Performance-Driven Compensation Drives . . . Performance

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.