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.

Bootstrapping With AI: The Startup Story Behind Omneky’s AdTech Success With Hikari Senju 06/25/2025

Building an Eight-Figure Agency From Scratch With Jacqueline Basulto 06/04/2025

Navigating Agency Growth Challenges With Gilad Bechar 05/21/2025

Building a Winning Team Culture With Chris Shihadeh 05/07/2025

Finding Purpose, Niche, and Balance in Agency Life With Veronica Clerkin 04/23/2025

The Art of Content Chemistry With Andy Crestodina 04/09/2025

Navigating SEO's Evolution With Nick Musica 03/26/2025

Scaling a Digital Marketing Agency With White Hat SEO: Insights From Cody Jensen 03/12/2025

Embracing Change and AI in Photography With Stewart Cohen 02/26/2025

AI and Data-Driven Marketing: Scaling Business Growth With Irina Papuc 02/14/2025

Inside Superdigital’s “Anti-Agency” Approach With Biz Hennigan 12/11/2024

Building a Global Agency From the Ground Up With Tim Kelsey 09/11/2024

Unlocking the Secrets to Agency Growth With Marcel Petitpas 08/28/2024

Agency Growth Secrets With Leeann Leahy 07/31/2024

Strategies for Smarter Agencies With Jason Therrien 06/19/2024

Mitigating the Legal Risks of AI Content With Sharon Toerek 06/05/2024

Adapting Agencies for the Social-Centric Era With Jason Mitchell 05/22/2024

Data-Driven Entrepreneurship: Insights From Luke Komiskey 05/08/2024

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

The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

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