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Brian Phillips is Co-founder and CEO of The Basement, an integrated (technology + creativity + measurement) B2C and B2B marketing agency with its roots in production. Brian dabbled in art and worked in architecture before he took the artistic principles of rendering positive and negative space to marketing. He explains, “The positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works.” He believes marketers can get a lot of understanding out of identifying and analyzing negative space – the things that don’t work – and that these, too, can help define the client journey. He believes “Negative space helps define and form the positive space.” His interests today remain diverse. For the past year, he has avidly read scientific books, pursuing ideas related to how genetics might impact buying and selling. The agency manages all media and destinations (the social channels and websites where consumers engage), extracting and analyzing as much data as possible and using multivariate testing. As an example, the agency may “cross-reference data out of Amazon” with data from its analytics platform on the ecommerce side.” The Basement markets its clients through an often complex, multi-touch, multi-channel approach. Larger companies may have as many as 150 datapoints across their consumer journey from “high level impressions down to ecommerce platform conversions.”  Brian has found that insights gained by analyzing data about consumers in the lower funnel can provide information on how the consumer got there and what the consumer will do next. The agency measures its success through outcomes, which, Brain explains, ensures accountability. Brian says his agency’s focus has always been on growth, but growth “has to be calculated.” When asked about his agency’s culture, he says simply, “Stay fascinated,” and then expands on the thought, adding, “Stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated.” Brian can be reached on his agency’s website at: thebsmnt.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Phillips, Co-founder and CEO of The Basement based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast. BRIAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here, Brian. Why don’t you start off by telling us about The Basement and where the firm excels? BRIAN: The Basement is an integrated agency, and there’s probably some backstory there of how we got to be an integrated agency with roots in a production company. It’s sad but true, but one of our greatest strengths is being able to deliver on what we say we can do. I’ve sat at many tables with brands that are unsatisfied with whoever their partners are, and sometimes it’s as simple as just being able to deliver. I think as a production company, at the beginning that was what we prided ourselves on, and over time we’ve evolved to include that same delivery mentality against the consumer journey and a fully integrated offering of technology and creativity and measurements with the consumer journey in mind. We’ve had a lot of success with brands. We’re not afraid to talk about outcomes. Actually, we prefer talking about outcomes, and we prefer the accountability that comes with that. We’ve been very fortunate to align with some great brands, and they acknowledge and accept our approach. It’s turned out to be very impactful for both their business and mine. ROB: Are those brands typically more consumer-facing, or is there some B2B in there as well? BRIAN: Mostly consumer-facing, but we do have some B2B. Certainly there are major differences there. But we really approach our work systematically and through a proprietary framework that we’ve developed. Technologies roll in, audiences roll into it, but at the end of the day we’re still performing the same services against that framework for B2B and B2C. ROB: Interesting. Tell me a little bit more about that framework. I think you have some brands that are of a pretty big size, and their go-to-market with customers is probably very multi-touch in a way that would often be hard to measure and hard to be accountable for, but that very much seems to be what you’ve leaned into. BRIAN: Yeah, there’s no question. It seems like the majority of our clients are that way with the multi-touch and the omnichannel approach. I think it’s important when we start talking with a brand that we’re all aligned on accountability, and where we’re going to hold ourselves accountable and where the brands are going to be accountable. Throughout that initial phase where we’re working on strategy, we have to come to consensus on how we’re going to measure success. Measuring that success along the consumer journey is something that we work together on and then we measure against. So that becomes, in my opinion, a lot easier to have dialogue and to have fruitful conversations and collaborations if you’re aligning at the beginning. And that approach has been the core of what we do and how we build our integrated offerings. ROB: What sorts of things are you measuring for brands? BRIAN: Oh, man. [laughs] One of our larger brands that we work with that is a consumer brand, we’re measuring 150 datapoints across their consumer journey, and that’s everything from high level impressions down to conversions through their ecommerce platform and everything in between. At that point we’re managing all media, all what we call destinations – places where consumers engage, whether that be social channels, whether that be their enterprise websites. We’re going to build that infrastructure inside of that journey so that we can extract as much data as possible. Then we want to analyze it. We want to understand if there’s any insights we can gain in the lower funnel that can impact how the consumer’s getting there and what the consumer’s doing next. And we’ve got case studies where we’ve seen and applied insights that were upper funnel, that were on the advertising layer, where we were able to test what type of product mix through display ads – we would run multivariate testing and we noticed that these certain product mixes with color combinations and words were effective. That then translates all the way down to the way we communicate on our website and what products we show on the website, how we’re driving conversions through the performance funnel online. That cross-analysis is very important to us. We use and leverage a lot of technology, don’t get me wrong; technology is extremely important to our business. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that our core teams that work with the brand are analyzing that data, and we’re looking for those insights and we’re trying to figure things out on behalf of the brand. Machine learning is helpful. Obviously, it’s a trend and it’s going to be here. It already has changed the business and it’s going to continue to change the business. But at the end of the day, I think you still need to have humans involved in that analysis, and that’s something that we do very diligently with our clients. ROB: It’s fascinating because a lot of marketers think about knowing how to track marketing when they can track the individual user all the way around the internet, when they can get a hard link through to conversion, that sort of thing. Certainly, you will have that in cases on the ecommerce side. But it almost sounds like on the broader consumer/general market side – maybe they bought something on Home Depot’s website or Costco’s website or Amazon or someplace where you can’t sink into the data – it sounds like maybe you’re still pulling on the stages of the customer journey at a macro level to see what’s pushing down the funnel. Is that how you’re thinking about it? You know what the stages are, you know what people are doing; even if you can’t link each person, you can still see the echoes of what you’ve done up-funnel. BRIAN: Exactly. That’s exactly right. Amazon’s a great example where we can get data out of Amazon and we can get data out of our analytics platform on the ecommerce, and we have to cross-reference those. We have to understand why this happened versus something else happened. My background is kind of an interesting background, but it certainly comes from the creative side. I often talk to my team and in general about the importance of the consumer journey and looking at it very similar to figure drawing. The way that I learned figure drawing is you have positive and negative space, and the positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works. But with figure drawing, you need to leverage and use the negative space as templates to help you define and form your positive space. I relate that to marketing and the consumer journey in a way that says sometimes things don’t work, but understanding why they don’t work and having the measurements in place to understand and help define – that helps us define what’s going to work and what didn’t work. So we really want to look at the positive and the negative space. I think there’s an idea or a wish for marketers and agencies to say, “We just want to find all the positive and that’s it. That’s what we want to base everything on.” We try to look more holistic than that, because we think we can get a lot of definition and a lot of insights out of the things that don’t work. ROB: It’s fascinating to hear such a – there’s sort of a disciplined line of thinking around the creativity that probably frees you up to be creative in other ways. It’s interesting how it echoes right into marketing. It almost sounds like we’re talking about planetary physics or something while we’re at it. BRIAN: Now you’re really going to get me going. [laughs] ROB: Oh, how so? BRIAN: I study science. I don’t read many business books; I never did. I mean, I’ve read marketing and business books, but I’ve found that the focus on our business and the focus on science, everything from natural order to epigenetics, is something that I’ve been really focused on over the past year and a half and applying that level of thinking. To your point, you mentioned the word discipline, and I think that’s certainly a strength of the agency and it’s something that my business partner and I have always strived for. If I were to analyze my career, I think a systematic, more scientific approach to creative is something that I’ve always done. The parallels of science and creativity are just so fascinating to me. ROB: I think you can’t just drop epigenetics into the conversation without actually helping those of us who think we know what that is, but maybe we don’t. [laughs] Can you give a definition of what that is and maybe how it ties into, if it does tie into, your work and marketing? BRIAN: Any of the scientists in your audience may say, “He’s completely off,” so I’ll use the caveat that this is how I’ve interpreted it. The genes that we have as humans are what I would consider more binary. They do simple on and off. They can’t define the entire character of a person. They may define the way you look, they may define other parts of your genetic makeup, but epigenetics is a newer science that is the study of the chemicals that are how the genes are expressed. What’s so fascinating to me and what really got me interested in the concept is that these chemicals, these imprints of chemicals can become part of your genetic makeup that you can pass down to your children. There may be a certain way that you move or the way that you stand that wouldn’t necessarily be part of a gene. A gene doesn’t have that in it, but epigenetics have put that imprint on you because of the way that things have happened through your environment. That is what I find so fascinating about it – that study of behavior and getting all the way down to that science to say these behaviors can actually be explored through genes. Tying that to marketing – I think this is way, way future-focused, but when that data becomes more readily available and people start mapping it, which they are now, how does that bring the science of genetics into the targeting of how people are buying and selling products? That is the stuff that I find fascinating and I read about. ROB: Is this something in the neighborhood of a gene drive or something like that? Is that what we’re talking about here? Or am I completely out of the neighborhood? BRIAN: What did you call that? ROB: A gene drive, where they can take certain things and introduce them – like they can introduce sterilization into the mosquito population not by shooting a mosquito into a crisper or anything like that. It’s called a gene drive. Basically, they can introduce this trait into the population in this external way. BRIAN: I’m not spending a lot of my time and energy on what they’re going to do with that innovation. [laughs] I do think that the future of medicine is going to be more tailored based on the structural variations within people’s genes. So I do think that’s going to change medicine as a potential outcome. But right now, my fascination and interest has just been the data and what happens when that source, that mapping has been done, what you do with it. It’s like Tesla having all the data of people driving their cars. ROB: I see. So, you’re able to measure things you’ve never been able to measure before to get insight you’ve never been able to draw before, just by how deep you’re able to look into the picture. BRIAN: Right. That’s what we keep doing as society. We keep finding new ways to extract data, and that is a parallel to the way we look at our framework and the way that we work with our clients. How can we extract meaningful data from the journey? It’s just going to get smarter and more robust, and the systems are going to be in place and the first party data is going to be there. It’s an interesting time, for sure. ROB: You’ve alluded a couple of times to your own background and your own origin story. What is the origin story of The Basement? What made you decide to start the firm, and what have been some key inflection points along the way? BRIAN: How far do you want me to go back? I think there’s some relevance to the first brush of creativity. For the record, I’m about 6’6” and I come from an athletic family, and I was a basketball player. There was a point in my life where I thought I was going to go play basketball. Certainly not professionally, but in college. And I was always an artist. When I was in high school – this was in the early to mid-’90s – I met a graffiti artist from Chicago. That culture didn’t really exist in Indianapolis in a meaningful way. That culture really didn’t exist in the common culture of society. Hip-hop culture was in its infancy, really, at that time. I became fascinated by that art form. I think one of the key powers or superpowers, if you will – and for the record, I think superpowers change over time. At that time in my life, one of the things that defined me was defiance, and I think that carried through my career, from graffiti art to wanting to be an animator when I saw the movie Toy Story. That became my goal. My dream was to be a character animator. That’s what my career set off into: how can I make animated films or shorts or whatever? I didn’t really have a definition. I ended up in architecture, and I spent a number of years in architecture. It was at this period when the internet was becoming relevant. It was getting introduced to businesses. This was pre-broadband. Everyone was on dial-up. We were just at that point in society where the internet and how people engaged online was being defined. Then I became really interested in creating these very rich, high-end experiences that eventually became online, for lack of a better term, engagements. That’s how my career started. I was doing that in architecture, and at one point my business partner and I met, and I was frustrated with my career and the ceiling that I saw for myself and the work I wanted to do. I wanted to work at Pixar. I left. I just quit my job. I convinced my business partner to start a business. He was certainly more of a marketing business mind than me at the time. I was very much an artist and a producer. The combination of the two of us has worked out really well. And we left. He left McDonald’s Corporation, where he was a very successful regional marketing director, and I was this young, probably cocky kid who was doing 3D animation and interactive 3D online and virtual worlds, and we took off. We ended up becoming one of the first digital agencies in Indiana, and from there we started The Basement because we saw a void with traditional agencies that didn’t have an understanding of digital. We saw that as an opportunity and a void in the market and serviced agencies for the first 5 or 6 years of our business as a high-end interactive studio, doing animated TV spots, doing Flash games. We made a number of video games, we made a number of TV spots, we did a number of very high-end, rich websites for consumer brands and national product launches, until we saw an opportunity. We were really good at building the destinations and the engagement points with consumers, and we would always ask the agencies and the people we were working with, “How are we getting people here? What’s the narrative? What’s that consumer narrative and how do we extend it?” That’s where we started to take on more direct clients. We had clients that were at agencies that went to the brand side and wanted to hire us directly. It really started to snowball, and then we built a media business, and now we have a full national internal media business and analytics business, and obviously creative is still there, still a studio. We still produce a lot of work in-house. There’s a ton of content that gets produced along with consumer journey. Being able to build that content against a very robust media strategy that’s looking at data, looking for data, that’s the kind of integration that we’ve built. In a very, very short, run-on sentence, that’s how we got to where we are. ROB: Brian, you mentioned something that I think is very common, which is that a creative firm starts up to work on a particular practice area that other agencies aren’t focused on, and you’ll either take a referral or you’ll get white-labeled under them on the engagement – and then there’s this jumping off point that has to come around to grow more. That’s that graduation from taking other people’s subprojects and leftovers and engaging the clients directly. How did you change the mindset and make that jump in the business? Because a lot of people get stuck there. BRIAN: I really give a lot of that credit to my business partner. We also have one of our vice presidents who took the client services part of the business. We all worked really hard together, and my business partner’s background in the agency was account service. He knew that business. He knew it very well. He’s very disciplined, and he understands how to build systems, and again, echoing the points that we made, we think systematically. So we built systems that will hold ourselves accountable, and we made sure that we were honest with each other and collaborated. We’re transparent. I think that transparency was a very important key for us with our clients throughout. If we can do something, we’ll tell you we can do it. If we can’t do it at that time, we’re going to be honest with you and we’ll tell you when we can do it. That formula worked really well for us. I’ve always been an advocate for hiring people that are better than you, and that is what we did. At that time we had to build a culture, and we built a culture around growth not only for our clients, but for ourselves and for the individuals that are within the company. We fostered the culture, and that culture helped organically make us better. That is I think equal weight in the success of that adoption and being able to change and being able to recognize how something needs to improve. That’s, again, been a big part of who we are. We have a tagline, which really is the definition of our culture, and that’s “Stay fascinated.” Our culture is defined by stay curious, stay ambitious, stay competitive, stay genuine, and stay fascinated. That idea of staying fascinated is see something bigger than yourself, see something that we can become collectively. When you see something and you strive for something and you strive for growth, things need to change and things get better. That’s how we define our culture, and that’s how we were able to improve. Because I’ll tell you right now, our account service business was not great when we started. It was good. We’ve made it great. ROB: It sounds like by being honest with yourself and with your clients – both of which takes discipline, which we said before – you were able to avoid getting yourself in the deep end in some areas and say no to the things that were too big while also growing into bigger and bigger capabilities along the way. BRIAN: Yeah. We expanded our services along the way. Again, very, very proud today. We’ve had tremendous growth over the life of the agency, and we still plan to grow. We are going to continue to grow. Thinking of it from a biological standpoint, organisms grow to the point where they peak and they start to decay. We feel that we’re not even close to decaying. Growth has always been a part of our strategy, but it has to be calculated. We’ve said no to things that we knew we weren’t going to be able to deliver against, and that I think is very important and has defined us by saying no to things versus saying yes to everything. That was a really good business lesson that we’ve learned along the way. And preservation of culture, because you can say yes to things and short term you can grow revenue, you can make more money – but at the peril of what? That was something we’ve always been very protective of: the culture, the people, the dynamics within the team. Because as we recruit and we want to hire the most talented people, then you have to protect them and you have to make sure that they are in a position to do what they’re great at. The point I made about superpowers evolving – as I got further in my career and further into the growth of business, that became part of my role and what I strive to be good at. ROB: It’s quite a journey, Brian. Thank you for sharing. I feel like there’s a lot more we could pull on; I want to be respectful of everybody’s time. Brian, when people want to get in touch with you and with The Basement, how should they connect with you? BRIAN: Certainly the website for The Basement, and that is thebsmnt.com. That’s the easiest way to get a hold of us. We love challenges, and we love brands that want to swing above their weight class. We’re actively looking for new partnerships. I really appreciate you taking a moment to have me on and talk about this business that we’ve built out of Indianapolis, which is not typically known for advertising. ROB: If people don’t know, there’s a lot there. ExactTarget didn’t get as long in the sun as people might’ve wanted it to, but that was a big deal out of Indy, right? BRIAN: Oh my goodness, yes. ExactTarget has been a fantastic story, and Salesforce is there. Yeah, things are changing. There’s no doubt. Things have definitely changed and momentum is with our city right now. ROB: Got that Atlanta to Indy connection with Pardot and Salesforce and all that. We appreciated ExactTarget as well. It was good for our ecosystem. BRIAN: Good. ROB: Thanks so much, Brian. Good to have you on. Be well. BRIAN: Likewise. Thank you again. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

Omi Diaz-Cooper is CEO at Diaz & Cooper Advertising, a digital “growth agency” that focuses on developing tight strategic plans and transforming client websites into top-performing salespeople. Omi says that websites are no longer “set it and forget it”—they are “living things that need to be producing” for clients. Since Covid, even companies that used to have “catalog” websites have found the need to proactively nurture prospects along the customer value journey.  Engaging and locking-in relationships with customers before they are ready to purchase is essential. People may start out merely seeking information. Providing great content and thought leadership will encourage today’s digitally-empowered potential clients to “keep coming back” until they are ready to buy. Nurturing them after the sale turns them continues the client-journey as customers become repeat customers and provide references.  Diaz & Cooper utilizes data-backed optimization to build a predictable system of growth for two industry verticals – travel/tourism and online retailers. When Covid struck, travel and tourism revenues took a dive . . . and business for companies that sold things online soared. Omi agrees that “anybody who didn’t have an ecommerce store who ever needed to decided they needed one pretty quickly.” Diaz & Cooper is both a Shopify Certified Agency and a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner.  Omi loves the travel industry and expects that it will rebound. She explains that most people who love to travel will do a lot of online inspirational research before they book. They may be looking for a unique experience or an adventure, seeking something new to surprise them, or to go somewhere where they know exactly what to expect.  During the research phase, Omi says, “You have to get them to sign up for something so you can remarket to them with an email.” She recommends offering such things as destination information or tips on how to pack for a given climate to build value so people keep returning to your site. Engagement needs to be an iterative process where each stage brings opportunities to remarket. If potential customers book outside your brand’s website, it is hard to recapture the relationship.  After an individual becomes a guest at your venue, remarket to them for great reviews and references. In this interview, Omi talks about how agency focus has shifted. At the turn of the century, agencies created concepts, gave the concepts away in pitches, backed everything up with an invented rationale, and made money by handing accounts off to lower-paid junior executives, padding time sheets, or through media commissions. In the past five to ten years, the focus has shifted to consumer first, with senior-level strategy development, billing based on value provided to clients, and integration of constantly evolving technological innovations. Omi can be reached Twitter at @diazcooperor on the agency’s website at www.diazcooper.com. The website offers a variety of audits and calls to action that visitors may find of value.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Omi Diaz-Cooper, CEO of Diaz & Cooper Advertising based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Omi. OMI: Thanks, Rob. It’s really great to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Diaz & Cooper and where the firm excels? OMI: Absolutely. We really think of ourselves as a growth agency rather than a traditional marketing shop. Our focus is really on transforming our clients’ websites into top performing salespeople. How we do that, or rather our secret sauce, is really data-backed optimization. We want to create a predictable system of growth. We believe websites are living things that need to be producing for our clients, especially since nowadays, consumers are just so much more digitally empowered than ever before. The old ways of building websites, of setting them and forgetting them, and the old ways of how you used to reach customers online really have to evolve. So, we’re kind of a bunch of data nerds who understand and love the customer value journey. [laughs] ROB: That seems like it can be better for everyone, because so often the website is this giant project that people work on, they get the website out the door, they work with someone to get it done, they don’t talk to them for 2 years – maybe they do talk to them 2 years later – and then you rebuild everything from scratch because the universe has changed. Having a framework where the site can evolve and where the relationship between the agency and the brand can continue – I guess if you’re cynical, you’d say it looks like you’re just keeping them on the hook, but realistically, something has to change every month unless you don’t expect anything at all from the website. OMI: Yeah, exactly. That’s why we really focus on people who are actually selling something online. We do well with lead gen, but where we really shine and what really jazzes us is seeing our client numbers go up in analytics, making more and more revenue for our clients, but also connecting them to the people who will have some sort of an enhancement in their life experience by connecting to this particular brand. Like you said, it’s really not about those brochure sites of “set it and forget it.” It’s really about growth-driven design, and that’s driven by actual visitor data. And those things change. We saw the huge changes that have happened over the last 6 months in consumer behavior. If you had a dusty old site that you hadn’t touched in 2 or 3 years, you bet your bottom dollar that you’re touching it now. ROB: Right. Omi, you mentioned being able to tie something back to the bottom line and measurability. Are there particular industries that you find that Diaz & Cooper engages with most often? OMI: Yeah, we have two pretty big industry niches. The first one, believe it or not, is in travel/tourism. We’ve worked with everything from local attractions of an aquarium in Tampa that’s pretty famous and has actually been in a movie to global brands like Regent Seven Seas and Royal Caribbean. I have a lot of faith in the travel industry, even though obviously it got whacked pretty bad 6 months ago. We can talk about that a little bit later. So that’s one niche. But again, it’s all about generating bookings online. For example, we currently have an airline client, and it’s all about generating those bookings. Then the other piece of it is more of a peer ecommerce place, so retail businesses that are selling something online through Shopify, for example. We are a Shopify Certified Agency as well as a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner. ROB: That’s an interesting place to be. Quite often, when people think about HubSpot, they think very B2B, but HubSpot is also a lot about the customer journey. The past couple years – certainly not this year, but the 2 years prior, we recorded this podcast at the Inbound Conference because they get great speakers in there, and the advantage of recording in person is really helpful. It makes for a great conversation. Talk a little bit about how to think about – I think booking travel is a customer journey, much like buying a B2B product. What are the stages when somebody’s thinking about travel that might make sense to us but be not intuitive to somebody looking from the outside? OMI: For sure, travel, and especially with more and more people doing so much research online, travel begins at the inspiration. Unless you’re traveling for business and you have to have travel and you don’t have that much choice in the matter, most people that love to travel really are looking for an experience, something unique – they either want adventure and they want to be surprised, or they want to know exactly what to expect. Either way, they’re going to do a lot of that inspirational research online. That’s the piece where a lot of companies, like for example tour companies, have really not been doing super well in the past. I’ll give you an example. Have you ever landed in a new city and gotten out of the station and seen people handing out little flyers or little postcards for bus tours or an excursion locally? Honestly, that’s been one of the largest ways that a lot of these tour companies have marketed themselves, and they’ve really ignored that pre-travel inspiration research aspect of it. By the time someone’s landed nowadays, they might be pretty set with their itinerary and they may not even look twice at whatever excursion you have to offer. So, it’s really about trying to capture the imagination of people who are at that research stage and then having engaging content. From there it’s a pretty traditional ecommerce journey. You have to engage them with content, you have to get them to hopefully sign up. If they’re not ready to book yet, you have to get them to sign up for something so you can remarket to them with email. And then after they become a guest, how do you remarket to them so that they give you a great review and refer you to others? It’s really looking at everything from the time that they first think about wanting to travel through turning them into a raving fan. ROB: It seems like it could be getting very divergent. It seems like there would be a pull. A lot of the travel booking sites would probably be trying to pull these brands into their own marketplace to book alongside their travel, to book alongside their AirBnB. But it seems to me if you’re doing that, you’ve lost complete control of the customer relationship. How is that pull working on the tours? Or is it not much of a factor yet? OMI: It’s beginning to be. For example, I think Bookings Holdings, which is the owners of Booking.com, they realize the potential of the excursions & tours area of travel tourism, and they actually purchased a booking engine called Fair Harbor. Again, they want to have more control of that customer journey. But you’re right; that means the brand themselves loses that a little bit. It’s really important to have a mechanism by which you can engage with the potential customers before they actually book so that they’re already looking to you for information, whether it’s destination information or whether you’re giving them tips on how to dress or how to pack for a particular climate. Whatever the case might be, it’s going back to good old-fashioned content creation and thought leadership where you really want to be able to establish that relationship before they book. Because if they book outside of your brand’s website, you’ve lost that relationship until you can capture their email again or something like that. It’s really about providing touchpoints prior as well as throughout. As soon as they book, what are you doing to nurture them before they show up? Unless it’s like a same day thing. Obviously, every brand is a little bit different, but those basics are the same as far as wanting to figure out ways to create more touchpoints throughout the relationship so that you don’t lose that touch with the guest. ROB: And they might even be able to capture some of the referral revenue out to the accommodations, out to the plane flights and whatnot, right? OMI: Yeah, that’s actually pretty common in the industry. For example, concierges at a hotel, if they book a tour or something like that, they get a piece of the revenue. That’s a pretty common practice. How do we do that digitally, and how do we do it digitally effectively so that you’re not pushing things on people that don’t make sense? That’s the rub. ROB: Got it. March 2020 must have been quite an inversion of your business, because you have this travel vertical that undoubtedly was hit hard, but conversely you have this ecommerce side of things that anybody who didn’t have an ecommerce store who ever needed to decided they needed one probably pretty quickly. OMI: Yes. [laughs] That was definitely our saving grace, that we did have that part of the business. We had already been Shopify partners for several years and have had a lot of success with some retailers. Because yeah, literally about 60% of our agency’s revenue paused within a week or two of March, the terrible Ides of March. [laughs] ROB: Were people looking for any sort of store to sell their thing online? Were there particular types of products that seemed to accelerate faster? OMI: Obviously anything related to health and toilet paper and sanitation and that kind of thing. Obviously all of that was huge. But overall I think it took a little time for people who had never done ecommerce before. They knew that they needed to go into it, but they weren’t sure how to go about it. And that’s not really our core target audience. It was really more about finding more of those clients who already had a decent ecommerce shop and how do we make it better? How do we do conversion rate optimization so that they capture more of the market? Because the behavior really changed. The behavior changed in that people were less loyal to specific brands and they were looking for bargains and looking for something that was going to make sense for their budgets. Again, yes, there were a lot more people buying online, but there were also a lot more people with less money to spend. ROB: Right. It all flipped very quickly. We had one client who was in a different business who decided to spin up a third party marketplace for challenger and interesting food brands. You can imagine, they’re talking to all these companies that are used to selling stuff in grocery stores; now they’re not because nobody is stopping and browsing around a grocery store. If they’re going at all, they’re going to find their toilet paper and their core essentials. The shift from March until now – at the beginning, everyone they talked to said, “No, we don’t have a store.” It has come so quickly to now they fully expect this client to integrate with their Shopify store and integrate their order history. The knowledge and sophistication really turned amazingly quickly. OMI: Yeah. I read somewhere that the CEO of Microsoft said that we experienced 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months, and that’s exactly what it felt like. [laughs] ROB: Oh yes, it felt like a lot of things, for sure. Omi, when you look back, tell us about the origin story of Diaz & Cooper. How did you decide to get this business rolling? OMI: That’s actually a funny story. A little bit personal, but I’m going to go ahead and share it. I had been in the ad agency world for, I don’t know, 10 years, maybe 15. I can’t even remember. I had decided to step off the hamster wheel and freelance. I wanted a little bit less pressure; I wanted a little bit more intimate contact with my clients and all of that. I also wanted to start a family around that time. After about a year, I was finally pregnant. I was about 7 months pregnant or so, and my husband and co-founder Todd Cooper came home from work – he was an associate creative director of a kind of large agency here at the time – and he said, “Hey, I want to quit my job too. Let’s do this for real.” So, I looked down at my pregnant belly, looked at him, looked at my belly again, and went, “Are you crazy?” [laughs] But then I realized, okay, there’s a gap in the market we can fill. Why not? Let’s try it out. At that time – this was back in 2000-2001 – most local agencies created work in a vacuum. All the agencies we had worked for would come up with creative and then invent a rationale. Nobody was talking about data, nobody was talking about putting the consumer first. A lot of agencies were hyper-focused on getting creative awards – or even worse, as soon as they landed an account, they just dumped it off on a junior executive. Because strategy was not valued and creative was given away in pitches, the only way agencies could make real money was through media commissions. That really misaligns the agency and the client goals. Tim Williams talks a lot about this, how with hourly billing, the agency is penalized for being efficient, so you either have to make up time sheets or just make a lot of money through media commissions. A lot of that has definitely changed in the last 5-10 years, but back then that was the status quo. We really learned how to value what we do based on the value that we achieved for our clients, and that’s really what we wanted to do with the agency from the inception. We wanted to provide senior level strategy, access to senior level thinking to all the clients, and be able to feed our intense curiosity for new technologies. ROB: And if LinkedIn is to be believed, it looks like he joined in early to mid 2001. OMI: Yeah. ROB: So you put all of your family eggs in this basket, you have a child incoming, and then you have 9/11. You’re now in your third turning of the world upside down, between COVID, the financial crisis, and 9/11. How did 9/11 and that time affect your business? And were you in travel then? Because that was another travel mess. OMI: Yeah, it was. Luckily, 9/11, as horrific as it was, really didn’t have the long-lasting effects to the industry that COVID has had. We did have a couple of travel/tourism clients at the time. I think we had a couple of hotels. They didn’t really change a lot. That didn’t really affect us horribly. One thing that did, though, was the real estate bubble bursting. 2008 was one that really whacked us because we were pretty deep in the real estate market. Probably 10 out of 15 clients were in real estate. So that was another big wackadoodle. We learned a lot of hard lessons. Big agencies treat employees like cogs in a wheel, but for us they were almost like family, so it was hard to sit down and say, “Oh my gosh, what staff do we need to cut? How do we make it so that people can survive this?” That was just a big lesson in making sure that we weren’t overextended not just in terms of staff but also in terms of expenses. We had a big fancy office and things like that. All of those things really played a part in us reassessing the model itself and being able to focus more on the team and less on anything extraneous so that we could be more resilient when things like this happen. And inevitably something will happen again. It’s almost our 20th year in business. Bring it! What’s next, world? [laughs] ROB: Yeah, you’re still here. Did you have an office in January, and do you have an office now? OMI: We did. This is another semi-funny story. We were ROWE Certified back in 2012. ROWE is Results Only Work Environment. Obviously, from pretty early on, it made sense for us to focus on results versus somebody spending X amount of time in a seat in an office. So we’ve been at least hybrid since 2012. By hybrid, I mean some days some people come into the office, some days some people don’t. Back in October of last year, we made the decision that we were going to go 100% remote. We looked around and we saw that almost all the big HubSpot partners were either 100% remote or nearly 100% remote, and a lot of our clients are not even in the vicinity. They’re not traveling to our offices all the time. If anything, we would travel more to them for presentations. So we said, let’s not have an office anymore. Let’s go 100% remote. We can always do a WeWork type situation if we have to do a conference or a meeting or find other ways to meet as a team. So we had already made that decision in October. We had already let our landlord know we weren’t going to renew our lease in the summer, and we wrote a blog post about how to measure results remotely and things like that, kind of in preparation for announcing that we were going to 100% remote. Then, of course, COVID hit 3-4 months after that, and we were already ready from the standpoint of letting go of the office. That was already in the works. So we were already ready. And of course, we were already hybrid for many years, so all of our systems are online, our management software is online, our servers, everything. It was a really seamless transition. ROB: Do you think it’ll be completely remote when the world comes back? Or do you think you’ll have some sort of default remote? Some people were 3 or 4 days in the office before. Do you think it’ll be 3 or 4 days remote and 1 or 2 in an office if you choose, or are you thinking doesn’t matter, probably fully distributed, maybe not even all in the same city or state? OMI: We already don’t have everybody in the same city or state. We’ve had employees as far away as Italy. Today we work with a U.S. designer out of Mexico; I have writers that are in North Florida. So we already have people. I think the beauty is not just the flexibility for employees, that they have a much more balanced lifestyle and they’re actually a lot more productive. The real beauty is that you can get the best talent no matter where they are. I have a very long-time employee, someone that’s been with us 10 years, who recently let us know, “Hey, since we’re going to be 100% remote, I think I’m going to be moving. I want to try out a new city.” His roommate got a job in New Orleans, and he’s like, “I’m moving to New Orleans with my roommate. Is that cool?” I’m like, “Yeah, of course. Why not?” So I think moving forward, if we do have some sort of an office, it would probably be more one of those contracted things where you can have a coworking space somewhere. It would have to be pretty flexible because, like I said, we meet with people usually in their cities. So, it would have to be something where we could meet in different cities. ROB: Right. Our team is very distributed as well. When our team still wants to work remote but not in their house, we may try to equip them with some sort of local coworking membership. The bigger challenge, I think, is in relationship and team rapport. Have you thought at all, or have you done, something to bring a distributed team together and to maybe gain some of the benefit of having been in the same place, even if that’s not the norm?  OMI: Yeah. Obviously, we do a lot of video meetings. We do little celebrations online. We send each other things. Culture is such a big part of the agency. Culture is so important. But we’re playing around with the idea of maybe having quarterly live meetings in, like you said, a coworking membership type of space, and even like a retreat once a year when we can all travel again. I’m really looking forward to doing that. This is our first year, and I’m definitely itching to travel. So that’s definitely something that as soon as it’s safe for everyone, we would likely have maybe a once a year agency retreat. ROB: That’s going to be such an interesting ongoing conversation, I think, the agency retreat. We have one employee in Santiago, Chile, and I’m hoping we all go see him. OMI: Oh, that’d be fun. ROB: That’s some logistics right there. OMI: Yeah. ROB: We’ve talked about some lessons already, but what are some things you’ve learned in building Diaz & Cooper that you might like to do differently if you were starting over right now? OMI: I will tell you that I would’ve done the remote thing a lot sooner. Like I said, the benefits of being able to attract talent from all over the U.S. and things like that – I would definitely have done that a lot sooner. I would’ve pushed harder to go fully remote sooner rather than later. Also, moving to more of a value or performance pricing model versus hourly billing. We did that pretty early on. If I could do it from the inception, I would’ve. One of the ways we started when we first started our agency was we were kind of a little creative boutique, and we did a lot of ghost creative for bigger agencies. We moved away from that pretty quick, but I probably would’ve done it quicker, looking back, because we got a lot more out of getting referrals from those bigger agencies and having them rely on us for things that they couldn’t do. I probably would’ve done that sooner and created our customer base larger more quickly. ROB: Right. OMI: The other really big lesson – this is a plug to all those wonderful agency consultants out there – there’s some really good ones out there, like Jason Swank and Karl Sakas. I would’ve invested in a consultant sooner as well. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. [laughs] ROB: Jason was an early guest. He was once a fellow Atlantan, although I do believe that’s not the case anymore. Not that you’d see anybody in your same city right now very much. When you talk about, especially on the consulting and advice consultants give you there, a few different perspectives on value-based pricing, how do you think about arriving at a cost for an engagement? Do you have packages? Are you using some sort of estimated effort but then adjusting so that it’s not hourly and you can have comfort giving certainty to the client? OMI: That’s kind of a bird’s nest. I’ll tell you that agencies will fight over this. “No, my way’s best,” “My way’s best.” We looked at the whole point system that was pretty popular with the HubSpot Partners a couple years back. What we arrived at, what works best for us and most of our clients, is we do have certain packaged programs. However, they’re highly, highly customizable. We always, always start with a strategy engagement. It’s a limited time. It’s a value for the client. It’s not exactly a loss leader for us, but it’s not exactly a big money maker either. What that allows us to do is, number one, see how we work with the client. Really shape where we think the account should go. Really understand what their customers’ journeys are, what needs optimization, and really be able to craft the program that will work best for them. It’s also kind of a dating before you marry for both of us. They can see what it’s like to work with us, we see what it’s like to work with them. We can see if we’re a really good fit. And then after that, there are programs at different levels that they can sign onto depending on how fast they want to reach their goals. Everything is goal-based. Everything is all around reaching certain SMART goals that we define during the strategy process. Then where the performance comes in is certain built-in bonuses for going beyond certain expected performance metrics. ROB: Makes a ton of sense. No matter how you approach the price for what’s done, I think one of the big unlocks that a lot of agencies struggle with is how to define an initial structured engagement that is paid discovery that also delivers value to the clients. OMI: Yes. And it does have to deliver value. It can’t just be a laundry list of B.S. It really does need to be strategic. And what we deliver, they could literally take it and run or go with somebody else and do it. A lot of people are hesitant of that, but I find that the approach that some of the prepackages that I’ve seen of “Well, you get four blog posts a month and six social media posts and an hour of SEO” – how can you determine that that’s what they need before you even get to know their business? They may not need blog posts. They may have somebody that does it internally and maybe you’re just reviewing and helping them out with the topic strategy and the SEO. Until you have a good strategic plan, you’re really just checking off deliverables, and that’s not what we’re about. We’re about delivering a result, and you can’t do that unless you have a good plan. ROB: That’s super key. This is probably a topic we could spend a lot of time on with a lot of people. It’s a lever to growth, and it’s a lever to not seeming like – you don’t want to sound like you’re asking to bill hours to fill out their RFP. That’s where it comes from, this defensive “Somebody asked me to do a thing and I didn’t have an answer for them, so it cost me time, so I’m going to throw up a defense.” But that positioning and framing towards value really helps you stand out and it helps people have some skin in the game with you while also you freeing them to go anywhere and also not wanting to. OMI: Yeah, exactly. ROB: Excellent. Omi, when people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to connect with you and Diaz & Cooper? OMI: We are on Twitter @diazcooper. Also our website at www.diazcooper.com. Those are the best ways to reach us. There’s all kinds of different calls to action and website audits and all kinds of things that are of value that we provide free on our website. So that’s probably the best way to reach us. ROB: Sounds good. Omi, thank you so much for making time to come on the podcast. You have shared some wisdom from the year, some experience, some nuggets to carry forward, some really good stuff. I wish you and Diaz & Cooper the best, especially as you are able to not only keep your ecommerce folks happy, but bring those travel clients back into the world. Sounds like a good season ahead. OMI: Yeah, we’re excited about it. ROB: Thank you so much. OMI: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

Waylon Tate is Principal at J. Waylon & Associates, a full spectrum PR and marketing agency that provides traditional public relations, digital outreach, and advertising services, mostly for startups. He and two of his friends with their own companies have created what Waylon refers to as a “communications trifecta,” with the ability to collectively and collaboratively meet every need an entrepreneurial startup might have. Web development, graphics, and photography? The client works with Waylon’s friend Tracy at Critical Launch. Printed material? The client may work with Waylon & Associate’s inhouse printshop or with Waylon’s friend Mikey at PrintRunner.    Although Marketing and PR are quite different fields, both rely on attention to the bigger picture and the longer game. With an understanding of both disciplines, Waylon believes it makes sense for his clients to be able to get both of these experiences “in the same place.” Public relations requires an understanding of what is “warm and fuzzy” to particular network and media audiences. Waylon works closely with each client to elicit their operational definition of PR. For some, it may be no more than editorial solicitation. Others may want to reach into the influencer market, an investment which Waylon often recommends, especially in direct-to-consumer businesses, for its ability to provide the biggest return on investment.  Influencers do not have to be “big names,” so much as they are people who have “come up through the ranks and are really good at taking pictures and developing a broad network of supporters.” Approaches to senior program producers or publication editors have to include not only the topic of conversation, but also how the material will resonate with that platform’s audience.  Waylon believes the days of the promotional press releases are past and suggests that they may no longer be effective because of the intense competition for “air space.” The key to everything is communications which, Waylon says, “is all about relationships.” Relationships with the editors and the writers the agency works with have far more impact than sending out press releases. You have to think, “What does an audience want to hear about?” Waylon believes that, in the coming months, ecommerce is “going to absolutely explode into a level we probably can’t even comprehend at the moment.” Waylon did not start his career in any form of Marketing. After completing his Master in Public Policy (capstone project: Citizens Prosecutor Attorney), he finished a prestigious fellowship in Washington, D.C., and returned to Dallas to work in the District Attorney’s Office under the Texas’s first African-American DA. When the DA left office, Waylon had a choice: to take a cushy job in corporate communications . . . or to strike out on his own. Today, his public service experience plays into a new gig that he and Tracy started: Politicize.co. Waylon explains that their success is the result of reinterpreting what PR and marketing look like for progressive political campaigns. They use the same model and flow for political campaigns as they use for marketing restaurants and storefronts. The purpose is the same: to get people to buy into a brand.  Waylon can be reached on his agency’s website at: https://www.jwaylon.com/ or on politicize.co. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Waylon Tate, Principal at J. Waylon & Associates based in Dallas, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Waylon. WAYLON: Thanks, Rob, for having me. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by giving us a rundown of J. Waylon & Associates and the expertise of that business?  WAYLON: Absolutely. J. Waylon & Associates is a full spectrum PR and marketing agency here in Dallas, Texas. We really dive into both of those categories at the same time, handling everything from traditional public relations like editorial solicitation, navigating all of the editorial aspects of PR, but also diving pretty heavily into digital outreach and advertising as well. ROB: Waylon, you sit at this intersection of marketing and PR. What I’ve seen is quite often, firms will specialize in either one or the other and actively choose not to engage in the other side of the business. Why do you think that is? WAYLON: It’s interesting that you say that, first and foremost, but my approach was always different. I think when I started my agency, I came into it with an active understanding of both of those different disciplines. Marketing definitely has its own angles and things that you need to do, and PR is a very specialized field as well. I really wanted to enter into the marketplace myself as a startup addressing both of those needs to the clients. We work mostly with startups, and it made more sense to me, as I think it made sense to our clients, that they were able to get both of those experiences in the same house. ROB: Got it. Nonetheless, we all have to draw lines in our business. What lines of business have you then chosen not to engage in? Particular practices or things outside of the lanes you’ve chosen to be in, and why? WAYLON: Gosh, that’s a good question. I wish I had a better response for you. I’m kind of an all-inclusive kind of guy. To give you a little bit more of a backstory as to how my agency came out, there really is a creative hub. It’s a trifecta of communications, if you will. About 6 or 7 years ago, me and two of my best friends decided that we wanted to start our own gig. We really did create a communications trifecta. Myself, J. Waylon & Associates, we do mostly marketing and public relations. My best friend Tracy owns another company called Critical Launch, which does web development and graphics and all of those kind of things, photography and a number of other things. My other friend Mikey owns PrintRunner. So we actually have two print shops, one in-house here in downtown Dallas and another one in a city not too far away. We were really able to collectively meet every single need that a startup would encounter as they were going on that journey of entrepreneurship – everything from printing business cards to building their website to building out all of their social accounts and then to fully engage and build out platforms to increase their brand awareness through public relations, but also increase their on-the-ground sales through marketing efforts as well. ROB: It’s really interesting how you’ve created specialization and focus while still serving a broad set of needs by having different entities and brands to serve those different needs.  WAYLON: Absolutely. ROB: Public relations means a lot of things to a lot of people. How have you seen the definition of public relations evolve and maybe even refocus after some of the noise – PR has become so noisy that maybe it’s not even effective. What would you say? WAYLON: Well, I’ll tell you this. You just hit the nail on the head. In fact, when we’re engaging with a potential new client, most of the time they don’t really understand that public relations is a very broad term. I think it’s important that we create an operational definition for each client in their own framework. What does PR mean to them? For some clients that means nothing but doing editorial solicitation; for other clients that means reaching into the influencer market. To touch on the question that you just asked, I can tell you that influencers, love them or hate them, have become a huge need for most businesses, especially in direct-to-consumer businesses that are selling merchandise. We represent a number of bars and restaurants, and I can tell you the influencer marketing that we do has made – I will actually encourage my clients to move a considerable amount of advertising dollars into hiring influencers because the return on that investment is normally much higher. ROB: What does an influencer look like for a local restaurant? Are these A-list, B-list celebrities? Or is it something more nuanced? Is it more of a social person with a high audience? WAYLON: Probably the second of those. It’s not so much about fame. I think it’s so much about the peer-to-peer respect. I don’t know if you know this, Rob, but there’s certainly an underlying group of influencers in the food marketplace that are really able to capture in a different way than an A- or B-list celebrity would in that I think the public at large has become much more cognizant of how the whole influencer marketing game works, and they’re more willing to participate in an activity or maybe visit a place that they wouldn’t normally, based on what an influencer suggests rather than what a celebrity is getting paid to talk about, even though the influencers are many times paid as well. ROB: For a food influencer, I’m picturing in my mind someone who got through half a season of Top Chef, so people got to follow them before they got eliminated. Is that one category? Or is it something I wouldn’t even expect? WAYLON: I would think that might be one category, but the majority of influencers that we work with here in Dallas – and keep in mind, Dallas is the number five media market in the country; we have a big population here as well. But no, to be honest with you, these are people that have come up through the ranks and are really good at taking really, really good pictures and developing a broad network of supporters. I think, again, we always have to assign definitions to these terms, and they’re forever evolving, but no, the majority of influencers that we work with have a really large following but have never had media exposure through reality television and those means. ROB: Really interesting. I’ve never really thought about this alignment between influencer and PR because both of them require an attention to the bigger picture and the longer game. To an extent, you can measure the lift to a restaurant as to how one month was over another, but in a broader sense, much like – as you would call it, I think – an editorial solicitation, you’re not necessarily getting leads coming in or credit cards coming in that you can link back in the traditional attribution model. WAYLON: That is absolutely true. In fact, there really is no – and this is going to sound incredibly crazy, probably, to hear – but I tell my clients, there are metrics. There are analytics. If we deploy a digital advertisement, we’re going to be able to follow that train, that sales tunnel to understand where it’s coming from. With public relations, it is a much different ballgame, and many times it’s very difficult to navigate earned media and to understand exactly how you’re getting from Point A to Point B and was it effective in placing those dollars there. But they serve two very different purposes. For example, in March, believe it or not, during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we launched a pretty high-end wine bar and marketplace called Trova here in Dallas. We knew going in that we were going to be up against some obstacles, obviously. But we really utilized each one of those services in a very different way. For the public relations avenue, we built out a communications plan that was driven in understanding that there would be some media interest in “Why is this woman investing so much money into opening this wine bar in the middle of a pandemic when the city is really shut down?” There was indeed a lot of interest in having that conversation, which really increased brand awareness. We saw a huge uptick to the website and other digital sources when those articles started generating. But for the marketing aspect, we understood that we were going to have to really pivot to different ways of getting people engaged and seeing the follow-through to purchase. Was that curbside? Was that order deliveries to go? Traditional ways of marketing a restaurant is you’re trying to bring people into the space. Well, obviously, in a pandemic when you’re mandated to not be inside of the space, you have to understand, this is moving forward; the client is moving forward with opening the space, so how do you do that from a marketing perspective? We did it. It wasn’t easy, and we’re still not easy. We’re still working through that. ROB: I have a friend in the restaurant business, and I don’t know whether he has a very good PR firm or whether he is an instinctive public relater. You mentioned, “Why is this woman opening a restaurant and spending lots of money on it to open during a pandemic?” There are so many layers and hooks and pegs to pull on there, versus what a restaurateur might want to do is say (A) “I’m opening a restaurant or (B) “I’m opening a restaurant; here’s the kind of food I’m making.” They’re such basic stories. How do you think about turning this factual story of “I’m opening a restaurant” into something that is worth talking about, that has a hook to it? WAYLON: The essence of public relations specifically dealing with the media is you really have to understand the audiences of each one of those networks or publications. What we always do as PR agents is try to figure out what is the warm and fuzzy. And you have to understand that if we’re going to senior producers of morning shows or editors of particular publications, we have to explain to them in the pitch not only “this is what we’re wanting you to talk about,” but “this is how it’s going to resonate with your audience.” There are a number of magazines here in Dallas that focus on nothing but the food and beverage industry, so the pitches that we had to them were much different than the pitches we had to really engaged podcasts or the morning shows. For the first probably 4 weeks that we deployed this communications campaign, most of those conversations really circled around her, the owner, and this journey that she was about to go through. I think that what we found was there was a really good pickup of people that were interested – yes, there’s a new space opening up and it’s something that we want to visit, but also, I think she got a lot of support because everyone in the city understands what entrepreneurs are going through. I think they wanted to be in many ways the wind beneath her wings of making this journey that was about to take place a reality and support her however they could. ROB: Really interesting. I’ll ask, with that level of customization going into the pitch to the publication or to the outlet, what then is the place in 2020 for the vaunted press release? WAYLON: Let me tell you this, Rob. I haven’t sent a press release in probably 10 months. Again, I think that maybe it could be the difference in generational folks that are working communications, but press releases to me – and this is probably going to sound like sacrilege to a lot of other publicists that are going to listen to this podcast – in many ways are archaic because you’re competing with so many other brands that are trying to push whatever it is that they’re wanting to talk about. Communications in and of itself is all about relationships. We rely much more on the relationships that we have with the editors and the writers that we work with than we do on sending out press releases. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, maybe if you’re in consumer goods and you’re creating a new product or you’re launching a brand new item, that might be a space for that, and then you put something on the wire. But for really hyperlocal communications, at least for me and my agency, we don’t really send out press releases. ROB: Got it. Thanks for the take there. I appreciate that sort of thing. You can certainly get pitched on all sorts of platforms and all sorts of different plans to push out press releases, but that thought of “What is the audience wanting to hear about?” is a much more thoughtful approach to it. Waylon, you mentioned a little bit of the mechanics of starting and the partners and the trifecta of businesses, but let’s step a moment into the “why.” What made you decide to put a stake in the ground and start your own business instead of being a part of joining/leading someone else’s? WAYLON: I found my way to public relations and marketing in an odd way. I have a Master’s in Public Policy. I had finished a pretty prestigious fellowship in Washington, D.C., came back to Dallas and started working with the district attorney’s office. In fact, the capstone project that I did for my master’s project was starting what was called the Citizens Prosecutor Academy. Now, keep in mind the Dallas District Attorney’s office is the seventh largest in the country. It’s huge. They have some 500 employees. So, to be able to engage as a master’s student with such a large entity was a pretty cool experience for me. But what it did was it opened me up to a district attorney that was the first-ever African-American elected to that office in the entire state of Texas. He was on Bill Maher and in the New York Times, something on a much bigger scale than a normal district attorney would be. I really got a firsthand kind of power worker experience with communications just in that experience alone. When he left office, I really had two choices. I was going to go into a corporate communications job and have a cush-cush experience, or I would take that leap of faith and really jump out on my own. If I never make another good decision, that was the good one to make. That was really the way I found myself to PR and marketing. Then it was just a really good time for my two friends as well. I think we all foresaw what was coming. We really looked internally at our own strengths and what we could bring to the table, and it made sense, for us at least, that I would be able to, as a good communicator, bring in the clients and then offer them stellar web development that I could push over to Tracy, or all of their printing needs and move over to Mikey. And it worked equally with the other two; if Tracy was developing a website for one of his clients, it made sense for him to suggest PR and marketing to me. ROB: If one looks at your background, clearly you have that background in public service. You also have a branch of business that you work on involving political activity, and I would imagine some PR and marketing around that world. How do you think about the cyclicality of that business? The good part is you have a steady-state PR business that is operating when there’s not anything of political note to dive into, but then you have a year like this year where there’s everything political to dive into. How do you handle that burst of activity on the political side with also trying to build a resilient and ongoing business in the traditional PR and marketing space? WAYLON: Well, with a lot of caution and care, I’ll tell you that. You always have to approach the situation when you own your own business with, like I said, caution and care. With J. Waylon & Associates, we are a PR and marketing agency for brands in particular – storefronts, authors, attorneys, doctors, things of that nature. You never really want to trail into the political conversation when you’re dealing with storefronts specifically. So, we really wanted to separate those. Tracy and I launched a whole other gig called Politicize.co, and you’re right; the cyclical nature of being in this 2-year or 4-year rotation, we gear up and we understand that in those crucial months, I’m going to have to pull back a little bit and let the employees work more on the marketing and PR side. We normally don’t engage with new clients during those months because I’m all about giving a stellar experience, especially in the onboarding process, to new clients. So just making those wise decisions as to understanding your business as a whole. What does the PR and marketing agency look like on a year calendar? When are our busiest months? Specifically for us, we deal with a lot of bars and restaurants. September, October, November, we always know that’s going to be the busiest months for those businesses. The same thing with the political company. We understand, even if it’s a municipal election – that’s going to be in May, so you have to give that 3-month ramp before that. Or in a 4-year cycle, a presidential election year, you’re looking at November, so what does 4-6 months before that look like? ROB: It’s interesting because what I hear you saying in a way is that on the political side, not that you don’t have to work for the new business, but you know that for that season of time, your new business is going to come in through the political arm. So you can spin down some of the new business on the PR side. Overall, it’s a fascinating solution. I did some work once upon a time in a political technology startup and watched as those different campaign workers would – a campaign ends earlier than you thought, so some of them – you kind of scatter to the winds. People scatter to other campaigns, they scatter to PAC-like entities, some into local. But you have a solution where you get to go back to your business when it’s done. WAYLON: That’s correct. Good for me, right? You always have to be cognizant of your time, and that’s something, the older I get, that I really understand – understanding how much time I need to reserve for whatever aspect of my life, be it professional or personal. Tracy and I really brought a new interpretation to what PR and marketing looked like for progressive political campaigns. Again, I think that’s what has been our success in that market. We didn’t look at the campaign as campaigns have been looked at for many, many years. We engaged campaigns that were doing nothing but on-ground canvassing and had no digital plan of action in place, and we really approached even the political campaigns that we’ve worked on in a private marketplace approach. The campaign is in and of itself a brand, and you’re trying to get people to buy onto that brand. So what do you need to do? It was the same model and flow that we use for the clients with restaurants or storefronts. ROB: Some of the work I was in – it was back in 2008, 2006, 2010 era. At the time, there was sort of a suspicion. Any campaign you engaged with at that time wanted you to declare your party allegiance, and it was almost outside of their frame of thought, even 10 years ago, the possibility of a neutral third party – even though as a technology firm you’re going to think about how to serve the full scope of audience of parties. How has that trended? Are campaigns more open to something like a NationBuilder and this idea that technology can be nonpartisan? Or has it required a little bit more specialization into declaring an allegiance as a solutions provider? WAYLON: I have to say, the elections that we’ve been able to work on thus far have been in a municipal environment, or at least a local environment. We haven’t really worked on state campaigns yet. With municipal elections, they are nonpartisan. You can always identify just through their actions, the pillars of their campaigns, what side of the equation they mostly fit on. Tracy and I were adamant from the very beginning about the side of the equation that we wanted to work on, and it’s written into the DNA of the company itself. In fact, I think the tagline is that we are “bringing progressive campaigns into focus” or something of that nature. But I think that it would be difficult for a tech agency like you were talking about – and they are very much partisan when you get to NationBuilder and things like that and the fundraising technologies that are out there – but if you’re handling the PR and marketing campaigning stuff, even on a local level, it would just be hard to have as much passion into the campaign if you don’t believe in the cause of what they’re doing. ROB: Right. That aligned purpose is really helpful. That’s the conversation we had with Michael Skolnik of We Are Soze up in Brooklyn back at South by Southwest about a year and a half ago. They had very passionate people in Brooklyn who were aligned to progressive causes, but fascinatingly, I think they were more beneficially ideological than partisan. They knew what they wanted to happen in the world more than they knew the party. They just happened to line up. WAYLON: I’ll tell you this: that passion goes a long way. From the owners of those two different agencies, you see the success measured in very different ways. If we’re representing a new startup and they’re selling something to the public, of course we get really excited when we start seeing growth or they start scaling. But it’s a very different kind of excited or measurement of success when we know that a campaign is getting to the finish line and it’s probably going to go in their favor because we understand the impact of those two different things. For a startup, you’re going to see success measured in dollars, bottom line, what does that look like? But for a campaign, there are so many ideological things that are wrapped into campaigns, and you understand that in most cases, that campaign and the candidate, should they succeed, is going to be making hopefully changes for a lot of people. It’s interesting the way we step back and look at what success looks like for each one of those situations. ROB: Really interesting that difference in the level of passion and involvement you have. It’s hard to be so personally impacted by a SaaS product unless it’s very, very close to your heart. Waylon, when you think about the history of the firm so far, what are some lessons you have learned along the way of building J. Waylon & Associates that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting – let’s say today or even looking forward, post-pandemic, in case you would do something remarkably different right now because of where we are. WAYLON: I think probably the biggest lesson that I’ve learned – we had a lockdown, obviously, here for a couple of months, and it gave me a lot of time to really look back at what I’ve done so far and what I want the next chapters of my agency to look like. I think if I could go back in time and tell myself something when I first started, it would be to be a little bit more picky and choosy as to what you do. Don’t take all of the business that comes your way just because you would have business. Really carve out somewhat of a niche into the brands that you want to represent. Just as any small business owner, in the very beginning you’re excited to have any business, whatever that may be. But the more successful that we’ve become, the more I can be a little bit more picky and choosy as to who we represent. ROB: Where has that led you? How are you deciding what to say no to right now? WAYLON: I daresay low-hanging fruit. This probably comes from a personal trait of mine, which is I want everything to be perfect all of the time for my clients. So it’s difficult for me personally to not give the same approach, thought, care, and attention to a $3,000 client that we give to a $20,000 a month client. So I’m constantly having to pull back and go, I need to be paid for my time. How does that look? What kind of clients can be we bring on? Even if I fall in love with the idea or the concept, I have to make really big decisions about myself and the clients we bring on because I wouldn’t be a good businessman myself if I gave the same amount of time and attention to a lower budget client that I do to a higher budget client. ROB: Definitely something to learn from that there. Waylon, what is coming up for J. Waylon & Associates or perhaps the broader marketing world in general that is exciting to you? WAYLON: One and the same. I think that you’re going to see – we are already seeing this – that ecommerce is going to absolutely explode into a level that we probably can’t even comprehend at the moment. The agency is starting to bring on more clients that are in the ecommerce marketplace, which is good for us. We have clients now that have ecommerce shops. It’s really forcing us as marketers to dive deeper and to really increase the tools that are in our own tool belt, to be able to offer those services to our clients at the same level of esteem that we offer other marketing solutions and public relations solutions to our clients. ROB: That’s exciting. We’ll look for much more through the end of the year and in 2021. I wish you and your team the best. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Waylon. WAYLON: Thanks so much, Rob. I appreciate it. ROB: Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

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

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

Todd Marks is Founder and CEO at Mindgrub, an agency, consultancy, and support company that designs technology for people to transform businesses, creates enterprise mobile apps and web applications, provides digital marketing, and “unlocks human potential.” Winning Inc. 5000’s Design/Development Firm of the year five years in a row might suggest that this is a notable tech firm. Yes, but this same company has also won the American Marketing Associations Marketing Excellence Award for Best Branding Campaign. How does this all fit together? A “high school math and computer science teacher” turned technologist, Todd collaborated with friends at his website- and eLearning-focused digital agency in the late-90s. In 2002, he founded Mindgrub as an engineering group writing code: building Flash, HTML, and CSS applications. When Apple released the iPhone in 2007, Todd recognized an important “disruption in technology,” and redirected his efforts to web application development and mobile application fulfillment. Customers soon requested information architecture, leading to larger projects.  Early on, the company ran with agency style, top-down, waterfall project management. Today, it specializes in DevOps/agile product, mobile, and web development; user experience design, testing, and emerging technology utilization; branding, digital and traditional marketing, and application support. It has redefined the meaning of “full-service” agency by reaching back to the very beginning – developing the plan, the strategy and designing the software product and pushing forward to the very end – marketing to make sure the product ends up in the hands of its target customers, and then supporting it. The agency manages the development of a strategic blend of technical projects in parallel with a comprehensive marketing framework. The process? Identify and define application users. Analyze competitors and the market. Conduct stakeholder interviews. Test hypothetical solutions (rapid-prototyping) to build the high-level functionality requirements on the technical side and lower level functionality user stories on the marketing side. Design the software – the information architecture, the product build, the user interface – and then provide the needed support and market the product.  In this interview, Todd discusses the increasingly important role of technology in the marketing world.  In particular, marketing needs automation to effectively manage and move prospects through the customer journey. Todd says COVID took the governor off the business. Today, the virtual workplace means the company can hire excellent talent anywhere – the company has grown from 105 employees at the beginning of the year to 155 with another 30 or 40 contractors.   Todd identifies 7 kinds of business opportunities: Deal Type 1: Go out and get new business Deal Type 2: Change orders to an existing project Deal Type 3: Adding a different service line Deal Type 4: “Support” or upselling (e.g., marketing) Deal Type 5: Adding a second project, same buyer Deal Type 6: Same account, new buyer Deal Type 7: An existing team member goes on long-term retainer  Todd has written and contributed to a number of books including Flash Magic, New Masters of Flash, and Web Design in a Nutshell. He sits on the advisory boards for Loyola University’s MBA program, the Maryland Technology Council (MTC) (Chairman of the Board since 2018), and the Northeastern Maryland Tech Council (NMTC). He can be reached at his company’s website at: mindgrub.com or on LinkedIn. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Todd Marks, Founder and CEO of Mindgrub, based in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome to the podcast, Todd. TODD: Thanks for having me, Rob. ROB: Great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by giving us a rundown of Mindgrub and where the business excels? TODD: Absolutely. Mindgrub is an agency, a consultancy, and a support company. We make enterprise mobile apps, web applications, and perform digital marketing, and we excel at unlocking human potential. ROB: Wow. That’s a pretty wide range. A lot of people just do the digital marketing part, but you’re also, you said, support, and also building applications. Where did you start? Were you doing all of that from Day 1? How did the business evolve? TODD: That’s a great question. I really started the business in 2002. I had a startup with some partners in ’98-’99, and after September 11th we went our separate ways. In 2002 I founded Mindgrub, and I really focused on Flash application development at the time. It became Flex. I also did some web application development with HTML and CSS. I did that for a number of years; I worked in New York, worked for a Deloitte brand for a little bit, and then in 2008 the iPhone came out. I knew that was a big differentiator. I was working in Chicago at the time. I’ve kind of glamorized the story, but it was a cold day in Chicago and I got splashed by a cab. Meanwhile, I was going back and forth to Maryland and it was getting warmer and warmer at the time, and I couldn’t take the winter in Chicago. The SDK was released in January 2008, and by March I was done going to Chicago. I was also teaching at University of Maryland Baltimore County, teaching instructional technology but working with a lot of technical students on campus. So, I quit my day job, came back to Maryland, holed up in my basement and started making some early mobile apps. We started out as really web application development and mobile application fulfillment, and we did a great job. Engineers. But my clients started to ask, “You do design; can you do a little information architecture?” And I could, so I started to do that as well. Then we found ourselves growing into larger and larger projects, and we evolved from doing a lot of agency style, top-down, waterfall sort of project management to evolving a little bit more into agile. With agile it takes a lot more planning up front, so we found ourselves doing a lot of the strategy and planning, which we call Sprint Zero, but it’s really identifying the users of the application, doing some competitor analysis, some market analysis. With those users, we’ll do stakeholder interviews, testing, you name it, and we’ll inevitably come up with a list of epics, which is the high level functionality they need, and user stories, which is a lower level functionality. From those users, we then design the software, we do that information architecture, we build it, and then we evolved into supporting it. So we have a support team as well, which I mentioned, called Aces. Then finally that full continuum was that we’d market it. We would release software, and a lot of times these enterprise mobile apps we’d put in the store – the clients would say, “We don’t have any downloads but it’s in the store.” We said, “What marketing did you do?” “Nothing. It’s in the store.” “Did you even do optimization for the store?” “No.” Particularly, that store is not optimized. It doesn’t necessarily get crawled effectively. There’s some dark arts there that you can add some optimization for search engines. But you need landing pages, you need newsletters, you need marketing automation. There’s all these additional things. So, we were getting unhappy seeing our clients not successful. We’ve made apps for Wendy’s and Yamahas and Geicos of the world, and they always have tons of downloads. They have millions of people in a database somewhere and they can get hundreds of thousands of downloads. But for our startups that didn’t have that marketing automation tool, they don’t have a big CRM, they don’t have a huge database of prospect users, they have to do marketing. Long story long, we are an end-to-end agency. We do everything from planning, design, development, support, and ongoing marketing. We don’t just do it at the agency level, but we also have become a bit of a consultancy as well where we compete against the Accentures and the Deloittes of the world on that kind of channel. I see there’s really two camps. There’s the Big Four on the agency side, WPP, Omnicom, Dentsu – and the Big Four on the consulting side – Deloitte, Accenture, Booz, and Booz started out as an accounting company and now they’re a consulting company. We inevitably play right in between. One of our taglines is that we’re a very technical agency, which is our differentiator, and we’re an extremely creative consultancy, which is a differentiator. ROB: It’s certainly a differentiator, the creativity side. You can imagine there are probably a great number of development shops that – well, a lot of folks can’t actually deliver a functioning application. We’ll start there. But of those that can, you can see them delivering the application and saying, “Here it is,” and then you get to the customer saying, “What do I do with it? How do I promote it?” But for you to take on that responsibility – it seems like there’s quite a shift in responsibility from “I gave you a functioning app” to “I am also accountable for people using it.” Was that a difficult transition to embrace, or was it somehow more natural? TODD: I would say it was a little bit difficult in that we started out as an engineering group, very analytical, writing code. Marketing started out really with advertising and more around the creative marketing – communication planning, branding and identity, visuals. We could always do application visuals, but we never really tackled that advertising piece. But marketing evolved to not just be the visual aspects of marketing, but the technical aspects of marketing. You think about the HubSpots and the Marketos and the Pardots of the world – those have only been around in recent years, and they automate the marketing process. They have APIs, and you can integrate with them and you can pull data and you can set up key performance indicators so that you can create rich dashboards to see how your marketing is performing. You can set up smart lists and you can automatically move people along from one list to another based on their interaction in your software or your marketing products. So, marketing itself has become extremely technical. As a technical company, I saw a lot of advertising and marketing agencies getting left behind because they weren’t very technical. So we were able to come in from the technical side, set up the KPIs and the smart lists and the automation, and integrate with the API so that based on user interaction in the app, we can then progress them in the marketing automation software. That was a skill that marketing and advertising agencies didn’t have, and the piece we didn’t have necessarily was some of that design/advertising creativity. So, we did a couple acquisitions there. We acquired a marketing company that brought communication planning, branding, and identity with them, so we were able to add that competency. Now we’re able to do really well on it because we have that full continuum. A lot of times we’ll get a customer where we’ll come in with a mobile app, but next thing we know, they then want us helping out with their website. They otherwise used a more traditional agency, but they see how technical we are, and creative, and they say, “Can you help with our website? And by the way, we have a kiosk too.” We call that the hat trick. Wendy’s, for instance, we designed their mobile app and then we helped design parts of their website. We designed their kiosk. I don’t know if you have Royal Farms down there. I don’t know if you’re more Sheetz or Wawa, but Royal Farms is a pretty big convenience store, and they’re also a quick service restaurant with chicken based out of Maryland. Town & Country actually said they were the number one fast food chicken in the world, which is a pretty big accolade. Needless to say, we had a hat trick with them. We designed their mobile app, then we redesigned their kiosk, we’ve helped with their website. But in that case, they were so confident with our ability that they actually gave us traditional marketing as well. They have a big campaign called the Chicken Palooza campaign, which is billboards and sheets and mugs. We redesigned their chicken icon, which is a classic. So that’s a case where we are the end-to-end agency, but we really are end-to-end. We’re not just doing their traditional and digital marketing; we’re doing their mobile apps, their websites, their loyalty program, integrating with their backend services. And this is all in the vein of marketing, but now there’s enterprise application development that is a marketing effort. It’s meant to increase sales. It’s an app, it’s a utility function, but it is also a marketing function. We’ve gotten good at marketing. ROB: That’s interesting. We do not have that chain, but now I’m wishing that we did. It also seems like being in that chair for marketing is helpful to stay top of mind. A lot of times if you talk about a site build or an app build, some people are always working on their app and their site, but some people are much more burst-y about it. They complete an initiative and then they stop. If you were only involved in the technology side, you might not be in the conversation at the right time when they’re ready to rebuild. somebody’s forgotten, turnover has happened a little bit, that sort of thing. TODD: You’re absolutely right. The marketing buyers still consider a mobile app a one-off project, whereas our consulting buyers, they’re buying teams for years on end with option years to extend. Where we fill in a nice spot is that we are very technical, but we’re extremely creative, so we’re able to be that agency of record that can do it all. We’ll get large monthly retainers as the agency of record, but within that retainer, it is mobile apps and marketing automation and SEO and banner ads and web micro sites. You name it. It’s a very wide mixed variety of stuff that we can do. Whereas to your point, just a mobile shop or just a web shop, if they’re just that technical shop, they’re considered more of a project fulfillment company and not somebody that you would otherwise give to on a big monthly retainer.  ROB: You’ve mentioned quite a range of clients. You’ve mentioned startups and you’ve certainly mentioned some very enterprise customers. Have you always had that range of client mix? Where did you start out in some of those earlier years? TODD: That’s a good question. The first couple clients for Mindgrub were actually large clients because it was myself. I was always able to position myself on bigger jobs and bigger brands and ended up working in New York City and Chicago with big brands for a while. When I started getting some work for the team on the web side, that started really back in 2002 when I founded the company. I always had some independent contractors, some interns, and even though I was in and out of a couple jobs at that point, I always had some freelancing work. And that was just smaller projects in my network, but not my job as the consultant or the day job I worked for, which were these bigger brands. What changed a lot of it is when mobile came out, I’d work with these bigger brands and I jumped ship with all the contracts I had and all these brands and opportunities to go start a business in my basement. I really hung my shingle on mobile. A lot of the marketing I did was mobile, mobile, mobile, “we make mobile apps.” At the time, I also had a product company. I was trying to make a mobile product. I got a lot of exposure to mobile there, so a lot of my network that were the bigger brands were just chomping at the bit to find mobile developers, and they got to me. So on the mobile side, we started working with really big brands. On the web side was a little smaller. Now that we’ve progressed, we’ve always actually done more web work than mobile because most mobile apps have a web backend, plus all the individual web work. Fast forward 18 years, mobile always attracted big brands, but web after 18 years also attracted big brands. On the application side, we do a lot with the big brands. On the marketing side, our first acquisition was just over 5 years ago, and we’ve really grown that team. I’d say our marketing team, when they’re just working direct for the client, we’ve really moved up the chain. But we’re a little bit more midmarket. Now, when our mobile and web division nets an enterprise client such as Wendy’s or Royal Farms – Wendy’s is a little different because we worked with the IT buyer. Even though we did their mobile app and helped design their website and kiosk, we were not necessarily working with the marketing department. They had it together and we were brought in. On Royal Farms, they’re a little bit smaller of a business, so therefore we were able to come in on mobile, get the website, get the kiosk, but then they were a small enough company that the same conversations we’re having with their head of IT, we’re having with their marketing department. Next thing you know, their marketing department is asking us to do some fulfillment, and then it leads into this long-term great relationship where we’re fulfilling a lot of aspects from mobile to marketing. So really, to answer that question, the big brands find us because of our differentiators, which happen to be on the technology side, and then they learn that we are good across the board. We are actively trying to push on our marketing side, and I know we just won eight communicator awards and five – some other. I know we’re submitting for the Webbies right now. Our marketing team and the creative team, they don’t want to be in the shadows anymore. We’re winning all these awards, so now we’re starting to stand on our own two feet as far as the look and feel. Some of our communications that we’re doing, some of the branding that we’re doing – these were things that we didn’t start with 18 years ago, we really started pushing on 5 or 6 years ago. But because we have the experience working with big brands and they have that trust on the technology side, now we’re commanding direct marketing work. For Sylvan, which is a really big online education institution, we did their advertising videos. For ExxonMobil, we did their TV spot. We filmed it, we used Mindgrubbers as actors in it, and there was only I think one or two paid actors that we had for that shoot. We were able to do it all in-house. It’s just amazing, some of the things that we’re able to do now. I would’ve never thought I’d be sitting on a TV commercial shoot, which I get to do now, which is super exciting. ROB: That’s absolutely fascinating for the variety. One of my advisors was positing to me the other day – his perception was that many businesses, and particularly enterprises, were much more eager to send marketing work to marketing agencies than technology work to technology shops. How do you feel about that suggestion? Do you see truth in it? And is it shifting, if that has been the case? TODD: You said marketing work for marketing agencies and technology work for technology. Did you mean they’re more willing to send technology work to marketing companies than they are willing to send marketing work to technology companies? ROB: That they’ve been more willing to hire a marketing agency while still trying to build a technology capability in-house, and maybe less likely to outsource parts of that. That was the suggestion and perception. How do you see it? TODD: Gotcha. I think you have to look at each buyer, and then when the core IP of the business is. If you had a business that was let’s say a law firm, marketing and technology is not anywhere near their wheelhouse, so they would probably subcontract both. But if you’re an events company and that events company is more of not a platform play, they’re the coordination and they’re hosting physical events, and you’re a bunch of marketers, you’re all about marketing, but you’re not a platform event company. So you probably pull your marketing in-house, but at some point you want to go build a platform because now marketing of events is online, and you’re not in a good position and Zoom’s not cutting it anymore. You would then outsource your technology because you’re a marketing core. And even though you’re growing and you start to build some products, you still probably at that point would think, “I want to do my marketing in-house.” Let’s say you’re the opposite. Let’s say you’re that company that realizes there’s disruption in the event space and Zoom isn’t cutting it and there’s a huge opportunity to recreate that in-person experience. You might go out and build software, and you’re not going to be good at marketing, and you’re probably not even going to try to do it in-house, or if you do you’re going to flail because you’re a software company. You build product. So, you should outsource your marketing. I really think it goes back to the buyer and the nature of the work they do and what is core to their IP versus things they should be subbing out. ROB: I can definitely tell you’ve thought a lot about this, about the buyers, about the organizational structure. As you’ve grown, how have you thought about helping other people on your team? It seems like you’re at a point where you can’t be the only one selling, so how have you equipped other people to think about navigating organizations and understanding buyers well? TODD: You got it. I originated pretty much every one of our departments. Now that we’re bigger, some of those departments are being created by my other leadership. But sales, I started out, like just about every founder-led company, doing what’s called founder sales. I had to sell everything. I started out as an engineer. My first company, I was raised by designers, so I went from growing our engineering department to our design department to our user experience department, accounting, the works. Sales was finally the last department that I had to stand up, and it was founder sales. The first thing I wanted to do was find a second person that could also sell. That individual had to be highly technical, highly creative. They had to be a subject matter expert, and then they had to also be good at business development. Then I was able to supplement helping them with the contracts piece, maybe even giving them some leads that came through our contact form. But at least they could put a solution together and basically sell the work and be personable. As we’ve advanced, I knew I needed to have a lot more people, so we really focused on process. With any business, it’s the product, the process, and the people. We started with the product. We identified what it is we’re going to sell. Every year we organized that list of solutions. Some solutions, maybe it wasn’t great that year. We decided, let’s not push on it next year. Other solutions have been a winner for us, we’re doing multimillions in that solution and that market is big, and there’s a huge opportunity. Then we’ll promote those solutions. Then marketing knows what they’re going to be marketing, production knows where they need to do some training, what they need to ramp up. We have solutions. The other thing we have is for every deal, we put together a deal team. Marketing works on the outside of the funnel. They’re trying to come up with contacts that could be prospects so those prospects are qualified. In our industry, we’re looking at marketing or IT buyers. We have a budget. They probably have some pain points we might be able to identify digitally. But they’re qualified contacts. They’re making them prospects, they’re putting them in Smartlist, they’re nurturing them through events, through newsletters. Then our BD team is interacting with these prospects and they’re engaging with them. They’re having conversations. They’re sending personal emails. They’re trying to figure out their pain points as well, but is there a solution we can provide to address their pain point? From there, our BD team then, if there is a solution, they then assemble a deal team now. They brought in the lead; they’re more than likely going to be the principal manager of that deal. We then bring in a subject matter expert and we bring in a contracts person, and that subject matter expert is either technical or creative or potentially on project management side, depending on where their pain is. If their pain point is in speedy delivery, we need to bring in some project managers to see whether it’s feasible given our timelines and resource capacities are the moment. If it’s a technical pain point, then we bring in a technical subject matter expert. If it’s a creative pain point, we bring in a creative director to really focus on what is the solution. From the solution then, we give them a cost to produce it, a timeline, and a resource plan. Then we close the work, and we’ve turned our products into a process. Then the thing that is absolutely quintessential is we hire just the best people. We have really good products, really good process, and amazing people, so as a result, we’ve just been commanding a lot of work. We started the year at about 105, 110. We’re 155 employees with about another 30 or 40 contractors. That all started post March. And really, COVID actually took the governor off our business. We had amazing people and process and products, but there were a lot of things that slowed us down. Driving all over the place and meeting clients physically, we spent a lot of time and energy and money on planes, trains, and automobiles. Also employees. We had a big box office in Baltimore. We also have a bar and restaurant that we use as now a food incubator, but it was a tech incubator as well. And we have a new light manufacturing space coming online. But we thought because we have now these different facilities in Baltimore, we had to have people generally in Baltimore. In a pinch we hired a few remote workers, or we’d have a really good talent that moved remotely. But as soon as COVID hit, I said, “That’s it, we’re just going to be a virtual company; hire people wherever they live.” We’re still trying to keep the same time zone and mostly North America, although we’re looking at some points in South America now to start growing some of our own employees – but the governor came off. We didn’t have to hire in Baltimore anymore, and it was so much easier to hire when you can hire from anywhere. We’ve got amazing talent, and not having to drive around and see our clients and get in planes, trains, and automobiles – it gave us tons of time back. All of our numbers went up. Our sales increased, our productivity increased. Our initiatives now, believe it or not, our next training is on how to take vacation. Our team members have taken one week less this time per year, so we’re actually retraining them on how to take a vacation and how to eliminate burnout because they’ve just been so stellar. Needless to say, that’s how we’ve done it. We focused on product, process, and people. In our pipeline, it’s very, very systematic. It’s no longer the founder anymore. Myself, I’m on the BD team. I have a couple other people that do BD, and I am trying to get out there and be an evangelist and network. When I hear of opportunities, I’m constantly growing our engagement directors – that’s what our sales team are generally called – to be subject matter experts in a core vertical. And those verticals for us are obvious things in the Baltimore area – health, cyber, government, education – but then some not-so-obvious things for Baltimore. We’re really big into retail and ecommerce and hospitality and support a lot of brands there. We’re getting into legal and insurance. We’re starting to do some financial services. So we’re in a number of industries, and I’m trying to grow those salespeople. And then I’m an evangelist. The rest of our BD team, we’re routing them deals. They’re either coming inbound or from BD efforts. And then one more thing, just to share this amazing – and I’m a teacher; I started out as a high school teacher. I taught at university. What people will find is I’m very apt to share these things I’ve learned because it’s fascinating. I was a technical guy, and I had to learn to build a sales team. But we even identified all our deal types, and we have sales plays. You have your outside team that tries to go out and hunt or farm and get new business development. We call that Deal Type 1. That’s a new account and a new buyer. Then Deal Type 2 is typical stuff. A change order. They want more functionality. We teach all of our client services team and our project managers now who work with our clients to look out for Deal Type 2. That’s the change order. You’d be surprised; a lot of times they think from leadership, “You scoped this project out. We should just be able to deliver exactly what’s in this statement of work without deviation, or shame on us.” That’s not true at all. If the project deviates – and it’s certainly not agile, because in agile you can deviate as you go – if the project deviates, work with the client. If they need to come up with more budget, or same budget but you want to swap out some requirements, the change order, it’s Deal Type 2. Deal Type 3 is adding a different service line. In our case, we do add support at the end of every contract. We go from the initial build to then going into monthly support. That’s Deal Type 3. Deal Type 4 is not necessarily support, but upselling to marketing, for instance. Deal Type 5 is a second project. So we’re not just adding services and values to that first project, but we’re adding a second project to the mix. Same buyer. Deal Type 6 for us is same account but a brand new buyer with that account. Deal Type 7 is an existing team member now getting an ongoing retainer to satisfy all of the needs of the business. We’re trying to get everybody up to that Lucky 7 where we’re that agency of record, but it’s across the board. Everything from mobile through digital. ROB: Congratulations, Todd. It sounds like it’s been a heck of a year. We’ve seen that same thing with that switch to virtual. We definitely made that decision, and we’re seeing good access to talent. We’re seeing that talent really appreciates when you’re willing to commit to being virtual versus where you’re asking them, huddled in their home, to think about somebody moving to where you are. I think people need some relief and they need some permission to be in their own place and thrive there. TODD: You got that right. As soon as we realized it was going to be a virtual world, we said, “If you’re a producer, you will never ever have to come back to the office from here on out if you don’t want to.” We surveyed them, and half want to come back half the time, and then it’s like a bell curve from there. But they shouldn’t have to. We can work online. We’re very data-oriented as a business, and we found we are more efficient. That said, we’re also more disconnected from each other. So as soon as we decided that we wanted to be an online company, we knew that we had to really invest in what that meant. We used to invest in climbing walls and game rooms, and we had a virtual reality holodeck in the office. That was some fun bells and whistles, but it wasn’t really what makes culture. Our culture is our passion, our creativity, our technology. It’s our grit. Those were the things that we had to really reinforce that we still were about online. And then we had some of the bells and whistles too. We had Wellness Week. We’re now doing a Games for Giving, where we’re essentially donating for every step that an employee does to get them out of their chairs and moving, which is really important. We do yoga lessons, we have adventure club teams where they go on regional hikes. We’re really trying to be a full experience for our team members and to really provide an amazing culture, from who we are and our values and our mission all the way through just having some really killer programming. We’re having fun with it because it’s a disruptive time. That’s what I tell people. With Mindgrub, why have I been successful? I did have my family back here in Baltimore. As I mentioned, I was in Chicago. It was cold there, and I wanted to come home. So I had the need. I had, as they say in the book Outliers, more than 10 years’ experience and 10,000 hours, so I had the experience. Ultimately, what was successful for Mindgrub was the fact that the iPhone came out in 2008, and that was major disruption. So that really grew us. Right now we are experiencing another boom because it is another period in our lifetimes of major disruption. I’ve learned to really make the most of it. ROB: Excellent teaching all the way through there, Todd. I love the way you set up and structured these things for us to learn from. When people want to find you and when they want to find Mindgrub, where should they go to connect with you? TODD: They can go, for Mindgrub, directly to mindgrub.com. And certainly I’d love if anybody reaches out to me on LinkedIn. I think that’s an amazing channel for business networking and business relationships. As I mentioned, I started out as a teacher, and I love engagement and answering questions. By all means, I am happy to do so on email or LinkedIn. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much, Todd, for coming on, and congratulations on everything that’s going on – the businesses, the growth. There’s a lot to learn from here, so thank you for sharing.  TODD: Thank you so much for having me, Rob. ROB: All right, take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

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

Rahul Raj is founder and CMO of 5&Vine, a fractional CMO and marketing agency that identifies industry incumbents’ vulnerabilities, market changes, and technological opportunities to enable startup brands to challenge and overtake established brands.  The agency focuses on challenger brands that have both economic and social goals, e.g., increasing financial literacy, addressing discrimination, or making organic food more accessible to the masses.  Before starting 5&Vine, Raj worked at a Canadian thermostat startup, Ecobee. The big-name competitors, Honeywell and Nest, owned the market. Their vulnerability: single location thermostats did not address the comfort of people in “different” parts of their homes. Ecobee developed a system of individual room sensors that identified temperature and occupancy so that people could be comfortable where they were, instead of only being comfortable in the “single thermostat” hallway. The technological opportunity, Bluetooth, enabled sensors located in different rooms to communicate to the main thermostat without the need for “dropping wires.” The company had no money, no “presence,” and no awareness. It invested heavily in customer support, won converts, and curated reviews. Ecobee had 10% of the five-star reviews of big-name competitor Nest . . . with only 0.1% of the market share – which made Ecobee larger than they actually were.  Faced with a profound family tragedy, Rahul left Ecobee, interviewed over 200 companies, received 10 offers, and decided he wanted to “date.” With each company, he agreed to work for anywhere from a week to a month which de-risked the hiring process for both sides. He so loved working as a “fractional CMO” that he professionalized his “dating” and launched a fractional CMO agency. Rahul’s “sweet spot” is working with referred clients are those who are “pre Series A to just post Series B” – those who have the financial resources to invest in marketing and are highly motivated to grow. In keeping with his “dating” philosophy, Rahul typically works for a company for up to three days to ensure there is a personal and intellectual fit. If both Rahul and the customer are satisfied, they write a formal contract. Of the thirty or so companies 5&Vine has worked with, the agency has taken a significantly reduced financial compensation from five or six – in exchange for equity or options in the client organization. Rahul has developed a formalized process to discern vulnerabilities that open opportunities for his startup clients to beat more-established companies. Use the web to research the big company’s product Compare customer reviews to the company’s product claims Buy and use the product and compare your experience to the company claims and to customer’s reviews. Answer the questions: What are people yearning for? What is being under-delivered, and  What opportunity exists for your startup to come up with a powerful product that will prove a market winner? In this interview, he also notes that it is helpful to determine what has changed over time. . . and what technologies could be applied to solve problems. Rahul spoke at HubSpot’s 2020 Inbound Conference on Go-To-Market Strategies for Startups: A Framework + Insights from One Challenger Brand to Another. He can be found on his agency’s website at 5andVine.   Transcript Follows: Rob: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Rob Kischuk and I am excited to be joined today by Rahul Raj, founder and CMO of 5&Vine based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, Rahul. Rahul: Thanks so much I’m delighted to be here. Rob: It's excellent to have you here. Would've loved to meet up with you in person at the Inbound conference, which you spoke on and we'll talk about that, but glad to be on the line too, in virtual land. Why don't you start off by telling us about 5&Vine and what your agency superpower is? Rahul: Fantastic. We are a fractional CMO and marketing agency that helps startups and scale-ups take on industry incumbents and win. We focus on challenger brands that have some type of social pursuit alongside an economic aim. Whether that be financial literacy or addressing discrimination head on or making organic food more accessible to the masses. What we're particularly great at is identifying the vulnerabilities of the industry incumbents and using that to help propel the challenger brands that we work with to positions where they either take on or take down those industry incumbents. Rob: And you have some experience with that yourself having worked in a startup and a challenger brand before starting the firm, right? Rahul: I do indeed. Yeah. Prior to starting 5&Vine, I was the CMO at a technology company called Ecobee. Now, when I joined that firm, they were single digit million in sales, they were focused on the B2B market with a smart thermostat. That organization had a tremendous opportunity to go head-to-head with both Nest and Honeywell in the consumer space, but they were very reluctant to do so. Obviously, both of those organizations like Honeywell, as an example, created the thermostat and are a massive multi-billion-dollar organization with a variety of product lines that essentially translates to deep pockets. On the side of Nest, they were the darlings of Silicon Valley, started by Tony Fidel, who was the principal designer behind the Apple iPhone. And so they had tremendous street credit on the design side. And so here was this little engine that could call Ecobee in the Canadian marketplace that kind of wanted to rattle the cages of those big dogs. And, in essence, what we did was we identified the single biggest vulnerability of both of those organizations. And that vulnerability being that consumers are uncomfortable in their homes despite hiring a thermostat to make them comfortable. And the reason is that both of them measured the temperature in one spot only and it was typically in something like a hallway. Now, if you spend the entirety of your life in the hallway, outside of your thermostat, you are going to have one cushy life when it comes to temperature. But if you're like the vast majority of humans that sleep in their bedroom that eat in their dining room or hang out in their rec room, you're probably going to experience hot and cold spots. With that insight in mind, we created what was deemed to be a room sensor. Now a room sensor measured temperature and occupancy. So, we knew which room you were in, and we could help curate the comfort for the room that you were in instead of by the hallway. The way that we framed it from a language point of view is that Ecobee delivered comfort in the rooms that matter. So, there was a sub text, which was Ecobee: for homes with more than one room. And that, that strategy of going and addressing a fundamental design flaw that existed with thermostats was the cornerstone that enabled us to take on those industry incumbents. Rob: That's interesting. I didn't know that Ecobee story so much and, I'm just curious, how did those room sensors connect through to the main thermostat? Rahul: Yes, it was done through Bluetooth. Rob: That makes sense. And that really highlights it. You know, one of the things that can make a startup a success is by taking advantage of something that has changed in the market. And something that has changed in the market is Bluetooth, right? Very few people would string wires around their house to connect different rooms, to connect the sensor back to the thermostat, but with Bluetooth or even if it had been Wi-Fi or something like that, that's something that changed in the market that it seems like hadn't fully been exploited by the incumbents or even the splashy new entrants. Rahul: A 100%. Yeah. I think that they kind of fail to acknowledge the customer pain point, failed to sort of conceive of a solution. And then it was the like solving for “how do you make that solution technically feasible.” Now that the sort of first chapter of that story. The second chapter, just in brief, was that we had no money and we had no presence and no awareness. And so what we ended up doing to get this product out into the market was that we invested disproportionately in customer support, over marketing. And so the intent was to go out and find people that had this pain point, sell them on the resolution of the pain point, which is be comfortable in the rooms that matter, but then go out of our way to deliver on support. So if they needed help with the installation, we would stay on the phone with them the entire time. We would go out of our way to do whatever it took to make sure they had an extraordinary experience.  Now, at the end of that experience, we say, if you're happy with our product and our service, could you do us a solid and write us a review. There wasn't any sort of bias towards it, where it was like writing a review that consisted of X nor was that like write a review and we'll give you X dollars. It was just based on reciprocity – doing the right thing. If we go out of our way to do right by you, could you please help us with a review? And in the end, we had about 10% of the five-star reviews that Nest had with like 0.1% of the market share. So, we presented an image to the world that we were bigger than we actually were. And then we worked like heck to close the gap between the perception and our reality and grew our sales. Rob: That's a great point. And in your talk at the Inbound conference was go to market strategies for startups, a framework and insights from one challenger brand to the other. And I think that kind of tees into the question of how you build a business and agency around finding these insights. Because a lot of times what you have is this sort of survivorship bias where a company survives, and then you go back and you write the story of why they succeeded. But you're really putting yourself in the position where you need to have a process to uncover these insights about what the vulnerability is in the market. How do you get to that? Rahul: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the starting point is just like web research about the product. So obviously there's a bunch of commentary that's put out by the organization about what they're great at and perhaps what they're not as great at. So that becomes your starting point and it's the hypothesis that you're trying to validate working validate. So, the next step is to go to customer reviews and seeing whether the customers substantiate the strength of that product or service or whether the company is misleading people by stating that they are better than they actually are and so that becomes the second phase. The third phase is to buy the products yourself and experience them in some way and determine whether your experience is in fact reflective of the reviews and what the company has stated or not. I think in total, that that gives you a sense of what are people yearning for that is being under-delivered and what opportunity exists for your startup to really come out with a powerful product or service and clean up. Rob: Wow. And so you've talked a little bit about the origin story of the business, and I think we can kind of see the overall through-line, but it's still nonetheless a significant jump to go from CMO of a sort of scaled physical product startup into starting 5&Vine as a services organization. What led you into taking that jump? Rahul: Yeah, I mean, truthfully, I did not architect this. I accidentally stumbled upon it. So, when I left Ecobee, it was on the back of a profound amount of family tragedy, five deaths in three months, murder, a suicide. My father was given three months to live, it was overwhelming. Through the negotiation of that grief, I read an adage that said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And it resonated so deeply with me that my quest was actually to find my five. So, I went through the process of evaluating a number of jobs, and I had 287 job-related conversations, which translated into 10 offers. And with each of those 10 offers, I wanted the experience of working with them before I drew a conclusion about whether I wanted to engage full time. So, in other words, I wanted to date. I didn't want to get married because I was aware that dating behavior in marriage behavior are materially different. So for each of them, I said, let me work with you for anywhere between a week to a month, pay me and we will essentially de-risk the hiring for both sides. So, I did this 10 times, and with each of them, I was able to make a significant impact to their business, to help them see opportunities that perhaps they were otherwise they were otherwise unaware of. And, and that was all done in a very short period of time. Now, the reframe of that experience is that I was engaged as a fractional CMO instead of a full-time CMO. And I loved the civility with which I was able to engage because I was treated almost more like a guest than a family member. Can I decided that this was such a delightful experience and the variety was so appealing that instead of taking any one of those jobs, I would just professionalize my dating and launch a fractional CMO agency. Rob: And at what point did it become clear that you were going to have to get some more people on board? You know, obviously it’s one thing you can kind of picture making your own way kind of as a consultant, but there's another inflection point from there where you say, gosh, I need some help and even get to the point where you may have other people who are running that primary fractional CMO seat. What was that transition like? Rahul: Again, it was relatively like a logical transition and it kind of comes back to de-risking the move. So, when I needed extra help whether it would be in PR and growth in social, in content, in design. I would initially go to trusted people in my network that I could engage on a contract. And so, I would start paying them to do the work. We would evaluate or solidify our chemistry, both personality wise, intellect wise. And it was only when the expense for that discipline became significant enough that I could make the calculus to say, I think it would be more economical to hire someone full-time than it would be to continue on contract. And that's when I started building up my team. Rob: You make it sound so logical, but I, you can also see it, it really is kind of a steady sort of building block path to progress. Now, one thing that strikes me, particularly when you're talking about startups, a challenge that some agencies have when they work with startups is client selection. Because you have to essentially find clients that you can help, but also are financially solvent enough to not leave you hanging with open invoices. How do you think about process of choosing the right risks when it comes to clients? Rahul: Yeah, it's a fascinating question. There's a few dimensions to the answer. So, I'd say as a general rule, what I've learned is my sweet spot is just pre-Series A to just post-Series B. And the reason for that is that the organizations have the financial resources to invest in marketing and to pay me, but it beautifully aligns with their motivation to grow. They've they need to show aggressive growth as they, in order to land financing, or if they've just landed financing, they need to show their investors that it was worth it, that they can grow at the pace that they originally promised. So that's my sweet spot when it comes to . . . Rob: Okay. Have they typically raised seed money or have bootstrapped their way to some measure of viability at that point? Rahul: Yes. Yes. So, it's either that, or the founders themselves have means either due to a previous success, the discipline of saving, or family means. Rob: I see. And so, it definitely makes sense that somebody who's pre-Series A, you know, they're looking for that edge. They're looking to come into that fundraise with all of their advantages and with articulation of their differentiation and that's always an investor conversation, is what makes you different. And so, I can certainly see, you probably are plumbing some words into some investor decks along your way, Rahul: 100%. Yeah. I've pitched X so far for the startups that I engage with, and it's been amazing to even join them alongside those pitches to help close financing. Rob: And how do you think about customer acquisition in this way? Because it seems to me that startups are, they kind of show up, they get some degree of success. Sometimes they disappear there. It's not like targeting a Fortune 500 firm, everybody knows where Coca-Cola is and how to find them. You may have to navigate the organization to get there, but it seems to me that startups right around as they're getting to your sweet spot can be a little bit hard to find even. How are you finding these businesses? Rahul: So, fortunately it's all referral based. There's no active prospecting, it is just word-of-mouth, because I think when you start to see a startup do well, many people ask, well, how the heck did that happen? Right. Where did these guys come from and what drove their growth? And when I'm associated with that story and whether it's helping in a minor way or in a major way – that helps generate more client work. Rob: Got it. Rahul, you've been at this for a little bit now, what are some lessons you've learned in building 5&Vine that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting over from scratch today? Rahul: Yeah. Great question. So I think the first is, it's something that I'm now practicing I just didn't realize that at the beginning But I employ the same first date premise that I did with the job prospects that I referenced earlier to the startup clients. So, because fit matters and it's really, it's hard to assess fit during an interview process. I'd like to start by engaging in one to three days’ worth of paid work with the client, but I don't need a contract. I just work on the honor system and I want to see whether our personality-based chemistry in our intellectual-based chemistry works. And if they're happy with the value that I've delivered and they like me, and I feel the same way about them, then we'll formalize a contract. And to me, it's not how I necessarily started, but it's what I've embraced now, it’s very different than trying to hunt for as many clients as you can and treating them all as just dollar signs to build your business. I'm not trying to optimize for money alone, I'm trying to optimize for joy, social impact and fair economic compensation so that's one of the big lessons. Rob: Got it. It's funny how sometimes there are things we instinctively do early in our business that we don't realize we value. It sounds like you were doing this dating and then you kind of got away from it and you've realized that it wasn't just something that you did. It's actually something you did that was valuable along the way, it's an interesting journey there. Does anything else come to mind that you might adjust? Rahul: Definitely. The second one is, thinking about the composition of your compensation. I have out of the, certainly, 30 companies that we've worked with, there were about five or six where I have taken a meaningfully reduced financial compensation in exchange for equity or options in that organization. And that is just a powerful decision to make, but it obviously comes along with a proportionate level of risk. But it's powerful because when that organization does well, its game changing, it's just game changing. So, give you one example and knowing that you're in Atlanta, this will land pretty well, but one of my early clients was a company called Greenlight Financial, based in Atlanta. Greenlight is a smart debit card for kids that helps parents teach kids about financial literacy in an era where we're no longer as dependent on paper bills. Right? So, because our transactions occur virtually Greenlight helps facilitate that conversation and that education between parents and kids using a debit card and a mobile app, and they do an extraordinary job. When I was engaged, we grew the business significantly enough to close a Series A, led by Amazon. Recently within the past month, Greenlight has closed a $215 million round of financing that values the company at $1.2 billion. Trust me that I am delighted that I took a reduced financial compensation and have a piece of that business. Rob: Yeah, that's a great one to be in, they are certainly on their way, but early on, I think there were probably along the lines of what you were saying with the thermostat. Some unspoken kind of concerns and skepticism from the market. I know those folks, Johnson Cook, I think I know over there, I've known for a while. I think, Tim that's in charge of it.  Rahul: That’s correct, yeah. Rob: Anyhow. They used to be right down the hall from us So, I know Greenlight well. Rahul: Do you know TBC as well? Rob: Yes. Absolutely. But talking about the insights, what was the insight in that payment market that really, it seems to me that the challenge would be trust. I think I had a little bit of skepticism and trust around the product when they first rolled it out the way I knew the people involved were excellent. Most people don't have that privilege. So how did you think about the differentiation and opportunity in the market with Greenlight? Rahul: Yes, there was, I guess to your exact point, because it's trust-based, you de-risk a situation when you know someone that has used it and derives value from it. So, you need to take something that is a private experience – and most financial things are private – and you need to help make the private public, and you can do that through storytelling. And so what we did fairly early on was we had great relationships with the parents and kids that were using our product and with their permission either encourage them to share their story on social and or enable us to share their stories on social. But we did so in such a way that the storytelling was, you were exposed to the storytelling, likely from someone in your community, in your city or someone that was relatable because their kids play in a particular sports league that your kids played in. So we made the private engagement with the product or public but did so in a way that you could relate to, and that was familiar to you. Rob: Wow. That's really intriguing and for the sake of Rahul, but as well as for the sake of your children, go check out Greenlight is a really, really cool product. I would encourage anybody listening to go have a look. I think the market is certainly validated that there is something there, there is value there, and I will vouch that there are good people working on it, so that's really exciting. Rahul, when you look ahead, when you look at what's coming up for 5&Vine, or maybe more broadly in the market of either marketing or innovation, what's exciting to you that's coming up? Rahul: So, we're evolving our business into a venture studio model where we are taking a bigger position in companies but taking on a higher level of risk in developing their brand, their websites, and their acquisition strategies. So, in essence, whereas a venture capital firm might put in dollars and then the use of proceeds is to do those things, we are doing the same thing, except we're giving all of our intellectual capital to these organizations to help them develop and accelerate them in exchange for more material equity positions. And that to me is unbelievably exciting because there's so much skin in the game. Where our future essentially depends on the success of those organizations and I'm just so excited to unleash more of the team's talents in bringing more socially responsible brands to market. Rob: That's interesting. And it's really interesting from a team compensation perspective, because oftentimes a lot of agencies will get into a model of some sort of profit sharing or distribution or something like that. How do you think about, is there any way you've been able to align the equity upside to the incentives of your team to kind of be staked into the long-term success of the clients? Rahul: Yeah, truthfully, not yet. But the model that I'm exploring – but I have not yet solved for – is the venture capital model. And my understanding of the venture capital model takes into consideration is: who’s working on the business, how long are they working on that business, and then what is the outcome? And then how do you proportionately share proceeds based on agency and risk and by agency, I think involvement. And that's the trickiest part of this model is that we all know there's turnover. People leave agencies for a variety of reasons and so you want to ensure if they contributed to the success of an organization, that they can benefit from it for the time that they were involved. But the related thing is to what extent does it impact their base compensation? Because it's a risk model and the risks or the return isn't necessarily generated in the first two years, five years, or even 10 years. Right? And so, I'm trying to figure out how to structure it in such a way that it's equitable, doesn't disadvantage people, also they're still able to live fairly, get compensated fairly, but benefit from that level of upside, knowing that it's the agency that's taking on the most risk. Rob: Right. I've been having some conversations lately with attorneys. I've been facing down a similar thing because coming from an investor-funded product business, as I have, but also a services business, which we are spinning up. What you run into, if you just follow a typical startup pattern of granting equity, not that you run out of equity, but you keep diluting people with people who are not there anymore. And on the one hand you want them to benefit from the upside maybe . . . probably . . . not at the expense of everyone, they’re not at the expense of maybe even an investor. So I've been tweaking with an idea, and I'm not sure if we're going to get anywhere with it, but if I can find an attorney who will make this format public the same way that some attorneys have made like safe notes and certain sorts of, investment instruments, they've made them public and sort of open source. What I've been thinking is to have people vest into a profit sharing and equity pool that they vest out of, they relinquish when they leave and that doesn't fully solve things. We had an episode where we talked to Soze, which is an agency out of Brooklyn. And they, it wasn't like Monte Python where they were an autonomous collective, but they said something kind of like that. It was a very like Brooklyn kind of hippy sounding, but really compelling and empathetic way where they, nobody owns that agency, they’re a co-op I think they said. So, everybody owns the share that they own for the time they've been there while they're there and then it goes back in the pool when they leave. And so, I think somewhat inspired by that I've been tweaking with ideas and I, I don't know where I will get with it. I hope if anyone else has some thoughts on it, I'd love to hear drop me an email. Rahul: Oh, that's fascinating. We should make sure to stay in touch on that one then. Rob: Yeah. I think it's something that needs to be solved for, I mean, a service business with an interest in the product, which is what we are, which is what you are. I don't know how many of those there are, but I'm a big believer in letting the team share in the upside. And it's a lot easier to reckon that I think on the services side, it's here's profit sharing. but it's, it's harder when it's longer term it's harder when it's, it's something that's not, it's not divisible in the same way.  Rahul: Yeah, fascinating. Rob: Well, Rahul, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5&Vine, where should they look for you? Rahul: Yeah, the best way is online. Our website is 5andvine.com. It's the number 5, A-, N-, D-, V-, like Victor, I-, N-, E.com. And as you referenced earlier, it's based on the David and Goliath story where David took five stones from a river and use that in a slingshot to take down Goliath. So, he made a Slingshot out of vine. So it's 5 and Vine Rob: That's a good, concise backstory as well. Well, Rahul, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your story and I'm sure the audience will benefit well from it Rahul: Much appreciated. Thanks so much for having me on. Rob: Be well. Bye-bye.  Thank you for listening. The marketing agency podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive to learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer at Colder Ice Media, started in e-commerce in 2000 on eBay. He claims that people talked about business in Ebay chat rooms, making it  “the first social commerce platform” before there was such a term. At the time, John sold bandanas, and was pestered by constant customer questions for information on “how to fold a bandana.” So, he made a video and tracked ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars in sales – from that single video listing. Today’s digital/social media was not the beginning of social commerce. John says, “No matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce” and that no matter the channel, there is always a person on the other end. If you appeal to human instinct, people will respond. Commerce, by its very nature, requires human interaction and “social” should be much more broadly defined. John explains that there are social channels that many people do not recognize as social, e.g., Amazon Comments. John wrote a book, Kickass Social Commerce, which offers universal stories of social commerce (as opposed to social media). In one story the book, he tells how Madam C.J. Walker, an African-American entrepreneur, developed a line of hair care products, marketed them to her friends, then sold them door to door, and finally had her friends set up “product presentation” parties for a cut of the sales, a sales strategy later used by such companies as Tupperware and Avon. Walker became the first self-made female millionaire in the US. John describes this as “early social marketing.” John presented “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today” at HubSpot’s 2020 Inbound Conference, where he talked about the phases of social that make people buy and “the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact.” Two key concepts he covered were: Identify and define your avatar, your King Consumer . . . and profile in detail a minimum of three people who would purchase your product. Establish a need for reciprocity. DO SOMETHING for your King Consumer that creates an imbalance that makes them feel that the need to do something for you in return. In a candid and enlightening history lesson, John also discusses how race has impacted the growth and development of black entrepreneurship. Thank you, John. John can be reached through “Colder Ice” on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – almost everywhere except on Tick-Tock. ROB: Welcome to the marketing agency leadership podcast, I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer of Colder Ice Media, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, thanks for having me, bro. ROB: Yeah. Good to have you here. If we were you know, if it weren't COVID, we might meet up in person. JOHN: Right? ROB: We have an Atlanta episode today. JOHN: Absolutely. ROB: Well, why don't you start off, John, by giving us a rundown of Colder Ice Media and what you all do exceptionally? JOHN: What I do exceptionally. I do e-commerce. Right. And I started my e-commerce business back in 2000 on eBay as a necessity. People were asking me the same question over and over, how to fold a bandana because I sold bandanas. It was annoying. So, I made a video on YouTube on how to fold a bandana. I would give everybody who asked that question that link. That bandana video went completely viral. Three hundred thousand people watched the video. Out of that, we were able to track ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars – but actual sales from that single video listing. That was like a cavalcade of understanding for me as people started asking me, “Hey, how do you do videos for selling stuff online?” I'm like, “Answer questions that people want.” That got me on stages. Finally I was like, “OK, if you need help with how to use social – the whole world of social – then that's what we did with Colder Ice Media. ROB: That's a very fun story. I can see why someone would put you on stage to talk about it. I think within that, at a tactical level, there's some cleverness, I think probably in your attribution –  because when you're talking about was not the easiest time to tie through who bought this thing. So how did you sort out that people were buying OR buying more of your product from that particular video? What was your tracking? JOHN: We would just look at the Google tag. Google tells you where traffic was coming from and we would see YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, and I'm like, “Dude, this is crazy.: And then, like you say, back in the day, the tools were not that deep, but they would show you the views. I would see these peaks and valleys in the number of views.  The week of Halloween, the peak would be 10X normal viewership. I had no idea that Halloween would be a great time to run specials selling bandanas. And I got that kind of information just by the volume of watchers during that Halloween week. So, it's if you take all of the parts, then you start seeing trends. You can't see a trend in a month. I know people think you can, but a real trend comes over years. When you see something happen three years, you can jump on and really take advantage of those little blips that other people are not able to see because they're just getting started. So, there's value in being there for a long haul, especially on social media. ROB: Wow. How many YouTube channels do you have in your orbit now? JOHN: Five. Yeah, I'm short. I will tell you one thing that I do – every time I get a new client, I create their own Google space – go out and create a Google account – because you need a Google account to create the YouTube. You're going to need that for writing or using their Google advertising. I will create that entire environment and isolate it for myself. What we do – we can show them the value of one-to-one versus, “Oh, by the way, here's some other tracking inside of your tracking.” I'm like, “No, we're tracking this. Put this in your cart so you can see exactly what our efforts are bringing to your business.” ROB: That makes perfect sense. You got this start in understanding on the video side, but you have this, I think, a broader intentionality around social commerce in general. How has that unfolded – your understanding from that first moment of “a video driving sales” to the broader portfolio of social platforms and tactics? JOHN: That's great . . . I like that question. What happened with me is I got really fascinated with Twitter in the beginning. I'm talking about . . . there were like one hundred thousand people on Twitter when I joined. What was fascinating for me is that I had created this business and I left the office space and I didn't have a whole lot of conversations anymore. So, I started using Twitter to just conversate with people while I was sitting at home in my home office. All of a sudden, it just started naturally moving into, “Hey, what do you do?” “Here's what I do.” “Oh, Ok.” Then I start talking about what I did. The e-commerce thing just started bringing other people in that were in the same field. That made me say, “Why or what is it about being or putting your expertise out that makes people suddenly feel like you are their expert?” You hear about this – everybody today will say, if you want to be an influencer, the first thing you do is start going to places and giving your expertise, There was no playbook when I was doing this. But I would watch this happen and it would happen organically. So, you start wondering. Social is very organic. I know people think it is some technology, but it's really not. I've traveled all over the world and no matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce. In that commerce marketplace, there's always at least one coffee shop where you have social. Social and commerce go together. I tell people. Facebook was not the first social platform neither was MySpace. Actually, eBay was the first platform. Why? Back in the day, we would sit in these chat rooms while we were waiting for eBay auctions to end. A lot of people were talking about business in those chat rooms. They were a social commerce platform way before there was a term. They were doing social because social has been here since chat boards and chat rooms. AOL was Facebook, 1990. Social has been here forever. And if you grasp what I'd like to call the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact  . . . it goes around and around in that flywheel. And that's kind of what I talked about when we were doing the Inbound thing. It was about the phases of social that make people buy. ROB: Let's get right into that. We were talking beforehand. We were probably hoping to meet up at the Inbound conference and record this live and in person or in Atlanta. But we're not meeting up for things like that right now. But Inbound still happened. HubSpot’s big Inbound conference, tens of thousands of people, maybe more – online. And your session there was “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today.” And so I'd love you to dig in and get us into some of the meat and potatoes, maybe some particular things that you saw resonate back out into your audience on Social because you probably were paying attention to that. JOHN: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'm all about and I tell people and Ok, I get it these do feel very, "Oh I've heard that before." And that's probably the problem is that if you've heard identify your avatar, I call him the King consumer. If you can identify and get in the mind of your King Consumer, then everything that you do after that speaks to that King Consumer. Create at least one. But I say really, at minimum three people that actually purchase your product. They can be real people or they can be fake people. Let's say you don't have your product in market yet, or you think you know who's going to buy that product when you create this King consumer, what you have to do is start thinking about everything that that consumer is into. I want you to go deep into your thought patterns about, not just what they're what they want, but what do they need, what situation are they in? How do they know how many kids do they have? What job do they have?  What are they what do they listen to? What do they say? What are some of the terminology they use? And the more you find that out, the better your business is going to be. I know when I created our business and I was selling those bandanas, I bought those because I was into hip hop and everybody in my neighborhood was wearing the bandanas. I could sell that to people in my sphere. But once I started putting it out there and getting the feedback from others, I was like, whoa, wait a minute; these aren't hip hoppers that are just buying these. These are the bikers. Oh, wow, that's cool. Like I said, people do in the Halloween. Oh, Ok. Cool. And once I started asking my people, hey, how are you using that? How did you like that? You got to definitely go out there and ask. You have to ask. What you're going to learn from your ask are things you're never going to be able to come up with in your own mind. Things that you think when you think that your product and you are your customer – you're not. You're absolutely not. So back to the original question. Identifying that King consumer is one of the things you have to do. The next thing I talk about was reciprocity. If you do something for others, there becomes an imbalance in them that makes them feel like they have to do something for you. That was the whole thing about me teaching people – and I didn't tell you that is the main question actually was – how to fold a bandana like Tupac. Right. And it's so ridiculous. But remember, this is early 2000s, so or late 2000. So, the deal was in my mind, I'm like; everybody knows how to do that. But here's the deal. The people between the East Coast in the West Coast – those flyovers would watch videos and they wanted the same look and they didn't know. Once I taught them how to fold that bandana, then when they were making their choice on who to buy one from, they automatically thought about, “Hey, those guys taught me how to do it.” And just by the nature of who we are, we wanted to make the balance inside of ourselves with reciprocity. So, I'll buy it from them. They might be a dollar more, but I'll go ahead and do it. So, you really want to think about that. That's human nature. We want to get in balance. We always do. If I ask all my friends to help me move, I know, when one of them asks me to help them move, I can't say no. That's reciprocity. Right? ROB: And it's even more helpful in it's not just that they want to know this information. It's that the Internet to an extent and social have made it possible to ask questions that you're too embarrassed to ask your friends. So, you're bailing people out of feeling silly that they don't know how to fold that bandana. JOHN: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Or, they don't even know who to ask. ROB: Yeah. And that continues on out to – I think you look at the some of the beauty influencers and all these makeup tips. There are people who want to know how to do something with their makeup and they are embarrassed that they cannot. Yeah. YouTube bails us out of that. YouTube bailed me out of not knowing how to fix my toilet . . . anything. JOHN: And think of who are the biggest beauty influencers out there – a lot of them are males. That's crazy, right? But you think these guys wanted to put on makeup and a lot of their audience maybe never did. So, who are you going to ask? Your sister? There's a whole lot I got to do before I ask my sister how to put on makeup, There’s a whole lot of steps I got to go through. ROB: Yeah, you're probably not going to get a straight up answer right away on that. JOHN: There's going to be some other conversation where exactly we need to have a deeper conversation. ROB: Amazing. I like how the story it started out. When did you realize that you were going to be into this world of social and commerce and Colder Ice Media for the longer run? Was that evident right away? Or was there something after the instigating moment that really cemented the business for you? JOHN: It was probably around 2012 2013. These guys were writing a column about eBay sellers and they asked me if I could do an interview as one of people who are eBay success stories. I agreed.  We get on the phone and were doing this interview and she's like, ”You’re one of ten people we're going to feature blah, blah, blah.” But we stayed on the phone for 80 to 90 minutes. And I was like, “Just for a feature piece, this is kind of weird.” We were just having good conversation. At the end of that call . . . she and her husband are a team and write together . . . . . . at the end of the call, they said, “John, man, that was really good stuff. I think we're going to make a multipart feature just on your business.”  I was like, “Really? That's pretty cool.”  And then he's like, “Hey, and if you ever think about writing a book, I'd help you because we've written twenty-two books and we'd love to help you.”  I was like, “Really?” I had never thought about writing a book before because I never thought I had much to say . . . or how much you need to say. But once we put the treatment together, it became my social commerce book. First. It was about social commerce, not just social media. But the key thing was, I don't care how many people like me – I want you to buy from me. There are a lot of people out here who have social influence but couldn't get people to piss on them if they were on fire – they don't really have the ability to move people. There's a difference between having likes and having people that will buy from you. And that's the big difference to me in social media. For me, it was all about the commerce portion. ROB: And what's the name of the book folks want to go . . . JOHN: Kickass Social Commerce. ROB: Excellent. Excellent. Any additional publishings of it or is it still pretty fresh? JOHN: You know what? Here's the thing. When I wrote the book, I wrote it forever. Yeah, right. I did. I literally did because the concepts, again, of social and purchasing go together. So, I grabbed all of these universal stories. And one of my major stories, he first story I talk about is a woman called Madam C.J. Walker. Have you heard of her? ROB: I am not familiar with her. JOHN: Great. Fantastic. So, I could tell this story if you don't mind. ROB: Go. JOHN: All right. So, here's the deal. Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American, a black woman. OK, I like that better. Right? She was a black woman and she created a scalp ointment because her hair was falling out from straightening it. She created an ointment that would keep her hair healthy. And other women saw her hair from going to where she had maybe patches, bald spots, and not healthy hair to these long, luxurious locks. People asked, “What are you using?” She had created this thing in her kitchen and she ended up going from her sink and to the bathtub to create larger volumes of it to sell to her friends. Well, the business starts growing and she starts going door to door to do sales. So that's the first part, right? You go from friends telling friends to going door to door. Her door to door sales grew so much that she realized that she was limited by the number of doors she could go to in a day, and that was hampering the growth of her base simply because there's only so many doors you can knock on. So, she came up with this great idea. She said, look, I'll get one of my clients that already buys for me to have a party and I'll go to the party and display my products at the party. Sound familiar? ROB: Mmm-hmm. JOHN: She was the one that created the model that today Mary Kay and Avon use. She created that and that was, again, social. You're expanding your network by using small influencers to bring their friends in and allowing you to do that demonstration. Of course, you would give them a cut for the party. Ultimately, she built a house bigger than the White House . . . and this was in 1918. This is she is the first self-made female millionaire in America. She was ranked number six of the top 10 entrepreneurs in Entrepreneur magazine for all time, one of the greatest success stories. But I tell this story because, as I was listening and reading and researching, I realized how social media can grow for commerce because. literally, she had her own, quote “Facebook” by doing what she did with these people. So, it's universal. I wrote from that understanding . . . from that standpoint. ROB: Yeah. You can imagine a version of a book on social commerce that would get nitty-gritty – focus very much on the popular channels, marketing channels of the day, would talk about specific ad-spending tactics – and it would have a very short shelf life. But I get the sense from talking to you that you define social channels – and you did this a little bit with eBay – you define that remarkably differently from many people. So, when we think about social channels today, what are some other channels you think may not be intuitively understood as social, but yet are extremely so? JOHN: Hmm, that's a good question. ROB: Because we could talk about Tick-Tock, but we don't and we can, but we don't have to. I don't think you could write a book with a long shelf life if that was your frame of mind. JOHN: Right. Because the channels always change their rules. Yeah. But if your understanding is, no matter what their handle is, there is a person on the other end and there are certain things that we . . . we as humans are just a higher level of animals and there's certain habits that we have that we're always going to use. No matter what channel you use to get there, if you nail that human instinct, they're going to respond to it. Here's what I give you that you wouldn't think of: Amazon comments. Amazon comment, that is a social channel. There are some people that do nothing but read and post or try things and post and then they read other stuff from people. And then they respond in those posts. They do this all day long. Why are they doing that? Because that's their social world. ROB: Hmm. Have you seen some people using Slack communities in a business context, maybe? JOHN: Yes, absolutely. Because what they're doing now is they're getting people away – moreso Reddit. I mean, Reddit, its killer. Reddit is really killer. But a Slack community is a great way to get people that are interested in a specific topic away from the distraction that is social media, especially in an election year. ROB: Hmm, right. Plenty of that. JOHN: There's so much of that. And people's moods are being changed sometimes by the constant back and forth in these major social channels like Facebook or Twitter. It gets distracting. So, you get your people out from there into a nice global world that doesn't have all the noise in it. ROB: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's almost in some cases, there's too much – If you were in a room, there are some rooms where there's too much shouting to be helpful. You can't help people who are in the middle of a fight. JOHN: Right. Exactly. It's like it's really hard to get my attention when there's a train wreck right in front of us. ROB: What does that pivot point look like? What's it look like? What's an example – help us kind of think through it and catalyze our thinking – of someone who's commenting on reviews on Amazon and they're selling something and it's driving – I understand it conceptually, but it's a bit abstract. Is there a concrete example you've seen where they comment on this thing because they were selling this other thing? JOHN: Well, what ends up happening is, if you comment a lot, Amazon flags you as a commenter. Once you get that known as a trusted source, once you get that flagging, then other people that are trying to get reviews by people that have that tag or that flag will start reaching out to send you products. ROB: Got it. JOHN: Right. So, here's the deal. Once you recognize that people are gravitating to you, starting to ask you for your opinion, you’ve probably got something going on there. I've got a client right now that built a business – and this is so weird – around selling old music media. So, it's flipping CDs. Who buys a CD today? Why don’t I get that? I didn't get that. I get it now. He's done six figures just teaching people how to look for CDs at garage sales and thrift stores. That's just amazing to me. You wouldn't think there was a community around that before this. I just never knew. So, there are a lot of niches – there are people that do nothing but needlepoint – there's a niche for darn near everything and it doesn't take a lot of people for you to reach out and find an audience that will either purchase from you or take your recommendations and purchase other things so you can become that influencer for that thing. ROB: Right. It's like the kind of the Kevin Kelly conversation, around a thousand true fans and there are lots of thousands of fans that are looking to be with him.  JOHN: Who did you say? ROB: Kevin Kelly, I think. JOHN: Who's Kevin Kelly? Wait a minute, is not the original? ROB: It might be. Where have you heard it most? JOHN: I'm just going to check this out because. Ok, says Kevin Kelly. Interesting. I'm thinking. Anyway, go ahead. Go ahead. I want to talk about it, Ok? KK.org got it. Technically. ROB: Yep. JOHN: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's funny you say that. When it first came out, I was so into that. The reason why I was into it, just to go a little bit backwards. is because I'm a huge Prince fan. When Prince left the label, he left a multi-million-dollar deal with Warner Brothers. He was like, “You know what? You can have my entire song category. I just want to be free.” And I was like, “What the hell?” Right after that, he put out his own album. This was the early 90s, He used like a chat room, basically a chat board, to sell a hundred thousand records. Now, this is a man that sold 10 million records for just his Purple Rain album and now he's selling a hundred thousand. And he said, “You know what? I made more off that hundred thousand records than I ever made off of Purple Rain. And when that thousand true fans came out, I was like, ‘Wow’.” That is the basis from where I teach. If you can get a thousand true fans, you’re in. ROB: That's amazing, I didn't know that story about Prince, but even in the music world, it brings me forward even to someone like Run the Jewels. Their first album, they put it on their website for free. And they kept on doing their albums for free. And now their albums are basically for free, even if on Spotify. But they were able to cut through a lot of noise and find their fans a lot faster, but still make a living and in a way that is far beyond just selling music. JOHN: Right. Most musicians don't make their money off selling music anyway. That's why they have to tour. Yeah. They have to tour to pay for everything because, I mean, the music business is an amazing thing. I don't want to go into how they really do their business, but let's put it like this: If you sell a million records, you're probably not a millionaire. ROB: Yeah, man. Well, John, this is this is quite a knowledge drop here. I hope that when we're back to meeting in person, people will get a chance to get out and see you and meet you and hear you. When people want to find you and when they want to find Colder Ice Media, where should they go to track you down? JOHN: Just put in Colder Ice. That's all you got to do. Put it in your browser and I will show up I'm Colder Ice on every platform. I am one of those branding crazy people that did that a long time ago. And I'm Colder Ice on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I don't care where you go. Pretty much I own Colder Ice except for Tick-Tock. Somebody stopped me on Tick-Tock. ROB: Oh man, that's tough. Well maybe you can make a phone call at some point and get it unlocked for Colder Ice. The handle you reserve when you were early on Twitter, did you get another good Twitter handle early. JOHN: Man, you are just pulling out all the good stories. But my name is so common. John Lawson. When I first looked it up, there were like eight million John Lawsons. I had the story in my head. I remember this story that back in segregation – a lot of people don't understand this, but African-Americans are some very original entrepreneurs, not because we had the entrepreneurial spirit – but you had to be an entrepreneur if you wanted to feed your family. You couldn't I couldn't walk into the regular grocery store and buy groceries back then. You had to have a black-only grocery store. There was a black-only cab company. There was a black-only bus company, black-only hotels. All of that. Run by black people because “white people wasn't sharing.” But literally, those storefronts that were serving the black community, the day that integration became the norm, they would see their customers walk right past their storefronts to go shop downtown. They came up with the saying, “Well, I guess the white man's ice is colder.” And I always remember that: colder ice. That's the story. ROB: Wow, I didn't know that either and you’re gracious in your history lessons. There's a lot of strong feelings tied up in that. I know. We're all trying to figure out different ways to actually be sorry and be better. JOHN: No, we're all getting better, man. That it's all good effects on your ear. That's the great story of America. ROB: Well, John, thank you for coming on again. I can't wait to get out and hear you share something in real life, but I appreciate you joining virtually as well. And I think our audience is better for it as well. JOHN: This was a great interview. I really had fun. ROB: Thank you. Thank you for listening. The marketing agency leadership podcast is presented by Converged. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting email info@convergehq.com or visit us on the web at Convergehq.com.

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

David Sonn is the Founder and President of Arc Intermedia, a HubSpot certified, digital only agency that focuses on “customer acquisition using digital strategies and digital tactics.” David ran a web development company for 13 years but found that he and his partner had become “production monkeys,” delivering a commodity and competing with offshore developers. “You never want to sell or have to build a model based on price,” he says. Ten years ago, when people started requesting Search Engine Optimization, David found his niche. Intrigued by the ability to precisely measure results, he founded Arc Intermedia -- and got out of the website building business and into the business of building businesses.  David may have started his agency “really slow and really small,” but he didn’t start “really cheap.” He hired the most experienced SEO and paid search experts he could find, people who could lead practice area development. He says, “When you’re a somewhat small agency that we are, every person counts.” Hiring and investing in the right people is critically important. In this interview, David provides a wide range of tips on building a strong digital business. Marketing initiatives need to start with strategy. When clients try to tell Arc Intermedia what they want the agency to do, David says it is critically important to understand “the good, the bad, and the ugly” about that business, to get to know the client well enough to discover things of which even the client may be unaware, and to know the client’s goals – what the client is trying to accomplish – before building the strategy and implementing the strategically determined tactics. As many people in marketing say, content is king. Marketers need to know how to leverage that content through SEO, distribution, credibility, and across social platforms. While a variety of tactics can be used get leads, to drive people to a website, to fill out a form, to give them “stuff,” people often resist filling out forms because they don’t want the sales calls that immediately follow. David recommends giving people something of value in exchange for their personal information.  The key to building customer relationships is nurturing potential clients through broad exposure on a variety of platforms and providing a variety of (non-sale) interactions. Use marketing automation to nurture clients to help close the deal. Clients often come to Arc Intermedia and request adding a particular tool, such as SEO, to their marketing mix. David reminds us that today’s digital marketing requires an integrated process to succeed. SEO, social presence, publication on an industry website or blog . . . these things “loosen the soil” and build the familiarity and credibility that makes a paid search or display ad work.  Customer acquisition is what “moves the needle for the bottom line of a company.” Paid search has evolved to a high level of sophistication. Precise targeting produces a wealth of data. Advertising on social platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – should be backed by “great strategy.” Knowing when to pivot, why you need to pivot, and having the ability to pivot is critical.  David describes paid search as a “sprint,” and SEO as a “marathon.” He feels that it is important for both parties to set their expectations realistically about what’s going to be accomplished when. He requires SEO contracts to be for at least 12 months – SEO takes that long to show a return. After a year, when he shows clients where they were in month zero and what has been accomplished in the year that followed, “the contracts basically renew themselves.” SEO on paid media optimized for terms and topics in high demand? He says, “It’s infinite traffic if you do it correctly.” David can most easily be found on his agency’s website at arcintermedia.com.   Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by David Sonn, President and Founder of Arc Intermedia based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, David. DAVID: Thank you. Hi, Rob. How are you? I appreciate you including me today. ROB: Great to have you here and have a little pre-call with you before this. Tell us about Arc Intermedia. What is this agency, and how did it get started? DAVID: Arc Intermedia is what I call a digital only agency. Why I need to make that designation is I’ve been around the block for a while, so I have experience in traditional advertising and that kind of thing, but with this agency, when I built this agency 10 years ago, I wanted to hyper-focus only on digital strategies and digital tactics. We basically will come to a customer that needs more customers. I don’t care if you’re Apple Computers or you’re a two-man band working out of a garage; everybody needs more customers. So we built this agency on customer acquisition using digital tactics. ROB: Got it. How long has the business been around? DAVID: I founded this 10 years ago. Oh, by the way, we’re 10 years old this year. ROB: Happy birthday. Anniversary, whatever you want to call it. DAVID: Thank you. [laughs] Yes. ROB: The digital tactics even over that time have changed a lot. What were the tactics on Day Zero when it’s you and – were you by yourself? Did you have partners in the earliest stages of the firm? DAVID: I’m going to back up and tell you a little different story. I promise, promise, promise to get there. Before I had Arc Intermedia, back in 1996 I founded one of the first interactive firms in Philadelphia. When we went into business, and I had a partner at the time, we built websites. At the time, 1996, a lot of companies didn’t even have websites yet. There was no roadmap whatsoever. We thought this was a fantastic idea. We thought, hmm, this internet thing has a chance to stick around. So we built a company around it without a real plan. We raised some money from friends and family and just got after it. We made a lot of mistakes, but it was all good. 13 years of success proved that out. But I did find that when I had that web development company, we basically became production monkeys. Clients began to tell us what they wanted, what colors, this, this, and this, and we just became builders, not thinkers or advisors. When you’re in that space and you begin to try to build a commodity like that, you’re now competing against the whole world. And oh by the way, it’s really hard if you think you’re going to compete against offshore solutions on price. You never want to sell or have to build a model based on price. I began to look at the business and say, hmm, is this really what I want to continue to do? Near the tail end of it, we began to get more and more requests for SEO, search engine optimization. We were building these websites, but no traffic was coming to them. Clients wanted us to do SEO. I began to get my hands involved in SEO, and then jointly, paid search – way, way, way back, the origin of that was – I don’t know if you remember the GoTo Network? It was the beginnings of all of it. ROB: Oh yeah. DAVID: I got my hands involved in the GoTo Network, and I got real excited. I’m like, look, we can build out some strategies. We have some money, and we instantly can begin to drive traffic to these websites. Then I had clients calling me up and telling me that they were getting all these sales leads and things were changing, and what was going on at the website? That was a light bulb moment for me. I really didn’t want to be involved in the web building business anymore. I wanted to be in the business building business. I got real excited. Being an entrepreneur, I started to get that itch again. I’m like, I built this company and it’s now been 12-13 years. I think it’s time for me to bust a move into something else that I want to do. This customer acquisition piece – the part that actually moves the needle for the bottom line of a company – became very exciting to me. Then I did, and now back to your original question, I began to explore some of these original tactics much further. I didn’t see any companies out there specializing in it. The agencies of the land, the traditional ad agencies, still wanted to spend your money on radio and TV and that kind of stuff and things that couldn’t be measured. As scary as digital is in that you can measure right down to the penny, to the click, to this, to that, that actually was really, in some weird way, extremely enticing to me. That we could see it, we could measure it, and I could stand up and find the client and say, “I succeeded” or, hopefully not, “I failed.” But for some reason that was an incredible, incredible attraction to me. I decided that it was time to dissolve the web development company, and I launched Arc Intermedia, but this time I decided to start really slow, really small on purpose. It was myself and Mike Maier, who came over with me. It was just the two of us, and we started the company. We hyper-focused on some of the basic tactics of the day. There was SEO; it was much different than it is today, but it was SEO, and there was the paid search and that piece. Then as I began to see what was working for customers, the different technologies and tactics that were evolving, I began to build the experts around it. I went out and got one of the best SEOs, Ron Sansone, in the Philadelphia area, and he began to build out our search practice. From him, I added more people with SEO experience, paid search experience. Rasheed Hendricks heads up our paid advertising department, and he’s just absolutely fantastic. That piece is ever-evolving. And then, as you probably have heard from doing many of these interviews, content is king. You need to know how to leverage content. Content can be leveraged from an SEO standpoint, from a distribution standpoint, from a credibility standpoint, from a social standpoint, all of it. You and I were talking a little bit about how we’re HubSpot certified. Katie Schieder on my team is in charge of content and content marketing, and she does a fantastic job with her team. There’s a lot of different pieces, and I know I’m maybe sounding like I’m rambling right now, but hopefully I answered your question. ROB: One thing I hear in there is a strong recognition and appreciation for a team of experts in the different subject areas. One thread I want to pull on a little bit that’s unique about your story is you mentioned in your previous business, the web development shop, that you had investors. We talk a good bit about investors, but what we most often talk about on this podcast is people who are proud and grateful to not have investors, and maybe sometimes a chip on their shoulder because they know other people who have raised money and have gone out of business. What did you learn from having investors, and what would you say to other people who think they wish they had investors? You mentioned it was friends and family, so we didn’t go out and raise $100 million, but still there are entailments to that. DAVID: There is nothing – nothing – sexy about having investors. Zero. Now, I was super fortunate that we ended up raising money through friends and family. And oh by the way, that was because no bank would touch us. When we had a plan to build a web development company back in 1996, every bank says, “Oh, that’s fantastic, but I need a 150% collateral that we are going to freeze for every dollar that we give you.” If I had a 150% collateral that I could do, I wouldn’t be sitting at that bank looking for money. That was just silly. So obviously that never went through. But we were fortunate that we were able to do it through friends and family and a lot of people who supported us. I will tell you, there’s an incredible extra weight on your shoulders because you don’t want to fail them. In my mind there was no chance, ever, in any way, shape, or form, that I wasn’t going to return every dollar back to the people that invested in us – and then some, of course. My success was definitely going to be their success, and I was going to make sure that happened regardless, even if it meant that I was going to pay that money back personally. I was going to get it done. When you’re taking VC money, that’s a different approach and you can’t always do all of that. But having investors is not sexy or anything that you should really go for unless you absolutely have to. Now, when I had Arc Intermedia, the one thing that was to my benefit was that I was going to start small, and I’m also now a little bit older, a little bit wiser. I self-funded my whole thing. The beauty there is, I never had anybody standing on my shoulders. I never had anybody that I had to answer to in that regard. So my advice would be try, try, try to do it on your own or figure out a way to do it on your own or try to figure out where you can get investment from people that trust and believe and love you, and then the VC thing is separate. Last. ROB: Right on. I think I would perceive in the web world, when you talk about the ’90s, you’ll hear a lot about some of the sticker prices people paid for pretty simple websites by our standards. You’ll hear half a million, a million, 10 million. You mention competing with offshore now and this race to the bottom. Certainly it has been cheaper and cheaper to get a pretty good website. You can pay a kid from a high school and get something pretty decent. You can pay a pro less than you would pay one person in a year for sure. You don’t see that same race to the bottom in the marketing world. You can’t get 10 times as much marketing for the same price as you could 5 years ago. What do you think it is that keeps it from becoming a race to the bottom where some high school kid can hop out and just crush your B2B marketing? DAVID: Because there’s so much more that goes into it. The tools now are very sophisticated with paid search and all the data you can get back and the targeting you can do, if you’re going to do advertising on social platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that. But at the end of the day, there has to be some really great strategy in there, and there has to be the ability to pivot and the eye to know when to pivot or why you need to pivot. Then the other part of it is the customer. Can the customer tell you what their cost of acquisition needs to be? Or can you then prove it out? For example, Rob, if I said to you, “Hey, you give me $1,000 bucks, and for every $1,000 bucks you give me, I’m going to give you $10,000 back in business,” you would do that all day long. You would figure out how many thousands you could give me so I could give you tenfold back. To answer your question, I think that only happens if you really have the people that have the expertise and the daily eye on this stuff to really know what works. The customer acquisition piece and the journey and all the points in between, it doesn’t happen by chance. It’s not by luck, and it’s also not subjective. You used websites as the example. We can sit here and argue that the homepage needs to be a shade of blue or maroon or what have you, and maybe we’re both right. Who knows? But at the end of the day with digital marketing, either I’m driving results and giving you a positive return or I’m not. I think that’s the difference. ROB: That makes sense. There’s infinite rounds of competition, and there’s a level of spending that’s always going to meet the value. The value of what people buy online keeps on going. People are buying more stuff online, and you need smarter people to drive those tools as you go. You mentioned some key folks that you have on your team, and you had clearly built a team before with your web dev shop. How did you think about assembling your team differently as you were building your second business? DAVID: This is probably an old adage that you’ve heard before, but it’s always hire slow, fire fast. Thank God, I’ve not had to fire anybody at Arc Intermedia. I’ve got that great of a team. That’s actually one of the things that I really do hang my hat on. In 10 years, we’ve never had anybody leave but one person, and it was more or less just a career change in that case. We still remain friends with that young woman to this day. But hiring the right people on the front end and making an investment in the right people is critically important. What my process was – and I’m going to use the SEO one as an example because it’s clean and easy – I began to see in the marketplace that SEO was critically important, but I also could see that I could build a business around it. When I wanted to go and build the SEO, I didn’t want to just hire a mid-tier person or an entry-level person or something where we were going to, together, learn it on the fly. Rather, I thought the most important or better move was to make the investment in a senior level person who had been doing it and we could build off of that person and let that person build out the practice, if you will. That’s my approach. When you’re a somewhat small agency that we are, every person counts. We’re mean and lean and there’s no place to hide, and everybody has to be able to show for what they bring to the table. My entire team, basically, is built with fairly senior level people that I would say are experts in their field. It’s just been a much better approach than what I’ve seen others do. ROB: How do you think about positioning? When you have a senior person, that SEO offering also has to be a little bit of a premium offering. SEO certainly can have one of the highest long-term ROIs, but it can also be one of the slowest marketing tactics to start to bear fruit. How do you walk a customer along expectations around the sticker price you need to show them to bring the team that you have to bear on SEO? DAVID: You actually used my word, expectations. You’ve got to set the expectation correctly up front. As a joke, we say SEO is the marathon, paid search is the sprint. If you begin to lay out and set those expectations, both parties can get their head around what’s going to be accomplished when. Part of that is, with SEO, we will not take on a contract that’s less than 12 months, and the reason being is it is completely unfair to judge us on anything less than 12 months. 3 months in, if you were to look at what we were doing, you’d say, “You guys don’t know what you’re doing” or “This is a complete waste of money.” And they’d be right, because there wouldn’t really be the return in 3 months. Wouldn’t really be the return there in 6 months. But what you’ve got to do is look at a plan that’s been executed correctly over a 12-month period, step back and say, “This is where we were month zero. Now look where we are.” Honestly, the contracts basically renew themselves because once you can show what can be delivered with SEO – and the beauty of SEO on paid media – it’s infinite traffic if you do it correctly. If you’re optimizing for terms and for topics that are in high demand, you can drive a great deal of traffic. And then if you have set up your customer journey correctly on the website and begin to show those conversions and whatever it may be, whether it be ecommerce or registrations or sales leads or what have you, it kind of sells itself if you do it correctly. Now, as far as a high ticket, SEO is a very difficult industry. It’s getting a bit better, but we’re constantly up against the – I don’t know what to really call them outside of where they begin to make promises for SEO for $200 a month. We’re always fighting against that. But our price point – and you’ve got to remember it’s all labor-based, so people need to get paid. Especially when you have senior level people that you alluded to, they’ve got to get paid and you’ve got to offset those costs. So yeah, good SEO is not cheap, but I will tell you this: look at an SEO contract for 12 months, the cost of it, and compare that to some kind of media play. Compare that to a TV or radio campaign. Or even sometimes the money we really need to move the needle in paid search just because the search terms may be very costly, and if you don’t have X amount of dollars, you’re spitting in the wind. You’d be foolish to think you’re going to get any kind of return because you can’t drive the volume to get the return. In the grand scheme of things, SEO is actually not expensive if you’re comparing it correctly. ROB: Right, it just doesn’t track as quickly. “I did X dollars of SEO this month and it generated this amount of results.” You have to be more patient than that. We have talked a good bit about SEO. I know that is where you started, but I know you’ve also been thoughtful about layering in other service offerings to the business. What have you added in, and how did you reach those decisions of starting to embrace something where a lot of times agencies will partner on offerings they’re not ready to do or ready to do yet? DAVID: I often find clients will come to us, and sometimes they will have a need. The need may be that they need more sales leads or they need to sell X amount more widgets. But often they come to us with a tactic in mind. For example, “We need to do SEO.” “Why do you need to do SEO?” It’s just because that’s what they’ve been told, that’s what they’ve heard, that’s what they may not be doing. They may not be coming up in the search results, so they think that’s what they need. But really what we’re seeing today now in digital marketing is it’s more of what we call an integrated approach. It’s the SEO, it’s the presence on social, it’s the being published on an industry website or a blog that begins to loosen up the soil so that when we do finally hit them with a paid search ad or a display ad, they’ve seen us before. There’s some kind of credibility that’s been built up just because they’ve seen us in multiple places, and we’ve nurtured them along and we can close the deal. Many of these things now work so hand-in-hand, and again, we always want to start strategy first. Don’t tell us what to do; tell us what you’re trying to accomplish. Then once we understand the goals and we’re all on the same page with the goals, we’ll build out the strategy. Then the strategy will dictate the tactics. That then leads into, what did we think made sense to bring in-house? With SEO, the counterbalance was the paid search. We had started doing some paid search from the very beginning, but not to the level of what we’re doing today and what we needed to. That was a no-brainer, to make sure we headed up that department with paid search. Paid search is nice because people are looking for your exact service. In fact, paid search is one of my favorite forms of advertising because it’s people actively looking for what you have. You just need to get in front of them. Conversely, people who are a bit more passive or are not actually searching, we need to prospect. And the best way to prospect is through display advertising or social advertising and those kinds of things. Again, having that piece of the pie just made a ton of sense of another piece that we need to layer on. Now, we can talk all day long about different tactics of driving people to a website, to filling out a form, to be giving them stuff, but the place that I see people now fall short of is you’ve got the sales lead; now what? The customer fills out a form. One of the reasons they don’t want to fill out a form is because they know immediately they’re going to get a phone call from a salesperson, and that’s the last thing they want. So you’ve got to look at it a bit differently. “Hey, fill out this form and I’m going to give you something of value.” I always say you’ve got to give something to get something. Maybe they fill out the form to get some kind of a free tool or a download or a piece of advice or a consultation or something like that. But if you’re really, really going to do this and you think you’re going to get a return on that initial investment, you’d better be able to nurture. The nurture piece comes in with this marketing automation. For example, I know I’ve already said it before, but we’re HubSpot certified, and that platform allows us to do a lot of different things. We can do email marketing and we can manage the workflow all the way through. If they open this email and they click on this, we know that they’re demonstrating X interest in something, and we can then take them down the next path of providing them the next piece of content. We can nurture and we can build that relationship without the phone call, without the salesperson getting after them. So having the marketing automation piece was something we absolutely needed to bring in because we were doing such a fantastic job with driving leads on the front end that we needed to have the nurturing piece on the back end. ROB: It seems like you not only are comprehensive in the different services you provide, but you have to be comprehensive in your understanding of the business to be able to nurture leads along. You can get a first conversation, but to be able to nurture and build trust and credibility with somebody else’s customer is not something you can get from just an onboarding form for a new client. How do you get to that depth of knowledge where you’re actually building trust on behalf of a business that’s not yours? That’s a challenge. DAVID: You’re right, it really is. I’ll tell you, we get down into the weeds to the nth degree of some stuff that I never thought I needed to know about, from tuberculosis testing to hospice care to minor league baseball to all kinds of stuff. If you’re willing to make a commitment to a new client – and to be honest with you, we do say no. There’s times that we’re like, “This isn’t going to be a fit for us for XYZ reasons.” But when you finally say, “I am going to commit to you,” commit means I’ve got to learn your business, and I’ve got to find the skeletons in the closet. I’ve got to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly. Honestly, it’s a constant learning process. We often will do onboarding with a client and we’ll try to learn and glean as much information as we can, and as we launch programs, we begin to understand that what they were telling us is completely wrong. And they didn’t even know it. So there’s that piece of it too. Also, there’s times where we’ll do pilot programs of things just to begin to gather data. I’d like to believe that our team is very smart, and we have a lot of experience to begin to make some great guesses. But at the end of the day, we’re not always right. You’ve got to look at the data. You’ve got to really look at what’s happening in a given space and then be ready to pivot and think about things completely differently than when you went into it. But it’s ongoing. There’s no end to it. I’m still learning about tuberculosis and all those kinds of things. [laughs] ROB: It’s more and more valuable for more and more people to be marketing online. David, when you are looking at what is next for you and what’s next for Arc Intermedia and marketing in general, what are you excited about? DAVID: One of the things I’m excited about – we’re in a horrible global pandemic, and one little tiny, tiny good thing that’s come out of this from a digital marketing standpoint is I’m now having clients who we’ve been talking to about this for a long time understand that the lion’s share of the budget really does need to start going to digital. Digital can deliver. It can be measured, and it’s the one actually bringing in the leads. Just in this past 6 months, we’ve had a number of clients tell me that they’re going to do major shifts in their budget for 2021 more towards the digital space. Why that makes me excited is if you give me more budget, I can do more things. I can expand out that integrated approach. I can go deeper in different tactics and strategies that we maybe have been pushing for that we couldn’t just straight up because of budget. We can get after more of the content marketing piece, the content distribution piece. We can begin to see how we can tie different paid tactics to some other things that we’re doing on the site. We can also look at different offer types and incentives to help ring the bell. ROB: That makes sense. The margin for execution on a small budget – there’s just not a lot of room for mistakes or a lot of room for experimentation. I can absolutely see where having real digital budgets is a meaningful thing. David, when people want to track you down, when they want to connect with you and with Arc Intermedia, where should they go to find you? DAVID: Of course, we have that wonderful website that we’ve just done some updates to. We’ve even got our anniversary video out on the homepage, so I would direct everybody to arcintermedia.com. A lot of people find me on LinkedIn because that’s a super easy way. Occasionally some people may find me over on Twitter. But I would say website. ROB: [laughs] Sometimes we find a different version of ourselves over on Twitter. DAVID: Yeah, I think I’m pretty good on that front. [laughs] For the most part. You won’t me on Facebook, I will tell you that. ROB: Got it. Just have to have a shadow account to manage some of the client relationships? [laughs] DAVID: We have a love/hate relationship. I love the data that Facebook gives us to market on behalf of our clients. I’m not super fond of participating on Facebook myself. ROB: I understand completely. Even after they ban QAnon, who knows what’s next? Or if they’ll actually accomplish that. Who knows? Anyhow, David, good to connect with you. Good to have you on the podcast. Congratulations on 10 years of Arc Intermedia, and really of making a living going out and killing your own food for much longer than that with the web dev shop before that. DAVID: Yes indeed. Working without a net. ROB: [laughs] Indeed. Thank you so much, David, and be well. DAVID: Rob, I really appreciate your time. Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

Jay Taylor is the Managing Director of Leverage, an award-winning digital marketing agency and Certified Google Partner. Leverage partners with its client brands to help them dominate their market with custom-tailored, location-based digital marketing strategies and concentrates on verticals in legal, healthcare, real estate and construction. The goal is to position a client company at the top in terms of search visibility and digital presence for each of a client’s geographic locations and practice areas. Key to this effort is utilizing a “hybrid strategy,” embedding websites with obvious search terms and then including other less competitive, highly targeted keywords. Jay provides the example of a “Tampa personal injury attorney,” whose keywords might also include “Tampa dog bite injury attorney” and “Tampa slip and fall attorney.” While great content is essential to successful SEO, the agency recommends adding paid search, PPC, Google Ads . . . all of these combined can be “very effective.: The goal is to get a client’s site to show up once on the first search results page, and quite possibly once on the second or third pages, with a possible first position in Organic . . . AND in the paid results above that AND in the right-hand side knowledge panel.  Is that enough? Not yet.  Jay believes reputation management is essential for establishing a successful online presence and even more critical for establishing a successful search presence. Companies need to have a reputation generation and management strategy running alongside their SEO and PPC efforts. The objective is to beat competitors with both the number of reviews AND with a higher average rating. Perception: More ratings + higher average rating = CLEAR WINNER! Jay started his career in marketing working at someone else’s agency. He studied finance and marketing while pursuing his MBA and started Leverage Digital upon graduation in 2006-2007, way too soon, he says, in retrospect. A few more years of experience at an established agency would have provided him with the opportunity to learn how run an agency, “from sales to operations to account management,” and to understand the services. He confesses to googling “how to write an invoice” upon securing his first client. Jay gave himself a deadline of “being profitable within 12 months” and two years later started hiring staff so the agency could grow. At the same time, he shifted his personal focus from technical work to working on client strategy. Today, Leverage’s creative team handles design and copywriting, the development team handles programming and website development, and the account management team services the accounts. When Covid-19 struck, his agency went remote. They are back in the office now, masked, and with social distancing measures in place. They meet with clients either remotely or in person, depending on the client’s preference – but the focus is always “on safety.” Jay defines agency growth more In terms of growing the size of the accounts they have rather than adding to the number of accounts.  Leverage has received a number of industry accolades and honors, including those from the International Davey Awards, Hermes Awards, W3 Awards, and Communicator Awards. In 2018, Leverage was named the 9th fastest growing company owned or led by a University of South Florida alumnus. Jay notes that it important “to focus on your strengths and be the best in your area of expertise and not try to be all things to all people.” Jay can be reached on his agency’s website at leveragedigital.com and on LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/jaytennysontaylor Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Jay Taylor. He is the Managing Director of Leverage, based in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Jay. JAY: Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Leverage. What is your specialty? What is your superpower?  JAY: Sure. We are a digitally focused agency here in Tampa Bay. We are specialists in helping our clients engage their customers at the local level with custom tailored location-based digital marketing strategies. Essentially, what that means is that whether our client has one location or 100 locations, we help them dominate each of the markets that they serve in terms of their search visibility and their overall digital presence. ROB: With that in mind, help us flesh out that idea a little bit. What are some examples of types of clients that you tend to work with? JAY: We have concentrations in the legal, healthcare, real estate, and construction verticals. A good example would be a law firm. Let’s say a law firm that has five different locations in five different markets. Each of these locations really needs to be front and center whenever somebody is searching for whatever the practice area may be. Let’s say they’re searching for a personal injury attorney. If their customers search for a personal injury attorney within one of the markets that they serve, we need to make sure that our client is populating at the top of the search results for that particular search within their market. Then we replicate that for each of their markets. Again, whether they’re serving one market or five markets or more, we make sure that they dominate the search results in each of those markets. ROB: That’s really interesting. For the example you gave of personal injury attorneys, they can be, shall we say, very aggressive marketers. I would imagine some of those search terms are pretty competitive. What is the state of the art in 2020 to get somebody ranking for the terms they want to rank for in a local market? JAY: That’s an excellent question. Everyone tends to go after the obvious search terms. We actually try to avoid those. We try to help our clients outmaneuver their competition in terms of the search terms or keywords that they’re going after. Sticking with the personal injury example, a law firm here in Tampa that specializes in personal injury are going to, in most cases, want to target “Tampa personal injury lawyer.” That’s an obvious term that all of their competition is going to be going after. It’s very competitive, and probably not the best use of resources. What we would recommend or advise is, hey, instead of putting all our resources into going after a handful of highly competitive keywords, let’s go after lots of less competitive, highly targeted keywords. Let’s go after “Tampa dog bite injury attorney” or something along those lines, or “Tampa slip and fall attorney,” something that’s not as obvious and not something that all of your competitors are also going after. By having that what we call hybrid approach where, yes, we’re going after the competitive search terms as well, but we’re also going after a lot of the less competitive, more targeted search terms – and by more targeted, I mean they’ll convert at a higher rate – we are able to help our clients compete at a lower cost and also outmaneuver their competition. ROB: That sounds like a meaningful long-tail strategy. That informs a little bit of what terms you’re targeting, but sticking a little bit into how are you targeting, in 2020 is this still a game of content marketing? Is it crafting specific pages really well? Are there supplemental non-SEO strategies that are coming to bear there? JAY: Absolutely, all of the above. Content marketing is a significant component if we’re talking about organic search or search engine optimization. Content really is the foundation of a successful SEO campaign. We do recommend adding a paid search component. SEO and paid search or PPC or Google Ads, whatever you want to call it, combined can be very effective. What we like to do is help our client literally dominate the search results page for each of the keywords that they target. What I mean by that is, instead of just showing up once on the search results page – let’s say they show up once in the second or third, maybe even the first position in organic. We also want them to show up in the paid results right above that, and we also want them to show up in the knowledge panel on the right hand side. We refer to that essentially as the holy grail, if you will. We have them listed three times on the Google search results page for one single keyword. And if we can replicate that for 20 keywords or 30 keywords, that is a very effective overall search marketing strategy that consists of both organic and paid search. ROB: Makes plenty of sense. One thing we’ve often heard when it comes to local marketing is the challenge of local reputation management, of ensuring that your contact information, whether due to a lack of maintenance or due to maliciousness, is not being shown as incorrect. Is there much of a trend around the need for reputation, or is Google getting better about that, and Bing and Yelp and so on? JAY: Reputation management is critical in terms of establishing a successful online presence in general. I believe it’s even more critical when we’re talking about establishing a successful search presence. What we advise our clients is that you cannot have a successful search presence without also having a great online reputation. We typically advise having a reputation management strategy in place that coincides with your SEO and PPC efforts. When somebody finds your website on Google, as an example, they see that you have fifty 5-star reviews while your competitors probably have fewer reviews than that, and they’re probably going to be somewhere right around 3 to 4 stars while you’re closer to 5 stars. Because of the volume of reviews that our client has and because their overall rating is going to typically be higher than their competition, they’re going to be the clear winner from a perception standpoint that a prospective customer might have when they find them after performing a search. ROB: Reviews have certainly become a battleground for getting noticed. These days, some businesses almost have so many growing reviews that there’s a question of authenticity around that. How are you seeing that question of, “Are these reviews for real?” And sometimes maybe they’re even not for a competitor. JAY: That’s interesting. One thing that I see is sometimes all of the reviews will come from people who work for the company. That’s great; it’s great to get feedback from your employees, from your staff, and it’ll give you that 5-star rating on Google in particular. That is good to a certain extent. There’s nothing wrong with getting reviews from your employees, again, getting positive feedback. But at the same time, that’s not what your customers are looking for. If they dig a little further and they start to actually read the reviews, they’re going to quickly discover these aren’t reviews coming from other customers. These are reviews coming from employees of the company, and they’re probably not going to have much faith in those reviews. It’s much more effective, much more powerful to have reviews from actual customers. It’s pretty obvious when a real customer is leaving a review versus somebody that is not being authentic. Sometimes you’ll see a review that’s way over the top and it almost sounds like it came straight from the owner. And in some cases it might have. It’s pretty obvious. I definitely would not recommend that. We recommend developing a review generation strategy, having a system, a program in place to request legitimate reviews from legitimate customers. That’s the best way to handle it. ROB: So getting reviews just becomes a process you execute as a business, just like you would pay your bills and order supplies and whatnot. JAY: Absolutely. It just becomes a part of your marketing strategy. ROB: Perfect. Jay, if we rewind a little bit, what is the origin story of Leverage? How did you get into this business? JAY: It’s a pretty long story, so I’ll give you the short and sweet version. While I was getting my MBA, I figured out that I wanted to start working in the marketing and advertising industry. I got a job working at an ad agency here in Tampa and really fell in love with the work, fell in love with the day to day challenges. I was studying both financing and marketing while I was getting my MBA, so I was learning the theoretical side of marketing, but I was also getting the practical experience at my job. This was right around 2006-2007, and then the recession hit and I said, “Probably not the best time to start a business, but I’ve always wanted to start a business.” At that point in time, I was right out of school. Really didn’t have a lot to lose at that time of my life. So, I said, “I’m going to take the risk and I’m going to do it now because it’s now or never.” That was my mindset. I took what I learned in school, I took what I learned working at that advertising agency, and I used that to help launch Leverage. This was in 2008. At that point in time it was just me, and I was working out of my house. Bootstrapped. I didn’t take any loans. I didn’t borrow any money from my parents or anyone. I really started with a few hundred bucks and used that to purchase my equipment, purchase the necessary software. I did everything. I designed the websites, I programmed the websites, I did the SEO, I ran the Google AdWords, as it was called at that time. I did everything. Then after doing that for a little while, I realized, “If I want to grow, I have to start to hire.” I also realized that I really enjoyed working on the strategy side of things with clients, and if I was building websites and doing a lot of the technical work, I didn’t really have time to work with my clients and communicate with my clients and work with them on developing their marketing strategy and overseeing that. So, I started to hire and fill those roles that were needed to meet our clients’ needs and ensure that we were providing them with the best outcomes, because I certainly wasn’t the best graphic designer. I certainly wasn’t the best programmer. I went to school for business. I didn’t go to school for these things. So, I hired experts who did, and here we are. It’s been a long road, but a good journey, a fun journey. ROB: At what point on that journey did it become clear to you that this was going to be able to be more than an experiment and a “why not?” and that you were probably going to be doing this thing for a while? What did that look like? JAY: I gave myself one year and I said, “I want to build a profitable business within 12 months. I have to be able to support myself within 12 months, and if I cannot support myself within 12 months – meaning be able to comfortably pay my rent, buy my groceries, have food on the table, put gas in my car – if I can’t do those things after 12 months comfortably, then I’m going to go get a job.” So, to answer your question, I gave myself a 12-month deadline and I was able to meet those goals. I was able to get to a point after that first year where I was still working out of my house, but it was comfortable. It wasn’t a situation where I felt like I was being stretched too thin. By Year 2, I was able to rent my first office. By Year 3, I was able to begin hiring employees. Year 1 was by far the toughest, and then after Year 1, I really started to gain some traction and go from being a solopreneur, as it’s called, to building a team and having a legitimate operation. ROB: I’m going to press in a little bit. I think a lot of people would want to know – just wondering how other people are handling work life and structure as we’re 6 months into this COVID pandemic. How did you first adjust your team structure and working patterns, and what does that look like for you now, in October 2020? JAY: We went remote for a while, especially when things heated up in terms of the pandemic, when things got really bad there for a little while. We went remote. We thought that that was the responsible thing to do, the prudent thing to do. It was challenging because we’re a very collaborative environment. We’re in the office every day. So, it was challenging, and we really relied on technology to help us get through that. Lots of Zoom calls. As of today, we are for the most part back in the office. We’ve altered the way the office is situated so that everybody remains 6 feet apart. Everyone’s wearing masks. It’s a very safe environment. We want everybody here so that the collaboration can continue. And yes, you can collaborate through Slack and other means, but that face-to-face interaction I feel really helps us deliver the best outcomes for our clients, and ultimately that’s what we’re here for: our clients. So, we maintain a safe environment, but without sacrificing that collaboration that really allows us to achieve the best outcomes for our clients. ROB: That’s really helpful context there. What are you seeing in terms of clients and their receptiveness to meet? You mentioned you have multi-city clients, so some of them I’m sure you would get on planes to talk to. Where are clients at in this day and age? JAY: For the most part, they’re fine meeting via Zoom. We have meetings pretty much every day with clients via Zoom. It’s worked out just fine. A lot of our clients are not local. That was not uncommon before, so it really hasn’t impacted the way we do things now. But we do still meet with clients in person here at our office in Tampa if they’re local and they prefer to meet in person – of course, adhering to social distancing guidelines. So, it’s a little bit of a mix. But I would say that our clients who are local do have a preference in some cases, still, to meet face to face. ROB: Got it. Little bit of everything, and I’m sure it comes and goes a little bit. JAY: And Rob, I just want to mention this. At the end of the day, we’re here because of our clients. We try to be flexible and meet our clients the way they want to meet. If they prefer to meet by Zoom, then that’s what we do. If they prefer to meet in person, then we make that work as well. Ultimately, taking care of them is our number one priority. ROB: Absolutely. Jay, when you reflect on the life of Leverage so far, what are some things you might do differently if you were starting from scratch today? JAY: [laughs] I laugh because that is a very easy question to answer. I would have stayed with the agency that I started with a little bit longer. I think I probably jumped in with both feet a little prematurely. I think there would’ve been a lot of value in continuing to work with that agency, and if not that agency, another established agency to gain more experience and just learn more about the business before going out on my own. But of course, like every twenty-something, I thought I knew everything. I thought I had it all figured out. At that age you tend to be very confident in yourself and your capabilities, even though you probably don’t know as much as you think you do. I suffered from that affliction and decided I was going to do it right then and there. So definitely getting a little bit more agency experience before venturing out on my own is what I would have done differently in hindsight. ROB: What are some of the things you think you might have learned staying and learning in that agency environment faster than you did on your own, or you had to maybe take some lumps? JAY: I think there were probably a number of things. I think I would’ve learned a bit more about the business itself. Just how to run an agency, and just the simple – everything from sales to operations to account management, and then of course the actual services themselves. I think I probably would’ve learned a lot more in all of those areas. I definitely took the more challenging road, which was basically “just figure it out as you go.” I remember when I first started the agency – this was probably within a few weeks, maybe a month of starting the agency. Landed my first client, and I had to google how to create an invoice. I had never created an invoice before. Google was a great resource for me at this time. This, again, is in 2008. So I googled “how to create an invoice.” I did not even know how to create an invoice because I’d never had a reason to create an invoice before. Just things like that. ROB: You might not even know how to get money from people. At least you knew that you needed to send an invoice, so that’s helpful. You learned some in the other agency. It’s a good start for sure. You started off – you mentioned that 2008 timeline. I think until recently you were known as Leverage Digital. I’m sure when you mention something like a personal injury attorney, there’s probably a steady pull to get into other lines of business. I think attorneys are very famously – out-of-home advertising, buses, billboards, you name it. How have you decided which lines of business to open up and do and which ones to still stay out of? JAY: In terms of the types of services that we offer and the channels that we focus on? ROB: Yes. JAY: You referenced our recent brand refresh from Leverage Digital to Leverage. We did that because Leverage is easier to recall, it’s easier to say. There’s too many syllables in Leverage Digital. Even hard for me to say, even though I’ve been saying it for over 10 years. So, we dropped “Digital” for those reasons, and also because we feel digital is becoming somewhat antiquated. 10 years ago, it made sense to have that in the name, and now I think digital is expected if you’re a marketing agency. I don’t think there’s a marketing agency – at least there shouldn’t be – on the planet that doesn’t do digital. That used to be a unique characteristic of ours; I don’t think digital is unique to us anymore. So, we dropped it for those reasons. But we still decided to focus on digital because that is what we excel at. A lot of agencies that have started doing digital over the last few years, they’re still learning it. They don’t really know the space yet. They don’t really understand it. There’s still a lot of trial and error and a lot of testing, whereas we’ve been doing it for over a decade. It’s in our DNA. It’s what we do. There’s really no reason for us to get outside of that and to start doing billboards and outdoor advertising and things like that. I truthfully am not interested in doing those types of things. Of course, we could if a client asked. We always want to be accommodating and we’ll help them, but that’s not really our focus. That’s not what we excel at. I think it’s really important to focus on your strengths and be the best in your area of expertise and not try to be all things to all people. ROB: That definitely makes sense. The focus thing, you were even able to categorize early on some of the vertical markets you work in most often. There were plenty of things we didn’t hear. Some people go deep into auto dealerships. Some people go deep into restaurant marketing, multi-location restaurants, franchises, etc. So, there’s definitely some focus there. When we look at what’s next for you and for Leverage, if people look you up, at least on LinkedIn, it looks like you’ve got a few people that work with you on this thing. So, what is coming up next for Leverage or broader in marketing that you are excited about?  JAY: With the pandemic and some of the external factors that we’ve all been dealing with for the last year, or at least for 2020, digital channels are really becoming more competitive because budgets are shifting more and more to digital. Advertisers are – as the example we cited earlier regarding billboards, they’re less inclined to get a billboard because there’s less people on the roads. That marketing budget has to go somewhere. If it’s not going to billboards, it’s not going to tradeshows, it’s not going to conferences – it’s going to digital. That is making digital more competitive, but it’s also creating opportunities for digitally focused agencies like ours. We’re well positioned to help our clients compete and remain dominant players in the markets that they serve, and we’re also well positioned to help clients that we don’t yet work with become dominant players in the markets they serve because we have that expertise in digital and we’ve been doing it for so long. ROB: That makes perfect sense. How do you think about, within the agency, scaling up? When you think about the next 25% of people you’re going to bring on board to serve your clients well, how do you think about structuring? Are you in a pod structure when it comes to clients? Do you have more departmental responsibilities and more vertical focus – this person focuses on content, this person focuses on creative, etc.? JAY: The latter. Basically we have our development team and then we have our creative team. Our creative team handles the graphic design and copywriting. Our development team obviously handles the programming and development of websites. We have our account management team that handles account servicing. And I’ll tell you, in terms of scaling, I’m not so interested in scaling in terms of growing the size of our agency as much as I am in growing the size of the accounts that we work with. We’re not a volume-based agency. We’re more selective about who we work with. We prefer to have fewer, larger accounts than having lots of small accounts, if that makes sense. By doing that, we’re able to provide our clients with a very high level of service. And that’s really what it’s all about for us: the level of service that we provide. If we have lots of clients, then we’re going to have to have lots of people to service those clients, and they’re probably not going to get the same level of service because we’re managing so many different strategies for so many different accounts. By having just a few larger accounts that we can really learn and invest in and invest our resources into, we essentially are able to function almost like an outsourced marketing department for our clients. And they get the same level of service and they get the same or better outcomes than if they were trying to do everything in-house. ROB: That’s great to think about the benefit, even for your team, of giving them the ability to focus on serving a client well rather than having to switch contexts between serving 50 clients, and maybe something slips and then you’re serving more clients not as well as you’d like to. JAY: That’s right. I’ve learned over the years that whether a client is spending $1,000 a month with you or $100,000 a month with you, their expectations are not that much different. Everybody wants to get great results. Everybody wants great service. There’s no wrong or right way to do it; it’s just the way we do it, we’ve discovered that we want to be able to give our clients the best level of service and the best possible outcomes. But we’re realistic and we know we can’t do that if we’re spread so thin because we’re working with a high volume of accounts. So we really prefer to be selective, make sure that we’re the right fit for them and they’re the right fit for us, and that we can deliver on their expectations. ROB: Got it. That’s perfect, Jay. When people want to find you and they want to find Leverage, where should they go to track you down? JAY: Our website is leveragedigital.com, and I can also be found on LinkedIn. I’m going to try to do this from memory – I might get it wrong, but I think it’s linkedin.com/jaytennysontaylor. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Jay, and I hope people will look you up. I learned a lot, and hopefully we all will together. JAY: My pleasure, Rob. Thank you for having me on. ROB: Be well. Thanks. JAY: Thanks. You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Saunders, Founder of 5Four Digital, honed his SEO, SEM, and PPC digital marketing skills when he started his career working for an agency that provided dealership-level marketing services for automobile manufacturers. When John figured out that he wanted to use his skills for different kinds of projects and a more diverse clientele (SMBs, tech-startups), he started his own company. Today, 5Four focuses on brand identity (logo design and brand guidelines), and website design and development on Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress platforms. In this interview, John explains how to build automated linkages that will increase customer engagement and discusses 3 “shopping” platforms: WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow.  John says WordPress was a game-changer – it made CMS (content management systems) “accessible” for people with lower-level HTML and CSS skills. The platform is flexible enough that amazing sites can be built with either the supplied templates or with custom code. A disadvantage of WordPress is that it requires the use of an extensive array of plugins for website “attributes,” and these and other security measures need to be maintained. Wordpress with a WooCommerce plug-in works well for ecommerce, but John has found that Shopify allows the agency to more quickly scale stores for its clients. One Shopify app, Teelaunch, provides companies with low cost, high-quality print on demand products so customers can create an MVP (minimum viable product, Eric Ries: The Lean Startup,) and build their own brand for less than $1000. Another CMS option, Webflow, can produce outstanding websites. It has a slight learning curve but is easy to use and highly flexible. Although John currently sees Webflow as ”the future,” an organization’s decision to use a particular CMS platform should be based on a number of considerations. Through the years, John has developed systems and standard operating procedures which allow him to delegate tasks to his staff or to automate processes, so the work gets done automatically. One tool he has found to be particularly helpful is Zapier, which provides a way to “web-hook” different websites, platforms, and apps. John uses Zapier to cross-integrate his company website contact form with Slack (to notify John that the form has been filled out), and then with Mailchimp to send a “thank you for your interest, here’s another form.” Response to that drives another form for scheduling . . . and that information is sent to Colony. John says Zapier can be used to link Facebook to Gmail, Facebook Forms to Google Sheets, with up to 10 such linkages free. John recommends written website SOPs to facilitate task handoffs to clients if the client prefers to maintain the site. 5Four Digital was already running remotely when Covid-19 hit. John’s SOPs and integrated technology continue to keep the agency operating smoothly. Many of his team use Asana to manage tasks. He notes that not everything he has done succeeded. However, the failures often provided the tools, resources, and experience he needed for subsequent projects . . . that did succeed. John recently started a company offering downloadable illustrations featuring people of color so sitebuilders have beautiful pictures that promote diversity. BlackIllustrations.com. He is also involved in digital education and sees a lot of that in the future replacing the traditional four-year degree.  John can be found on his personal website at JohnDSaunders.com and @JohnDSaunders on Facebook and Instagram. His agency’s website is: https://www.5fourdigital.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by John Saunders, Founder at 5Four Digital based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, Rob. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here, man. Thank you. ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start us off with an introduction to 5Four Digital and where you specialize. JOHN: Absolutely. My name, of course, as you said, is John D. Saunders. I’m the founder of 5Four Digital. We focus and allocate our resources towards a couple key services. Those are brand identity, which is logo design and brand guidelines, as well as website design and development for Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress. Those are our main focus areas. ROB: That makes perfect sense. WordPress obviously has been around for a very long time, Shopify a decent amount of time. Webflow is a little newer. How has that development of competencies happened? Did you start in one of those areas? How have you decided where to keep your skills sharp? JOHN: Great question. I started in WordPress – man, it was at least 10 years ago. WordPress put CMS, or content management systems, on the map in regards to making it accessible for people that either have an entry level to HTML and CSS or high level. You create these amazing websites either using templates or doing custom code. I started doing that with WordPress, and man, it was an exciting time because I started out and I learned everything I could from YouTube videos and other things like that. This was in the infancy of WordPress, so it was before they even had all these templates and themes. I was able to build a site for my mom, who’s a teacher, and we built this tutoring site. Kids were able to go on, fill out the contact form. I was able to take this idea I had in my head and make it something tangible. That’s when I was hooked. As the agency grew, we really thought to allocate our resources toward a few key resources, and WordPress was that main one. As ecommerce started to build up and develop, I thought, WordPress is great. We have WooCommerce, plug-ins that integrate well. But I feel like Shopify was the perfect platform because we were able to scale out stores for clients at a quicker level than WordPress. So, we did that with Shopify. Then a couple years ago, we heard about Webflow, which is another content management system or almost like a live builder, and man, I built my first site in Webflow and I was like, this is definitely the future. It’s easy to use. Of course it has a learning curve, but ultimately you can build essentially whatever you want in regards to your website, have your own custom CSS in there, and the designs and things we’ve been able to create with Webflow have been really, really dope. ROB: Right on. If somebody has a WordPress website, they’ll probably stick with WordPress for the time being, although any given revision to a WordPress site can certainly be an entire rebuild. But if someone’s starting today, how would you help them consider the decision of whether to go with WordPress or whether to go with Webflow? JOHN: That’s a great question. If they’re an existing business – let’s say they’ve been using WordPress for 5 or 6 years and they just want to do a refresh or redesign their site. They already have historical data or historical SEO attributes to that website, so I probably wouldn’t recommend completely changing over to Webflow unless the site was new and they didn’t get a ton of traffic. If they’re doing over 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 hits per month, we’d probably stay with WordPress and scale out that website in regards to building out a new design. If the business doesn’t get a ton of traffic and they’re not really worried about pulling all that traffic to the new site, I would absolutely recommend Webflow. One thing I like about Webflow is a lot is the transition in regards to using the platform is easier. You can build out sites how you want. You don’t necessarily need a ton of plug-ins, which is one of the issues I have with WordPress; you need plug-ins for a lot of the attributes you need to add to a website. It also takes a lot of constant upkeep. Every month you have to make sure the plug-ins are up to date. You also have to make sure WordPress, the framework, is up to date, and you’re open to malware and malicious attacks from people because the CMS is so popular. The good point about that is there’s a ton of resources on WordPress and information out there. Thousands of plug-ins, thousands of resources, developers, designers. It’s an open source platform that has a lot of people linked to it. With Webflow, it’s a little bit newer, so it’s smaller. But the level to entry isn’t as steep as say WordPress, and it doesn’t need that constant upkeep. You can build out your site, you can set up Zapier to set up web hooks between different websites and platforms, and you’re pretty much good to go. ROB: Wow, it sounds like you’re deep on the Zapier stuff. That’s a whole other unlock there. JOHN: Oh man, it’s like a cheat code, dude. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Tell us about that a little bit for folks who aren’t as familiar with Zapier and what sort of directions you can take that toolkit. JOHN: I’ll give you a precursor. The first thing is I’m a big proponent of standard operating procedures or setting up systems within the business so I can delegate to either staff, team members, or create automation. That way no one has to do it and it just gets done automatically. I’m a big proponent of that. I work from home. I have five team members on our team, and I love to have the freedom to be able to focus on big picture. With that said, Zapier is a great way to connect different platforms easily through a platform seamlessly. I’ll explain that. For example, when you visit our agency website and you fill out the contact form, that form automatically pushes to Slack. As soon as the form gets filled out, I get a notification that someone’s filled it out on Slack with their information. That keeps me up to date. Secondly, we set up a Zapier so that it integrates with MailChimp. So as soon as someone fills out that form, they get an automatic email response saying, “Hey, thank you for your interest. Would you mind filling out this free form?” Once they fill out that form, then they get another automatic email push that says, “Hey, great, go ahead and book a time here,” and then we’ve connected Colony. All Zapier does is just connects different apps to each other. You can connect Facebook to Gmail, you can connect Facebook Forms to Google Sheets – the possibilities are endless. I think you can do up to 10 for free and then you can pay for different Zaps. ROB: Very nice. Thinking about WordPress versus Webflow, you get the site designed, you get it developed, you hand it over to the client – is either one of those more conducive to clients being able to manage things themselves? Or is it just the case that clients, even if you give them all the tools, aren’t going to manage things themselves to make minor changes in the future? JOHN: It really depends on the client because they’re both very user-friendly, especially on the client side, for the most part. It’s easy to add blogs. It’s easy to update pages once either you’re using a third party platform like Oxygen or Divi or Elementor, the page builders. It’s pretty easy to use once you get over that initial learning curve. Both WordPress and Webflow have a client-facing side so that they can make updates. So that part is pretty easy. What I like to tell people, especially agency owners, is it’s a good idea to set up SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for your clients in regards to the handoff. If you’re a web design agency, there’s one of two things you can do. You can either manage and host that website for the client, and then they pay a fee every month, or you say, “Hey, here’s a repository of my trainings on how to use the platform, how to jump in, how to add blogs. Your team can use this.” Because sometimes you’ll build a project and give it to their staff. They might have a marketing team or a content marketing team that can create that content; they just need to know how to use the backend. So, you want to have that in your back pocket so that way when a client is like, “Yeah, we don’t really want you to manage it. We just want you to build it out and then hand it off to us,” you already have that repository of operating procedures that you can give them. ROB: That all makes sense. John, if we rewind a few years, how did you come to start 5Four Digital? What’s the origin story here? JOHN: For me, I was at an agency. I worked there for about 4 years. I moved up in the ranks and became marketing director. It was an automotive dealership agency, so we dealt primarily with a lot of the car manufacturers – Audi, Land Rover, Ford – at the dealership level. We would do the marketing at the dealership level. Being in that position taught me a lot because I was able to use SEO, SEM, PPC, all these different services under the digital marketing moniker. It helped me develop my skillset. Once I did that, I got to the point where I wanted to work on different types of projects. I got kind of burnt out from the automotive side. I wanted to work with maybe SMBs, tech startups, and that type of thing. That’s when I left and I started my own company, 5Four Digital. I was focused on more so on the product as opposed to how it looked. I didn’t need to have a fancy office or anything. Honestly, when I started, I didn’t really have much money. I was on the ramen diet, and I was saving money because I had segued from a full-time position to doing this on my own. The biggest thing for me was to really focus and allocate my resources towards providing a great product to the client. I didn’t have an office. I was working from home, and I started to build my team remotely. When other agency owners were like, “You need an office, you need this, you need that,” I was like, instead of paying $2,500, $3,000, $3,500 – because I am in South Florida – for an office, I can take those resources and I can pay a developer, I can pay a project manager to help scale this business without having to have that burden of a physical location. ROB: So, you were completely ready for the shutdowns this year. Did very much change for you as a business, either with how your team worked, or maybe with some of your clients when some of the COVID-19 shutdowns started to come through? JOHN: I do want to say that a lot of people are going through a lot currently. People are being furloughed, fired from their jobs. It’s just a lot. The transition for us prior to COVID and to now hasn’t really changed much because we were already running remotely. All the platforms and things that we were using were already conducive to that environment. A lot of our team and our staff work through Asana, our task management system, and that’s what we work by. This is when something’s due, and team members can work at night, in the day, they can take the day off and take their kids to the park. For me, ultimately you work when you’re comfortable because I feel like that’s when people work the best, and then we follow the structure of the due date within the task management system. ROB: That makes sense. When I look at your LinkedIn profile, some people are all-in on one thing and some people have a whole portfolio of interesting things they’re involved in. What can you share about some of the other projects or businesses that you’re involved in that keep your attention and you feel are worth pursuing? JOHN: For me it’s about building an agency that not only works well for our clients, but for us internally also. I always recommend those that have the skillset to build an agency because (1) you can help build and develop clients, and then (2) you can build your own products or your own projects that siphon through your agency ecosystem. For us, when we have an idea and we want to build something internally, we’re just taking that project or that idea and running it through our client cycle. For example, I have a business called BlackIllustrations.com, which we launched in April, which is a platform that allows folks to download illustrations for their websites, for their projects, featuring people of color. Because I didn’t see the market have a lot of that, and as a website builder, there just wasn’t a lot of diversity in the illustrations. Now, I’ve seen some beautiful illustrations, and we’ve leveraged a lot of them online, but I just didn’t see that and I saw that opportunity. When that happened, I put together the process, I told the team, “Hey, this is what we’re going to start building out,” and then it’s essentially just walking them through that client lifecycle. It’s almost like taking the ideas that we have and pushing them through this conveyor belt of the business and then being able to make another business that has its own separate income as an entity. BlackIllustrations.com launched in April; we’ve already had 40,000+ downloads, over about half a million visitors to the website. I’m really proud of that, and a lot of that comes down to creating those procedures and then running it through that cycle. ROB: That makes a ton of sense. With those different projects, you can imagine that some of them are going to thrive, some of them are going to perhaps not thrive. Some of them over time you might need to put to rest. I wonder maybe if even there’s some projects that you have brought through the process, they lived a good life, and then you put them on pause. How do you think about the lifecycle and lifespan of these internal projects? JOHN: Essentially, for me it’s really about learning as much as I can from the process. In one example, as an entrepreneur, you know we have a ton of failures. I’m not going to act like everything I touch turns to gold. I had one project in particular – it was a Kickstarter campaign. I was trying to raise funds for an app. This was 5 years ago, 6 years ago maybe. I went through the entire process of hiring a videographer, getting footage, walking through the process of creating this crowdfunding campaign, and it was a lot of fun doing it and experiencing it. Ultimately, we flopped because we didn’t get to 100% of the goal. I think we got to around 60%. At first, I was like, man, I’m a failure. I didn’t do the right thing. But, ultimately, I learned a lot through that process. I learned how to start a crowdfunding campaign, how to create engaging video that converts folks, and how to leverage an audience. So, I like to look at it as an experience as opposed to a failure, and I’m able to use those resources and those things that I came up with and allocate them later on in the next project. ROB: Each project is its own success, even if the project itself doesn’t succeed. In that case, how fortunate to assess demand for an app. It’s an inexpensive experiment to launch a crowdfunding campaign versus building the dang app and then hoping somebody likes it. JOHN: Exactly. ROB: Very good. John, you mentioned some lessons you learned there. When you look back over the history of 5Four Digital so far, what are some other lessons you’ve learned along the way and things you might consider doing differently if you were starting from zero? JOHN: I would look at delegating faster than I did prior. I think in the beginning, especially the first year, first couple years, I was trying to do everything and do it all myself. When I started the agency, we were doing SEO, SEM, Facebook ads, social media, web design, web development. It was a complete agency, full service. Which is great, especially if you have a good amount of employees, but it was just me. So I’m working with clients and one client is doing SEO, one client is doing PPC, one client is doing web design, and it’s just a lot of work, especially changing your mind and doing the different things and turning off that creative and turning on the analytical side. It was just a lot. I started to get burnt out. One of the things I wish I did was niche down to a specific set of services. Not even niching down to a specific client set, but only offering a few core services. That would’ve helped me really streamline my process and be like, “This is the process we go through every time we take on a client” as opposed to doing all these different services myself, especially as a small agency or even a freelancer. It was just a lot. So, I wish that was one thing that I did: focus on a few core services. Secondly, I wish I would’ve started to make my operating procedures in the initial or in the beginning. Really start to think about, “These are the core services we have. These are the things we want to offer.” But I think it just took me time to get acclimated to providing a high-quality service to clients and then documenting that process. Then the third piece is hiring faster, hiring either a part-timer or an independent contractor in the beginning to help facilitate some of these things instead of trying to do it all myself and taking hours and hours in the wee morning trying to do it. ROB: How did you go about finding some of those fractional or independent contractors that you could trust to do the work in a way that’s going to keep your clients happy? Did that involve the clients at all in the conversation of shifting who was doing the work? JOHN: Great question. For me, finding great people – and again, this is a process as well – comes down to not even necessarily their full skillset. A lot of times you’ll try to find the perfect candidate in regards to their skills. I try to find a good quality designer, for example, but I also want them to be able to fit into our team dynamic. The fact that they’re fun, engaging. The fact that they get their work done, but they’re able to balance that and know that it’s an open work environment where they’ll be able to have fun and enjoy cultivating their creativity. So, for me, it’s really finding someone that’s a good fit for the team as opposed to just focusing on skillset. ROB: I hear a recurring passion for process. Is that something that has come naturally for you, but you didn’t initially apply it to the business? Or has it been something you’ve discovered in some way as you’ve built the agency? JOHN: It’s definitely something I’ve discovered while building the agency. There’s a book by Michael E. Gerber called The E-Myth, another book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek – those are two great reads – that talk about building a process so that you can delegate. For me, ultimately, in the agency right now I’m pretty much the project manager. I’m the one that talks to the client, that organizes the projects, that puts in my two cents and my recommendations and helps the team navigate through the buyer journey or the customer journey. I love being in that role because I’m able to pull out of the day to day and focus more so on big picture. I’m able to convey my ideas to the team, and we’re able to implement together on what works best.  ROB: I can definitely understand that, and there’s probably some future date where you’re thinking about that second project manager role that takes that over. That’s probably a whole new round of hire. John, you mentioned in your previous agency experience that you had done some work with auto dealers. For people who don’t know, that can be a whole segment. A lot of agencies that do auto kind of only do auto. It sounds like you’re not doing much of that anymore. One concern I have heard from people who are heavy into that space is some different constraints to the budgets of some of the different dealerships and what they want, and sometimes even the technology. What is your experience with that then, and was there any consideration of that when you decided not to focus on that as much with 5Four? JOHN: Can you repeat the last part of the question? It cut out for a sec. ROB: Oh, sure. How much of that distinction of the constraints of automotive clients drove your decision to focus less on that when you started 5Four? JOHN: Oh man, there’s a lot of red tape you have to deal with. Just getting a webpage up or going through a brand discovery session, there’s so many people that it has to go through that by the time you get the thing live, it’s already dated. [laughs] It was really hard to move and grow the design and the marketing side of it because we had so many constraints in regards to the industry. But nowadays, especially working more so with startups or Series A companies, they have a lot more freedom to move around and upward. If there’s new technology that comes out that we want to implement, you don’t have to go through three C-level executives to get it done. You can just talk to a couple people, tell them, “Hey, this is how it works,” do a small test – if it works, great. Scale it up. It’s a totally different dynamic. ROB: I’ve also heard a number of complaints about the technology that is even able to serve the auto dealer industry. Is that true, number one? And if so, why do you think it is? I’ve heard often there’s a completely different marketing stack for that particular customer. JOHN: I will say in the last probably 2 to 3 years, there’s been a lot of companies doing cutting-edge stuff in the automotive industry. Of course, outside of that you have Tesla, which is doing phenomenal things. But there are platforms, especially like for example Dealer.com, which is an automotive digital marketing company – they crush it, man. They do a lot of these different things – it’s almost like Google, but in the automotive industry. They have all these different solutions and resources. So, I will say in the last few years there’s been a dynamic shift.  Of course, you have startups coming out like Carvana that are doing a really great job of showcasing and making the process easier for the customer. I think the automotive industry has taken a while to understand it, but a lot of people don’t necessarily want to go into the dealership. They don’t want to go through that long process. They’re trying to accommodate this fast shifting economy. ROB: I understand that. It’s nice that there is some future that is not really, really dated marketing stacks for that industry. John, when you look ahead a little bit, what are you excited about that’s coming up either for 5Four Digital in particular or for marketing more generally? JOHN: Man, I’m a tech guy, so I love being a part of this process and being in this industry. Some of the biggest things I see coming down the pipeline are one-click or headless ecommerce. A lot of folks have been talking about it. It’s an ecommerce experience where you literally push one button and you’re able to purchase, similar to what Amazon has and a lot of these sites that are coming out, but it actually works across the entire internet. That’s something I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about. In regards to the education side of digital, I’m really excited about it. As we move or shift into this new world dynamic, a lot of people are realizing that traditional college degrees might not necessarily be the best bet for us all. There are just so many options. I have my Bachelor’s, but there’s just so many different opportunities now. You have all of these educators, people like myself and yourself, who are great and skilled and adept that can create courses and teach other people our processes and the things we’re doing. So, I’m really excited for the digital education frontier, I guess we could call it. But I think a lot of people are going to start segueing or moving towards that because it’s super affordable. You can buy $500, $1,000, $50 bucks for these courses and learn these tangible skills that can pay you well into the six figures. So, I’m ultimately excited for that. ROB: Do you have some of your current projects or future projects in that online education space? JOHN: Yeah, we have a few resources. My biggest thing is providing value, value, value, value up front so that way you can position yourself as a thought leader, you can gain the trust of the people, they actually take your advice and leverage it and use it, and then creating more high-level, detailed courses for those people that are really trying to dive in heavily. We have a couple courses. We have a Web Design Studio Accelerator, which is for people that want to start their own web design accelerator, and then I have other job templates and SOP courses that people can leverage to learn and apply these skills. ROB: Solid. The SOP courses seem like something you can even also show to your team for training. JOHN: Oh yeah, that’s what we do. We probably have 100+ videos for our team. We have one business – it’s called IllustratorHub.com; the whole business runs on an SOP. I don’t do anything with the business. It’s automatically updated. Our team manages it, and it’s just a great platform and a great example of creating these operating procedures in your business so that way you can thrive. ROB: Wow, that’s excellent. Looping back to one thing you mentioned earlier – and I think I let it go a little bit too quickly; you mentioned beyond Webflow and WordPress – we dug into those differences there – but you also mentioned that you do work on the Shopify platform. If you look at their stock, they’re not quite Zoom, but they’re pretty close. This seems to have been a fairly banner year for that approachable “get an ecommerce store online” platform. What have you seen in terms of either how clients are investing differently in Shopify now or people who are putting stores online that hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet? JOHN: I’m glad you brought up the Shopify stock, man, because it makes me feel like I’m Warren Buffett out here. [laughs] I bought 20 shares when it was like $60 bucks because I believed in the company and I saw what they were doing. With Shopify, I think, like you said, this year is their year. So many people are home. They want to start a business. They want something that’s easy, that they can leverage, that they can create a high quality product. And that’s what Shopify does. You look at some of the top stores, you have Kylie Jenner’s Cosmetics, you have Allbirds, I think Warby Parker at one point was on Shopify. You have all these major brands running through this platform. It just goes to show you that it’s made for commerce. People that are starting out like, “I want to sell some t-shirts” can open up a Shopify store, they can integrate it with Teelaunch, and then they can have these high-quality print on demand products with their own logo, their own brand on it. It’s really low cost out of the gate. You can test and you can create this MVP, or minimum viable product, as Eric Ries would say, the writer of The Lean Startup, and ultimately you can really build your own brand for less than $1,000 bucks. ROB: Is Teelaunch a Shopify plug-in, or how does it work? JOHN: Yes, it’s a Shopify app. They have hundreds of products – teacups, t-shirts. They even have air fresheners. It’s ridiculous. [laughs] ROB: CafePress used to sort of let you do this, but you were listing stuff on their site. This is your own brand store. You can have your custom underpants, whatever you want. JOHN: Exactly. And they fulfill on your behalf, so if someone goes on your website and your shirt is $24.99, they go and buy that shirt – the app is integrated, so as soon as they make that purchase, it pushes to Teelaunch, they charge you the $12, $10 for the shirt and then the shipping, and then you take the rest for your profit. Then they ship it on your behalf to the customer, so you don’t even have to touch the inventory. ROB: Very, very cool. John, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5Four Digital, where should they go to look you up? JOHN: They can find me at JohnDSaunders.co. That’s where all of my resources and guides are. Also, I’m on Facebook and Instagram @JohnDSaunders, and that’s pretty much where I’m at. ROB: Excellent. What’s the “D” for in John D. Saunders? JOHN: David. ROB: Excellent. Perfect. JOHN: I have that because there’s a famous ESPN newscaster who passed away a few years ago and his name is John Saunders. So, I had to put that “D” in there to add a little difference. ROB: Yep, I know that name. I remember that sportscaster. John D. Saunders of 5Four Digital, thank you for coming on the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast.  JOHN: Rob, thank you for having me, man. I’m happy to be here. ROB: Thank you much. Be well. Bye. JOHN: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

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