I said, “Well, this client was willing to pay, and he sold.” They sold the company to Hilco. Much larger, $300 million company. They kept us around for a year because they were actually amazed at what we could do with our team. And they had a 50-people marketing team. They let us run this, and then eventually they absorbed it in-house. That was the time I said, “Okay, we can do this for other clients and start selling it.” The hardest point was what you did identify: if somebody comes to us, “We’ve just got $2,000” – turning down that $2,000 was hard, because you’re still building the agency. They’re willing to give you $2,000 per month for a few months. We had to tell them, “Sorry, we don’t do that anymore. You should really spend money to figure out what you need and then plan.” The other thing we started realizing is that this only works for companies who really think they want to double, triple, or who are brick-and-mortar who have fixed money already and they have a fixed budget. It doesn’t work for somebody who’s just trying and playing and not serious about the business. They need to be somebody who’s also ambitious. Either they’ve got funding, or they have decided now to really move to the next stage. Only then can we tell them, “Get the whole package. We can really move you to the next level.” The other challenge is this stuff takes time, a few months. We sign them up for longer, but we have a deal that you can fire us within the first month. So, we’ve got to do enough in the first month to buy in their trust that, “These guys are not just planning. They’re actually saying things which make sense.” It took us a while, but we do have a system now where we are able to show them within a month the value that will come. Even if actual sales might not happen, they will see enough plans to say, “This will work” and continue on a longer term contract. As a small agency, that’s the thing you’ve got to decide at some point, who to turn away. We keep increasing the threshold – “This much, no, this much, no, this much, no,” and then we moved on from there. It was a transition, for sure. ROB: What size metric would you use to describe that you were at when you felt like you needed to start cutting off this low-end, very transactional customer? AVI: Basically, in size metrics, what we said is that when we switched to more than 50% who we were billing at least $5k a month, then we said we might lose some – we didn’t fire any client if they were small ones. But we said, “We won’t take anymore, because we have proven that more than 50% of our revenue comes from these bigger clients who are willing to” – so that was our criteria. Once we get more than 50% of clients paying $5,000 a month and they are going for strategy – and usually the average client ends up at 20 to 25. So, we said, “Don’t take anymore. Just existing ones.” We do have some for now, 12 years, existing clients working. We’re still doing their social media. But it’s a lot fewer of them. ROB: That also makes sense, how you’re able to then incubate this capability within the firm. It’s hard to go from not having an offering to having an offering, but when 50% of your clients need the service, you’re able to start building the processes, building the people. You’re not trying to go from nothing to something. You’re saying, “Here’s the offering. Now we know how to maybe repeat it a little bit.” AVI: Absolutely. By the way, the building process part – even though we’ve been doing this overall 13 years and the last 5 years, this – it’s an ongoing process. It’s never set as a cookie-cutter, ever. Things change and the business changes. What we have said is just agree to the fact that the process itself will be changing, but we need a process. That’s what we’ve been doing. ROB: Processes are all about enablement. They’re not about restrictions, they’re not about tying hands. They create freedom. It’s hard to feel that, because I’m not a process kind myself, but it’s necessary, or else you go crazy. AVI: Yeah, absolutely. ROB: Avi, what led you into this business in the first place? What led you to start an agency and originally start taking some ad budgets and then continue figuring out what the business needed to be? AVI: I worked for a major corporation. I was a microprocessor architect. I worked on Pentium 4. I worked on some low power processors for Intel and going into Apple. It was a very different area. So, when I wanted to do something, I realized it’s impossible, almost, to start a hardware business. You want to do chip design? It’s very expensive. And I did try that for about a year. I had some funding from the Chinese government, but it didn’t go very far. Then I had to pivot and say, okay, I want to do my own thing. My sabbatical came up; I left Intel. I wanted to start something different. I had enough money from Intel, from stock options, so I said, let’s play the stock market and do things on the side. That’s when I started looking at ecommerce and started doing and selling things from my connections in China online. This was 14 years back or so. I was not expecting to do well. Everybody knows so much SEO, they’re talking about techniques, and I’m a hardware guy. And marketing – I mean, yeah, I did have an MBS somewhere along the line, but they don’t teach you marketing there. It was more management. So, I was thinking this would never work. But soon I found I became the number one seller of Windows XP online, and an Adobe reseller, by just doing a few things online. That’s what got me thinking, okay, if I can do this in three to four months, then I think I can help others too and create a business out of it. It seems like it’s not as – the system, everybody’s not exploited it yet. I used to assume that marketing guys knew everything; “How will I learn this?” That’s where we just kept on doing ecommerce. First a lot more ecommerce. We were doing Zen Cart, if you can remember that. Then moved on to Drupal Commerce and Magento. Did a lot more ecommerce initially. The thing was, ecommerce people have money. They’re selling something, always. So that’s what we did a lot more, and then we moved on to B2B. So it was more of a slow process, and I didn’t trust myself in marketing for the first five years. I kept telling people, “I know slightly more than the customers but not much more.” That was a learning process also, just to try to figure that out. ROB: Right, but ecommerce is a pretty good on-ramp for a lot of mathematical minds. It adds up. You can put some money in, you can get some money out, get some feedback on whether or not you’re doing a good job. This is one of these funny episodes we have from time to time where you’re a computer engineer from UT Austin, got your MBA, I’m a computer engineer from Georgia Tech, I have my MBA, and we get to hang out and talk marketing. [laughs] We have these episodes every year or so. We have engineers who have made their way into the marketing world. AVI: The phrase I use is ecommerce is the closest you can get to engineering in marketing. If you’re used to engineering, ecommerce is the closest thing you can touch which looks/feels a little bit like engineering. ROB: As you’ve had to grow the capabilities, grow the firm, sometimes you think about those key hires that have come at a moment where you needed a little something different in the business or it was really an inflection point. What are some of the people or roles that have made a difference in Kuware? AVI: Early days, the first hire which people talk about, it should be done earlier than later, before contracting. I’m talking about beyond contracting. Of course, contracting and outsourcing still works, and we all have done that and we still do some of it. But your first full-time hire I think should be done as soon as possible. It really changes the game because you have to think about two people. You have to make enough money for two people now. You start thinking more seriously than just playing it as a game at that point. You’re responsible for people’s salaries at that point. I think that was a key. And that person was great. She was not a great marketer, but she was a great person to work with. Then as I moved on, into the CMO world, I needed people with credentials beyond me so when I took them to clients, they’d say, “Oh yeah, they have experience. They can handle our CMO.” So those became our key employees later because their credentials they had from other places got us to easily sell that service – which we already knew how to do, but people still want to know who will be the CMO. Those became key people for us. I think the next key thing for me was stop outsourcing. We used to do development outsourcing to India. Being of Indian origin, I said, “I’m just going to go to India and set up shop,” because I learned my first outsourcing team were outsourcing to somebody else. Being an Indian, I thought, “They will not fool me because I’m Indian origin, right?” But that happened to me. So, then I said, “I want my actual salaried team in India.” If you have a system, if you are doing it for low cost, I would say start owning the piece of it somehow. To me, that building of the business that way gave us the stability that I never had to think – I mean, I can give a quote on any website without spending too much time now. I don’t have to depend on a freelancer or somebody telling me how much it’ll be so I can pad it and add my expense and do it because it’s all in-house. I think that changed the game for us, and for our customers, because now when customers say something needs to be fixed, it’ll be fixed overnight. And if it’s a small thing, we don’t even worry about billing it. It’s not worth the time to bill it. And they’re happy. Customers are happy that this happened so quickly. ROB: Right, it’s a strategy to overserve. It makes a ton of sense. For people who find that idea, though, of salaried employees outside of their country intimidating, how did you get over that hill? I think about setting up a legal entity. What’s the local compliance, what’s all that look like? I would be scared a little bit. How do you think about it? AVI: It was a hassle, for sure, absolutely. I would rather do business, I used to say those days, in China than India. I spent a lot of time in China with Intel. In India, in many places, things are not as clear. So, it was just a question of, I’m going to risk getting two to three people, and how much is it? It’s money which will go away. As long as I can afford that money, worst case, this will fail. That’s how I started. I start all situations by saying, “Can I afford this failure, this much money, pragmatically?” And that’s what I did with it. It worked. Great. We had to make some changes there. Another thing I did for outsourcing is I said I’m going to pay everybody over 20% the market. As a result, in our 11 years of company in India, nobody has quit. ROB: Wow. AVI: We have fired people because they didn’t work out, but they don’t quit because they’re going to another job. And India is like Silicon Valley of 2000, where people quit every three months for more money. We have managed to do that by keeping the salary slightly higher and not getting too greedy on how we pay them and compensate them in India. ROB: Yeah, this past year we have a partner who’s very much in that outsourcing space in India, and I feel like they had to do about 25% bumps across the board to stop the bleeding from people. They had really good retention and then they got hit by the COVID compensation wave over there. AVI: Yeah. I was concerned. My being of Indian origin didn’t help that part, because that was definitely the same worry, a U.S. company dealing with these entities in India. ROB: One thing that you shared with us as we were booking is that you’ve recently undertaken an acquisition, which is a different sort of adventure in another entity. Talk about that process, how you figured out who you wanted to acquire, how you closed that transaction. AVI: Sure. For a year and a half, I was saying, “I need to grow faster; should I invest?” This opportunity – this is a white label PPC service. The reason I was very intrigued by this is we do PPC for our clients. Our clients’ ad spends are in hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, so these are big, and they allow us to experiment. I thought, we do this and our clients let us do whatever; are we really good? There must be somebody who does only PPC. If anybody does only PPC and nothing else, they must be good because that’s all they do. So, I used to keep hiring consultants from other companies to audit us. But anything they told us was not eye-opening. Some good ideas. When I ran into this opportunity, Rob Warner’s company InvisiblePPC – he’s out of the UK – I said, “Oh, you guys do just PPC ads, and you do it for agencies, and you are not working with a $100,000 budget. Most of your clients are spending $5,000-$10,000 a month, which means these small clients, if... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/21362054

How to Suck at Sales and Charge More Money 12/16/2021

How to Suck at Sales and Charge More Money Matthew Hunt built and sold two agencies over the past decade. Automation Wolf is his third iteration. In his second agency, after losing almost two years of momentum because he never “got around” to marketing his own business, he hired another marketing agency to promote his agency. Although he was not completely satisfied with the result, he says, “80 percent done is better than not done at all” and his agency finally gained momentum and grew. In this interview, Matthew explains his understanding of what a lot of agencies don’t understand – that clients are “not looking for a do-it-yourself model or a done-with-you model” and “not looking to coach-and-consult it.” He claims, “They're looking for done-for-you model.” Matthew believes that most agencies should probably not be trying to do for themselves what they do for their clients. He has found that webinars, epic inbound-outbound marketing efforts, and labyrinthine Rube-Goldberg-machine sales funnels don’t work. He proposes that the most important website component for agencies with under a million dollars in annual revenue is a “ten-minute amplifier video,” where the owner-founder (usually an agency’s best salesperson) articulates the transformation the agency can provide for its clients. Skip the blogs. Skip the podcasts. The abbreviated VSL (video sales letter, which Matthew says needs to be “done right”), social proofs of success (before-and-after reports, analytics screenshots, and brief descriptions of how the agency effected change), a scrolling list of customer testimonials, and the price are all a smaller agency needs to drive business. The goal is to get as few leads as possible but to get pre-qualified, pre-sold leads and to close them all. As it grows, the “filter” for an agency is not how much money it will take to scale, but how much time you can put into it. Matthew holds that low effort, high-impact demand generation is the most effective way to generate business. He recommends connecting with clients and potential clients on LinkedIn and posting helpful, short-form (snackable) content to build relationships and entice potential customers to the agency’s VSL. Matthew says, “People only buy from people they know, like, and trust, and no selling can be done until you actually establish trust.” He then goes on to say that the biggest mistake many people make with inbound and outbound is they're always trying to sell too early.” Matthew discusses the challenges an agency faces in building an agency team and a “referral engine” and the strategies he has employed to move his agency quickly through the phases of startup . . . stay up . . . and scale up. He can be found as Matthew Hunt on LinkedIn or on his agency’s website at: . ROB: Welcome to The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I am joined today by Matthew Hunt who is the founder at Automation Wolf based in Toronto Ontario, welcome to the podcast, Matthew. MATTHEW: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by giving us the rundown on Automation Wolf? What is your sweet spot? MATTHEW: Automation was created because it was one of my own problems. I wish I had had this service when I built my first two agencies. Most agencies, at the end of the day, suffer from what we call the cobbler's kid goes with no shoes syndrome – where they're so busy taking care of their team and their existing clients that they never get around to doing their own marketing. I remember my second agency, so this is my third agency. I've had two that I sold in the last ten years and built – this is the third one. But my second one, I remember losing almost two years of momentum because I kept thinking we were going to get around to doing our own marketing. Finally, after two years, I finally bit the bullet. I hired another agency to do marketing for our marketing agency. It wasn't done perfectly, but I'll tell you something – 80 percent of done is better than not done at all. So even though I didn't think it was perfect and it wasn't exactly what I wanted, it provided so much momentum. That's when we really started to grow, so sometimes you just got to do it. ROB: What was the lag time from pulling the trigger to impact? Because there's kind of some shortcuts . . . there's some cheats . . . there's some fast forwards you can do and then you really have to do the work and build the engine, right? MATTHEW: Yeah, totally. What's really interesting is another thing a lot of marketing agencies tend to make mistakes with is they think what they do for their clients is what they should do for themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. I spent a lot of time doing a lot of inbound marketing and then even trying outbound marketing. In general, both were pretty epic failures for my agency. Same thing with webinars or doing other things like this . . . they really did not produce the results that I was after. I would say that's the case for most marketing agencies. They can't understand, or there's two things – one is it becomes sort of, for lack of better vocabulary, but of a mind eff because it works so well for your clients, but then it doesn't work for you. The second thing, right? You're like, “Why is this working for clients but my own damn agency, it doesn't work for.” The second thing is a lot of times the thing that they do for their client isn't the right thing for them because they're not – they shouldn't be using the same filter, The filter you should be using for your own agency is really a different question than the money question. That's usually what people are asking, like “What's the ROI and how much money can I throw at this thing to scale this thing up?” That's not the real problem for them. The real problem is time. How much time can you provide? What you want to look at is, “What is the thing that we can do as an agency that is a low effort but yet high impact? That's the first thing. So, to get things in the right order. Once you use that as a filter, what you're going to discover is, it's much like growing up as a kid – if you've ever raised kids. I've got 3 of them myself now. But they have to learn how to sit up first before they crawl. Then they learn how to crawl and then they learn how to walk, and then they learn how to run. Then, when they get to be – my kids’ age now is teens, they start to do backflips off the back shed of the house and you go, “My god! Get off the shed! Why are you on the roof?” Right? But that's a good problem to have. That's one filter. The next thing is really understanding. You know how your ideal clients actually buy and where your best customers come from. Once you understand that, then you start making the right marketing decisions. A lot of agencies, what they don't understand is their clients don't actually want to know how to do something – they're coming to you because they're not looking for a do-it-yourself model or a done-with-you model. They're not looking to coach-and-consult it. They're looking for done-for-you model. They're also busy as well, too. In general, the first thing that most agencies need to do is get their ten-minute amplifier video on their website that explains what sort of transformation they provide for other people. The reason why you want to do this – some people call the VSL, but a VSL is way too long. If it's more than ten minutes, it's too long. That's the first asset you need because, what it does, it multiplies you. Usually, who's the best salesperson in your organization? Yeah, usually owner-founder. If you can create your signature system and you can clearly articulate the transformation that you provide for people – from the before and after state that they're going to receive – in ten minutes or less and you don't gate the video, people will watch it and they will fill out your contact form and you've already done the demo. So, then you're only getting people . . . and you should put the price in there too and that is the only thing you need. And if you're a marketing agency that's under a million dollars per year, if you do anything else besides that VSL and a whack of testimonials down below, you are totally wasting your time. Do not do anything else. Do not blog. Do not create a podcast. Do not. You do not get to collect go and collect your two hundred dollars. That is where you need to start. If you haven't done that, that's the only thing you need to do. Then you need to find a way to get people to that VSL. Getting them there is not as hard as you think. You don't need as many people as you think either, because the goal is not to get lots of leads and fill your calendar with loads of leads. The goal is to get as few leads as possible but close them all. And have them pre-qualified before they get there, right? And if you can have them pre-qualified, pre-sold, then the time that they get to you – you can suck at sales and you can charge more. Because you shouldn't seem like everybody else – which is like all your other competitors – which is probably a sea of sameness. If – just go ahead and do this – please type in digital marketing agency of any kind that you want. You go and do this right? Go to Google right now, I dare you to pause this and go and look. I want you with it, quickly go and look at all the digital marketing websites from city to city to city, from service offer to service offer – you all look exactly the freaking same. Then I dare you to go and look at your Google analytics or whatever analytics tool you want to look at and look at what is the average time on your website. It's probably a minute. What do you think all this other stuff is doing for you at the end of the day? I know you sell this as a service – to blog and create content and to run ads into having these epic crazy labyrinth funnels that one thing triggers to another thing, which triggers this email, and this triggers this upsell, in this downsell and ends up turning into this giant Rube Goldberg machine which is totally cool. Don't get me wrong – I am wowed by it. It is awesome and there was so much work into it, but it didn't do anything for you. It didn't create any transformation. It didn't help you, except for create a whole lot of noise, a whole lot of effort, and provided very little impact for you. So, these are some things I want you to consider. The other thing I want you to consider is usually when you're focused on inbound and/or outbound, it's very, very small thinking. It does not leverage what you have already created because most agencies, right, or businesses, begin organically and grow out of referrals. The business grows, which is awesome. But what happens is the business grows and you get some people on payroll and then you have mouths to feed and mortgages to cover and it starts going, “Oh, crap! This is a serious business!” And then you go, “Oh, a client left.” Or, all of the sudden you have a bad month or Covid hits and shish hits the fan and you're like, “I need a consistent way of getting business,” and so you think the solution is . . . more leads. You're like, “Hey, that worked for my clients and B2C. We sent the gym or the dentist or the lawyer the whatever more business and they're loving it. This is going to work for my agency too.” And wrong. It doesn't, you don't need leads, what you need is a consistent way of getting more referrals and staying top of mind with your existing clientele, with your existing partners with, your existing network at the end of the day, without coming across as being salesy or sleazy because nobody likes to be marketed to. Including you, right? Marketers are the most jaded people in the world, right? Nobody likes to be sold to – so it has to feel invisible. So, if it has to feel invisible, it has to be low effort but high impact. Well, what do you do? What I usually recommend is that you look at doing something called Demand Gen. Demand Gen is just a simple way of saying putting helpful content out there that makes people more awesome and gives you the ability to do one to many selling, ideally to your existing warm network. Now, if you're going to do that, a great place to begin is emailing them if you have a list with your database but more ideally, that feels like marketing, a better thing to do is make sure you're connected with them on a place like LinkedIn and then publish little short snackable content on LinkedIn where they go. They don't go to LinkedIn to consume long-form content or read articles or blogs they go to LinkedIn because they treat it like any other social media network and they're in the mindset to discover, maybe learn something very quickly, and/or most likely procrastinate before and after meetings, right, is what they're doing. If you do, that your warm network will see you being helpful and will keep you top of mind. Then they continue to send you referrals. Good things happen and more opportunities come up because, at the end of the day, people only buy from people they know, like, and trust. No selling can be done until you establish trust. So, the biggest mistake that people make with inbound and outbound is they're always trying to sell too early. It's they’re eager beavers, right? ROB: So, we poke in tactically a little bit on LinkedIn. Obviously, strategy level makes sense. Tactically, you get all sorts of advice all over the map. You have your brand page. You have companies developing entire initiatives around getting their team to share their brand content. Sometimes there's just the founder as a salesperson in an authentic way. What kind of mix of activity do you see as effective? It seems to me it's a golden age in LinkedIn right now. I see nothing but opportunity there. But there's a lot of ways to waste time, too. MATTHEW: Totally. So, we have a system that we recommend agency owners follow. It's called the “ACES” method – to keep it simple. Basically, you're asking what kind of content do we create and what is most impactful, right? And how do we do this? Here's how you the ACES method – Authority, Connect, Engage, and Show. Authority is anything that you want to be known for, that you know really well, that you can share – where you can offer a tip and make people more awesome. Connect is anything that hits the heart, the gut, and/or the funny bone – comedy goes a long way. Engage is not necessarily always having to come up with the content – a lot of time you can ask your network, your community, your connections for advice to start conversations. Let them create the content for you to gamify a little bit. Why do you always have to be the one coming up with the content? The last one is Show. We don't tell, we Show. We don't want to come across as braggadocios, right? We don't want to be telling people and beating our chest about how amazing we are. What we want to do is give sneak peeks behind the scene. We want to show before-and-after transformations or screenshots of analytics and growth with a little tip of how you went about doing it. This positions you as an expert on what you're doing by showing. If you do that and then break it up into the different content formats – we've got video, text posts, images, and polls, and then pdf documents – those are basically the core types of content, because you don't know what people enjoy. Do a version of each. I only put a post out per day. That's how you stay top of mind. It's all about consistency, right? They can't trust you if they don't like you. They can't like you if they don't know you. So, step one is about being consistent. The biggest challenge is most people are inconsistent. We all know we’ve got to go to the gym on a regular basis and eat clean if we want to be fit, right? That this is not brain surgery. Well, it's the same thing with LinkedIn, you need the consistency. The problem is time. It’s why most people fail. This is why we created one of our personal branding LinkedIn products. We created a product because this would solve this problem – where someone can spend an hour-and-a-half with us per month and we will create all of their social media, snackable content including for LinkedIn, and post it every single day. The way we do it is we record them via Zoom with the intention that snackable content is the lead domino which gets all the videos, and the videos that inspire all the text posts, the images, the polls, the pdf document carousels, etc., and then we post it for them. Basically, we created a product that allows people to look like they go to the gym every day and eat clean. Yet, they only have to go to the gym once a month for an hour and a half. ROB: It's like a filter for your social media. You just put the filter on, everybody looks good. You hinted at it and I'm curious. You said, you had your previous agencies. You sold them. You had one agency that came in and did things about 80 percent right, and then you started Automation Wolf. Number one, what led you to want to dive back into the fray and then start over again? Number two, what was that difference – the twenty percent between what was done for you and what you felt like needed to be done for others? MATTHEW: Great questions. I sold my shares in my second agency due to partner conflicts. Having partners is a very tricky ship to sail. When it works well, it's amazing. When it doesn't, it's like going through an ugly divorce. It's never fun. So, we went through our divorce and I was not finished with my mission yet on creating the business that I wanted to create. That's what sent me back to the fray now. We had an inbound marketing agency that we were a Goldspot, a Reseller of Hubspot, did PPC, did SEO. We were mostly focused on enterprise clients, mostly Fortune Five Hundred. Very successful agency, did very, very well. I was in a non-compete – to not able to do any sort of inbound marketing for two years – which is fine. When you sell your shares, that's the rightful thing that needs to come up – which led me to doing outbound. Yeah, it was like, “All right, fine. I can't do inbound. I'll do outbound.” So, I started the outbound agency. We basically sprayed and prayed. We basically spammed people on LinkedIn, used LinkedIn automation. We cold emailed you and did all kinds of stuff. Throughout that process, I quickly realized what worked and what didn't work. The reality was outbound sucks even more than inbound and works even less if you really want to piss the whole industry. Inbound is the same thing but when you do inbound and outbound, you're focused on the exact same market which is the 1 to 3 percent of the market that's in market right now. So, you can grow that way. Inbound, you don't feel it emotionally because you don't see all the nos. When you do outbound, you feel it immediately because everybody tells you how much they hate you in the process, right? What the challenge that I realized was – both are not the correct answer. The right answer is actually creating demand first so you can do outbound and inbound. You want to put them into an invisible marketing funnel where you're adding value first and creating demand. Once we switch around to being focused on that – wow! Magic happened. So, we focus a lot on personal branding on LinkedIn so you can connect with people and put them in a controlled environment where they can get to know, like, and trust you. You could do it through an interview series just like you're doing right now, you can do it through community, you can do it through all different ways. There's a lot of different tactics that do it. But, at the end of the day, all we're trying to do is take a group of people and put them in a controlled environment where it doesn’t feel like we're marketing and selling to... /episode/index/show/convergehq/id/21332078

The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

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