The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Keith Perhac is the Founder of SegMetrics, a once-upon-a-time marketing agency that pivoted from marketing services to a suite of analytical and reporting products. Today SegMetrics builds and refines digital testing and tracking tools that provide marketers with critical information on where "leads come from, how they act, and how much a marketing program is really worth." In this interview, Keith explains that KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) tell a company if it is doing something better or worse than at some time in the past. However, KPIs are about averages – they do not explain what is wrong or right – or what action to take next. Keith says it is important to look at the outliers, follow your leads through their entire customer journey, and dig beyond top-level KPIs to get a deeper understanding of the contribution different components make to a KPI. Before SegMetrics, Keith worked as a developer at a marketing/development agency in the middle of nowhere Japan. Fed up with long hours, Keith decided to quit to do "something on his own." He started freelancing, "building awesome software" for great marketers, including Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Keith claims Ramit taught him most of what he knows about marketing. Back then, agencies built their own metrics and testing tools. Ramit's focus on data, customer experience, and the customer journey brought a new dimension to Keith's understanding of marketing: He had to go back to his college psychology lessons on "how people think." How could a company measure every touchpoint, every experience? How could it split-test design or copy position? What could it do to test whether people were converting? Keith's agency focused on expediting client launches and optimizing their marketing funnels. Keith says that, often, the biggest value the agency provided was in pointing out customer journey disconnects, fragmentation, and "holes" in funnels. The launches were exciting . . . the retainers not so much. Still, the agency expanded to twelve employees in four countries. During a two-week period of client-free downtime, Keith's team built the software that is the foundation of SegMetrics today. A month-and-a-half later, the product launched. Keith intended to transform the agency to a product-oriented company over time and as the product increased in popularity. Didn't happen. The product did not "take off" until three years later, when they started a SegMetrics marketing campaign . . . and shut down the agency. Skillsets, tools, the business model, and staffing needs changed overnight. Today, SegMetrics provides done-for-you services, facilitates client agency onboarding, and offers a lot of customer support for its software. The biggest challenge is educating agencies that "think they already know what they know." Keith is believes that setting up solid tracking and UTM implementation is critical for understanding where to best spend marketing dollars. An Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is simple URL-linked code that generates Google Analytics.) Keith discusses the impact of Covid-19 on various business segments . . . and highlights the surprising number and kinds of businesses that are seeing tremendous business growth. While brick-and-mortar companies have suffered, Keith has seen increased traffic for companies providing entertainment, digital media, telecommunications, online information products, and Masterclasses. SegMetrics is releasing its first printed book this May: The 90-Minute Guide to Building Marketing Funnels That Convert. The book will be available on Amazon. Keith can be contacted throughs his company's website at: segmetrics.io and on Twitter (Keith Perhac). Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Keith Perhac. He is the Founder of Segmetrics, based in Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the podcast, Keith. KEITH: Thanks so much for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Keith, why don't you tell us a little bit about your own journey and how that landed you into Segmetrics? KEITH: It was a long journey, as I think many listeners' journeys were. I started out working as a salaryman in middle-of-nowhere, Japan as a marketer. Or not as a marketer, as kind of a developer and working at a standard marketing/development agency. That continued on for a while. The company got acquired; I decided I don't like working until 2 a.m. every night, and I'd prefer to do something on my own. I ended up leaving that and started out freelancing and doing work for a couple of marketers that were not very well-known at the time. Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich and a couple of other people. It grew and ballooned from there. It was interesting, because my journey was not, "Oh, I'm going to go start an agency." It was more falling into that agency. I started out as a freelancer and then I got too busy, and it's like, I've got to bring on a subcontractor, and then I've got to bring on another one, and then there's more clients who want to work with me, and okay, now I have five people working with me. Oh, now I need to start doing events, and now I have 12 people working for me in multiple countries. So, it just grew organically from "I just like building awesome software and working with great marketers" to "Now we have a team of 12 people over four countries and we're working with clients all over the globe." That was a shift. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] That's quite a shift. Across the world, across industries. So many different shifts there. KEITH: Yeah. ROB: I would imagine going through that I Will Teach You to Be Rich phase – people may have heard of Ramit now. From a marketing perspective, were they numbers-driven? Is that part of your story? KEITH: Yeah, he's always been super numbers-driven. Honestly, working with him was probably the highlight of my career and probably where I learned the most stuff about marketing because it really was trial by fire. This was back in the day when there really wasn't a lot of marketing technology out there. We look at things like automated webinars now, or we look at things like proof, to have a little pop-up to say, "So-and-so just bought . . ." None of this existed back then. There were no metrics except what you could calculate yourself. Google Analytics was around, but it wasn't very good. Split testing tools – all of the stuff that we take for granted now, we had to build ourselves. Ramit's always been a marketer who has been very into the data and very into the experience that customers are having and that people are going through. So the whole idea of how we can measure every touchpoint, every experience that people have and then take that and do something with that, whether that's a split test on design, whether that's positioning for copy, whether that's a little pop-up that says "So-and-so just bought . . .," what are the things that we can do to test and see if people are converting or not? This all sounds like standard hat now; it wasn't back then. And we were also in a compressed timeline where it's like, "Hey, we want to have this up by Wednesday and it's Tuesday evening." [laughs] It really was a trial by fire. I had had some marketing background, mainly dev and design, and then suddenly I got thrown into this world of, "You have to understand the marketing, how people think." I used a lot of my psychology background and stuff that I learned in college that I thought, "I'm never going to use this again," and now that's front and center with how people react to pages, how people interact with sites and copy and design, and then being able to test and improve that. It's really crazy. It was just constant. I think we worked with him for 5 years. That sounds about right. But it was a small team. He had just launched the second version of his first product, and I think there were five of us. It was pretty amazing. ROB: That sounds like quite an adventure, and quite a journey for him, his brand, and probably you along the way. I think you have talked a lot about numbers, about KPIs, and things that people get right and people get wrong about KPIs. What are some of the goods and bads of KPIs? KEITH: There's a lot of cargo culting in marketing, for good and bad. I think that KPIs are something that have been pushed for so long that people, rightly so, are like, "KPIs are important. They're our key performance indicator. If we don't know these, then we're not going to be able to improve our marketing." That's what I hear over and over, especially when we were doing the consulting with the agency, and especially now that we're a KPI-driven company. People are always like, "What KPIs do I need to look at to improve my marketing?" The answer is you don't, because KPIs are key performance indicators. They indicate whether the company is doing well or not, or whether a marketing funnel is doing well or not. It's a measure like your speedometer, or I guess the engine heat gauge on your car. If the number is going down or up, you know you're doing something wrong or right. But just looking at that number is not going to let you know what to do next. That's why we're really big into looking at outliers. When you look at a KPI, you're looking at an average. Let's say you have 200 people coming into a funnel. You have 100 people coming in from Google, you have 100 people coming in from Facebook. The 100 people from Google convert at 100%. Every single person purchases. No one purchases from Facebook. What's your KPI for your conversion rate? It's 50%. That's great. But that didn't tell you that you have one audience that's making all the money and one audience that's making none of it. So, you know what to do at that point. You either get rid of the Facebook ads or you figure out why they're not converting. Looking at that top level KPI – and this is what most people think of when they think of the KPIs – it doesn't let you know anything other than, is the business continuing to do better or worse than it was yesterday or last month? It doesn't tell you those outliers, which is what you actually need to look at if you're going to improve. ROB: That's interesting what you mentioned on outliers. Especially when you're talking about looking at traffic from Google, some traffic from Google you can do more quickly in terms of ads. Some traffic you can do more slowly, maybe, in search. And sometimes you don't know – without a proper indicator of search traffic, there may not be any more traffic for you to get. KEITH: Right. ROB: All of that is context, I think, for what makes a good number and what makes a good KPI. What are you seeing in terms of maybe some unexpected outliers? We are in this moment where many of us are sheltering at home. We are in the middle of this coronavirus outbreak and trying to take care of each other and other people in our world by staying home. What are some of the shifting outliers you've seen in this mode? KEITH: This has been super interesting because some of the things that I predicted would go down and fail have not, and some of the things that I thought would do great have not. Obviously, anything with a physical aspect to it has done poorly. Anything where you have to go do sales in person or you're running a brick-and-mortar shop, those places are really struggling right now. It's very difficult. We've had a number of clients in those spaces – we had some dog trainers that are not able to do their work anymore. We had some construction places that aren't able to do their work anymore. There's a lot of places like that. That was I think an assumption that everyone had. Entertainment, digital media has gone way up, which has been really interesting. I think everyone kind of assumed that as well. Netflix is killing it. Telecommunications, of course – Zoom, we've all heard what's going on there, but that's been crazy. There's all these new telecommunications companies coming out of the woodwork because working from home is the new normal. I think both of those, people knew that that was coming. The one that's been really interesting to me, though, is online info products, especially higher tier ones, because I expected that people have less money, they have less disposable income; they're not going to be dropping $300, $500, $1,000 on info products and learning products. And I was wrong. Across the board, we've seen most niches of info products actually increasing in sales. Masterminds are increasing. A lot of events that have gone virtual, those are all improving. Specific niches – like I have a friend who is in the jobs space, and that of course has gone down because no one's going to work. But most places for general online learning have been increasing, and it's been very interesting to see that. ROB: Very interesting. I'm getting bombarded with ads for ClassPass – not ClassPass, rather, but Masterclass. ClassPass is probably having a hard time with their gym passes. KEITH: Right. [laughs] ROB: Masterclass for sure. So, it's interesting to hear those trends. When we look a little bit at your journey, Keith, talk about the transition from agency world to product world a little bit more. Was that a gradual transition, and one day you just realized where you wanted to be? Or was there a very decisive moment where you threw a switch? KEITH: It's a little bit of both, to be honest. I'm kind of risk-averse, I guess I would say. We were probably 6 years into the agency at this point, and our whole thing was we help people with launches, we help people optimize their marketing funnels. So, we're dealing with clients who, when they do a launch, they do $5-12 million launches. We bust our butts, and it's really rough, and then we see the same retainer, the same pay rate for that client that we do for any other client. So, we help make a $10 million launch and then we're just sitting there at the same point. After doing a number of these, we got to the point where we were like, "We know all the parts of this; why can't we do this for ourselves?", as I think many people do. We're a bunch of developers. We really like developing, and we had done the marketing, so we said, "Why don't we try to build our own software?" We had about two weeks of downtime where we knew we weren't going to have any client work, and we said, "We're going to sit down for two weeks and build this thing." And we did. We launched it I think a month and a half later, because building it and launching it are two completely different things, and it was always something that we were going to continuously work on in order to improve, and eventually that was going to take over the revenue for the agency. We were going to slowly transition from agency work to working on Segmetrics as it became more popular. We jumped up, we had really good MRR [Monthly Recurring Revenue] in the first month, and then it just plateaued for the next 3 years. [laughs] We didn't really lose any MRR; we didn't really gain any MRR. It just kind of sat there, and occasionally we'd fix things, but there was no focus on it. This was the main problem that we had for many years, which was "We have this great piece of software that we're using internally for all our customers, but how do we focus on it?" Focusing on the software is easy because we're all developers. Focusing on the marketing is harder because marketing is not something that you can sit down for an hour or two hours and bang out. Marketing is an overall idea and understanding of your customers. There's customer research. There's a lot of that goes into it. What we were finding was we couldn't make the time to do it. ROB: I think many services firms have that challenge. It's sort of the "cobbler's children have no shoes" scenario. How do you look at turning that corner? What started to unlock for you? Because that's a problem even for any given agency, I think. KEITH: Yeah, definitely. Just look at most agency websites. They don't usually build them internally because they don't have the time or the energy, or it makes more sense to go work on client work. Back when I was a salaryman, we actually had a group of five agencies and we were all friends with each other, and we would build each other's websites. We'd hire each other to build the other one's website because we weren't going to do it ourselves. [laughs] So, we tried a number of things. If you know 37signals, who did Basecamp, they were an agency originally. They're probably the unicorn of that agency turning into a SaaS company. They did the Fridays. They said, "We don't do any client work on Fridays, and we're only going to work on our own stuff." We tried that; that didn't really work. We tried "After 3:00, we're not going to work on client stuff." That didn't work. We tried a lot of different things, and we never really were able to get any traction on any of them. I think that a lot of it was just mental, because it's things like – let's take the Friday for example. We worked really hard on clients Monday through Thursday; now we're going to work on our own stuff, and we're just exhausted from 4 days of working on client stuff. And then we also need to reset and say, "Where were we last Friday when we left off?" So, there's this huge gap of what we did then, what the priorities are, if the priorities have shifted. Half the day is then essentially wasted getting back up to speed on what we were doing last week. We had the same problem with doing afternoons. After 3:00, we would work on our own stuff, or after 2:00 or whenever we decided to make that break, and the issue was for the entire morning, we're focused on a very input-output type of work style. Client says, "I need these six things," we produce those six things, we know the agency has made six things' worth of money. It's a very transactional idea. Being able to translate from that into "Okay, now we need a marketing campaign. When are we doing this marketing campaign?" "I don't know, we need to figure it out" – going from this transactional to this creative side of things was very difficult for everyone. Those were really the two main challenges we had. How do you shift from a transactional mindset with the agency and with client work to an almost blue-sky, "We don't know what the answer is here"? usually when we're working with clients, they have a strong readership, they have a strong brand. They've gotten to a certain point where we are iterating on a foundation that they've made. But we're now having to build that foundation from scratch. Starting over from that and not knowing where to go, and to have to spend that time to do it, was very difficult, making that mental shift every day or every week. ROB: You knew yourself as a customer. You knew what you needed. You built technology to do what you needed. But it seems like there was probably a stage of getting to know your own customer better, which we all need to do. How did you take the steps to get to know that customer well enough to speak their language and really market well to them? KEITH: Lots of customer calls is honestly the only way. We talked with our agency friends, got on calls with them. Made it very obvious that they weren't sales calls, but essentially saying, "Hey, I want to show you this. What is the value for you?" We knew what the value for us was. We knew what the values for our customers was as an agency. But one thing we've learned is that every single marketer is different, and every single marketer wants different things, and they all have it set up differently. Honestly, that's the most painful thing out of all of it. We take something simple like recurring payments – there's 101 ways to set up recurring payments for a product. Maybe it's an invoice that gets an extra payment on it. Maybe it's multiple invoices. Maybe it's not even called an invoice, but a recurring – there's just so many things that come in, and everyone has set them up differently, even within similar systems. This was the first time where we realized, oh crap, everyone's doing something different; we need to figure out how to support everyone in a single bucket. So yeah, it was just talking with a lot of agencies. A lot of the things we ran into with the agencies were not actually technical at all. They were more like, "This is great. I really want to start using this. We don't have the time to set this up. We just signed up for someone else who does something similar, and it's been sitting there for 3 months because no one has the time to do anything with it." ROB: Even with one of the simple things that you were involved in with Segmetrics, when I see lead tracking – we actually had an experiment we did with some agencies that we know involving simple things: how do you get very regimented about your UTM tracking, and how do you do this right? Can you get involved in publishing content and ads and whatnot so that it's easier to close the loop on a transaction? Everybody does it differently. Some people say "That's not important to me"; some people say "That's confusing." And yet I know myself, coming from an engineering background, there's a part of me that screams out and says, "Don't you see? This is a really good way to do things." [laughs] One thing I notice when I look at your product platform and some of the things that it does – and we don't talk a lot about products on this podcast, but I think it's worth reflecting on, especially from your background. I see this different DNA of how to efficiently run an agency well. You want to know when someone's not paying you. You know that talking to a client every week, giving them feedback on what you've done for them every week, can be a good practice to do that a lot of people don't get around to. How do you strike that balance of the stuff you feel like you strongly know somebody should do and whether or not they're ready to do it? I think we all have those things we feel like we ought to do. We ought to eat our vegetables, but we're not ready to, business-wise or at dinner. KEITH: It's rough. You know the old saying: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. There's a number of things that we want people to do. There's a number of things that we want people to think of when they're doing analytics. The only thing we can do is really educate them. We produce a lot of content about teaching people how to market. We have onboarding calls and we have hand-holding, done-for-you services and stuff. But the education side, especially when you're targeting agencies, is tough because they think they already know what they know. That's one of the biggest issues I think we have, which is we want to teach people that you should really use UTM values, and they're like, "We haven't used them up until now and we've been doing fine." I'm like, "Well…" It's funny because I think the biggest hurdle we have is getting people's tracking set up correctly – installing the snippet, making sure those ad IDs and those UTMs are installed. We have a number of customers who are more technical, and they have literally perfect analytics. 100% attribution of every single click, and it is beautiful. I love it. And then I work with some people and I'm like, "None of your ads are set up correctly." They're like, "Oh, we threw it over to the ad guy and he never set it up." It's just so frustrating; it's been like 3 weeks, and why have they not added this ad snippet in? It's just very frustrating that because I'm technical and I understand the technology of how the web and marketing on the web works, I consider it a foregone conclusion that these are the things you need to do to set up. What I'm realizing is that a lot of marketers do not understand how the internet works and how marketing on the internet works. I think this is a difference of marketing now versus marketing 10 years ago, when you had to build everything yourself. Most people just see, "I have this landing page builder, I slap in this iframe, and then I'm good to go," because from their perspective, it works. But that's not actually how anything is working, and there's a lot of magic going on in the background that they can't see and they don't understand as to how it's actually working. As long as it's working for them, they're like, "Everything's good." But then something breaks and they have no idea why. We had one customer we were looking at and they weren't getting – and this is amazing, I think, with the software. This is also what we found when we did the agency stuff. The biggest value we provided to new customers was telling them where the holes were in their funnel. And sometimes these holes were not like, "Not many people are clicking on this." It was "This campaign is not hooked up to anything" or "Your webinar is not sending in any leads to your marketing, so you have 5,000 leads that have never gotten an email from you." We find this all the time, and it's so frustrating. It's so frustrating, both for them and for us. ROB: You've dialed in with being able to lead a horse to water. The follow-on from that we don't think about as much is really that you learn this often in relationships. You can't change people for the most part, but you can be there and help them and be helpful to them when they make a decision to change. It seems like that's a lot of times what marketing around this kind of product can be. I think there's an interesting thread I want to pull on here. You mentioned your own agency making a transition into a product and 37signals making a transition into a product. What do you think it is, perhaps – and maybe you've seen some other examples – that is in the DNA of an agency that makes it possible for them to make a jump into product? I think a lot of agency owners want to, and even spend a little bit of their engineering bench time to build something, but there is a wide chasm to cross past that. What do you think makes it work? KEITH: I don't know exactly, and that's because I don't think that we were able to make it work while we were an agency. But I think that you can't look at the product as a side hustle. It has to be part – we did not really start growing Segmetrics until we decided, "Hey, we're shutting down the agency. We're going to start moving everyone off and we're going to focus on this full-time." It wasn't like we fired all the clients that day, but we made a very distinct decision that "We are not focusing on getting new clients. As client contracts are over, we're not going to renew them and we're just going to keep going down this path of software because that's where we want to go as the agency." It has to be buy-in from everyone. We had some people who either did not or could not make that transition mentally, or didn't want to, and that's fine. But if we were to keep those people on and we were to keep going half-kilter at it, we were never going to succeed, because we had done the half-kilter thing for 3 years and it just doesn't grow like that. You have to be all-in. Or at least have that all-in as the final goal. ROB: Were there some roles that were more or less receptive to the transition than others? KEITH: Yes. I think there were some roles, but also just some people because of the way that – we were talking about that transactional idea where a client says "Do this," you work for an hour, you complete that, the client is happy, and you know that you made the agency 1 hour's worth of money. With software, it's completely different. You could work for 8 hours and not produce anything because it was the wrong thing, or even if you did something awesome and everyone's happy, it doesn't actually result in any money. That was a very hard mental thing that was not role-specific, but a mental thing that needed to be addressed. One of the harder ones was account managers, because as an agency, you have to have an account manager, and only now are we starting to go back into account managers in Segmetrics because we just didn't need them. We needed support people, but that's very different than an account manager. We couldn't afford to have an account manager for every single customer that we had, especially when a customer is paying you $100-200 instead of $5,000 a month. It doesn't make sense at that scale. It was interesting, because I thought support was going to be very similar to account management, and it is not. It's a very different skillset. You need very different tools, and getting a new support person, getting support to work with Segmetrics was very difficult just because it was so different than anything we had done before. ROB: As you were talking about the account size required to support an account manager, it made me think of another example of what we're talking about here of an agency transitioning into a tech company, which was MailChimp. MailChimp started off as a web design shop and now is this huge, massive email marketing platform with hundreds and hundreds of people onboard. When you're charging $20 bucks a month for email marketing, you can't put an account manager on that. You can hardly spend an hour on them. But you can scale support. Support is a process of scale, I would argue, largely of consistency, of knowing when something needs to be escalated and when it doesn't, where the answers are, and how to help people find the answers. That may be overly simple. You probably have a better pulse on it than I do here. How would you distinguish it? KEITH: I think that's exactly right. It's very different than an account manager, where it's not about necessarily solving the issue directly, where support is, but more of that overall keeping in touch and relationship with them. It's more of an emotional thing than support is. ROB: Keith, what is coming up for Segmetrics and perhaps for broader marketing that you're excited about? We all need some things to be excited about in these moments, and I think many of us are finding them. What's exciting you? KEITH: Going outside at some point. [laughs] Being over quarantine would be great. Man, that's a hard question because there's so many things that I want to do and that we're working on that excite me. One personal thing that I'm excited about with Segmetrics is that we're actually releasing our first paper book in May, and I just got the proof for it yesterday, so I'm pretty excited about that. It's something that we've been working on for – even from the agency days, I had originally done a video course that never got produced, and we decided, "Hey, this is some great content. We really need to put this together into a book." So, I've been writing that for a while. Really happy about that. Overall, with Segmetrics, I don't know. I don't know what I'm excited about next. The long, slow SaaS ramp of death I think is what they call it, and I think we're right in the middle of that right now. I have a list of features and new things and new ideas that we're super excited about, but it's just doing them. It's out of that exciting, blue sky phase and more into the "Okay, time to put our pedal to the metal and actually get this stuff done." One thing that we did that I'm happy about is – I think I mentioned that we're bringing some account managers back, and what we decided to do is start working with agencies and companies that are signing up and providing them an account manager and getting them set up and having someone come in and configure all their campaigns and do all that. That's something I'm excited about that's hopefully going to be kicking off at the end of this month. ROB: Excellent. And where do we find your book when your book is available? KEITH: The book will be on Amazon. We're probably also going to have it on the site, but it's going to be on Amazon. It's called The 90-Minute Guide to Building Marketing Funnels That Convert. ROB: Excellent. That sounds very practical and like something we all need to think about. KEITH: I read a lot of marketing books. I read a lot of business books, and I always hate that they're really fluffy. They're also only half the size they need to be. I was talking to a friend about this who's a writer, an author in the industry, and I said I was reading Ryan Holiday's book – I'm trying to remember what the name of it was – and I'm like, "It was great up until the halfway point and then he started repeating the same stories. It was like he was rehashing the first half of the book." He's like, "Well yeah, a book has to be 175 pages. It cannot be shorter than that. If you only have enough content for half, the publisher will say, 'Write a second half that's just rehashing it.'" I hate that. ROB: Was this The Obstacle Is the Way or one of those? KEITH: No, I think it was his first main one that he did. I can't for the life of me remember which one it is. But I've always hated that, and I've always hated the extra – I like the stories because you have to get emotionally involved and you have to have a connection with the reader, but at the same time, at some point I just want to know "these are the six things you need to do, these are why they work, and here's my experience with them." So that's what I've really tried to do with this book, is really put it down into "here's the theory, here's the reasons, here's what you need to do." Hopefully it'll do that. ROB: Keith, when people want to find you and Segmetrics, where should they go to track you down? KEITH: Segmetrics is segmetrics.io. We're also on Twitter. I am Keith Perhac, also on Twitter. I am literally the only Keith Perhac in the world that I know of, so it's very easy to find me. And if you search far enough on Google, you will find things that I am still trying to bury 20 years later. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] We won't put those in the show notes. KEITH: Good, good. That's the problem with having a very unique name. You can never escape Google. ROB: Understood. Keith, thank you for coming on the podcast. KEITH: Thank you so much for having me. ROB: All the best for you and your team. Be well. KEITH: Definitely. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

Ty Largo is Owner and Creative Director at Awe Collective, a full-service agency providing branding, advertising, public relations, digital strategy, content marketing, social media, video and photography services to diverse industries across the US. Sometimes the agency does (awe) inspiring work. Currently, in the face of Covid-19, the whole agency has shifted to "show up for clients in a different way." Ty has been on phone calls, comforting clients crying about having to cut shifts. He has written emotionally difficult letters communicating a client's "hard messages" to their staff, vendors, and/or guests. He feels this kind of PR service is a privilege, an honor . . . and a burden. Even in these "weird and uncertain times," the agency's role is much the same as in better times . . . to provide guidance. Ty recognizes that no agency can excel at "everything," and wants every tool used for its clients to be "best in class." He uses the analogy of a Swiss army knife: a tool made of many tools . . . none of which work particularly well for what it's purported purpose. Ty believes it is a strength to know where parts of his agency work like a Swiss Army knife and to be willing to reach out to a partner agency whose tool is "best in class." If the client wins, then so does Awe. Ty explains further explains: The ideal situation for Awe is that they always have a good network of great partners to partner with in order to provide optimal client results. Awe can pass over clients to these same partner agencies when it is already working at capacity or when the client needs services Awe cannot provide. What has Ty learned over the years? In the past, when he was more "ego-driven," he would tell a prospective client that his agency could do everything, and then "white label" work contracted through other agencies. Today, he just tells clients what his agency can and cannot do, recommends when a partner is best added to the mix, or admits, kindly, "Hey, this is not a fit for us," and then refers the client to another agency. He says it's a relief "to be honest . . . transparent . . . not to try to pretend." Business owners often feel they should say "yes" to everything. Ty reminds us there are other options: you can compromise and you can say no. Ty went to college to study music, dropped out in his third year, and never returned. He hopscotched around industries and quit his job as creative director at a poorly-managed software firm on February 14, 2008 – the same day he bought his first house. Ty started freelance marketing consulting, growing his business client by client. (He had no training in marketing, and this was during the recession of 2008) He never planned to have a business. (He had no training in business and he thought he was going to be a nerdy band teacher.) In 2018, Awe Collective was named the #1 "Best Place to Work in Arizona" by the Phoenix Business Journal. Ty attributes that award, and his agency's success, to his obsession with team wellness. "Are they happy? Do they feel like they're in an environment where they're being challenged and they have opportunity?" Ty can be reached on his company website at: https://awecollective.com/ Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Ty James Largo, Owner and Creative Director at Awe Collective, based in Tempe, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast. TY: Hello. Hi, listeners. Thanks for having me. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Ty, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about Awe Collective and what makes Awe Collective great? TY: We are a full-service agency based in Tempe, Arizona, but our work spans across the country. When I say full service, everything from branding, marketing, advertising, public relations, digital – everything across the board. Our clients are a diverse portfolio, which is great, especially in these very interesting, ever-changing times. Clients include everything from luxury, a Venetian resort and spa, to the California Democratic Party. So, we are definitely a very diverse and very interesting agency. We do a little bit of everything, which is great. But I say it on our website: we are not a Swiss army knife, and I hate when people say that because a Swiss army knife is the worst thing on planet Earth. Could there ever have been a worse pair of scissors invented, or a nail file, or a knife? A Swiss army knife can do so many things, but it does it so poorly in every facet that it's actually engineered to do. But we are not a Swiss army knife. We are experts at everything. We are that full tray of tools that is expertly crafted to be its best max effort in every different medium where possible. That's us. Awe Collective. ROB: Fantastic. We are right in the thick of the coronavirus lockdown, so maybe doing a little bit more Democratic Party and a little bit less travel and spa right now? Or how are clients reacting? Are some doubling down and planning for the time of abundance after? How does that look? TY: Candidly, in my past 6 days, I've been getting on the phone with clients that just need someone to virtually hug them as they cry about having to do tough layoffs, having to cut shifts, having to deal with the actual true person-to-person tough calls that have to be made – I think that's our privilege and our honor and our burden, too, as a PR agency. We don't always get to promote great stuff. Sometimes we have to do real tough messaging and level up for our clients. That's been the past 5-6 days, where I've had to write really strongly, emotionally generous, hard messages for clients to their staff or to their vendors or to their guests. So, it's not a great time. But per this podcast and per the arc of everything that you've done work on, we typically get to say really great stuff all the time. We get to have fun and promote really cool things and all the stuff. But in this case right now, I'm switching gears and my whole agency is switching gears to be able to show up for clients in a different way, where they need help delivering very tough messages. Yeah, it's a weird time. ROB: For sure. But what a privilege to be called upon in this time, what a privilege to be needed to help people get outside the things that they don't quite know how to say, but they know they need to say, they know they have to communicate. I like what you said about the Swiss army knife. You've even probably seen the 1,000 tool Swiss army knife that they were briefly selling and had become a little bit of an internet meme. But it's not that useful. It's a tool in origin, I think, more of bare utility and survival and not one of thriving. As you think of being the best of each tool that you provide, how do you think about keeping excellence in each area while also – you're not probably a couple thousand person company with whole pods of teams on each specialty. So how do you keep that excellence on each tool? TY: Great question. When I do talks, when I do public speaking, I'm pretty real. I try as much as possible to not do pitching and spin. I think one of my strongest top tier superpowers is knowing what I suck at. I think that's part of – if we're using the Swiss army knife analogy, you can't be great at everything. No one can be. No agency out there can do all of the things on planet Earth. So, you have to have a real chat internally and reflect on, "Hey, are we the Swiss army knife on this part? Are we that crappy pair of scissors that's in the Swiss army knife in this area?" And if so, let it go. Or pull in a partner to fill that gap. Pull in a partner agency that it's like, these guys are amazing, we love them. We can provide strategy and leadership from a client perspective; however, we just don't have the capabilities that this other agency has to that degree. It's more about letting ego go, I think, and being, in the best way, self-deprecating to be able to be high performance. You can still perform and show up for a client without having to try to do it all. There's power in saying "Hey, I suck at this; however, my friend over here at XYZ agency is rad, and we can give him good direction on it, we can keep it aligned to our strategy overall, but let's partner with this person." It's not a moment of failure. I think a lot of agencies feel like they have to always be the best at everything. It's a moment of power, where you acknowledge power elsewhere and you acknowledge the fact that your superpowers are very different and very diverse. Pulling in a partner is not a threat to the work that you're doing with a client. It's a moment of strength, I think. ROB: I think it depends on what your goal is. The hard part and the ego part is to try and be the solution for everything, but that's not what your clients are asking for. If it's possible, what they'd love for you to do is to help them find a solution for any problem. That's a trust building exercise, when they come to you with a new problem and they say, "What about this? Could you help me?" You say, "Oh, I know this person over here, I know this partner" – because they don't. If they knew the partner, they wouldn't be asking you. TY: Right. In general, clients are calling us because they need guidance, period. It's not effective or healthy as an agency, or for the client, to mislead them on capabilities that you know you don't have expertise in or a specialty focus in. They're calling us because they want guidance. If you have a trusted partner that can do that for them, great. Do it. That's our purpose. Even in these times right now, too – again, not to make it a dramatic response, but more than ever, businesses are needing guidance and expertise. They're like, "What do I do?" So yeah, I think part of our model is to always have a good set of great partners that we can either partner with on clients or do a pass through where it's like, "We have a conflict of interest; however, we love this other agency, this other marketing provider that we love to death. We wish we could work with you right now, but we can't" – for whatever reason, whether it's a conflict or we're just at max capacity. I think that's an important thing for agencies in general, to get over yourself and just really, truly have a good network of people that you respect that you can refer work to or partner with on. It makes you that much stronger. It doesn't make you weaker. It makes you stronger. ROB: It's all in a good toolkit. I think there's an interesting question, and I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer to it: how do you think about when to white label, when to present the solution as part of your overall solution as an agency, versus when to partner where the partnership is more visible, and when to wholesale refer and not take any part of the business, but just pass it along? How do you think about that decision – if you have any sort of rubric for it? TY: I used to do the very ego-driven, "We can do it all," and if I private label a select part of the service, I'll do it. I think these days, though, I'm very transparent. I'm very like, okay, cool, we'll do our consultation on the sales call, and if I really, truly feel like this is not something that we 100% can do, or if we have to partner or if we have to refer, I just tell them. And I have to tell everyone in this audience here, there's such relief in that, not trying to pretend. Again, I don't want to be the Swiss army knife moment ever, and as much as we have a wide-ranging capability suite for sure, there's so much power and relief in being able to be transparent and honest right from the get-go. Before we even send a contract or a proposal or whatever. Just being able to say, "This is a project that needs a very specific toolset, and although we can do that work internally, my recommendation is we pull in a partner." Or "Hey, this is not a fit for us." We always say that with kindness. We're really big on chemistry with our clients. We're very fortunate in the way that we can pick and choose who we do and do not want to work with, and if there's not a chemistry, if there's not a cultural connection, we still love on those potential clients. We'll be upfront and say, "This is not a fit for the kind of work that we do. However, we're very grateful for the opportunity to chat with you. We are inspired by where you're going with the brand. However, we'd love for you to talk with XYZ partner." We've done that a million times. I think that's a big thing. You feel the need as a business owner to say yes to everything, but you can compromise, and you can say no. And there's power in saying it upfront versus going through the motions of a whole parade of fake, weird flirting when you're not interested, when you're having the worst date of your life. [laughs] It's a terrible date but you're still flirting; however, you know this person is not the one. There's power in real talk. There's power in being able to say, "No, it's not a vibe. Not a fit. I'm out." ROB: For sure. Not that it's quite this extreme, but if you go to a really nice hotel and you go to the concierge, they do absolutely nothing, but they have a huge degree of trust because they can tell you anything with a high degree of authority. If we rewind a little bit, Ty, tell me about the origin story of Awe Collective. How did it come into being? What made you start this thing? TY: Oh, interesting. I wish I could tell you some very charismatic leadership message about the origin story of my company, but I can't. I went to school for music. I took a break from college 3 years in, and I'm still on that break 20 years later. [laughs] So I don't have a degree in anything, period. I've never studied marketing or PR or branding or anything in that sense. I kind of hopscotched from industry to industry. I've done everything from public education to IT to marketing to fill-in-the-blank moment. My last job that I had was I was a creative director for a software firm based in Arlington. It was not a great situation. I had really bad bosses and leaders, period. So, I decided to quit my job. This was 2008. I quit my job on Valentine's Day in 2008 – also the same date that I bought my first house. Great timing. [laughs] Believe me when I say I did not have a plan to have a great business. But yeah, I made a leap of faith and I made it at a wrong time to dive into a deep end of a pool that I didn't know was so deep. I started doing freelance consulting for marketing, client after client. It made sense at some point to call it something different than just having clients cut checks to me directly. I never had a plan to have a business, ever. If you had asked me as a kid, "Would you ever think you would own a business?", I'd be like, "No, I want to be a band teacher. That's my purpose in life, to be a nerdy band teacher." But fate has a different plan for everybody than what we think we're supposed to be. Flash forward to now, I started off not planning to own a business and now I own a business, and I'm very proud of it. My company has been named the #1 Best Place to Work in Arizona – not just in my industry, but period, across the board. I didn't plan to own a business, but I'm pretty good at it. It's because I love on my team so much, honestly. Even as we're going through these crazy times and I don't get to see them every day – that's probably the hardest part of my job right now. I don't get to see my family every day. I love on them so much. I'm obsessed about their happiness. I think when you do that, you don't have to worry about the performance. You don't have to worry about how good the work is going to be. The only thing I think as a leader you have to worry about and obsess about – and I'll say it again, obsess about – is how happy your team is. You should be waking up at night in fear of like, "Is everyone happy?" That's where the focus should be. Again, I'm not a trained business owner; I did not plan to do this or to work in marketing. I'm not qualified, technically, to work in marketing. But I love my team so much, and I'm so grateful that they are on this journey with me. It seems very basic to me, but I think it's so revolutionary to some people, and maybe perhaps to the listeners here too – you will thrive if you just take care of your team. You will thrive, period. There's not a big pitch behind it. Just obsess about the happiness of your team, and the work will be good. I promise, the clients will be happy. The clients will be plentiful. The clients will continue to grow, and you'll get more clients, all the things, whatever. That's the endgame, for sure, but if you really focus on loving on your team and making that your prime priority, especially in this time right now – I didn't go to school for business, whatever, but I just know what has worked for us, and I'll just tell you, that's what the focus should be. ROB: Beyond the instinctual, are there any habits or rhythms or routines in the business that you have, whether it's daily/weekly/monthly, that help you reinforce love to your team? I know that sounds a little bit mechanistic, but for folks who it doesn't come naturally for, that may be helpful to them, or even helpful in showing love to people who may have different ways of feeling love. How do you think about rhythm and routine? TY: Great question. We have our weekly team meetings, and we do it over lunch. Not catered in because that's still in our office space and it feels very technical and it feels very clinical. We have a gross, awesome, amazing, wonderful local dive bar that is approximately 1.5 minutes away from our office. We'll go there and sit on the patio and just be exposed to fresh air. It's a limited venue, so either you get chicken tenders or you get a burger – and this is funny because we have James Beard caliber clients that we could go to if we wanted to, but this is not about that moment. It's about how we can really, truly feed ourselves in a very comfortable context. So we go there, and there's a level of love in that situation where we get to have work talk, talk through the clients, whatever, walk through the next week that's coming up, forecast it, go through the forensics of the last couple weeks. It's a weird, twisty dynamic, and I think that's part of our routine. We want to mix it up as much as possible, because the stresses at work are challenging. Why not just sit at a gross dive bar where every table that you sit at is sticky? [laughs] Just mix it up. And the staff knows fully that we are ready, able, and capable of doing a very bougie team meeting, but there's something about the self-deprecation, collectively, of chilling at a gross dive bar, like, "Hey, get over yourself. Let's chill and let's have an 11:00 vodka drink and chicken tenders and just be friends because we love each other." This is a space where we can be at ease. It's not at a conference table. It's not in a boardroom. We do that weekly. ROB: There's definitely something intangible about breaking bread together, about getting outside of the confines and the familiarity of the office, for sure. That's all really good stuff. What are some things that you've learned from building Awe Collective that you might do differently? Maybe some lessons learned if you were starting over, and things maybe you're already doing different going forward now? TY: Good question. If I could go back and do it again. Actually, I'll be honest – I don't know that I have any regrets. But I have advice. I think my path is very different than most business owners, period, let alone agency owners. I have no regrets because of the fact that all I did was always, endlessly obsess about my team's wellness. Are they happy? Do they feel like they're in an environment where they're being challenged and they have opportunity? The way I describe my company is this is not the place that you retire at. This is the place where you learn how to be a badass. I say that because I don't have high turnover; I have an incredible list of alumni who I've been very privileged to work with and to raise. That is my ultimate honor and purpose, to raise badasses. So, I don't have regrets in any way, shape, or form. I have pride in the sense that all I've ever done is obsess about the wellness and development of my team. As they move on, my alumni are not like a marketing specialist at XYZ Agency. Cody on my alumni list is a director at a global PR firm based in LA now. Another former alumni is a director internally at a global grocery chain. I think as a business owner, the tendency is to obsess about sales and very clinical things. That's responsible to do. Yes, do that stuff, or bring somebody on your team that does that for you. But – I sound like a broken record, but if I had to look back and think about it, I would have regretted not loving on my team. But thankfully I don't have those regrets because that's always been my obsession. It's been the critical key to my success, making sure that my team is growing, thriving. In their time with me, how much can I make sure that they make the most out of this for themselves? Everything else will just fall into place. Client success will fall into place. Agency success will fall into place. If you just focus on your talent, your team, who can say that's the wrong thing to do? It seems basic to me, but I think a lot of agency owners don't understand that. That should be your obsession. Obsess about every single person. If you have waking nightmares at night – which sometimes I do – it should be about that, not about "Is XYZ client happy?" or "Is XYZ client going to renew?" or whatever. Your eyes are not on the prize where they need to be. It has to be on the people that you should be loving. ROB: That's great. I hear a tremendous amount of positivity, a tremendous amount of even appreciation for the people that you have worked with. It's probably less scary – I think people worry when they go to work for a closely held business that their boss is going to be crazy and controlling. And I think a lot of people are, out of fear. I don't hear a lot of fear coming through. Certainly, fear of not treating people well, but not fear of the outworking of treating people well. TY: Part of having the privilege of being able to work with talented people is to know that they're not going to be with you forever, so just – I think that's part of the pressure to just absolutely endlessly love on somebody. You know they're going to be gone. Cody, who is one of my stars, forever amazing alumni, I've always known that he's going to move on – not away from us, but move on to something different. He needs more challenges. As a boss and as an employer and as a leader, you have to lean into that. You can't be sad about that stuff. You have to be very excited. I do feel like it is a family, and obviously my kids are not going to live at home for the rest of their lives. I'll be so happy when they go to their next steps. That's what it feels like to me. Again, it's an honor and a privilege, and a little bit of sadness, to see their next steps and to be a part of raising them where they are ready to go and be a badass somewhere else, and not take that as a loss, but take that as a win. I get to look at Cody and be so proud. Not to get too emotional but be so proud. It's cool. It's a cool thing. ROB: Fantastic. When people want to find you and Awe Collective, where should they go to find you? TY: I would say hit us up on our website, www.awecollective.com. Obviously on social too, as well. I feel like we've been very dark on social the past couple weeks, for obvious reasons, because we're dealing with this whole situation on behalf of our clients. We're there to support them. So, if our social channels seem a little quiet, that's why. But yeah, hit us up on the website. You can see a little bit more about our wide and weird breadth of the work that we do. There's a lot of our DNA in there, too, a lot of our voice. It's not just a big portfolio site. It's more like "Here's who we are; here's who we're not." So, you can really, truly see the DNA of our company. We try our best to express that on our website. It's not a pitch. It's not a flashy, razzle-dazzle website. It's just like "Here's who we are." It almost acts as a filter, if anything, for clients. If they want a very traditional path for marketing in general, you as a viewer on the website know that's not us. I think our website does a really good job of telling our story, and again, who we are and who we are not. ROB: Perfect. Ty James Largo of Awe Collective, thank you for joining the podcast and sharing with us today. TY: Thank you so much for having me and thank you to the audience for listening. This has been really fun, and hopefully informative for the audience here. I'm happy to do any follow-ups if needed. Go team. ROB: Perfect. We can all stay positive. Thank you, Ty. TY: Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

Jon Boles is the Founder and CEO of Avintiv Media Avintiv Media, an award-winning boutique digital marketing agency that focuses on branding, web design, and digital marketing content creation, syndication, and search engine optimization. Starting as a full service agency 4 years ago, running ads, Facebook ads, and working with celebrities and influencers in the influencer marketing niche. The agency withdrew from advertising and social media when they determined the uncontrollable volatility compromised the value add of those services. What that left was what they were passionate about anyway: branding, web design, and digital marketing – key pieces of every brand's lifecycle. Avintiv serves a wide variety of industries, but one "ideal client" is a well-funded, very-much-at-the-beginning startup with business experience. The process begins with a deep-level discovery consultation to determine the "end goal." This usually progresses to a half-day brand workshop, which involves the brand's/company's stakeholders and the entire Avintiv strategy team. The product of that workshop is a 40-50+ business plan/investor pitch deck that covers SWOT analysis, and includes buyer personas, a mission statement, and a competitive analysis, what Jon refers to as a company's "Bible for your business over the next 10 years." Jon explains his company's criteria for finding startups to work with . . . relationships where the end result is win-win-win . . . the company, its customers, and Avintiv all gain. In branding, Avintiv may provide a company name, logos, icons, SKUs, a style guide, typography, colors, and with e-commerce or product-based businesses, product development and design. The in-house development/creative team builds out a custom WordPress or Shopify website. The SEO team takes over at that point, providing keywords, creating a 6- to 12-month SEO campaign, and writing the content. The second "ideal client" is one that has grown in the past and wants to grow today, but can't seem to "move the needle" in today's business climate. Avintiv takes these companies through the entire buyer's journey to clarify who their customers really are . . . and why they buy. Working off data, Avintiv identifies the buyers and price points companies need to target, redesigns the website to fit buyer needs. Jon has found that working with investors and investor firms can be very effective, because investors appreciate that working with Avintiv increases the odds of recouping their investments. In this interview, Jon talks about the impact of corona virus . . . that he believes it will probably change a lot of the way we do business, that brands will need to pay closer attention to detail, that a "less trusting" population will research more, judge organizations' actions more during these hard times, and look for good people and good companies with which to do business. Jon says that he has found that, people in quarantine have become more engaged and more focused on providing good to the community. People whose work typically comes with a high price tag are jumping in and offering their services for free. In the same vein, Jon says he has no passion for building something for himself: his passion is for changing other people's lives. He expects the coming year to be one of unprecedented growth. Jon's company can be reached on its website at: www.avintivmedia.com or through Instagram t @AvintivMedia. Jon is best reached on Instagram @JonBoles. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Jon Boles. Jon is the Founder and CEO at Avintiv Media based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Jon. JON: How's it going, my man? ROB: It's going great. You? JON: No complaints this week as of yet. It's pretty crazy what's going on in the world, but we're prepared for it. ROB: Sure. We're dead in mid-late March, right in the thick of the coronavirus, and everybody is sheltering in place. But we are sheltering on a podcast. Why don't you start off, Jon, by telling us about Avintiv Media and where Avintiv excels? JON: Avintiv Media is an award-winning boutique digital marketing agency in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we specialize in three solutions for our clients: branding, web design, and digital marketing. With digital marketing, what we hone in on is content creation and syndication and SEO. Essentially, we launched Avintiv 4 years ago. We were a full service agency. We ran ads, we did Facebook ads, we did influencer marketing, we worked with a lot of celebrities and influencers. We just realized what we weren't passionate about anymore. We realized what we were passionate about, and that is building brands, and that's only offering services that we truly believe in. With how volatile and how up-and-down advertising is, social media channels are, we didn't feel that we had enough control over them to have them be fully valuable for a client. So we focus on those three services. ROB: Perfect. Those three services seem like a natural lifecycle that any brand is going to go through. JON: Exactly. ROB: The need for a brand refresh, the need to speak that into the world, and then the need to continue sustaining that. Do people often come to you at the branding end of things, or is it really they enter into that virtuous cycle at every point but still go through that cycle? JON: That's such a great question. I'm glad you asked that. The reason why we offer those three services – my background is consulting, so I've been building brands for close to 11 years now, probably built and scaled over 250 or 300 brands in the past 10 years so far. I found a common element on what it takes to start a brand, grow a brand, and keep growing it with trust and redoing the branding and redoing landing pages, websites, and that is why we offer those services that we do. To answer your question, we have two really ideal customers that come to us. We have a plethora of different industries that we serve, but our ideal customers that we know are going to be grand slams, it's going to be a win-win for both parties, is startups that haven't gotten started yet and they have funding behind them, whether it's an angel investor or they have family money behind them. They are already seasoned with business. They either have a good job or they've started companies in the past, and they realize that the statistics are against starting a small business or starting a business. The odds are against you. People come to Avintiv or to myself and they want it done right the first way. We start with the discovery; that goes into a small consultation to get to know them. What are their goals? What are their dreams? We dive inside their head, deeper than they've even gone, and figure out what they really wanting to start this company for. Is it an exit? Is it this is their lifelong dream that they've dreamt of since they were a child? What is their end goal? What happens is after that consultation, 9 times out of 10 it goes into a brand workshop. A brand workshop is a half-day consultation with our entire strategy team and whatever stakeholders are in that brand or that company. Then that dives into 40-50+ pages that we create for them. It's a new aged business plan/investor pitch deck, if you would. It goes over SWOT analysis, we create buyer personas, we create a mission statement, we go over your competition. It's the Bible for your business over the next 10 years. Clients really love that because it gives them, their team, their investors, or anyone involved the playbook of who they are, why they're doing what they're doing, and it creates validity to them starting this company. It gives them hope that this can be successful. After that, we help brand with naming, coming up with the name – or if they already have the name that they want, it goes into logo, icons, it goes into style guide, typography, colors, the whole nine yards. If it's an ecommerce or a product-based business, we then go into the product development and design. We were big in 2019 in the CBD industry. We had multiple clients that did the brand workshop. We then created 20 different SKUs for them, whether it was gummies, tinctures, bottles – you name it and we created – the bottles, the SKUs. We did a CBD water company in 1,200 or 2,400 Circle Ks, so we had to do different line item SKUs for them. Once it's in the product design phase and the packaging design phase, then we start building out the website. Once the website is fully built out, we do custom WordPress or Shopify, depending on what the client's needs are. We have in-house devs, in-house creative team, so it's not outsourced to Asia or India or anything like that. Once the website is getting ready to launch, our SEO team hops in and redoes all the on-page SEO. We build out their keyword analysis and basically create their 6- to 12-month SEO campaign, and we start writing the content. That's how we launch a lot of the companies. And we do consult with them what they should be doing on social media, what they should be doing on the ground with their team, and vice versa. So that's a 20,000-foot approach of a new brand that would hire us. Then we have a lot of companies that are 2 to 20 years old that have hit plateaus. They scaled up really quickly or they bought their family's business from them or they've bought a company or they just don't know how to grow in 2020. They come to us, and it's almost the same process. It's just a company that's doing a couple million in revenue and that's not good enough for them. They want to hire more employees. They want to scale up to more cities. They go through the exact same process that I just mentioned to you. ROB: Very interesting. One thing that's interesting there is that I think with an established brand, you as the agency have the advantage of they have customers; they may just not fully understand them. They may not fully understand why they are customers. It seems like you would be able to come in as Avintiv and pull on that thread and understand the deeper customer road and innovations. One thing that is hard in the startup world and the raising money world is that sometimes the ideal customer for them is a little bit more hypothetical. How do you walk through that process of helping them discover what is real versus what is an imagined fiction that they've been pushed towards – sometimes just in order to raise money? JON: I'll start with the first question and follow back with the startups. The first question you asked – yeah, I think it's vital for an already-successful company that's hit a plateau to come to us because they think they know their customers, but they've had so many employee changeovers, their team is much larger than it used to be. The owner thinks they know who their customers are because when they started it 2 to 10 years ago and they were the sales guy, they were on the frontlines – as the business grows, the CEO or the founder is not on the frontlines anymore. As time goes on – I've even been at fault for this in the past with other ecommerce companies – you start to lose who your customers are and what is making them purchase from you. We go through an entire customer buyer journey with them, and we even interview some of their customers and some of their clients and go through the whole process. "What is your buying process? Why do you buy from them? What makes you light up about working with this company?" The findings of that is it's almost like an out-of-body experience for business owners that have been in business for so long because it's completely different than anything they would've thought. The reasons why these customers shop with them or go to them are things they don't even focus on. That allows us to go back and figure out the three differentiators. Why do people shop with them? Why do people go to them for business? That allows us to help redesign the website and focus on why people go there, and use that as the language. That helps big time. Now, on the second question, for startups, you have a lot of people that are trying to raise money. Yeah, they put different types of Baby Boomers or millennials or this or that because they think that's the cool thing to talk about or they read a press release on Forbes or Entrepreneur.com and they're adding personas in there. What we do is go on data. We're not just throwing crap against the wall and hoping it sticks. Our team of analysts and our team of strategists, including myself, we've been researching for 10 years, so we know exactly what materials and resources to use, how to dive in, dive deep. We're able to find other business plans and other things that are already out there and basically pull together a web of different resources and show the entrepreneurs, "Hey, this is why your personas are a little bit off. Really, it's this person who's going to be buying from you. The price point needs to be XYZ, not what you had in your pitch deck." You might grow a little bit slower, you might grow a little bit faster, but we go off data. That's why investors and investor firms – we partner with a couple investment firms – they love working with us because when you work with Avintiv, the investor has higher odds of getting their return back, and at a quicker pace. But if you're working with an entrepreneur and this is their second or third business and there's really no direction, it's just going off of them, it's a lot riskier doing that because the investor is thinking, "What if something happens? What if they get burnout? What if this happens?" When you have an agency that knows what they're doing, we have as many case studies as we do, we have as much experience in the industry as we do, investors feel very safe working with us because our team acts as if we're the owners of the company as well. The past two weeks of coronavirus, I think I worked with our whole team till 9:30 at night. I've never worked that late with my team. I usually work that late, but my team goes above and beyond for the brands that we work with, especially in times of emergency like this. We're adding so many more hours to projects and not charging for them. We're just trying to provide as much value as possible right now. ROB: Absolutely. A lot of that value in this season is going to be probably going back to some of the diagnosis you've already done on customers, and some of it's going to be figuring out almost testing new ways of doing business. What are you seeing with maybe a customer or two that is finding a new way that they have to do business and actually learning about their customers in the process? JON: The good thing is our clients right now have been affected a little bit by what's going on, but I think that every one of our clients is understanding that they need to pay a lot more attention to marketing, to the words that they use, to every detail of everything that they publish. When people hire us, I'm very OCD. Our team is very OCD. We don't agree with us doing a Rolls-Royce style brand, logo, and packaging, but your social media looks like crap or your website looks like crap. I think clients are now understanding that the world is evolving to a place that isn't really trusting right now. The American people, or people around the world, aren't really trusting the government. They don't know what's real, they don't know what's fake. They're not really trusting banks. So I think 2020, people are going to be taking a step back and they're going to be thinking about their purchases a little bit more. They're going to be doing a little bit more research. They're going to be going from your website to your social media handles to see how you talk. People are wanting to invest in companies that stand for something, that are good people. I hate to say it, but a lot of businesses right now aren't being positive on social media and they're not being the light at the end of a dark tunnel. Customers are judging you. They're looking at you on what emails you're sending about the coronavirus, how you're acting in this type of emergency, because they're not going to come back and shop with you – if you can't handle yourself in an emergency, why do you deserve them when times are good? I think the biggest thing for brands right now is they have to pay attention to the details. I think for the agency world, the marketing agency industry and world is going to skyrocket over the next couple of months. We're looking at our sales forecasting, and it's not even about revenue for us. It's about the lives of our clients that we can change, and every client that we work with, they have hundreds if not thousands or millions of customers. So when we provide value to our one client, it's almost like we just impacted 10 million people. ROB: It's a good point you make that we're moving into a slightly longer buyer journey, in some cases because of trust and I think in other cases because we just can't get things as fast as we're used to and we don't need them as fast as we're used to. You order from Amazon Prime and it's not two days anymore sometimes. Sometimes it's four. You order from Instacart, sometimes you can't get an appointment for over a week. We're not as impulsive and the economy is not as booming, so people are going to think, and it's great that they're going to be able to think about and trust you. If we rewind that journey a little bit, how did you come to start Avintiv Media in the first place? What led you to the beginning of this journey? JON: Great question. I think most agency owners that would listen to this can agree – I kind of fell into it. I didn't plan on starting an agency. At the time, my background was consulting. I was in the bar and restaurant industry for a number of years, owned different establishments, was in event planning and event marketing. I owned a consulting firm. Then I got into ecommerce for a little bit. When I started Avintiv, I had an ecommerce clothing company that was booming at the time, and I kept hiring web developers and I kept hiring agencies to do Facebook ads and work on our marketing for us because even though I'm self-taught, being the CEO of a startup, you can't manage all aspects of everything. So I kept outsourcing it to different agencies, different people. Every developer I hired fell short of what I wanted, and then they wanted more money, they wanted more money. Then they took my website and threatened to not give the website back if we didn't pay an absurd fee. I just got sick and tired of being screwed over. The agencies that we were hiring – and I'm sure anyone that ran Facebook ads a couple years ago – there's a couple different settings on the Facebook ad ROIs you can click. One of them shows, "if this many people go to this landing page or add to cart, that's what the total would be." Our agencies were acting as if those were our revenue numbers, and I didn't catch on for a couple of months because I was running at the speed of light. My accountant told me, "Dude, you're not doing as much revenue as this agency is making it seem, and you're not even profitable working with these guys." I used two agencies, and both of them were not as truthful as I would've liked them to be. I kept having people reach out to me about a year after that like, "Hey, who did your logo? Who did your website? Who's running your social media?" I was doing everything. I taught myself web development. I taught myself videography. My background was social media, so I had that on lockdown. People kept reaching out to me, and I said, wow, there must be a need in the marketplace for offering these types of services that everyone keeps contacting me for. So I started building a couple websites for a couple local brands, and it evolved into I couldn't take on any more clients because I was at capacity. We were profitable the first week we launched the agency, and it evolved into being what it is today with having a full team and phenomenal clients. We're hitting our 4 years in April next month, and it's kind of like an out-of-body experience. I realized in this journey, I don't have a passion for building my own brands and selling my own products and launching – I owned a couple CBD brands last year. I don't have a passion for building my own thing. I have a passion for changing other people's lives. I've been a coach and consultant; I love changing an entrepreneur's life. I love giving them a phenomenal experience. That's why I love Avintiv so much, because we are so passionate about building other people's brands that change the world. We're working with a local health and wellness clinic in Scottsdale that's actually a very big clinic, and he is one of the most talented doctors I've ever met in 31 years of my life, doing holistic type of medicine, IV drips, Botox – a variety of different things. He has a new, modern way of doing medicine, and the amount of lives this guy is going to change just by us being able to redo his branding, his website, and sending him in a different direction – that's what gives me fuel to keep growing the agency. But if it was me just selling my own products and trying to get rich and things like that, I don't have a passion for that. ROB: It's hard to come across as genuine with a passion for that because it seems like you're serving yourself maybe more than your clients. How did you come to find this particular resonance with startups? Were you tapped into a vein locally? Is there a regional connection? Or do you think it's just a natural resonance with who you are and that brand building connection? JON: When I started my clothing company before I sold it, I posted my whole journey on Instagram, on social media. I'm talking about our first initial designs 6-7 years ago, and then our first warehouse, and people saw me use my living room as my warehouse, and then we got a bigger warehouse. So I've been sharing my journey for a number of years. But not only that, any industry I've been in, I'm blessed to be I guess you could say a social butterfly. No matter what city I live in or where I'm at, I'm able to meet the who's who that runs that city, become friends with them. I'm a likeable guy. I'm someone that doesn't screw anyone over. I have a lot of friends. I think that has helped me build a good amount of following and people that pay attention to me, along with press releases or certain things. I think it's just a combination of who I am and the journey of me sharing my journey. People have seen how many startups I've built or have consulted, or people ask around town, "Hey, I have this new company idea. Who's the best person in town I could ask?", and 9 times out of 10, people send them my way. ROB: As a social butterfly, I'm sure there's a certain extent to which you have also engaged with other social butterflies. How are you finding to connect and scratch that itch in this season we're in, where you're probably not getting together with people you don't know? JON: To be honest, if you look on my Instagram page or any public stuff that's out there of me, it probably looks like I'm the life of networking, going out – not partying, but being out and about and socializing. I am such an introvert. I'm standing, as I'm talking to you, at my bookshelf right now. Being locked in, reading books and working, I don't think I could be happier right now. Yeah, it's a little weird not going out, but I honestly think it's a little bit easier to connect with people right now. I have a lot of "celebrity influencer" friends that are in LA that it might take them a week or two weeks to text back or to get back. I'm talking to people I haven't talked to in years or months. I'm talking to my family more than ever. So I think what's going on with us all being locked in, I think people are more accessible. I'm hopping on so many free consultation calls and discovery calls that I would usually charge a pretty high rate for just because I have extra time on my hands. I'm not traveling to the office, I'm not traveling to the gym, so why not provide more value? I know a lot of friends or people of that nature, influencers in LA, New York, Miami, they're doing the same thing. And these are guys who charge a couple thousand dollars an hour, and they're hopping on tons of free webinars, they're hopping on free Zoom calls. I think it's a really cool thing, what's going on right now. All of us are trying to just be there for people that are scared and don't know where to turn. ROB: That's perfect. It's such a great time to give and to build trust – not that it isn't always time to build trust. Jon, as you look back, what are a couple things you've learned from building Avintiv in these 4 years that you would do differently if you were starting from scratch? JON: A couple of different things. Before I started Avintiv, I wish I would've understood the accounting and financial realm a little bit better. I always thought that having the best accountants, they would fix everything. I ran into a bad experience about 5 or 6 years ago when one of my accountants was going through chemo and had cancer and actually dropped the ball with a couple of things, and I didn't notice it because I didn't know it as well as I should have. So understanding the fundamentals of business – not per industry or what type of business, but just understanding accounting and business from a financial aspect. That's one of the things. Two, from an agency standpoint, I probably would've niched down immediately. Although I did, but the niche I chose was more fitness and fitness product realm, and there's not a lot of money in the fitness industry, as much as people might portray that. So I would've definitely niched down in the beginning, and I might've only launched one service. If I had to start over or if Avintiv sells down the road one day and I had to redo the agency realm, I would probably launch three individual brands. I would start with SEO. I would build a multiple 6-figure per month MRR SEO agency. I would then build a web design agency, and then I would build a branding agency. All three have different managers that run the businesses, all internal team members, and we outsource in between the companies. I would run each individual solely. When you're running your advertising and your lead gen for each of those businesses, you don't have to talk about web design or branding. You talk about SEO. It's simply SEO and content. So I would have three individual brands that basically live in the same ecosystem, but to the general public, they don't. ROB: Right, so to the general public, it wouldn't be a white label pass through. It would be a partnership to the world? JON: Exactly. ROB: Got it. What's next for Avintiv? What are you looking forward to? What do you think we should be looking to in the marketing world as we're looking ahead? JON: Oh man. What's next for Avintiv is, now seeing how busy everything is going to be, I definitely think that we're able to double in size and double in revenue this year. We might be going remote for the next couple of months just because it doesn't make sense having expensive office space when our city isn't even letting us operate out of our office. So we might be going remote for a couple of months. But I would like to scale the team up to about 15 in-house employees, a little bit bigger office space this year, and be the go-to for building startups and rebuilding brands that are hitting a plateau. 2020 is the first year that Avintiv has been my only company and my only focus. I had a lot of different fires out there in 2019. I owned a couple CBD brands, I was in the credit card processing space, and the opportunity cost that hit me – I was so passionate about helping these other brands grow that I got equity plays and equity pieces. It took my eye off the ball. So 2020 is honestly the first year since we've launched Avintiv where it is my only and sole focus. If we've grown this far in 4 years and it's only been 25% or 30% of what I do day to day, I'm pretty excited to see what 100% looks like. ROB: Wow. A lot of times when we have our hand in too many things, it becomes very difficult to find that margin and time to reflect and really gather the confidence that you've got to do something else, you have to change how you're doing things. How did you find that margin to realize the things you needed to cut out of your own world, the things you were more passionate and less passionate about, and focus solely on Avintiv? JON: I go through phases of cycles of what books I read and what coaches I hire. I had an out-of-body experience towards the end of 2019 and towards the beginning of 2020, and I just found out that I had too much – and I never usually have anxiety or stress. I live in a stressful environment doing what I do, but I never usually let it get to me. It started to get to me a little bit, and I said, what the heck is going on in my life that I can't really control – all of a sudden I'm having anxiety on a Monday or a Tuesday? I started to realize I was waking up and I was consulting for a financial client, and then I was running a CBD company, and then I was an agency owner, and then I was consulting on SEO and content. I was too many people in a given day where I'd come home – at the time I was in a relationship, and then I had to play boyfriend, or son. There was no time for me to sit back and just be Jon. I was 15 or 20 different people to so many different people, and I was filling so many other people's cups versus my own. I was taking care of everyone's needs but my own. ROB: Sometimes we do need that sort of break. If I look back to your ideal customers, I think one challenge people often find themselves in is when you're looking at startups, how do you qualify the ones who are good clients, and how do you qualify the ones that are going to have you do a bunch of work and not pay you? How do you think about discernment when it comes to the startup world? JON: Great question. We've run into some payment issues with the CBD industry, but now, going through that – and it pays to have a great collections agency and a great legal team behind your back. We're pretty protected when it comes to that. But we have a pretty good and robust discovery and consultation process where we can smell bull from a mile away. I've been doing this for so long where I trained my team to ask certain questions. And it's not that we don't want to help startups that don't have the funding or don't have the money, but we will be doing a disservice to you if you don't pay for what our services are worth because our team is going to resent working for you, we're not going to be able to profit or be able to pay for things. So at the end of the day, we don't usually work with people that don't have funding or they can't cope with money just because, even though it's not a business transaction, it has to be a win-win scenario. It can't be a win-lose scenario where we feel so bad for the startup and this entrepreneur because he or she is such a good person that we're going to discount our services 50% so they win. That is going to be a loss for us. It always has to be a win-win. We always tell our clients we want it to be a win-win-win scenario. All of our clients that we help are B2C, the majority of them. So if we help our clients succeed and we make our customers happy, those are two wins. And if those two people are happy, that equals a win for Avintiv. So we are in the win-win-win type of business. We just brought on a startup a month ago, and he's a very successful pilot. We can see that if someone has already had a career for 25 years or 20 years and they make a really good living, that shows us that there's probably capital that backs them. They went through schooling. Being a pilot is a rigorous checks and balances. They have a crazy amount of processes. So that would fit in line with how we run our agency. Now, if someone hasn't been employed for 10 or 15 years and they've had a couple startups that have failed, this is a new great idea that's going to take over the world, but they talk about crazy things like "This is the next billion dollar idea! I want to create this and sell it in two years for $5 million!", like half the CBD startups out there right now, we won't work with them. The expectations that they've fed into their head are not real, and I don't want to be the bearer of bad news to tell them that there's no Santa Claus. Everyone thinks "because this company sold for X" or "Elon Musk created this," that it's possible for anyone. I'm never the guy that's going to kill someone's dreams or say you can't do anything; I'm actually the guy that thinks anyone can do anything if they believe in themselves. But we're not going to go along on the ride if you're going to be dragging us through the mud with you because we're just not at that place anymore. Maybe 4-5 years ago, we would've tested the waters. But we have a big enough clientele and portfolio and case studies now where we are very choosy with who we work with. We can pick and choose very easily, and we turn down clients left and right. If it's not going to be a win-win-win, we're not going to work with you because you're going to be mad at us, we're going to be mad at you, and it's just going to create resentment. ROB: It almost sounds like a hiring decision. JON: Oh, one hundred percent. It's funny when clients are on a discovery call or consultation call and they think that they're interviewing us, and when the roles get reversed and we start interviewing them, they're like, "Wait a second. What's going on here?" It's like, we only take on X amount of clients per quarter, projects of this size. We want to make sure that our whole team would enjoy working on your project. It's not about revenue or profit for us. If our creative team is going to be bored out of their mind working on this project, we're not going to do it because that is going to stunt their growth for every other project they work on. So we are so careful with who we work with. ROB: Perfect. Jon, when people want to find you and want to find Avintiv Media, where should they go? JON: You can go to www.avintivmedia.com. Otherwise, our Instagram handle is @AvintivMedia. Otherwise, I am mainly on Instagram @JonBoles. It's got a little verified checkmark next to it, so it's pretty easy to find. ROB: That's a solid move there. Jon, thank you for coming on the podcast. Looking forward to that doubling growth here in 2020. JON: Thank you so much for having me. Hopefully I was able to provide a little bit of value to you guys. ROB: I definitely think so. Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Anthony Sarandrea is the founder of Siteflood, a high-revenue agency offering website design, search engine optimization, paid social, paid search management, and analytics and tracking to select clients. Siteflood's primary focus is on paid media, fast results, and a trackable ROI. Originally, a boutique agency with select clients paying a monthly retainer, Siteflood has added a "partnership model," where Siteflood's income from a client is tied directly the number of leads it generates or the client's sales numbers. As these clients grow, the agency's incentivization grows. This model has enabled Siteflood to scale quickly without needing to add huge numbers of staff or hundreds of clients. The agency garners a daily gross revenue in the six figures – with a staff of around 30 people. Does incentivization always work? Anthony relates the story where one of two client companies, with identical, copy-pasted Google AdWords, made $3 for every $1 net margin spend and the other company claimed they had not "made a dollar of revenue" in 4 months. The difference in results had nothing to do with the generated lead flow. It came from differences in the companies' internal sales processes, products, and how each company closed deals. Anthony emphasizes that incentivization only works when you are "aligned with the right people." In this interview, Anthony recommends finding clients that work . . . and then finding more of the same kind of clients. He describes the process Siteflood uses to select "the right clients": Does the company measure up on an in-depth "vetting process" of its processes, culture, and growth-readiness? Does this relationship look like it will be successful? Is the company at an inflection point where it is large enough to quickly scale to putting six figures a month into marketing and small enough that it can be coached to improve its internal, customer relationship, and sales processes? Does the company have the infrastructure to support a ten-fold increase in sales? At the beginning, Anthony did it all. He explains how growing his company was an iterative process of replacing himself. He recommends a book, The E-Myth, Why Most Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, available on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Most-Businesses-Dont-About/dp/0887303625. The book discusses the growth journey in terms of learning new skill sets. Anthony feels the key to sustainable long term growth is to invest in his people – to serve as a facilitator and cheerleader, to provide the right tools and training, to continuously invest in his employees' wellbeing, and to set them up for success. Growth also requires hiring . . . the right people for the right reasons: Hire quickly to replace yourself in jobs you don't like to do. For fast results, hire people who can do things better than you can. If you cannot afford someone full time, hire part time. Anthony recommends a site called Clarity.fm https://clarity.fm/ where experts are paid by the minute. Hire for jobs at which you excel, but expect that the person replacing you will only be 70% as good at it as you are. Here, Anthony explains his training process. He says a company owner absolutely has to replace him- or herself if the company is to grow. Anthony's interview is rich with ideas. His favorite way to be contacted is through Instagram at: @anthonysarandrea. Or google his name and reach out to him on one of his sites. He loves answering questions. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Anthony Sarandrea, Founder of Siteflood in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Anthony. ANTHONY: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me, brother. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Siteflood and the specialties that you work in? ANTHONY: We started as a boutique agency that took on select clients. Really the paid media space is where we've always sharpened our teeth. A lot of that is the speed of results to be able to have a trackable ROI on a lot we've done. We started taking on select clients in a traditional agency format where they paid us a retainer per month, and a lot of clients still are on that format. Over the years, we started performing well for clients and realized, why don't we productize our service? Why don't we sell leads or sell on a per sale or something like that where essentially, instead of getting paid a flat fee each month, we were tied to incentives that aligned with the actual company itself – or our partner, I should say. That allowed us to very rapidly scale without having to add hundreds of people or hundreds of clients or anything like that. When our clients grew, we grew and the incentivization grew and we made more money. Today, we've scaled up to a little over six figures a day that the company makes in gross revenue. I think a lot of people are surprised the team is only 30-something people. Most agencies in order to scale need to hire on dozens and dozens of people to get anywhere near that level, where because of the model and incentivization ad structure, and we've been able to do it in a win-win format. ROB: The productization you came up with, did you get to leads? Or was there another metric? Does it vary by client a little bit? ANTHONY: It varies by client. Most of what we focus on today is in the lead space, so each customer we send. But a lot of times it was structured initially on profit sharing or rev sharing or a bounty per new customer we drove. I think a lot of agencies and brands – we talked a little bit before this on where I see the future of advertising agencies – I think brands are going to demand more, as they should, out of their agencies, where it's not just a "write a check and forget it" and pay it each month. When essentially the incentivization is in alignment, both the agency and the company grow and everybody feels good about it versus writing a 10 grand a month check about SEO and saying you might see something in the next 2 years. ROB: Right. It seems like there's always tension in pricing, and you want to drive to value for sure. It seems like when you talk about leads, there's a tension because if you price towards closed business, then you are linking your business to their sales effectiveness. But if you are not pricing to their closed business, then it leaves room for conversations about lead quality. How did you figure out which side you wanted to land on, if you have? ANTHONY: Great question. That thought process – I'll start with this, too, to asterisk the whole thing – it forced us to realize that we bring a lot more – a lot of times companies or even vendors look at themselves as vendors and they're like, "These are the guys that write the checks for me." It's like, hold on, when we're doing good services, we're actually helping write the checks for them. We're helping them pay their employees because we're driving customers. So it put us a lot more in the driver's seat than I think a lot of agencies or even brands look at vendors or agencies. They look at them as a commodity or it's just another person, where now it forced us to be infinitely more selective on who we worked with. To your point, I remember at one point we had two companies that were the exact same. We literally copy and pasted the campaigns in Google AdWords, and one company was making $3 to every $1 net dollar margin that they were spending, and the other one said in 4 months, they hadn't made a dollar in revenue. What was the difference there? It was their sales process internally. It was their product. It was how they closed deals. It had nothing to do with the lead flow we were driving. I think a lot of agencies and brands, it's easy to point and say the leads suck or the traffic sucks or they're not good at what they do. We had to really look at, who are we aligning ourselves with? That is equally if not infinitely more important, to be aligned with the right people. I guess to answer your initial question, we focused at the beginning, and we do today, on driving the best customers, really helping our clients make the most money, because we know in order for us to get paid more and put more dollars in our pocket, we need to help them put more dollars in their pocket. Otherwise they can't pay us. If the company is not making money, they can't continue to justify paying us. So by focusing on really the bottom line of our clients or for agency owners to do that, you're able to essentially justify your fees coming back tenfold. They'd be silly to not want to pay you more if you're making them that money and you're able to trackably show that. ROB: As you've dialed in on these right customers for you, have there been certain categories, certain types of companies for certain product lines that have emerged? And how do you get close enough to really, really vet and evaluate whether they're a good customer? ANTHONY: The vetting, we'll do everything. When they come in and they're asking to work with us, we'll buy the product or we'll call in and even walk through the sales process of enrolling the client and stuff like that and just see, how is their follow-up sequence? How is their upsell sequence? How do they do it? A lot of that, we don't necessarily have enough hours in the day or resources and/or bandwidth that we want to point towards helping them tune up their sales process. If a lot of that is not already in place, we know it's probably going to be a failing campaign. Simple things that you forget, but most companies don't even pick up the phone when it rings. It's so funny. They have a $12 an hour college guy or gal answering the phone, and it's like, you're spending 10 grand a month on Google AdWords and then you have a $12 an hour girl or guy answering the phones? How does that make sense? So even just little quick things like that. Just saying, "Hey, is this going to be successful? Have they invested in their sales process?" That's number one. Number two, we're at a really interesting inflection point where we need a big enough company that can scale so they can put six figures a month into marketing dollars, but also small enough where we can grab their ear when we need to say, "Hey, answer the phone in a certain way" or "Hey, you should work on your upsell sequence." We had Fortune 500 companies where it took months to move anything, and it was hindering us, especially if we're tied to performance. If we know something is going to work, or at least we want to test it, and it takes 3 months of approvals to get through middle management to upper management to senior – that's not a partner for us either. So we've really landed on companies that probably do anywhere from $10 million to $50 million a year that are heavily focused on direct response advertising. Things like that are really our bread and butter. ROB: Any particular categories of direct response product? ANTHONY: On our own website, a lot of the lead focus are a lot in the financial space, but healthcare has also been very big for us. Very easily, though, you can apply the same model to ecommerce. The same challenges work there, and now the conversation is on the phone with the brand. "How is your supply chain pipeline? Are you guys able to scale up quickly? Do you guys have investments? How's your cash flow?" Asking those types of questions where if you're signing up 100 sales and you go to 1,000 sales a day, do they have the infrastructure to support that? I guarantee you, if you're an agency owner or if you're a brand listening, that conversation sticks out infinitely further than every other agency that's like "I charge 10% of spend. We're going to get you impressions and clicks and SEO." The brand owner is almost like, "I don't understand half this stuff. It feels like brain surgery. Everyone is having the same conversations with me." "Here's my past work." It's like, how about getting on the phone and being like, "Logistically, how would it work if you tripled it? Do you guys have the infrastructure to support that?" Have that conversation. See the response you get if you're an agency owner to a brand. Or if you're a brand, think about how good that would feel to have that agency partner having those conversations with you as a partner. I keep saying partner, too. I don't say a vendor. I don't say a company. It really becomes a partnership in a lot of ways because the whole train falls off the tracks if both sides aren't keeping up their end of the bargain. If the engine isn't moving, if they're not putting the right gasoline and oil into the engine, you're just the wheels, really. You could be the best wheels on the planet; if that engine is not fine-tuned, which is the client, or vice versa, there's a problem. So there really needs to be an alignment on both. ROB: Anthony, you said you're around 30 people in the company now, but obviously everybody starts somewhere, and it usually starts pretty small. How did you end up starting Siteflood, and what led to that beginning? ANTHONY: It really started with me doing a lot of essentially consultation or consulting work, it felt like, or side hustle, where you've got a couple clients. I was the technician. I'm the one running the AdWords accounts and things like that and having the conversations. At least me – I'll just tell my story – you start doing everything, really. I'm the bookkeeper, I'm the accountant. I'm wearing all the hats. Then, at least my journey, I got busy enough where I was able to hire on – at the time, the first hire was a bookkeeper part-time, and then the second hire was actually my brother, someone to run the ads where then I enjoyed and was good at the conversations with the clients. Then started building out essentially people doing the work, so the technicians. I was the manager/point of contact for the clients to liaison, I'll say. Then eventually replacing myself as that, and then last step is and was replacing myself in sales. That's the progression. I find a lot of agency owners move through a similar progression. They go from the technician to manager to learning how to be an entrepreneur. There's a great book called The E-Myth that I recommend to anybody listening. It essentially walks through that journey and how you're really each time learning new skillsets. I was a badass sales guy, and then I was a badass internet marketer, and then I had to learn how to be a good manager. Then I had to learn to be a good entrepreneur. You really start at ground zero, almost on each one. I think the quicker you wrap your head around this is a totally new skillset, even though it's the same industry or type of business – I think a lot of people fall into the fallacy that it's like "I'm really good at Google AdWords. I'll be a really good manager or a really good entrepreneur." It's not always the case. It's very difficult to start from ground zero and really humble yourself each time you move that progression from technician to manager to entrepreneur. ROB: Those last couple of steps that you mentioned can often be the most challenging. That switching out from being the lead salesperson, in particular, because in a services firm, so often the client wants some facetime with you as the founder, as the leader. How have you navigated that transition? Is it more that people who are taking the role and leading on sales are leading in that function and you're still brought in sometimes because that's part of the brand of the firm? Or have you found some tactics that you've been able to move it even further? ANTHONY: I think there's one thing that really stuck with me. I think especially a lot of A type entrepreneurs are very controlling, and nobody's going to ever have the same level of care you do for your business because your name is on it. You're taking the risk, so you get the downfall and the upside. When the company is making good money, you're making good money. When the company is struggling or failing, it's really your ass. Where was I going with that? Oh, I had a great mentor tell me one time, "If you can hire someone to do the job 70% as good as you, that's what you should aim for." It was tough because at first I had someone come in and would run the AdWords accounts, and I was like, I can do this better. The reality is, you probably can. If you're telling yourself that, it's probably true. But you will never grow with that mindset. The company will not grow. Unless you find a way to get more hours in the day – which Bill Gates hasn't been able to figure that out yet – unless you find a way to be able to extend the length of the day, it's impossible for you to ever break that. Wrapping my head around that was like, got it, cool, put your ego down, understand that yes, nobody can do this as good as you – and that's okay. Now it's become a function of, can I hire someone to do it 70% as good as me. I really lead with "I do, you watch, then you do, I watch, and then I manage." Essentially, I'm doing it and showing it; they're watching. Then I'm hands off and I'm watching and I'm saying, "Now you're doing it." Then when it feels good, it's putting checks and balances in place. It's "Hey, let's track the CPA you're driving for this campaign. Let's track how many conversations you had with a client." I'll poke in time to time and just listen on mute to a sales call, little things like that. But really, at least for me, it's a function of again, I'm doing and you're watching, you're taking notes. And it's not a one-time thing. It's consistently – it's funny. Now I joke I'm really a cheerleader, at the end of the day, today. I work for my team more than they work for me. My job all day long is like, "What can I get you? How can I help you?" They're like, "Go get me this." I'm running to go get coffee for everybody. That's my job now: to continuously invest in their wellbeing, to make sure they have the right tools, they have the right training, set them up to have consultations with people that might be better. That's in personal and business life. That continuous grooming of individuals is really, at least in my opinion, the key to sustainable long-term growth. But again, that was a little tactical there. I think that same progression applies to whether you're hiring someone around an AdWords account, someone to talk to clients, or someone to sell. But short answer, yeah. The other portion of my time is putting out fires. I'm not going to say I'm sitting on a beach all day and the machine runs itself. I am there to put our fires. I am there when there's a difficult conversation or a new challenge that comes up for a sales guy or within the accounts. I am there to help strategize or to jump in or anything like that. Yeah, I'd say I handle the top 10% of fires as well that roll up to me. ROB: Very good. Anthony, you mentioned that one of your early hires was your brother, and it sounded like he came in in this operational structuring role. How have you thought about, as you grow, handling this balance of needing process to scale while also needing creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit to continue growth and avoid stagnating? ANTHONY: That's an awesome question, dude. I think first you've got to understand where your strength is. Is it operationally or is that continued vision? Ultimately, I think I'd be lying if I didn't say you have to learn and work on both. That's where that challenge of the 24 hours comes in. But it's hiring people that can do things better than yourself. For instance, I remember when we were at a much, much, much smaller size, I hired an operational consultant who came in for a week. It was a ton of money at the time for him to come in, and I was like, this is a necessary investment. He put together project management systems and he put together processes. It was all stuff that I had been probably a year too late. We really needed it a year earlier and I just kept being like, "I'll do it" or "We should" or "We're good, the train's not falling off." Making those investments back into the business is extremely key because if I hadn't done that, we would've never unlocked the next level in the video game. We would've been stuck on that same level. That process is extremely important and it is something that I am not blessed with. I was not born to be very checklist, A, B, C, D, E. I always joke it's a "fire, ready, aim" mentality. Essentially, finding people, whether it's consultants, it's a part-time person – whoever gets that ball moving, because a lot of times it's hard, depending on the size of an agency, to be like "Let me go hire a full-time operations guy or project management." You might not have the cash flow to be able to justify that. But what can you afford and what kind of steps – there's a great site called Clarity.fm where you can pay people per minute for their time. Go find someone who ran a good-sized company operationally and have them come in and help put this together. Spend a day with someone on your team that can help do it. Because ultimately, you do need to be watching out for icebergs as an entrepreneur. If that is the role you're going to take and you are going to be the visionary, you do need to be looking out for the future and say, "Hey, we need to productize our service" or "Hey, we need to focus here." Some of the most successful people in the world stare out of a window for hours throughout the day. Everyone's like, "Are they daydreaming? What are they doing?" You get paid as an entrepreneur to think. The quicker you can free up your time from – I'll have days where I have 200 emails, and I'll shut it down. I'll just sit outside and just think. It sounds funny. It's like, "Dude, you've got to knock those out." Some of my highest ROI time is just sitting on a bench somewhere and thinking. It sounds funny and it sounds silly, but it really is true. Eventually, if you are the visionary, you're paid to think. You make money when you're thinking. The quicker you get out of the day-to-day rut and the more time you have free to just express yourself and think, the quicker the business is going to grow. If you're not the visionary, if you're not there, can you find a business partner that is? Can you find someone, again, a consultant or a mentor, someone who has been there, done that, grown to that level? How can you get around them and incentivize them again to help you? Maybe they make a percentage of growth. Maybe you're paying them high hourly to get that. Maybe that's a skill you're going to work on. "How do I study some of the best visionaries and thinkers in the world?" So I don't want you to get stuck if someone is really good operationally on stuff to be like "That's not me, I'm screwed." It's like, no, find someone who – essentially, understand what you're good at, double down on that, and then surround yourself with people that can pick up the slack on the other level, is really the key. I think the reason I'm so good at what I do is because I know what I'm really bad at and I'm okay with that. So I don't need to wear 50 hats. I don't need my ego to be stroked. I don't need to be right. In fact, I want to be wrong. How can you find people that will tell you you're wrong and can help get that to the next level? And it doesn't have to be hiring someone full-time. You don't need to have a $100,000 a month payroll to do that. I'm telling you, there are shortcuts. There are people that want a mentee in their life because they get a ton of value out of mentoring someone at any stage of a business. Are you reaching out to those people on LinkedIn? Are you direct messaging them on Instagram for a conversation? Again, are you hiring a consultant? Are you paying someone an hourly rate to come in? Are you finding a part-time CFO that can at least get the ball rolling so you can start seeing the value or start making somewhat of your investment back? Understand the value of a CFO or something like that at a limited facet before jumping in and hiring someone at $100,000 salary, $60,000 salary. ROB: A lot of gold there, Anthony. We will get Clarity.fm into the show notes as well. You've been looking back a little bit on some really good lessons along the way. What are some things you might do in building Siteflood that you would do differently that you've learned? If you said, "If I were doing this all over again, I would change…" ANTHONY: I had a few key moments for me. One was I remember I sat in this all-day learning thing, and they go, "If you can't sit here all day without having to go – if you can't step away from your business for a full day on a workday, there's a problem." I think that pain point really hit with me. I felt successful, I felt good enough, I was making good money, and I felt kind of like an idiot. I was like, damn. I got four or five calls throughout that thing. I had to literally go outside. I was like, "Holy crap, I have not created a business. I've created a job for myself." The second I woke up to that, I started really understanding, again, some of my pain points. Some of the things that I would do differently is niche down in the specific industry and focus on that. I hear it over and over again; it did not ring with me, and now I can say, thank God, it finally did. In hindsight I can look back, and like I said, healthcare and financial industries – it's not I just focus on plumbers or something like that, so I'm not even there yet, although I'd like to be one day. Even just this focus around finance and healthcare – we don't work with ecommerce clients. Even just cutting that off, it sounds funny and it felt funny at the beginning because you don't want to turn away business. There's ways to do it. Refer someone and get a referral fee to an agency that does work on ecommerce clients. Then it doesn't feel like you're turning away money. Stuff like that. But niching on one industry I think allows you to not just think about – if you're an advertising agency, not just advertising all day, but really helping you read on the financial industry or read on the healthcare industry, whatever it is. If it's legal, law firms, read on that. You start learning the conversations. You start seeing trends in what's working and not working, even as osmosis, even outside of running ads. It also allows your team to focus. Now they know how to run a law firm's account versus they're working with a car guy and then a plumber. They're learning new industries all day long. There's a compounding effect to just focusing on the same industry. So that's number one. I heard it, but I wasn't listening for probably 2 years. I heard niche down specific on one, and I was like, "Yep, sounds good, but I've got this auto guy who's about to sign up, and then I've got this DUI lawyer that's about to sign. That's money. I want money." I'm not necessarily telling you turn away money. Find ways to monetize that or do it at a limited facet, but start gravitating towards which client are you performing the best for? Who do you have the best results for? Then go find more of those people. Go find more of those to essentially enroll more in your program or bring on as a client. That niching is the number one change that I would make. Can't stress that enough. I didn't listen. Number two, again, is find what I disliked the most, like what didn't I like in my day-to-day the most, and hire for that immediately. There is a massive cost that people don't see to their brainpower, to you spending time on things that you're not good at and you don't like doing. It drains your energy. Looking at your energy as a currency is a really big deal. People don't look at their energy and time as a currency. Is something energizing you and getting you excited, or is it draining you? If it's draining you, find someone who it does excite. I remember my bookkeeper, I kept apologizing when I needed her to do stuff because I hated it. One day she goes, "Anthony, why do you keep apologizing? I love doing this stuff." That clicked with me. Just because I don't like to do it, doesn't mean other people dislike to do it. So that was a really big learning point for me too. Really, those two go a long way, the focusing, doubling down on a specific thing, and then essentially – there's a theme here – hiring around things you're not good at or you don't like doing. ROB: That's a great takeaway to get rid of those things. Really, it takes your mental energy to think about doing it, then to not do it, and then to do it. It's a bad, bad thing. Anthony, as you're looking ahead, what is coming up for Siteflood or the industry in general, marketing world, that you're pumped about? ANTHONY: I think marketing world in general I'll touch on – because I think it'll apply the best to everybody – I really do see a shift in the market where brands are not going to put up with just writing a $5,000 or $10,000 a month check and be okay with it. I think the companies and the agencies that are good at what they do are going to move to more and more performance-based. I think that's very healthy for the space. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here with both brands and agencies. They've gotten burnt by the people overseas that said, "I'll get you to Google No. 1 for $500 a month" or "I'll do this." The overpromise, underdeliveries I think are keeping a lot of brands from working with the right agencies. That's challenging, and I think we're moving that friction point of tying in performance bonuses or becoming more performance/CPA driven agencies versus, again, these big agencies that come in and get big contracts and say "Look how many eyeballs you're bringing out!", which some people are excited by, but most brands are ROI focused, CPA driven. At some point they are focused on revenue. I see that as a shift over the next few years. It will become more and more prevalent for marketing agencies, and I think it's going to squeeze out the low-performing ones, and I think it's going to put the high-performing ones on a rocket ship to the moon because brands are going to be a lot more excited to work with agencies. There's not this dirty feeling around it. I look at it as like buying a car. I hate going to buy a car because I feel dirty about it. Even when I need a car or even if I want one, I'm like, "Nah, I don't really want to go deal with that process." I think brands probably feel that way to an extent. They're like, "I know I need a marketing agency, I know there's good ones, I know I can use it, but man, I don't really want to get jerked around for another 6 months and thousands of dollars and this and that." I'm hoping the overall viewpoint and feeling around marketing agencies increases in a positive light versus "I've been burnt 50 times" or "I've just given up." They're too jaded. So I'm really hoping for that. The other thing that's interesting is we're in a great market right now. Everybody is a little bit more lenient with spending money and things like that, and as we head towards, eventually, the economy correcting itself – I don't know when it'll be, but that's something interesting to focus on, too, for a lot of agencies. Are you working with recession-proof businesses? That's interesting to think about on the horizon. Are you working with want-to-haves or need-to-haves? Are you working with people that sell trinkets? Are they going to be the first to get cut when it comes to a recession, or are you aligning yourself with businesses that are recession-proof? That's not everything, but it is an interesting thought that I think a lot of agencies may not be looking at. Because things are good, people forget the '08s or '06s of times. Or may not have been in business or around then. I fall into that too, being younger and not really being mature in business when the recession was low. So I'm really preaching to myself. Just look out for the horizon. I don't know what that exactly means to you listening, but it is an important thing that I think when times are good, everybody forgets and doesn't necessarily prep for. So apply that however you want. ROB: That's real solid, Anthony. When people want to find you and they want to find Siteflood, where should they go to track you down? ANTHONY: I'm most active probably on Instagram. It's just my first and last name, @anthonysarandrea. Just google me and reach out on one of my sites. I'm happy to answer any questions for anybody, too. Any way I can help. If you're an agency looking to grow, I'd be more than happy to help point you in the right direction or give any feedback. Or if you're a brand that's struggling to decide which agency to work with, I can help, give you some pointers as you're going through that process on some of the best people or best things to look out for or questions to ask, things like that. It does feel a little bit like brain surgery. Really, on either respect, if you're the agency or you're the brand, having third party clarity, I'm happy to jump in that facet. ROB: That's great. Thank you, Anthony Sarandrea, Founder of Siteflood. It has been great to hear your own story and journey. Congratulations on everything that y'all are doing. ANTHONY: Thanks, brother. Thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it. I had a blast. ROB: All right. Be well. ANTHONY: Thanks, bro. 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.

Espree Devora, got tagged as "the Girl Who Gets it Done." Later, when a friend observed her enthusiasm in tackling a number of business tasks for Tony Hsieh, then head of Zappos. Her passion for content creation began when she was in the 6th grade and her father gave her a video camera. She filmed hundreds of sequences featuring "extreme" sports (skateboarding, motocross) and built the first online action sports social network. In 2012, she attempted to start "We are LA Tech," featuring local startup founders. She shot 12-episodes, but her enterprise partner refused to edit the material. Dead end. Two years later, in September 2014, Espree resurrected "We are LA Tech" as a podcast. By October 2014, it topped Apple's New & Noteworthy. She had learned on YouTube everything she needed to know to run a podcast. In 2015, Espree launched "Women in Tech" in response to the dire "glass ceiling" warnings so prevalent at the time. Her purpose? To "create a positive piece of content whose sole purpose is to show us what's possible, to expand our belief system, so listeners walk away feeling, "'If she can do it, so can I.'" Much of the theme of her work is what Espree calls "vulnerable leadership." She wants to share "how people have built their companies and their professions in ways that are really empowering, and what can we learn from them." In this interview, For people interested in getting started in podcasting, Espree recommends the technical equipment and software that she has found to be most helpful, planning and motivational strategies, She provides a series of podcasting training videos. The first tool in Espree's podcasting toolbag was an app to help her maintain focus on daily goals, to help her deal with her fear of " creating this thing, and then creating a thing that didn't work out." Tools she uses today: An Audio Technica 2100 microphone, Sound Studio editing software. As podcasting has grown, the demand for podcasting training has likewise increased. Espree teaches everything from large groups to intensive, private, month-long master classes. She recommends continuous outreach to maintain relationships and lists a number of tools effective for doing this, and offers tips on techniques and frequency . . . in order to be "un—annoying." Espree had been scheduled as a speaker at this year's now-cancelled South by Southwest. She has given many presentations there in the past, performed live podcasts, and led meetup groups. She credits her success to being where hard work meets luck and opportunity, a variation of the Roman philosopher Seneca's "Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity." Espree can be reached on LinkedIn and all social at (Espree Devora), and onTwitter @espreedevora. Her podcasts are on: WeAreLATech.fm http://podcast.wearelatech.com/ and WomeninTech.fm http://podcast.womenintechshow.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Espree Devora, "the Girl Who Gets It Done." She is the Creator and Host of the We Are LA Tech podcast and also the host of Women in Tech. Welcome to the podcast, Espree. ESPREE: Hello, hello! Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. ROB: Very excited to have you here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your own journey into becoming "the Girl Who Gets It Done" and hosting the things that you do? ESPREE: Oh my gosh. A lot of people ask me when I became an entrepreneur, like when I made that decision. I feel like I was born an entrepreneur. I remember walking into Westwood Village with my father and looking into the empty office buildings, picturing what businesses I would put in them. As I went along my journey, I think I just became very resourceful in a lot of different areas, from junior high to high school to college, and eventually the tagline "the Girl Who Gets it Done" came from when I was hanging out with Tony Hsieh, who is the head of Zappos, and a bunch of his entourage. I was taking care of some things and people kept asking me, "Are you his assistant? Are you his publicist? Who are you?" My girlfriend who was with me at the time just said, "She's the girl who gets it done." [laughs] It just stuck, and it's been that way for a really long time. ROB: Excellent. I think if you get a nickname around Tony Hsieh, you stick to it for the most part. ESPREE: Definitely. ROB: What about the journey into these podcasts that you host? When did you realize that was something you wanted to do and then really caught your ongoing attention? ESPREE: I think the first moment that I realized I was really excited by content creation was in the 6th grade, when my dad gifted me a video camera and I got to explore. I ended up building the first action sports media company online. It was the first action sports social network, and we produced hundreds and hundreds of video content across skateboarding, motocross, all these things. Then in 2012, I had this urge to continue creating content, but at that point in my life I was more interested in the startup world. I had already been in the startup tech world, obviously, building the first social network for action sports, but I didn't understand that. At that time I was just doing things. They weren't a global trend like it is now. Terms like "social media," "entrepreneur," "founder," "accelerators," these things were not a thing then. In 2012, when LA started to have more startups and have more founder stories, I wanted to capture that moment, so I partnered with someone to create a video series called We Are LA Tech. Unfortunately, that person didn't share the same work ethic I had. We shot 12 episodes, and that person's responsibility was to edit them and none of them were edited. My heart was broken. I waited a year, and I ended up going on a backpacking trip to escape this reality that this video series would never be completed that I felt so passionate about. While backpacking in Europe, my friend Mark who founded a company called BetaList, started showing me podcasts on his iPhone. At the time I was an Android person. He's like, "You've got to listen to these podcasts. They're so funny. You'll love them." I get back to the States; I get an iPhone because I want to stay connected with my friends in Europe and it was the easiest way to do that at the time. I start listening to podcasts. I didn't realize that years before, I had actually been listening to two podcasts, Podcasts and Product People by Justin Jackson, who actually has now co-founded a podcast hosting company called Transistor. He was one of the early podcasters, and I just loved his show. But at that time I would move the audio files from the computer to my phone. It wasn't the thing it is today, so I didn't even know I was listening to podcasts. Anyway, at the same time, I was like, wow, if I start a podcast too, I never have to rely on a video editor again. [laughs] So in 2013 I started stirring up the We Are LA Tech podcast in my head. It launched in I think September 2014, and by October 2014, it was number one on Apple's New & Noteworthy. It was just really exciting. I'm completely a self-taught podcaster. I taught myself how to edit. I taught myself everything. I just watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I've been podcasting ever since. Then in 2015, I launched the Women in Tech podcast, and the story goes on and on. ROB: What made you realize that maybe it was worth at least experimenting with the Women in Tech podcast? Or were you all-in from Day 1 and you knew it had to be a thing? ESPREE: The Women in Tech podcast was inspired because at the time, these women's groups were becoming a thing. They were never a thing before. I'm like, "Oh look, that's me. I founded companies and I am a girl too, so I want to check out what's going on." All these groups I would go to at the time, the whole conversation would be about how women are held back or statistics that are in the negative and this and that. I'm like, man, I've never felt held back. The only person I've ever felt held back by is me. If I had heard all these messages about how much was not possible for me, I would have never built the first action sports social network. I wouldn't have raised money. I wouldn't have done all these things because I would've believed it wasn't possible for someone like me. So I wanted to create a positive piece of content whose sole purpose is to show us what's possible, to expand our belief system, so listeners walk away feeling "If she can do it, so can I." ROB: There's a common thread, it seems, between both of the podcasts. You have, with LA, an underappreciated market for startups – I think perhaps even still to this day, there's some very good companies, but also with a chip on their shoulder. And then with Women in Tech, similarly, there's sometimes a lack of appreciation, a lack of highlighting, a lack of encouragement in both cases, you're putting a positive spin on it rather than saying, "Hey, pay attention because you're not paying enough attention." ESPREE: Yeah. I think my brand theme – I call it vulnerable leadership, where it's not that I want to just be positive. I don't want to be Instagram perfect. But I do want to share a vulnerable message in a way that we could shift our belief system to turn something that could be perceived as a negative into a positive. I think the process behind that is really important. It's not just about being like "Everything's great! You have it so much better than everybody else!" [laughs] It's about, okay, today sucks or whatever a person is dealing with, but here are the steps I went to, because do I want to feel sucky right now? No. If I don't want to feel sucky, what's something that I can do to potentially shift myself out of that mindset? I think that's what my shows exemplify, just vulnerable leadership: how have people built their companies and their professions in ways that are really empowering, and what can we learn from them? ROB: For those of us who are outside of the LA tech world, certainly we've heard of some of the newer fliers – I think maybe Byrd or Lime scooters is from there. I apologize for not knowing what you know. ESPREE: That's okay. ROB: I've definitely ridden plenty of scooters. But what are some of the companies that are maybe trending right now that people may not fully be aware of, but should be? ESPREE: Oh wow, trending? I don't know who's trending right now because I tend to stay laser-focused on sharing people's stories. But some companies that are iconic that you may have seen – of course, Snapchat is here. FabFitFun is here. There's really huge companies that are popular at least across the U.S., if not globally, that were created – Myspace was in LA. Google has tons of offices here now, and they're really a dominant force in the LA tech scene. YouTube has their Creator Hub here. It's definitely a thriving tech city. My primary interest is the lifestyle and culture of a tech professional, more than what is the latest gadget. However, if you tell me the latest video or microphone gadget, I will be interested, but that's just for personal, selfish reasons. [laughs] ROB: I was going to ask – I think a lot of people, when they hear about podcasting, they feel very intimidated in terms of the whole process, from creation of the content to editing and publishing. What was in your first podcasting tool bag? ESPREE: That's a great question. I'd say the first thing that was in my podcasting tool bag was actually the app. I don't even remember what it was called. It's like Daily Goal. It was some daily goal app. The reason that was the first one in my bag is because I was so afraid of, one, creating this thing, and then creating a thing that didn't work out. What I did was I created a goal every day. It could be like "create podcast artwork," "get a microphone," "schedule an interview." Just one thing. And I wouldn't allow myself to not do the thing. I remember when I got my first podcast poster designed, and I didn't like the design and I thought it was really ugly, but my goal for that day was "post it," like it's done. So I just went with it. It was about the forward movement; it wasn't about being perfect. I actually happen to really like that flyer now, but at the time I did not. That was my first one. Then as I became more educated by watching YouTube videos, I bought a Snowball mic because I knew my episodes would be in-person and it would be more than one person, so I wanted a mic that picked up more people. A Snowball mic is actually the lowest level mic because it's really meant for musicians, like a guitarist or something like that. It's not meant for multiple people. Those are for technical reasons that I can get into another time. Feel free to tweet me @espreedevora if you'd like to know more reasons why. But it was a Snowball. What I'd recommend to everybody starting out is an Audio-Technica 2100, and that's actually what I'm using right now. Again, I could share with you the technicalities of why in another conversation. Then I had my computer. I have a Mac, so I found an editing program called Sound Studio. I found it on a random forum. They do a terrible marketing job because they're very hard to find. [laughs] But they're an incredible software program. The way I describe it, it's like iMovie for audio. They just make it stupid simple to edit audio. It's great. So I used that. I remember my very first interview, I didn't even know how to record it. I was just confused, and I plugged the Snowball into the computer and I was trying to figure it out. It's scary, but what matters is that we take a step forward. In my speeches, when I give speeches on how to podcast, the thing that I tell the whole audience is on their way home, I want them to take out their phone and, in their voice memo app in their phone, I want them to record their first interview on the drive home, or their first podcast episode. Then I want them to send me that via Google Drive or email or whatever it is, because that's all that matters in the beginning, is taking a step forward and just taking action. ROB: If you take that step forward every day, which you were doing with your app, it's like those challenges when people talk about if you just get 1% done better every day, it really does add up. Are you still editing, or have you managed to delegate that opportunity? ESPREE: First of all, I happen to love editing. I call it "painting audio." But it is not who I want to be in the world. [laughs] I'm very lucky; an editor that I hired in 2014 has been with me since, and he works with me and edits everything. I have other editors that I've worked with as well. So I do have the editing done. Every so often, I'll tell them that I want to contribute and I'll do an episode here or there, but I do not rely on my own time for editing anymore. ROB: It's the same as my experience. We actually did a quick cycle episode that we recorded yesterday about the financial stimulus involved in the CARES Act and how marketing agencies can claim that money for themselves to keep their team onboard. But normally, I have trained editors – and I think what you said before, audio versus video is very, very forgiving. ESPREE: Completely. ROB: If there's a glitch in the middle of a word, it's remarkable. You can just highlight it, delete it, and it sounds great all of a sudden, whereas if you did that with video it would look insane. ESPREE: Totally, completely. And there's so much that goes into video, from lighting, color correction, angles, audio. There are so many variables, you just cannot get away with high quality video if you don't know what you're doing. It's a huge learning curve. The main components of a podcast – and again, I can dig into this deeper in a different conversation – are the tracks: is each person's voice being recorded on a separate track or is everybody's voice on the same track? How does it sound, the mic that you're using? Are you doing it remotely or in person? Because that will have an impact on your equipment decisions. Things like that. But there's just so much more that goes into editing and shooting video. ROB: As you mentioned, all the information is out there. Everything is essentially figureoutable. I think there's a book to that effect. I first figured out how to record live because I was at the Social Shakeup Conference and I saw somebody there recording live, and I just walked up to them and asked them, and because they'd done it enough, they had a page that listed all their gear, and they had affiliate links. Normally I don't even click on affiliate links because I'm kind of ornery about that, but I totally clicked their affiliate links. It was something done with a mix of generosity and sharing, and if they get a few bucks, to your point, for that Snowball mic or for the Zoom recorder that we use when we're in person, who am I to be upset about that? ESPREE: Yeah, totally. But I don't have an affiliate link for you. [laughs] ROB: Maybe another revenue stream there. ESPREE: Yeah, it's something I've thought about. It's one of the many things that still is on my to-do list for way too long. ROB: But you're figuring it out step by step. How did you make that jump? I think a lot of agencies, marketers, organizations develop a competency without taking it to the next level. You went from creating podcasts to training people to do podcasts. How did you evolve into that shift? ESPREE: I think it's a few things. One, I was just asked by several people. I got into podcasting in 2013, when it wasn't a thing and it wasn't cool. It didn't start to become more – I mean, obviously podcasting has been around for several years, way before that, but it just became this mainstream thing in the last few years. In 2013, it wasn't on the radar. In 2014, it started to bubble up on the radar because of the StartUp podcast. Then Serial came out, so then the mainstream news started talking about podcasting, and it was a domino effect from there. At that time, I think it was just supply and demand. [laughs] Even today, it's supply and demand. People have a really hard time finding any indie production companies for podcasts, so I get a lot of inbound on that because I've been creating my show for several years. You can't find a lot of people who have been both producing and hosting for several years. Maybe they just started 10 episodes ago or something. I have hundreds and hundreds of episodes done and distributed. So sometimes it's just getting there early. Now my "why" is interesting. I get asked a lot to teach. Initially I did it just for the community so that they can learn and express themselves, but I found that it was really exciting to be a part of their journey in creation and to really help facilitate them creating something meaningful so it's not just another audio file, but it's something people feel mentally subscribed to. That's been great. So I do a couple things, whether I'm teaching classes for the general assemblies of the world or USC and organizations like that or I'm doing semi-private masterclasses that are a month-long immersive, and I meet with a small group of people and I have expert guest speakers on. It's just really, really fun. So I've really enjoyed it. That's why I do it, because I love it and love being a part of their journey. ROB: There's so many cool little hidden skills in there. I think you're able to keep going on a podcast because of that rhythm that you put into your life overall. I think people might not think entirely – you're based in the Los Angeles area, and that's content city. That has to partly pervade who's interested in talking to you. When I look at how you've picked up these skills along the way, one skill you picked up that I think a lot of people would look at with some jealousy is you have figured out how to be selected as a speaker at South by Southwest. That's where we originally intended to speak in person. How did you figure out that process? I know people who have been trying for years and can't sort it out. I imagine you did it one step at a time. ESPREE: Honestly, I feel like I got – what's that saying? "Where hard work meets luck and opportunity" or something like that, or preparedness? I've bene working so hard for so many years. I started going to South by as a journalist, and then I became a speaker at South by – I don't remember what year, but I've given many talks there and performed the podcast live and led meetup groups. But the meetup groups I've led have been the podcasters meetup, and like I said, in 2013 no one cared. I said I would do this thing; I was the only person offering myself up to do this thing. Or maybe there weren't a lot of people. And the talks that I've given have ranged from anything from in the early days it was more on entrepreneurship, and now, again, podcasting. It's just about demonstrating where my unique value proposition is, the unique insights, the energy that I bring to the table as a speaker, what makes me a speaker that stands out amongst the rest. So just really think about that for yourself. What is an interesting angle? Actually, I think I'll do a thing for you in a second, just for your audience, so you can have a little sampling of what that sounds like. The last thing is performing my podcast live at South by Southwest. I performed the Women in Tech podcast live last year and then also this year. Again, it's over time, establishing myself as a podcaster, my relationships, the audience that I have. The purpose and mission of why my content exists in the first place is very clear. It's just this stew of hard work, and then it's the luck of being noticed. Sometimes you can even manipulate being noticed. I should say positively manipulate, meaning that you're doing enough outreach, that you're using programs like Pipedrive and Contactually to make sure that you're continuously doing your outreach. That's maintaining your relationships. My mom comes from an entertainment background, and she always said – it was her or maybe my grandmother who said "the squeaky wheel gets the oil." So when she talks about being in the entertainment business, she says they'd cast the people who called last because that's the person that was on the top of their mind. I'm like, that's really interesting. And it's true; the more you're on the top of people's minds, in a non-annoying way, the more they'll think of you when there's an opportunity. The more you make yourself helpful – I was featured in Forbes randomly, and the reason I was featured in Forbes, that feature happened because I was doing an interview I think a year or a year and a half before, and the interview went something like 3 hours late. So I was just sitting in a waiting room for several hours. I never complained and I just chilled there and I was nice about it. Then the person who kept coming back in to apologize to me was so grateful that I did that that when there was the opportunity for Forbes, I was the first person that was thought of. Just because I waited in a chill manner. [laughs] ROB: Which anybody can do. ESPREE: Totally. So it's like, how are you showing up to life in unique ways that make you stand apart? If it's okay with you, Rob, I'm going to do a quick thing. I'm going to show you how I start my speaking engagements and my podcast, because it's not this tone of voice. Is that okay with you? Can I do that? ROB: Run with it. ESPREE: Okay, cool. Everybody watch your eardrums just a little bit. I'm going to hold the mic a little bit away because I don't know the levels of how we're recording right now. But this is what it sounds like, and the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because this is what sets me apart and makes me a unique speaker and podcaster. I'd say the thing that sets me apart is my energy when I show up to the stage. Three… two… one… "Welcome back to the Women in Tech podcast, celebrating women in tech around the world! So excited for our next guest here today. Welcome…" and then you say the person's name. But that's just crazy, right? That's out of nowhere. Where it's inspired from is growing up, I was super into wrestling. [laughs] ROB: Yes, it sounds like wrestling. [laughs] That's amazing. ESPREE: I was super into wrestling and I loved the wrestlers being announced onstage, and then I was really into Steven Tyler's stage performance and how he would really be into the mic and really be energized. So that's why when I do my podcasts and my interviews, I stand. You never see people stand when they're doing it. I stand. And I do it for a lot of other reasons too, because of your vocal cords. Onstage, I stand. Sometimes I'll kick my shoes off. I'll never stand behind a podium. There's just all sorts of techniques. My friend Mark, who actually built the YouTube Player, gave me the best speaking advice. He said, "People don't remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel." I think about that with my podcast. I think about that onstage. How am I making everyone feel? Are they feeling the way I intend for them to feel? And if not, what do I need to do? When I show up that way, the guest feels more energized, the audience feels more engaged, and to the event organizer, I'm a unique speaker that brings something different to the table. ROB: Absolutely. I love it. We have a wrestling announcement right here on the podcast. [laughs] I think you mentioned something that is really key that would be easy to get lost in the mix. You mentioned staying on people's minds in an un-annoying way. I think we are in a very perhaps more challenging moment for that, where people who don't have that skill may be a little bit lost. We are sheltering in place right now in our homes to avoid getting and spreading the coronavirus. What you can't count on is bumping into somebody in the halls, in a restaurant you usually run into, at a networking event. How do you think about staying on people's radar in an un-annoying way? Because quite often, I think people give advice of sending a link – and you actually did send me a very good link in our chat – but I think there are often times where that can feel still very inauthentic and people can tell. You're still just sending them a link because someone told you to send them a link to stay on their radar. ESPREE: A hundred percent. I think there's a lot of different ways, and we need to find the tools that are right for our own personalities. The kind of things that I look at – one of them, the first thing I want to say, there's a tool called Bombbomb which does video messaging. It's really great to make something a bit more personal, to show somebody that you care. I find that even when I send a Bombbomb video, if I don't say the person's name, they may think that I created it for a lot of people. I remember I made one for even my friend, who's also a customer, one time. She said, "You know, it was until you said my son's name, I thought it was a video for everyone." It's really interesting to me because it was personalized. There's tools – like I said, Contactually. There's a ton of other tools. I know Tim Ferriss uses Evernote a lot. I don't necessarily know if he uses it for maintaining follow-up, but Evernote is a great tool. There's WorkFlowy. There's different programs that will spit out who you haven't followed up with lately. LinkedIn is such a powerful resource for all of us. I think it's about really thinking, who do you want to connect with? Why do you want to connect with them, and how often? And are you tracking that follow-up? I use a CRM system called Pipedrive, and like I said, I'm a huge fan of Contactually as well. I think Contactually is just a great follow-up tool. I've heard good things about Nimble. You could find out what's going on in someone's life via Twitter, via Instagram, via Facebook. Really paying attention to their social networks. I call it ego marketing. It sometimes sounds like a bad thing, but all of us – all of us – we operate on our egos. We feel like the world is revolving around us at all times. "What's that person thinking of me? What's that person doing," blah, blah, blah, me, me, me. If you all of a sudden come to someone and say, "I watched your talk online," and say the specific talk, and then say what you got out of it and maybe a timestamp, it is just so clear that that is about them. The kind of messages I can't stand – because I get an abundance of inbound messaging for the Women in Tech podcast, or even one yesterday, perfect example, the We Are LA Tech podcast. Someone messaged me asking to be on the show and they weren't in Los Angeles. If they knew the show, they'd know every single episode is from someone in Los Angeles. So obviously you don't care. You're just mass mailing. With Women in Tech, I'll get messages about the controversial topics someone could talk about, and if they knew the show, they'd know we do no controversy, no politics. So it tells me that you really don't care. I'm just some name on your list. So when you're thinking about follow-up, you want to think about: who do you want to follow up with and why? What's a meaningful way to follow up with them? And then tracking that follow-up. And not following up too much. Another example is somebody followed up with me three times in one week, and I hadn't seen any of the messages. Then on the third message they said, "I know you're probably getting annoyed with my messages" – which just shows me it's an automated system. "You're getting annoyed with my messages," and the truth was I hadn't even seen the other two. My response back was, "One, I'm not interested, and two, I recommend you not follow up in such a short period of time." [laughs] Imagine if I'm giving a talk, if I'm at South by Southwest this week, I am not really on email or paying attention. If you follow up three times this week, during this particular phase of my life, the chances of me seeing them is so low. That's why it's way more effective to follow up 3 weeks to a couple months apart. But just really be sincere in why you're even following up with the people in the first place. ROB: If you're following up 3 weeks or 3 months or anything like that, also, you have to have a mindset where you're playing the long game. You're not playing the short game where it's "How many times can I message you in 2 weeks and then either ignore you or maybe you've answered me." ESPREE: Right. ROB: If someone looks at the Women in Tech podcast, I think one thing they'll realize is, number one, your level of commitment there. I think I'm seeing over 400, almost 450 episodes. But also, I think they'll notice that you do the work, and you do the work authentically. What I mean by that is you're not just cherry-picking and trying to ladder up to the biggest name. You have some names on the podcast that are known, but you also have – again, in this theme – people that your listeners might not know but they should. It looks to me like quite often you are going far and wide. You're doing the work of actually reaching out to people across the world, and probably even going there to have those conversations. ESPREE: Rob, I love how you did your homework. [laughs] You would be an email that I would open, because that is so spot-on. I get a lot of messages from a lot of super fancy people, thinking that they're just entitled to be on the show. My personal excitement is sharing a story of a woman that normally doesn't have access. I've traveled to Bosnia; recently I was in Kazakhstan. I've traveled to over 100 countries just to celebrate these women in tech in person, share their stories, be in their culture. People say, "Why not just do remotely?" I wouldn't see the bullets in the buildings on the streets of Bosnia if I wasn't in Bosnia, understanding that the girl I'm interviewing, as a child, she had to be in a bomb shelter to be safe from the war. These are just things you don't get on a 1-hour Skype call or something like that. So really discovering all these magnificent women in tech around the world, giving them the opportunity – I'm really proud that the Women in Tech podcast is, for the majority of guests, the first podcast they've ever been on. It just blows my mind. And it's not necessarily even, by the way, Rob, that these people aren't seasoned; they're just not the internet celebrities of the world. They're not the Gary Vaynerchuks. [laughs] Then I also have the more well-known people, as you mentioned, and I'm excited to share their stories as well. But my "why" in doing the show is not for social status. It's not to look good. It's really to be this bridge for women in tech around the world to be able to discover the resources and mentorship that they need to accelerate. Hearing stories of how women have pulled over to write notes, listening to the episodes, or shared the stories with their family, or investors have reached out to them because they've been on the show – truly social impact. It's amazing. So it's not about "do I look the coolest?" It's about "am I creating the biggest impact?" ROB: That resonates completely with who you are and what you want to accomplish. I think it's also a little bit of a secret – and it's not a secret because we're talking about it, but candidly, it makes booking a podcast a lot easier when you're booking people who are interesting and have a story, but it is their first podcast. They say yes a lot more. ESPREE: Oh yeah, I'm sure. Well, the one thing about women in tech – yes, I think your point is accurate, and, unfortunately, with women in tech – a lot of people ask me, "What's the biggest commonality of all the women in tech that you're met with?" They're expecting some technical answer. Unfortunately, the biggest commonality is that I think as a culture, oftentimes we feel we're not enough. So I will get women who will say "I don't think I'm good enough for your show" or "I haven't spoken before" or something. Then it's my responsibility as a person who wants to be empowering to give them the level of confidence, and also to say, "Listen, I wouldn't be picking you unless I thought you were good enough to be on the show, so how about I make the decision on that?" [laughs] I've had a couple people not want to be interviewed because they're scared, but yes, you are absolutely right that it's going to be a lot easier. You're also right that it's a huge pain point in the podcasting industry for new podcasters, or even a lot of seasoned podcasters, to get yeses from guests. It's a huge pain point. It is one that I do not have, and maybe that contributes to it, you're right. ROB: And you do in-person a lot, which always helps with that rapport. It would be great if we were, but that's not an option right now. We're not getting on planes right now. ESPREE: Totally. ROB: That is okay. We'll hope that we can meet up at South by Southwest next year, perhaps. ESPREE: A hundred percent. ROB: Espree, when people want to check out all the things that you're doing, where should they look to find you? ESPREE: Man, if only I had been smart enough to have one link that says all the things. [laughs] Honestly, look me up on LinkedIn, Espree Devora on LinkedIn. Add me there. It's also Espree Devora on all social – on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. I do really engage on Twitter. And check out the podcasts, WeAreLATech.fm and WomeninTech.fm. ROB: It's all those little things. You put in the work on the domains too. ESPREE: Yeah. ROB: Fantastic. You're consistent on the brand. Espree, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a true joy to get to know you a little bit, and I know our audience has enjoyed your challenging example of just doing one more thing each day and how that carries through in everything you do. ESPREE: Thank you so much for having me, Rob. This has been great. I'm happy that you made it remote and we were able to make this happen. ROB: That's great. Be well. ESPREE: 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.

Oliver and his brother started Kemweb in 1998, providing coding for other agencies and then livestreaming the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Three years ago, frustrated with being a tech-supply company, they took their technical expertise and redefined their business as a full-service digital agency, . offering results-driven web design, online marketing, social media marketing, PR, consulting, podcasting, video production and hosting services. Today, Kemweb's 35 developers, art directors, social media experts, and performance team workshop with clients to discover their needs. Kemweb customers range from B2B small and medium sized companies to fast moving consumer goods suppliers. Oliver credits his agency's success to curiosity and agility, and a change in its approach to potential customers. A lot of companies will pitch what they can do for customers, without first finding out what the customers need, saying, "We can do this . . . and this . . . and this. What do you want?" Companies may think about "What are we offering? What kind of service?" – but fail to ask, "Why are we doing it? Why should our customers believe the things we're doing?" Finding the answer to those last questions was pivotal in driving the Kemweb's approach to its own customers. Business consulting is rare in Germany . . . and it's one of the things that is an intrinsic part of today's Kemweb process. Oliver suggests that you have to drive a lot deeper than the "easy questions" to discover what actions will best serve a client's needs. Kemweb now begins a client business relationship with a workshop/consultation utilizing Strategyzer's Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas to map out a business's knowledge, unsnarl its inherent complexity, and structure a customer-centric solution, with a focus on communicate the messages their clients want to communicate. Sean notes that there are cultural differences between businesses in Germany and those in the U.S. For instance: German business owners have greater fear of change and new ways of doing things. Legalities differ as well: Data protection laws are more stringent in the U.S. Sean explains that the linear career process in Germany also affects the way people think. After finishing a German citizens finish their education, they take an apprenticeship, then go to a company and move up the ladder within that company. Oliver was supposed to serve as a mentor at South by Southwest 2020 in Austin, TX, but the COVID-19 pandemic changed all that. He believes that, "This is a special period in time (that) forces people to be more courageous and to try out new things." He feels that it is important for businesses to work together – to help the customers with their businesses and to help them survive. "We have to take care of each other . . . worldwide," he says Sean recommends looking at today's challenges as an opportunity to spend more time with family or to online to learn new skills – just use your time. He is using his time in quarantine to set up an English-language Kemweb landing page. Oliver and Sean can be reached on the social media channels or on the company's website at: www.kemweb.de. They have a German-American podcast, Robot Spaceship, at www.robotspaceship.com,. described as an industry-leading, European podcast network with a focus on technology, culture, innovation and living the digital lifestyle. (You may need to understand a little German.) Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Oliver Kemmann, Owner and Founder at Kemweb in Mainz, Germany, and also Sean Earley, the New Business Development Manager for the firm. Why don't you gentlemen start off by telling us about Kemweb and where Kemweb excels? SEAN: You go. OLIVER: Maybe I start. [laughs] I founded Kemweb together with my brother about 20 years ago, so 1998, in a time without smartphones, in a time without Facebook and YouTube. We were pretty much doing some coding for other agencies. We started also with livestreaming in the year 2000 for the Olympic Games in Sydney, so we were quite tech-related. As time passed by, we started to ask questions. How can we get away from being this tech supply company and how can we find our own customers? So we started to talk about digital communication and how we could help people out there to succeed in their special business by using modern digital technology. This is what we're doing today. We have about 35 people in the agency and we have developers and we have art directors and we have a social media team and a performance team. We do workshops and stuff to find out what the business is all about and how we can help, and then we set up the channels where we can communicate to the target groups of our customers. We think in stories and experience, talking about the stories our customer wants to get communicated, and we develop the experience on different channels and different devices. This is what we're doing. ROB: A lot of firms I think start off in that mode where they are taking downstream work from other agencies, other firms, but now it sounds like you have a better idea of who your direct customer is. What sort of company and perhaps focus or stage of company is that now? OLIVER: There's not one special kind of customer we are serving. We have a lot of B2B business. In Germany, we have a lot of small and medium sized companies. They're doing a lot of engineering stuff, or small producing companies. Usually they are not very familiar with classic marketing topics and how they could use digital communication to sell their products and services. But we also have, for example, fast moving consumer good customers and help them, for example, with social media campaigns. So it is very widespread, actually, the customers we are serving. It's quite exciting. What do you say, Sean? [laughs] SEAN: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think from my point of view, I come from a background – it's a little bit different in Germany than it is in America. In Germany people have a linear process; they go to school, they do an apprenticeship, they go to a company, and they stay there in that skill range, and they just move up the ladder. In the States, as you all probably know, we work all kinds of jobs before we actually start our career. I've done all kinds of different things. I've worked in all kinds of different jobs. Lots of different agencies, consulted, tech, gaming. One of the things that I have seen is that there's always differences in everybody's needs as a business, but when it comes to marketing specifically, there's a lot of things that everybody needs. It really gets down to that value point, that use case that everybody needs, what is the problem that they have and how we can provide a solution. I think a lot of agencies particularly get a pitch and they go to a client and they say, "We can do all this stuff. What do you want?" When I started working with Kemweb, Ollie and I had a talk and it was like, that's exhausting. It's counterintuitive to what we want to do, and it's kind of counterintuitive to what the client needs because there are specific things that clients need. So we tried to refocus our strategy a little bit to work with clients to figure out exactly what they need first before we say "We'll take your 200,000 euro budget and we'll give you one or two or three things. What do you want?" We really try to focus in on the needs of the client and give them exactly what they need, and at the same time try to explore other areas to try to explore new places ourselves internally and externally so we can provide lots of services to clients. But at the same time, we really like to consult first and then give them what they need, and not just "here's your website, have fun with it." Sometimes they say they want a website and they don't really need a website, so it's important to talk to people first. That's where the workshop and consulting come in. ROB: Got it. I think there's subtlety in the details there. You're not just talking about doing a bunch of discovery, if I'm hearing you correctly. You're actually talking about entering into a business relationship sooner with the client, where you have a process around a workshop, where you have a consulting arrangement rather than doing a bunch of unpaid discovery on an RFP. Is that what you're getting at? SEAN: Exactly. ROB: Very cool. What does a workshop look like for you? OLIVER: I'm a fan of a company called Strategyzer. It originated in Switzerland. These guys developed some canvas thing called the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas. I guess you're familiar with this. Our approach in the workshops is something Sean said. As a consultant, my job is to get the complexity out of the things. I'm taking all the knowledge the customer has and I'm structuring it in these canvases. This leads us to a very structured way, and at this point we start to look at our customer's customer, so it's very customer-centric. This leads us to exactly the customer pain we're addressing and what the customers are really looking for. Most of the time, it's the first time our customers have thought about their own purpose or why they're doing what they're doing. Most of them are coming from the "what?" – "What are we offering? What kind of service?" But not "Why are we doing it? Why should our customers believe the things we're doing?" This is what we do in the workshops. We try to get all the information from the customer and structure it down in canvases, and then we find the channels and we find the customer groups we should address first. ROB: That's probably been a part of your own journey as well. Business Model Canvas, anybody can google it. You'll find it, you'll pull it up. I feel like that tool flows from left to right, where it does flow into how everything leads in to the customer so you know what you're doing, but let's all tie that through to the customer. You probably had a little bit of your own journey on that as you transitioned from being a subcontractor coding shop to pursuing your own customers. What did that journey look like where you started to realize what the direct customers needed and you started to be able to pull away from taking parts of projects from other people? OLIVER: Good question, actually. Or the right question. When we started 2 or 3 years ago to find this way for ourselves, we always were communicating the "whats," what we were doing. Websites, apps, firms. This is what every other agency is doing, too. They say what the output is. Then we started to dig deeper and find out, what are we good for? What has brought my brother and me to the point of founding a company or agency? Curiosity and agility are what's driving us. What we are doing now is we're very much curious about our customer's business. If we fully understand what the customer is doing and what the customer needs, then we can help. This was the turning point in our own company history, when we found out that. ROB: That seems like a neat intersection because you've not only found this curiosity for what they're doing, you're aligning this tool. You have a tool that actually facilitates your own curiosity that aligns the customer to where they're actually getting value out of the discovery process, unless they can pay you for it. You've aligned the customer and value for them with who you are in your own curiosity, it sounds like. OLIVER: Yeah. In Germany, at least, it's not very common that you do some kind of business consulting thing in a web project, for example. Most people, after the workshop, say, "This was a business consulting, what you're doing." They start to look differently at their own business, at the company. In Germany, we're far behind you guys in the States where digital transformation is concerned. Most of the companies are very slow in changing things. The owner-driven companies really are shy to start changes, so they want someone who says, "Everything is okay. We have this web project, for example," and you give them the money and it's ready by the 1st of June or so, and then you don't have to think about it. SEAN: I would just interject and say culturally, working in the States and in Germany, there's a lot of hyper-focusing on details here. There's also a lot of different rules when it comes to things like data protection, so there's a lot of hesitancy in a lot that goes on here as well. Especially with some sort of new and innovative tech project, a lot of people are like, "We can't even legally do that." When it comes to things like sales funnels and where you store your customers' data, it's a whole other story over here, so it's not just – they're behind in their desire, but I think also they're behind because there's a hesitancy to want to try because sometimes it's difficult to make those steps. So I think it's a 50/50. There's innovation and there's also limitation. For us, we try to find a happy medium in there. Sometimes you have to talk a lot about that as well. ROB: In terms of adjustments, we were originally scheduled to have this conversation in person, in Austin, Texas at South by Southwest, and as we are in the midst of this global coronavirus pandemic, we're all doing this interview from home. I'm in a closet, to be candid. It's a different thing. But just for a moment, Oliver, you were invited to be there as a mentor. Is that something you've done before at South by Southwest? OLIVER: No, actually not. [laughs] I've been in Austin for the last 3 years, and last year I met some guy from Denmark and he was a mentor last year. He explained what he was doing there, and I thought it was interesting, so maybe I could help young people with my different perspective I bring as a German. Maybe I do look differently on things. On the other hand, I've been self-employed or an entrepreneur for more than 20 years. So maybe I can help some people. I just filled out the form and they picked me. [laughs] But I can't tell you what it's like because I didn't do this before. Maybe I will do it next year. SEAN: Ollie and I are both big music fans, and I actually played in a band at South by Southwest before. He was like, "Have you been to South by Southwest?" I was like, "Yeah, musically," but the whole tech thing – and he was so excited. I was like, oh man. I felt so bad when they cancelled that. He was like, "What am I going to talk about now?" I was like, "You're a German guy there. You've got to talk about German topics." I think that's stuff people want to know about. There's a whole different perspective there. It's not just tech in general. A lot of people talk general tech, but there's a lot of cultural differences in the tech industry here that I think he could really have provided. But I guess we have the internet now to communicate. ROB: Yes. People can reach out when they hear this and we can all talk in our closets. Or maybe we'll be out of our closets by the time we get this out there. Did they give you visibility into people signing up to talk to you and what they wanted to talk about? Or is it more so that you show up and people show up and go from there? How is that structured? OLIVER: I can't tell you. [laughs] We had a slot somewhere in a hotel for an hour I guess, or an hour and 50 minutes. I had 17 fans on the app, so 17 people were bookmarking me. Actually, I can tell. I guess you have to reserve a slot, but actually, I can't tell you if anybody already had the slot reserved. ROB: We're right here in the middle of March. At this juncture, as you are talking to your customers and potential customers and that sort of thing, how is the current state of things affecting both their mindset and maybe even how they do workshops? Are your workshops normally in person and you're planning for how to do them online? How is that changing your own business and your customer mindset? OLIVER: Wasn't it Macron, the French president, who said we are at war? [laughs] It's changing everything right now. We were well-prepared, actually. Sean, 2 weeks ago, said, "This is getting really bad, so we'd better be prepared." We tried to get all our people home office ready 2 weeks ago when it just started to get really bad. But I have tons of customers who were not prepared for that. They're not even prepared to get their people in the home office, and they didn't think what they could do in this time. To be honest, I think this will not be a thing for 2 weeks or 3 weeks. I guess we're talking about months or years if this is getting better. We should for sure find very fast things we can change to have a workshop by Zoom or Teams and so on, but I can work with my customers even if they are not in the room. It's a little bit different, so I need my customers to be courageous enough to take such a step. I have a lot of customers who say, "Let's postpone the workshop and meet in 2 or 3 weeks. This can wait." [laughs] I say, "Okay, go for it." But on the other hand, there are a couple of people from the consulting business who were already setting up their remote setup. I can film the canvas and I can put the post-its there by myself. The important thing for me is to get all the information from my customers. They are driving this process, so I need all the information, and I can structure it at home in my closet. [laughs] My impression – maybe, Sean, you have your own opinion about this – I think people are getting aware. This is a special period in time, and not many people have experienced what we are experiencing right now. This forces people to be more courageous and to try out new things. This is my impression. SEAN: Yeah, I would just say that we were lucky to have enough time to try to be proactive and plan for it. Kemweb has a lot of experience in livestreaming and webinars as a core business, so it wasn't anything new to go remote. Since we do a lot of consulting for how to become more digital, it was not a scary concept for us. It was more about organization. We've noticed a lot of people who weren't ready, who are reaching out and trying to get an idea of what they can do to get ready, and I think it's also important for any business who does have any sort of strategic advantage – at this point, it's not about competition anymore. This is a global problem that nobody's ever dealt with, so I think we're just trying to take the opinion of let's try to be as helpful as we can. Let's be a resource for people. Let's do some consulting for people just so they can figure out what to do, much less take action on it. Everybody has different problems, but we have CEOs and managers, and everybody is quarantined in their house, worrying about their business. Some people are losing their business as we speak, and some people are like, "I need to figure out how to conduct business when we're here. How do we do this?" Luckily, we've just been in a position to be able to help people. For me, that's the most important thing. Just making sure businesses are running, people are being as successful as they can with the limitations, and hopefully when we get through this, everybody's going to be in a better place and not a much worse place. ROB: Right. That's an advantage I think you have in being strategic. I was talking to a client yesterday, an agency, and they have one client who's in travel, and they're very large, so that client is rightly putting a lot of initiatives on hold. But I think everybody has an inclination towards timidity in this moment. One of their clients was a beer company, and they said, "Should we cut back?" They said, "No, you can be bold right now." SEAN: If you're not Corona. [laughter] ROB: Yes, for sure. I see it in my own feeds. People are talking about going out and buying beer right now. I think they look forward to it. So there are opportunities. OLIVER: That's what's different between Germans and Americans. Germans are buying toilet paper and noodles. [laughs] The French are hamstering red wine, and you guys go for beer. SEAN: The German term for prepping is hamstering, so there's a lot of hamster memes going on in Germany. [laughs] ROB: I had no idea. I've learned something there as well. Oliver, some people's agencies that we talk to are brand new, and some folks have been running them for a while. If you were in the U.S., we would probably talk about the 9/11 situation here. But you did navigate through the global financial crisis 13 years ago. What are some lessons that you may have encountered from that time that have helped you as you're looking at this new set of circumstances that is resetting global markets and making people worry a little bit? OLIVER: What we learned – our luck in this crisis 13 years ago was we had customers from all kinds of business areas. We were not only doing business with banks. So we survived it quite well, actually, but only because we had a widespread portfolio of customers. This is what we kept all the way from then to now. I guess this is also what maybe, or hopefully, will help us through this crisis too. We have also customers from the tourist business, so we're doing a lot of event stuff. Like Sean said, maybe now some livestreaming things. These companies are dying while we're talking. They're losing all the events, like South by, for example. All the catering people, our customers from catering. We have other customers from the public sector, for example, and we have customers from the hygienic field selling soaps. I think this is what we learned. Don't focus too much on one specific branch. 13 years ago, we were a much younger company. There were just a couple of people there. Actually, we were not flying high enough to be hit very strongly by the crisis 13 years ago, so it's hard for me to compare it this way. Sean, do you have a point here? SEAN: I wasn't with the company at the time, but I think just from experience and being in Germany at the time, it's similar in that there are companies that get financially hit and they're going to go down. There's nothing they can do. There's other companies that get hit hard, but they try to climb up. I think at this point, everybody is struggling and everybody is needing to be loud. Everybody is needing to communicate and reach out. Kemweb did video production, they did web production, so they had a rounded base of services that they could offer. If you have a diversified portfolio, then you can be agile with your approach to lots of clients. I think that's one of the reasons Kemweb has been able to be successful for so long through these ups and downs, at least in my opinion. Unless you know a secret I don't know. [laughs] That's just my outside opinion. OLIVER: Yeah, that's right. Maybe you know the new book by Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game. When I read this book, I didn't know up to the point I read the book we are in this infinite game. Since we are helping our customers, or trying to help our customers to succeed in a digital world – we did this for 20 years, actually, and every disruption or every crisis forces us to be inventive and to question our own work all the time. We did this for the last 20 years, and we came out stronger. So I guess he's right in his book. If you don't reach finite goals, to be the best in town or whatever, then you will find new approaches even for your customers, and you learn from every punch you get. You're learning. I think this is what we learned over the years. For example, when all the streaming was Flash – maybe your younger listeners remember, there was a software called Flash. Steven Jobs decided – all the streaming things we did were running on Flash from one day to the other. Nobody actually was using Flash, so our streaming business was down within a couple of months, for example. But you start finding workarounds and finding new solutions and stuff like this. If you get used to this, if you are not scared by disruptive changes – I guess such a crisis is a very, very disruptive change to everything. It's even a threat to your health, so this is a different problem. People are now really scared about their health, not only business-wise, but family and personal health-wise. So this is a different situation we have right now. ROB: That's a great point. With The Infinite Game, the objective, the point that Sinek makes is that this is not a chess game that you can win or lose. The goal is to keep playing the game. I think it could even be possible in this moment to take more encouragement. You mentioned Flash – Flash, for people who don't remember, was made by Adobe. It was Adobe's attempt to control the browser. SEAN: It was Macromedia and then it was Adobe, I think. ROB: Yeah. When Apple came out against Adobe, that was a specific headwind against Adobe, and a big part of their strategy and a big part of their business. They moved out of trying to control the browser into a bunch of other things. There's a lot of big companies that just take up space and are hard to admire, but Adobe, with having the primary paid enterprise for analytics up against Google Analytics, with the way they've managed to turn their creative suite into a subscription business, they really have figured out how to keep playing the game. I think anybody who's listening probably has even more of an advantage now because Adobe had a specific headwind; this is a headwind that we all have. Everyone's fighting this at the same time. So it's not just you. People are going to win here, and I think it can be Kemweb and it can be anyone else who's listening, if they figure out how to keep playing the game well. SEAN: Yeah. I'd look at this as an opportunity. You can look at it as negative as you want, you can get depressed about it and you can sit there and pout, or you can really try to think of the positive ends. For me, just being able to take time to spend more time with the kids when they're home, or to be able to teach them from home how I want to, or to be able to go online and spend my time with a course, learning something new – you've got to take this as positive as you can. You have to utilize your time. Everybody in the world is confined to their homes at this point, or almost, so do what you can do to benefit from that situation. I think that's really what you've got to do here. I think you will benefit in some way as long as you see it as a positive thing. OLIVER: I would like to bring up another point. It's actually about solidarity. We all have to take care of each other and the other companies. If our customers die, for example, we won't be able to do business after the crisis with them. So we also have to put up plans where we can help our customers not just on the business, but on the survival side of things. So maybe this will make people think about things they've done before or ways they saw things before. Right now we have to take care of each other worldwide, actually. ROB: Yeah, it has definitely taken that longer approach of, for people who are young, to say, "You may be young and you may not be likely to get sick, but what about someone else's parent, grandparent?" SEAN: We're getting up there. ROB: What about us on this call? Take care of us too. But really, how to think beyond yourself I hope is a lesson we can carry forward a little bit longer than just the memories of this unusual season. Oliver, Sean, when people want to track you guys down, when they want to find Kemweb, where should they go to find you? OLIVER: They should go to the internet, this new thing, you know? [laughs] ROB: That's all we got. That's all we got right now. OLIVER: You'll find us on the social media channels. We have our own podcast, actually, which is a German-American podcast form, and it's called Robot Spaceship. You need to understand a little German. I'm speaking German and Sean is speaking American English. But you'll find us on the web, www.kemweb.de. SEAN: Kemweb.de, and that's www.robotspaceship.com for the podcast. OLIVER: Sean is using his quarantine to set up an English landing page. [laughter] Isn't it, Sean? SEAN: It is. There's so much translation that happens. There's so much work. [laughs] I need to take a vacation from working because I've got so much work to do. [laughter] ROB: I think we'll all be looking to help the travel industry rebound in a little bit when we can all come out of our holes. Oliver, Sean, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing at this time. It's good to be able to connect over audio, at least, and share some of your learnings, lessons, and growth with the world. SEAN: Thank you. OLIVER: Thank you for the invitation. Great experience for us. ROB: Thank you so much. Maybe in Austin next year. SEAN: Definitely. OLIVER: For sure. ROB: Let's work that out. SEAN: Fingers crossed. OLIVER: On 6th Street. [laughs] ROB: All right, thanks, guys. Bye 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.

Laurie Keith is Vice President of Media, Social & Emerging for the Ad Council, "where creativity and causes converge." The Ad Council, a non-profit organization, coordinates "contributing partners" to address the most important issues in the US and globally, including social and environmental concerns and national crises. Laurie started her career working with big media agencies, but her heart was in her volunteer work. Joining the Ad Council in 2010 allowed her to meld her love for media strategy and planning with her passion for social good. Today, she manages the organization's relationships with major media, tech, and entertainment companies, including large tech platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, eBay, and Twitch. Since its start in 1942, the Ad Council has, over the years, produced many iconic messages. Two of the earliest were: "Loose lips sink ships" (a wartime reminder that divulging sensitive information could result in American deaths) and Smokey Bear, (who always seemed to be saying, "Only YOU can prevent forest fires.") Other iconic messages include: "Friends don't let friends drive drunk," Crash dummies, and the current "Love has no labels." In this interview, Laurie explains how the Ad Council's partnership model works and how it has grown: Nonprofit and government agency "issue experts" need help to communicate critical messages to their target audiences. U.S. creative agencies (and the Ad Council's Creators for Good team) donate time to develop creative strategy and content The Ad Council deploys this information to media volunteers The media volunteers provide pro bono digital "real estate" – the platform Today, these large media companies often contribute on creative side as well, honing material to produce platform-optimized messages. Before the COVID-19-precipitated cancellation of the South by Southwest 2020 conference, Laurie was scheduled to moderate a panel, "Marketing in the Age of Digital Community," exploring the power and rise of digital communities. Here, Laurie discusses the power of Reddit, a community where anonymity opens the opportunity for people to more freely talk about sensitive issues, and the potential gains (and caveats) for brands that decide to work in that space. Laurie talks about how the Ad Council's current "Alone together" message, encourages social isolation to slow the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic while communicating that doing so brings people into a "group" taking action together. Alone. But not alone. Laurie says she has been thrilled with the level and depth of brand involvement in communicating COVID-19 information to various audiences. Laurie can be reached on Twitter @lauriekeith, on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/adcouncil, and on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-advertising-council/. The Ad Council offers an audio/video/print "finished content" COVID-19 information toolkit for people or organizations with outreach capabilities at: coronavirus.adcouncilkit.org. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Laurie Keith. She's the Vice President of Media, Social & Emerging for the Ad Council based in San Francisco, California. Welcome to the podcast, Laurie. LAURIE: Thank you so much for having me. ROB: It's fantastic to have you here. I think a lot of people, the name "the Ad Council" is familiar to them, but they might not be able to tell you off the top of their heads what it is, how it operates, what the deal is. I think people don't even realize how many iconic campaigns the Ad Council is associated with. So why don't you give us the big picture of the Ad Council and what the Ad Council excels in? LAURIE: Of course. We like to say the Ad Council is where creativity and causes converge, put simply. We are a nonprofit organization. We've been around since 1942, and we bring together unique convening partners from the creative minds in advertising, media, technology, in order to address the nation's most important causes. We convene all of the partners that we have in all of those industries to tackle the country's toughest issues. We are a national nonprofit, so we're really focused on issues at home. Of course, if there's an issue of global importance, we also will take those on as well. It's a really unique intersection in that we're able to work with the nonprofits and government agencies – they really act as the issue experts – and our "clients" – the media, technology, marketing industries – in an effort to get these critical messages out there to the audiences that we're trying to reach. And then the advertising creative industry are really tasked with developing and coming up with the creative that you see out there. As you alluded to, we have created some of the most iconic campaigns in advertising history, from "Friends don't let friends drive drunk" to Smokey Bear. Our most iconic campaign right now I think is "Love has no labels." We really are the convener, as I said earlier, to bring everyone together so that we can make sure we're getting these critical issues out there. ROB: For sure. And even I believe going all the way back to Rosie the Riveter, at the origin? Is that right? LAURIE: That was up for debate for quite a long time. [laughs] I don't think we can claim that one, but our very iconic campaign was "Loose lips sink ships" back in World War II era. That was I think one of our first campaigns, along with Smokey Bear. ROB: Crash Test Dummies, McGruff, do you get to claim those? LAURIE: Yep, Crash Test Dummies, McGruff the Crime Dog. Those are also our iconic campaigns. I should mention we have a long history of creating campaigns in times of national crisis. I just mentioned World War II; we had a big September 11th "I am an American" campaign. Also, any time there's a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy. And of course, our most recent efforts that we have on the ground right now to spread awareness on the slow of the spread of coronavirus, COVID-19. We're currently spinning on all cylinders getting those messages out to the public. ROB: It's quite a charge to make these memorable and meaningful campaigns. I don't think a lot of people would think about having interesting and memorable government advertisements, but yet that is a place that the Ad Council has absolutely excelled. Let's dig a little bit into your own journey. How did you come to be at the Ad Council in the role that you are in now? LAURIE: In my role as Vice President of Media, focusing on social and emerging, I really work in this unique intersection of the tech media industry, and I manage our relationships with major media, tech, and entertainment companies, using their platforms to develop largescale, innovative, social good partnerships. I oversee our partnerships with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, eBay. I'm always worried like I'm missing someone. Twitch is a big one. A lot of the large tech media platforms really fall under my huge umbrella. Your question was how I got here. Prior to the Ad Council, joining 10 years ago, I worked at big media agencies. I started my career at Starcom MediaVest Group in Chicago, and then I moved to Los Angeles, where I worked for Mindshare, working on the Ford Automotive account, and then moved over to Initiative, where I worked on the Carl's Jr./Hardees QSR account. I reached a point in my career 10 years ago where – I went to school for advertising, I went through the media track; I really loved media. I've always been super interested in media as an industry. I was really enjoying the strategy that went behind building a media plan, understanding the specific targets and how they're consuming media and what we need to do creatively in order to get the message in front of them at the right time so they're going to take the call to action that we need them to take. But my client at the time, as I was going through this life shift, was a fast food restaurant. So, I was realizing I was doing such cool, innovative partnerships – I did one of the first text messaging campaigns for Carl's Jr./Hardees – but I was not really passionate about the brand that I was working on. It was like getting men 18-49 to continue to eat fast food hamburgers. I was also doing a lot of personal volunteering and helping out a lot in my local community in Los Angeles. I reached a point where I was like, how do I work in social good and help people, but also continue to work in advertising and media? Because I love how this industry is constantly changing and there's new technologies coming out all the time. So, I was trying to figure out how to bridge the two together. It was a long journey, which I won't get into on this podcast, but I ended up getting accepted to the United States Peace Corps, and I was thinking about going to – they wanted to send me to Kazakhstan to do youth and community development, and I was going to be the only Peace Corps volunteer. My parents are usually really excited about all of my adventures and ideas, but they were like, "Is that really what you want to be doing?" I was at the point in my career where if I were to leave to do something like, it would probably drastically change the course of my career. That was when I found the Ad Council. I was driving down La Cienega in LA. I was driving down a street that I normally wouldn't have been, but I was on jury duty during this time, so I was doing a lot of things and doing a lot of soul-searching, trying to figure out my next steps. I passed this billboard, and it was right after the Haiti earthquake, and it was a partnership that the Ad Council had with the Red Cross. It said "text (whatever) to donate to the Red Cross to help with the Haiti earthquake efforts." It was just one of those lightbulb moments. I've had a couple in my life, and I'm grateful that the Ad Council really came to me in this way. It was like, "Who is the Ad Council? Maybe you should look into what they're doing. Clearly, they have this big billboard on La Cienega, and maybe they're a company that you should look into." Everything just was clockwork after that. I reached out to the person that ended up becoming my boss and let them know that this was really my passion. My passion was social good, but my talent, so to speak, was media strategy and planning, and "I would love to come in and talk to you." That turned into an informational interview, which turned into they were looking for someone with exactly my experience, which was local and national media strategy. Also, at the time in 2010, Ad Council was really starting to build out their partnership model. Of course, we've always worked off of a donated media model, and we run all of our PSAs through donated media, which we're so grateful to get from the industry. But at the time, the partnership model – which is "How do we develop custom content together? How do we bring in a measurement study? How do we develop an innovative product that can help get the message out there?" – that was when they were starting to think in that vein, and that was really what I wanted to be doing for them. So it was just a perfect timing situation. The job was in New York City, and I was really excited about the opportunity to live in New York City and jump-start my career there. I took the job about 4 months later and have been with them for the last 10 years and have really, like I said, grown the digital/social/emerging part of the Ad Council, which has been really the highlight of my career. ROB: That's such a fascinating transition to bring you out to the West Coast again and really to identify – it seems like a lot of the technology opportunity – is it really donated media from them as well? Just as perhaps airtime on radio and on television would be donated, these platforms may also donate part of their own real estate to these causes? LAURIE: Yeah. Every time you see an Ad Council PSA advertisement, whether it's in your Instagram feed, whether it's on a billboard on the highway, whether it's on the radio or a podcast that you're listening to, all of that is donated to the Ad Council, which I think puts us in a really unique position because we're able to get our messages out there on all these different platforms. It's really the generosity of the media community that allows us to do that. So yeah, it's a very unique model. I think it's also a testament to the relationships that we have with these media companies that when we do need to get messages out there, they're raising their hand and they want to support it. It's a really great place to be. ROB: Wow. For them to donate that time, there has to be an element of trust that what they're going to be using that airtime, that screen space for, is going to be of excellent quality. Who actually creates the campaigns and creates the content? Are they also donating their time? LAURIE: That's a great question. The creative is really twofold, and I feel like it's one of the things that keeps evolving. Traditionally . . . our traditional model is that the advertising agencies in the U.S., the creative agencies in the U.S. – we call them volunteer agencies, and they will donate their time pro bono to develop the creative strategy and come up with the actual creative idea that we then deploy and put out there in the media. I feel like more and more, especially with the accounts that I manage, the media companies themselves not only want to donate the media, but they also want to be very heavily involved in the creative process. Facebook has Facebook Creative Shop, Pinterest has their own creative team, Snapchat has their own creative team. So oftentimes media companies will also step up and say, "Listen, we want to donate X amount of media, but we also want to work with our creative team to develop a custom filter or come up with a new video social campaign that is very specific to this platform." And we welcome those opportunities. Obviously, these media companies know what creative is going to perform best and what the best ways are to reach audiences on their platform, so we welcome that. Oftentimes we do work with media companies, and they will donate their time to develop content similar to advertising agencies. But of course, our agency model is very strong because there's so many media companies out there and so many ways to reach people through multiple media channels that it's important for us to have face-to-face campaign creative and have creative that's ready to get out there on any platform at any given time. ROB: That makes a lot of sense. I can definitely see, especially in your department, when you're dealing with these technology companies, even the way they would execute a campaign, they would probably like to execute it in a way that is very native to each platform that they're on in a way that might make the entire campaign different. LAURIE: Yeah. I should also add we have a whole department at the Ad Council called Creators for Good. Again, it's another small and mighty team, but they are working with talent. Anyone from digital talent, digital creator influencer, to celebrity talent, comedians, musicians. They also develop content for us and their voice, lending their talents to get these critical messages to the public. It's great. We have basically content coming in from all different directions in order to get the messaging out there. ROB: Perfect. I think very relevant to this, you were prepared at South by Southwest to be a part of a talk called "Marketing in the Age of Digital Community." That's very relevant, I think, to this conversation. What was going to be in that talk? And maybe we'll get a chance to hear it if it comes out in digital format later. LAURIE: Yeah. It was a panel that I put through. I was planning to be the moderator, and it was with Will Cady, the Head of Brand Strategy at Reddit, Addie Marino, who's the Global Prototype Lead at the Creative Shop Studio I just mentioned – we work with them – over at Facebook, and then Adam Warrington, who is the Vice President of Better World, the CSR arm of Anheuser-Busch. The panel was going to be focused on the power of digital communities and also the rise in digital communities. 81% of companies, up from 67% in 2012, report that they have a community-centric approach to marketing. And then at the same time, there's been a significant increase in the number of internet users that engage in online forums, blogs, subreddits. Reddit did a study called "The Era of We," and it went from 72% of global internet users saying that "yes, I engage in these online communities" and that has increased to 76%. It's this really interesting phenomenon that more and more people that are active internet/social media users are part of some type of community. Maybe they're part of one, maybe they're part of several. And at the same time, companies that are starting out or companies that are evolving are making sure that they have a community-centric strategy. We basically designed a panel around that, and as a brand, how do you authentically insert yourself into let's say a subreddit community that has millions of followers and people that are really passionate about an issue? You as a brand have a big stake in the ground, and how do you enter that community but then also do it in a very authentic way to where the people in that community are really receptive? That was another part of the panel, too. Reddit did a separate study that found that 82% of community users are receptive to brands participating, and they really respect when brands make an effort. So this whole idea of – this is a huge marketing opportunity for brands to come in and insert themselves into these communities, but doing it in an authentic way that really fares well for your brand. Of course, brands have a lot of guidelines on how they can show up and what they can say and do. How do you do that in a space that is very authentic? You don't want to stand out. You don't want to do anything that could make you come across as you don't know what you're talking about. So it was a really awesome panel that we had designed to talk about this, because I think a lot of brands are trying to figure out how to enter this space. ROB: An interesting panel for that. I would say perhaps Reddit is the place you can insert yourself into community and be most quickly corrected if you have done so in a way that is not right for that community. LAURIE: Yes, absolutely. I think Reddit is also super unique – and we were going to talk about this in the panel, too – just the anonymous nature of the platform. A lot of people are joining subreddits, but they don't reveal their real person, whereas on a Facebook, you are showing up as who you are. I think what makes Reddit so special is that you can be part of this community, but not have to reveal who you really are. From an Ad Council perspective, we've found this to be really powerful for campaigns like our Youth Suicide Prevention campaign, like holding a Reddit AMA and reaching out to different communities to get people to talk about the issue of mental health that maybe in a public setting, that's difficult to talk about. It's a sensitive subject. So we are able to see a lot of success in raising awareness on our campaigns when we do it in a really unique way on Reddit. ROB: Reddit is certainly, by contrast, also a place where if you do things right, the rewards are tremendously rich and robust. I think maybe relevant to that, you're at an intersection that is very interesting today amidst this COVID-19 crisis. At the Ad Council, I believe the day that we're recording this, there've been a couple of new ads that have come out. I think when you're talking about digital platforms, often younger audiences might be some of the folks who feel like they have the least to worry about with this COVID-19 crisis. How is the Ad Council working into this crisis and getting what messages out to the right places? LAURIE: It's a great question, and thank you for asking. We have a huge campaign, and it has a lot of legs. We actually announced our campaign on March 19th, and we are working in partnership with the White House, the CDC, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop this largescale national PSA campaign in order to get messages to the public. To your point, there are a lot of different targeting sets of people that we're trying to reach. We have a lot of different campaigns under this one COVID-19 umbrella, so to speak. We worked with NBCUniversal. They created a series of videos, TV, and digital and social graphics both in English and Spanish that are reaching the high-risk populations as well as the general public. Those ad sets talk about the steps that people can take to protect themselves. Then separately, we worked with ViacomCBS and really leveraged their portfolio of brands to develop a multiplatform PSA campaign that targets more of the Gen Z/Millennial, younger, low-risk, I think we're calling them – like the 16- to 35-year-olds that might be a carrier or might have had the coronavirus but had mild symptoms, but of course, are a carrier of the virus and can spread it quickly. That campaign is called Alone Together. We're partnering with Twitter, we're partnering with Snapchat, we're partnering with TikTok, all of the targeted media platforms, to really bring light to that campaign. It's also social and talent led, so we have a bunch of celebrity talents that have lent their voice to get the message out there, of course. They're really big on social platforms, so partnering with them was really important for the campaign. In addition to that, we also just launched new PSAs that feature the Surgeon-General, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci, the health officials that really get the message out there on social distancing. Those are also targeted to the low-risk group of Americans. And we have more and more, it seems like every day, more and more media companies coming to the table. We're now working with The Atlantic's internal creative studio to develop customized digital creative. iHeartMedia just raised their hand and they're going to be developing audio and radio spots. Wall Street Journal, I just heard this morning, and Hearst are going to be developing custom print. And then of course, the partners that we work with out here in San Francisco, our social and emerging media partners, have all – we basically reached out and asked for their support, and every single one of them is stepping up, whether that be through donating a significant amount of media to get these already-created assets out there to developing custom content. Snapchat, their creative team is developing custom filters as well as designing some new creative that will live within their app. We're partnering with TikTok and some celebrity, talent-led creative. Reddit is doing something really unique in that we're doing a trending takeover on their front page, and we're also going to be developing custom content with them. I could talk forever on all the companies that have stepped up, but it's really been an industry-wide effort to not only develop content that reaches these very specific audiences, but donating media and each platform lending their own creative team to make sure that we're getting this message out there in the way that their audience is going to consume it best. It's been definitely the highlight of my career in these last 10 years I've worked with the Ad Council. We always take the call. We take the call when there's a national crisis and a national emergency. I never thought in a million years that we would be dealing with this in our country, but it's so amazing to work at a company like the Ad Council that is really on the frontlines on this communication and media strategy in order to get people to do what we need them to do. ROB: You must really feel like this is such an opportunity to actually – I think more tangibly. Many of your campaigns have been out there to save lives, even going back to "Loose lips sink ships" or the Crash Test Dummies. I just think there's something a lot more tangible about the immediate opportunity here. I'm amazed you can keep all of that that you just shared even in your head. LAURIE: [laughs] It's hard. ROB: How do you think about organizing moving parts and partners with so many different campaigns in flight, so many different placements in flight, different contexts? LAURIE: Thankfully, we have such an incredible team at the Ad Council. Our media team at the Ad Council is really broken out in that we have different specialties and different focus areas. Of course, our team in San Francisco, we're really focused on social and emerging media companies. Anything we're doing with any of those companies, we're really leading the charge in developing those partnerships. We have another team that's focused on audio and podcasts. We have another team that's focused more on TV and radio. We have a whole team of people that are working tirelessly with all of their partners in order to get the message out there. And then, of course, we have our talent team that's leading the talent-led efforts. We have our campaign teams that are in charge of managing the relationships with the CDC and the White House. It honestly is a whole team effort. It really makes me take a step back and go, wow. I'm happy to be where I am during this crisis. Ad Council, we have the convening partners of the industry to enable us to do this. I've got to say, it's really awesome that we have a system set up for when there is a crisis and that we can get the messages out there so quickly across the entire industry. ROB: It sounds like you're saying there's a value of specialization, but there's also a value of coordination and having the right people in the right seats and enough of them to make sure this whole thing works together. LAURIE: Totally. ROB: You have the quantity and the talent. Perfect. In these moments of crisis, one thing I saw maybe right around the time that cities were beginning to lock down – there are always loud voices on Twitter, but I saw very intelligent people who were calling out and calling on some of these – probably companies you work with, the Facebooks, the Twitters of the world, and saying, "Why aren't you helping? Why aren't you getting the word out?" What do people not realize is going on behind the scenes? Because I'm sure they're talking about it. When these companies are thinking but haven't quite acted yet, what's going on behind the scenes that people might not appreciate about these companies? LAURIE: I think that's why we at the Ad Council work directly with our PR communications team, because it is important for us to get the message out there that these companies are standing up. I know we just came out with a press release last Monday talking specifically to the tech community and what they're doing to step up. You just mentioned Facebook and Twitter; they're both doing a lot for our campaigns. Facebook is donating a significant amount of media for us to get the message out there, and Twitter is developing a custom emoji that will show up any time someone types with the hashtag "#alonetogether." It's important for us to get the message out there that these media companies are stepping up, and we do that through a press release so that we can make these announcements and so the press can write about it. Obviously, sometimes that's not happening at the same exact time these questions are being asked, like, "Why aren't these companies stepping up?" But we were able to turn around a press release within a matter of 3 days. I think these companies, beyond what they're doing with the Ad Council, I'm reading every day – Apple just created a COVID-19 special section. Facebook has a COVID-19 special section. I know Twitter does as well. So I know beyond just what they're doing with the Ad Council and helping us get these messages to the public, I do think a lot of them are doing way more beyond that. They're actually using their product to get the message out there as well. I don't know if that helps answer your question, but we try to raise awareness on the fact that they're supporting through the press that we put out there. ROB: It's yet another example, I think, of the high-level, three-dimensional chess that you all have to play that very few people have to do. There's a PR dimension to what you're doing, but very rarely do you see such a deep level of also execution, also distribution, also partnering and coordinating, all within one organization. I think it's a tremendous amount to appreciate. LAURIE: It's a well-oiled machine. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] It sounds like it, especially to be all virtual now. Laurie, when you are looking at the future, what's coming up for the Ad Council and for the industry that you are excited about? LAURIE: It's a big question. For me personally, where I sit at the Ad Council and focusing on social and emerging media and having a pulse on the frontier of what's happening and where we should really be inserting ourselves, there's a couple things I think that I'm excited about. We're talking to some companies right now on the idea of a virtual concert where you essentially can join virtually, whether you have a VR headset or you just – you don't need a VR headset to join; you can also just join and experience it from your regular desktop or mobile phone. This idea that we can bring thousands if not millions of people together in a virtual space, share our messaging, whether that be – I think we're talking about bringing in some artists, some talent – but really getting everyone in a virtual space. Obviously it's hard in person. There's a lot of logistics that go into actually planning a physically live event. But the idea of being able to pull something off like this in a virtual space and have different messaging points, different levers that we can pull, whether that's getting a reward within the experience or maybe collecting user-generated content where people can share their own experiences as it relates to that issue – of course, there's a donation stream, if we wanted to raise money for a specific nonprofit. So I'm really excited about that potential, especially after we're living in this COVID-19 space where there is so much happening in a virtual world. I'm excited to see where Ad Council can take that, especially with our partners like Twitch and other leaders that are really driving the VR space. And then I think separately, it's this whole idea of purpose-driven marketing. I think we're going to see more and more brands really step up and make sure that they stand for something that's beyond just the product that they're selling and going beyond just their pocketbooks and giving money to causes – which of course is super important, but how can they actually develop unique experiences that happen in the communities of people that follow them and help make the world a better place through the causes that they care about? I think you're going to see more and more companies step up. Of course, that's an exciting opportunity for the Ad Council as well because we work with so many brands that sit on our board of directors, so how can we really play a part there, knowing that Ad Council invented this model of purpose-driven marketing back in 1942? How can we work together? We have a separate arm at the Ad Council that is focusing on this as a revenue stream. It's called Ad Council Edge, really helping brands and other nonprofits with their purpose-driven marketing strategy. So I'm really excited to see how that will play out over the next couple of years. ROB: It's amazing to see so much agility in a nearly 80-year-old organization. You mentioned VR there for a moment; I believe you've done some speaking and thinking on VR, but then you overlaid that onto our current moment. How much of things that you've seen and thought about in VR do you think are getting jammed into our lived experience of normal work and life right now? What's stuff we've talked about for VR that just became life all of a sudden? LAURIE: I went to F8 last year and they talked a lot about the Facebook Watch platform, and they showed an example of – it was two women. Her mother lived in Australia and she lived in Los Angeles, and they were watching Red Table Talk through their VR, like Oculus headsets, sitting in their living room, watching the show together and commenting. This whole experience of, okay, we're not physically together, but we are physically together because we are watching this and feeling this through this virtual experience. I see that, especially in where we are sitting right now with this shelter in place and people staying at home, this whole idea of watch parties and watching comet together and being able to respond in real time – just like you would if you were sitting in a living room with someone watching a show together. You might pause it and say, "Oh my gosh, what did you guys think about that?" or what have you. I see this really starting to pick up in a virtual space, being able to watch content together, experience content together. And then when we get out of this space and we eventually can get back to our normal lives and be together again in community with each other, I can see brands taking advantage of this whole – we have this online world, this online community, we're doing something together online, but then facilitating how those online connections can live out in the real world and in real life. I'm interested to see how brands will really scale that. I think we'll see more of these online-meets-real-life experiences happening. ROB: Fascinating. It will be interesting to see the before and after around this forced technology adoption. People are learning things they probably would have not learned for 5 years right now. It'll be fascinating to see what that means for the community that you are involved in and the companies you are working with. LAURIE: Absolutely, yeah. It's a huge opportunity for virtual companies and really digital companies that are thinking in this way to really take advantage of this time and figure out how they can evolve their products to fit in this space. ROB: That's all brilliant. Laurie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for sharing. I think we all learned a great deal. When people want to find and connect with you, where should they look for you? LAURIE: I'm pretty active on social media. That should not surprise you. [laughs] My Twitter is just my name, which is @lauriekeith. I'm always welcome to be hit up on Twitter through DMs. That's probably the best way to reach me. And then I did want to also plug our Coronavirus Toolkit, if I can. ROB: Absolutely. LAURIE: For anyone that's listening to this podcast and has the ability to reach people, we have a toolkit set up. It's coronavirus.adcouncilkit.org, and you will find everything from all of our PSAs to our social media assets to sample television and audio scripts if you want to develop your own content. I just wanted to make sure I plugged that, because I know a lot of people and companies are trying to figure out how they can help. I think it's a good one-stop shop of how to get our assets and get them out there. ROB: Super solid. Thank you so much, Laurie. LAURIE: Thank you so much. Hope you have a good one. ROB: You too. Bye 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.

Caren Carrasco is Senior Partner at Benjamin David Group, a 4-year-old marketing consultancy that excels at digital marketing – in particular, website creation, branding, content strategy, social media, email marketing, and paid media. Benjamin David group works with a wide range of clients, from startups focused on getting their Series A, others with their first infusion of venture capital, to larger, more mature corporations like Cirque du Soleil. The objective? To help their clients get fast, profitable growth. Many clients are B2B. Benjamin David Group provides strategy, with a focus on figuring out how to get traction fast, and supplies the team to make it happen – either by handing off the strategic plan to the client's team or by facilitating the hiring of an appropriate team. "It doesn't make sense to pay a consultant to execute," Caren says, except maybe at the very beginning when the marketing structure is not yet established. To maintain close contact, at least one member of Caren's agency will work in-office at the client's site. Except COVID-19 has changed things up. Caren explains how BDG is handling the imposed transition to virtual, the continued importance of weekly contact with their clients, the impact of an established and clear cut workflow, and why detailed meeting documentation is especially critical at this time. Caren started her career in loyalty and email marketing, and worked in a variety of industries. At Luxury Retreats, a villa rental company headquartered in Montreal, she drove customer journeys, learned "fast and agile" marketing, and worked closely with Salesforce. Salesforce invited her and her Luxury Retreat co-worker, Benjamin David, to speak at Connections 2014 on building effective client life-cycle programs, engagement strategies, and campaign automation. Realizing the depth of their knowledge, Ben and Caren decided to form a marketing consultancy, and set up their first office . . . in a local Starbucks. (This year, Salesforce Connections 2020, originally scheduled in Chicago for May 4 through May 6, will be a virtual experience.) In this interview, Caren introduces a powerful market targeting tool, RFM database segmentation. RFM identifies different buyer groups so that marketers can apply group-specific strategies and optimize repeat business. RFM is an acronym for recency, frequency, and monetary – where recency is how recently the buyer made a purchase; frequency is the number of times the buyer has purchased; and monetary is the dollar value of the purchase. Each category of buyer type needs to be approached in a way congruent with their buying history. Caren admits that BDG does not provide all the services a client might need. Instead, they work with a network of trusted partners, many of them curated through networking at industry events. Over the past 4 years, the agency has actually invested in 8 of its clients, through either sweat equity or capital investment. This type of partnering is something BDG would like to further explore since a client's success then becomes BDG's success. Caren and Ben can be reached on the company website at: www.benjamin-david.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 Caren Carrasco, Senior Partner at Benjamin David Group based in Montreal, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, Caren. CAREN: Thank you, Rob. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you kick us off by telling us about Benjamin David Group and where your firm excels? CAREN: Sure. Benjamin David Group, we're a marketing consultancy based in Montreal. We do everything that has to do with digital marketing, from website creation, branding, content strategy, social media, email marketing, paid media. We excel at those verticals. Our clientele can go from bigger corporations like Cirque du Soleil, which is a very well-known brand, or we also work with startups. The startup scene in Montreal and Toronto is very big right now, so we find a niche to work with funded startups – startups that are either chasing a Series A or that just got funded and they need a marketing arm to execute and start having traction. So, we help them with their marketing efforts. We have been in business for about 4 years now, and we're a team of marketing consultants. Our main goal is to help our clients with fast, profitable growth – not only to help them grow, but do it as fast as we can. That's a little bit of the nature of the startup clients that we have. They need to show results fast. ROB: Now more than ever, startups are asked to actually prove that their economics are good, and it sounds like you have this sweet spot where you're coming in in that in-between time where there is something there, there is something worth marketing and something to prove, still. They're not at the point maybe past a Series B, C, D, E, whatever, where they would bring in a CMO and a bigtime team. When they're looking to get to that Series A, what are some of the key metrics that you're driving and some of the key channels that are working for them to get there? CAREN: We work with quite a few B2B clients. What we focus on at the very beginning is to really set up a model where we can track what is the recipe to start growing. The recipe will have a mix between paid media, of course content will be present everywhere, but our first approach is to try to understand the formula to start driving traction, either through account-based marketing or gaining leads through gated content on different platforms. We actually act as their de facto CMO. We not only bring the strategy, but we also bring the muscle, the team to execute. Once we find that formula, we have two approaches. Either we hand the strategy to our client so that they can execute with their team, or we can take the executive with us and help them through the hiring process so that at some point, once they have their marketing team, we can hand that execution to them because it doesn't make sense to pay a consultant to execute. It makes sense at the very beginning when you're creating the pillars and having the foundation of your marketing practice, but after that, our goal is to really make our client autonomous, and they can use us for direction and strategy. That's a little bit of our approach. ROB: You mentioned the CMO. Probably not typically a full-time CMO, but probably a lot of times actually a fractional marketing team. So, I'd imagine there's a point where you are incrementally replacing yourselves, and sometimes you're able probably to bring – do you have one super marketer that's assigned to a client? Or are you giving them a thin slice of a full-on marketing team? Maybe two, three, five people, where they couldn't imagine having five full-timers on staff, but with you, they get a piece of five different expertises that they wouldn't have. CAREN: Exactly. We have a few clients on that model, and it's very effective for them because, to your point, they're not getting only one person. They're getting a fraction of our team. Another thing that we do with our clients is that we have an office presence with them. We make sure that we have a seat in their office so that we can be with them, and it's not a remote collaboration; we're actually there to be part of the key decisions, to also train their future team if they're at the point of hiring. It's a very, very effective model, and it helps fast-track things and make sure that we're aligned with our business objectives. ROB: The in-person model is definitely a differentiator, and I think it probably distinguishes you from people who might even outsource a lot of their execution to maybe somewhere far away. It's often so beneficial to have someone who understands intrinsically the context of the company, the context of the location, and relationships with the team. Originally, you and I were scheduled to meet up in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, and as everyone is probably well aware by now, that was cancelled. That in-person conversation for us was cancelled. I'd imagine some of your in-person conversations – perhaps all of them – have also been cancelled and that seat at the office is empty along with the rest of them. How have you thought about adapting that personal integration into the team operating in this coronavirus, social distancing, remote working environment? CAREN: Specifically, for South by Southwest – and this is a small collaboration that I did with another company through a webinar – there's still so many things that we can do even if events have been cancelled. We still have access to the attendee list for, for example, South by Southwest or any event. So, I think companies can still try to make those meetings happen, just not personally, but virtually. So that's one way you can still get the advantage of the whole event. With our clients, we're keeping the communications fluid through the tools that we have. We're making sure that every week, we're in touch with them. Because it's a situation that is not only on our side, but on their side as well, it has been very positive, the transition of not being in office, but making sure that we are online and available through different platforms and making sure that we have touchpoints with them. Actually, one of the things that we have at BDG is that we work with Jira and Confluence and we make sure that every single thing that happens for an internal meeting/external meeting, it's documented in meeting notes. That way, even if you're not physically there or if there's a meeting that was held between certain people, we make sure everyone is in the loop by giving access to those meeting notes. So far, with this whole crisis, I think we have managed well with our clients. ROB: That's really interesting. Jira and Confluence are pretty sophisticated and capable tools. Kind of a Basecamp on steroids sometimes. CAREN: Yeah. Thanks to us being very diligent on having our setup with those tools, it's actually how and why we are well-positioned to work remotely with our clients because we have a very clear workflow and process and methodology. So, I'm happy that we put that in place so that now we can actually work efficiently remotely. ROB: Excellent. You mentioned that you started BDG around 4 years ago. Tell me about that origin story. How did you come to start a business that you've now been glad to grow and work with some really excellent clients? CAREN: My expertise as a marketer was with loyalty and email marketing specifically. I worked in different industries, from luxury travel to loyalty. I worked at Aeroplan, which is the loyalty program of Air Canada. Here in Montreal, I worked at Luxury Retreats, which is a villa rental company that got acquired by Airbnb a couple of years ago. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work at a startup at Luxury Retreats and go through what it means to work fast and agile and where speed is everything. That's where I met my co-founder, Benjamin. We were very knowledgeable in everything that has to do with the customer journey and lifecycle. We worked closely with Salesforce. At the time it was ExactTarget. The people at Salesforce were very impressed with the way we were driving customer lifecycles with Luxury Retreats, to the point that they invited us to Connections and to give speaking sessions in Indianapolis and to basically speak to their clients about everything that they can do from a marketing automation standpoint. At that point, I think it was the very beginning of thinking that we could actually have a practice out of consulting, because we were very knowledgeable in everything that has to do with customer journeys. At that point, Ben had been at Luxury Retreats for 16 years, and I was working by that time at Aeroplan. At some point we got together and he was the one approaching me to say, "Caren, let's create a consultancy on marketing. We're very knowledgeable." At the time I was like, "How are we going to find clients? How do we grow this?" So, we started together. I quit my job. We started working at a Starbucks, no office. Fast forward 4 years, we're a team of 20 consultants and we have big clients such as Cirque du Soleil and a very healthy pipeline. It was an interesting decision, but it was very rewarding to see how based on the knowledge you have and the expertise, you can actually build a business out of it and grow it. ROB: Congratulations on all of that. It seems like a lot of your success is rooted in some very – I see with Jira and Confluence, and then also with ExactTarget, there's this deep technical competency that seems to resonate throughout and elevates the work to a level of consultancy and not just some sort of lightweight content shop. Now, what I'd like to dig into that goes even deeper to that technical capability is you have prepared presentations on something called RFM segmentation. Tell us what RFM segmentation is, what we need to know, and how we should be deploying it. CAREN: When we worked at Luxury Retreats and the reason why Salesforce was very impressed about what we were doing in marketing automation and lifecycle journeys was the segmentation that we put behind it. Basically, RFM segmentation is a way for you to segment your database and monetize it and get the most out of repeat business. This is a model that is very easy to implement for businesses for retail and travel. Basically, what you're trying to do is have a very specific strategy for people that have purchased with you one time or more than one time and have a different approach for each one, because you shouldn't be targeting in the same way a first-time buyer as a three-time buyer. That will help you with your incentive strategy, how you give up promotions, how you incentivize your database to keep buying more. RFM stands for recency, frequency, and monetary – recency, how recently the purchase was; frequency, how many times the buyer has purchased; and monetary, the value. In a nutshell, you assign scores from let's say 1 to 5 to one of those dimensions, and you will have different clusters of segments that you can target differently. Think about having a big grid of different segments where you are going to have your VIPs, which are the 5-5-5s. Let's say someone that made a purchase yesterday over $1,000 and they have purchased more than three times. The way you target a 5-5-5 is very different than the way you target a 1-1-1, someone that maybe had purchased over a year ago for a very low amount of money and they just purchased once. This really helps you focus your efforts and understand how you should be moving your low-engaged segments through your high-engaged segments. It's a very, very strategic and detailed approach, and it's a methodology that we have put in practice with different clients, as I was saying, in the retail and travel industry with very good results in terms of repeat business. ROB: I think that makes sense, and it makes even more sense with your background in loyalty because as I think about you talking about a 5-5-5, I think about the different airline status programs, even some credit card programs. It seems like there are entire programs, your Delta Platinums and Diamonds and I don't know how high it goes, that are all about capturing the brain of a 5-5-5. CAREN: Exactly. Also, because you don't have infinite budget to give incentives to everyone, that's why the RFM segmentation helps to put exactly where you should be putting your efforts. And at the same time, not everything is going to be a monetary incentive. Sometimes recency, like the time where you're targeting someone, is the variable that will make you move the needle. Through analysis, you can understand when is the right time to send a communication – for example, an email – to a customer that just made a purchase for the first time so that you can convince them at the right time to make the second purchase. It's not about maybe the incentive, but to understand that, for example, on Day 72, that's where your database is the perfect timing to trigger a second purchase. ROB: Very interesting. Does this have any applications then into something like a Cirque du Soleil or even into some of the startups that you work with? CAREN: Yeah, absolutely. We implement it on different clients. Any type of business that has a repeat behavior that it's a product or a service that you can buy over and over again can use RFM segmentation. ROB: So if you're in something like Cirque du Soleil, you might know that someone's going to buy every time you come to town or they're going to buy – I don't even know if there are higher packages available that you can get them into. But you could actually design marketing around the knowledge that someone's definitely going to go and what they're going to buy, versus they might come let's say every couple of years. CAREN: Exactly. It's the same thing as in travel, for the travel industry. Depending on your niche, you know when is the right time for someone to start thinking of their next travel. Because you know that information, which is your recency factor, you know exactly the right time to push for the next trip. At the same time, for most of the businesses that I have been working with, there is a truth in the data, which is once you convert a first-time buyer into a second-time buyer, you basically have them for life. If you make sure that you convert a one-time to a two-time, to get them to repeat to three times, four times, depending on your industry, is not that difficult. The big step that you have to focus on at the beginning of the program is how you make a first-time buyer buy a second time. After that, if you give good service and the product is good, they're going to be happy and they're going to keep buying from you. So that's what I usually recommend to our clients and where we usually focus at the beginning, to transform the first-time buyers into second-time buyers. ROB: Suppose you've solved the initial part of getting somebody to be a repeat buyer. Are there industries where you can actually impact the recency, frequency, or monetization of the customers? It seems like in some cases, particularly in travel, moving someone up from a one, a two, to three, to four, to five on the monetization scale, for instance, would be a real game-changer for a business. CAREN: Exactly. For example, if you master the recency and frequency and now you are close in the window for them to book faster and you're making them book with you multiple times, then you're viable to start to tackle monetary, how you can get them to spend more money with you. And there's different marketing strategies that you can do around that. ROB: What's an example of a way you might be able to move somebody up the monetization or frequency scale, for that matter? CAREN: We did a very interesting promotion once at Luxury Retreats. We were giving free flights to anyone that would be booking for a certain period of time for certain locations. It was a very interesting way to move people, first of all from first-time buyers to repeat buyers, and also to increase their monetary value because we needed to lock them for a certain number of nights. That promotion turned out to be one of the most successful promotions in this particular niche. This is luxury travel. So, you're getting a free flight, and the gain for the company is right away because you're not putting money upfront. You're only giving away the incentive once they book with you. That's a promotion that is still alive, and it was very, very successful from an RFM perspective because we were tackling the three variables at a time. ROB: That's fascinating. It seems like in the case of luxury travel, in particular, one of the things you may be able to do is actually change someone's concept of themselves as being the sort of person who does this sort of travel. If you can get them to think of themselves that way, it probably becomes something that feeds itself a little bit. CAREN: Yeah. In particular with luxury travel, incentives have a different take because those are brands that don't get discounted. It's a luxury item, so you don't offer discounts. Everything that you're offering them, either to book faster or to increase the basket size, is actually on giving them a better experience, to upgrade their experience, to give them something more. So it's a different way to see the incentive and how you can make them increase their monetary value. ROB: Fantastic. Caren, when you think about your 4-year journey so far building Benjamin David Group, what are some things that you might do differently if you were starting over? Some lessons learned, if you will. CAREN: I think as we positioned ourselves as a growth partner of our clients, one of the things that we have been doing – it's not something that I would do differently, but I think it's knowledge that I wish I'd had since Day 1: to build a network of trusted partners that I can always go to, to enhance the service that I provide to my clients. Just to give you an example, we don't provide PR services. We're very focused on digital marketing. But we have a lot of clients that at some point, because of the different marketing strategies that we have with them, there's a right time for them, for example, to engage with a PR agency. Sometimes we don't have the right partner to send to our clients. So I think to have a very strong network of different service providers that don't necessarily have to do with my core business, but that I can always give to my clients so that they can continue with that execution is something that I would like to have curated faster during this journey. ROB: What have you found to be some of the keys to establishing those connections? It sounds like you have a lot of that in place now. CAREN: A lot of these connections and partnerships that we have developed right now have been based off networking, to be honest. In every event and every opportunity that we attend, there are other players attending there. Just to give you an example, at South by Southwest, there are multiple agencies going there. Myself, I was booked pretty much the whole week with other agencies where my services are complementary to them or where they actually complement my services. So the best way we have curated those relationships has been through networking. ROB: I think another question that comes into play with that sort of partnership is: how do you think about, when you're working with a client, whether that relationship is an introduction and a referral or whether it's a white label service or just generally provided under the scope of BDG? CAREN: The way that we have managed, it depends on the needs of the client. Also, it depends on our direction on the overall service. Sometimes we just connect the client with the service provider and they can work with them directly and do whatever they need to do. But there are other instances where it makes sense for us to be involved, just to give direction to this third party, and then they will be working with us behind the scenes and we will be assisting them with the direction and getting all the information from the client, and then we're able to brief the third party. So it really depends on the mandate and also where the client sits, where they want to move forward. But both angles have worked with us. ROB: I can imagine some startup where you are the entire marketing arm of the organization, they probably just want you there to solve any marketing problem possible and to bring solutions to the table. Is that part of the mix? CAREN: Exactly, and that's a big difference. For example, I'm just thinking from a startup. That's the difference between hiring for example five different freelancers – let's say that a startup goes, "I'm going to hire someone for social media, someone for SEO, someone for email marketing," and so on; the client will still have to have someone to manage those five professionals and make sure that people are not working in silos and bring them all together with the direction. The difference with us is that we are that connection. We have the team and we have the specialists. The client just needs to make individual connections with the specialist because everything is centralized through our service. I think that's a big advantage for us to work in that way, mostly with our startup clients. ROB: Caren, what do you think is coming up next for BDG that we should be looking forward to, or maybe some lines of service that you're doing where you see some trends emerging? CAREN: Other things I would do at BDG – we do digital marketing, but we also have a small venture arm. Whenever it makes sense for us, we do invest in some of our clients in a mix between sweat equity and capital. That's something that we would like to explore even more. We have made eight investments during these past 4 years. Moving forward in 2020-2021, we really want to keep developing that ability to invest in companies where we provide the marketing services, but because we're also investors of the company, the dots are aligned, so our clients' success will be also our success. We want to keep exploring and get deeper into our investment arm. ROB: Very good. Any of those companies that we should be looking out for that you'd like to plug while we're chatting? CAREN: Absolutely. One of the companies that we're very, very proud of how they have success – it's a marketplace. They're called GoMaterials. Basically it's a marketplace between landscapers and vendors. We have been helping them since Day 1. It's a very, very interesting concept. They are disrupting an industry that is very old-fashioned, where everything is done through paper, and they're bringing technology to the industry, which is where they are succeeding in the space. So that's one of our investments that we're very, very proud of. ROB: Very, very interesting. That is probably a hot one right now, at least where we are in Atlanta. Landscaping is considered one of those necessary services where business is going to keep on humming except for maybe some people would pull back. But at the same time, probably having an online service to handle some of the logistics is better than going in person for a lot of people. CAREN: Absolutely. They have a platform where everything is centralized, so it's going to be a big, big change for the industry. The way that we provide and we support them is we have very good experience with marketplaces. Back at Luxury Retreats, it was basically a marketplace between the hosts and the guests. They're basically doing the same thing, but for landscapers. All industries that have been managed in an old-fashioned way, whoever can disrupt that and bring technology and make that marketplace unified has a winning angle to gain that market, and that's what they're doing. ROB: Fantastic. Caren, when people want to find you and want to find Benjamin David Group, where should they look? CAREN: Our website, www.benjamin-david.com. Also, we're very, very active on LinkedIn. I would say that our main focus in terms of content is through LinkedIn. So either our website or our LinkedIn page. That's where they can find us. ROB: Fantastic. Caren, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and best wishes to you and BDG, and hopefully we can connect up in person at your first South by Southwest in 2021. Hopefully we can make that happen. CAREN: Absolutely. Thank you, Rob, for the invite. ROB: Thank you so much. 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.