The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark were neighbors when they founded ClarkMcDowall, a 21-year-old agency that with "intelligence and imagination" architects growth for "visionary companies." Originally starting with big clients Catherine "inherited" from her previous employer, the agency had to put in effort to bring on the startups and mid-size companies that keep an agency nimble, fresh, and entrepreneurial – where there is a higher chance of "getting stuff done." Paul says the agency's most productive relationships come with clients that want to think ahead and think differently, make changes and do something different, and push boundaries – that these companies have a "sophistication in the way they think, but also a progressive way of thinking about their own industry or their own business." Catherine notes that the human side is important to the mix and that today's clients are far more savvy about marketing and innovation than they were even six years ago. Brand-architecting involves broad-scope innovation in such activities as creating new brands, amplifying "rising star brands," and transforming legacy brands for visionary clients by changing brand strategy, purpose, or positioning. The agency's brand expression work covers verbal expression (naming/ messaging) and visual expression (visual ID, packaging, design across the whole ecosystem, and web, video, and social components). Catherine says, "Architecting a brand is really about getting into what it stands for and then really thinking about how that impacts in all the ways it expresses itself." As an example of client work, Catherine talks about the agency's multi-year effort with the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team; addressing such issues as – What is their purpose? Why do they exist? How do they uniquely do things? What is it they actually do? – and then thinking how that manifests in the organization's operations – a campaign, a tagline, player experience, how a new player is greeted . . . or about the arena itself and the experience of the arena. Paul extends the scope by mentioning that these things include the internal culture as well, "how they talk to each other" and "how they hire." Although ClarkMcDowall is based in New York City, the 2020 Covid lockdown forced the agency to rethink its organization. Catherine talks about the tension that comes with change . . . and the agency's decision to "Just go hybrid and start building it." Today, the agency uses different systems, different ways of hiring, and different ways of working than in the past . . . and has a strong focus on creating a work environment that is less transactional and more about people's lives. About 25% of the agency's 25 employees work remotely – across the country. Catherine says all this change has come with some nice surprises (and these are quotes): The more we allow people to try to find their own rhythm and their own environment, the more we're able to retain them and get the best out of them. I feel like we're even truer to ourselves in our values. We've really doubled down on the way that we treat people, the way that we integrate into our community, some of the pro bono stuff that we're doing. There's this weird thing that the more you innovate, in a way, the easier it is to be true to yourself. You have to change a lot in order to really notice that anchor that you have. Catherine and Paul can be reached on their agency's website at: clarkmcdowall.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 a duo, Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark. They're both Founding Partners at ClarkMcDowall, based in New York City. Welcome to the podcast. PAUL: Thank you. CATHERINE: Thanks for having us. We're very excited to be here. ROB: It's very excellent to have you here. Maybe you could start off by telling us about ClarkMcDowall and about what it is that makes the firm unique. CATHERINE: We call ourselves brand architects. I guess we'll start there with the unique piece. Just to be tangible for everybody who might be listening in, that means we do a bunch of things. We create new brands, we amplify what we would call "rising star brands," and then we transform legacy brands for clients that we would consider to be visionary clients who are really looking for some change. What does that mean? It means we offer services like brand strategy, brand purpose, positioning, architecture. We also do a lot of innovation work, as that is also part of architecting those brands. Finally, we do brand expression work, whether that's verbal expression like naming/messaging or visual expression like vis ID packaging, designing across the whole ecosystem, web, video, social. There's about 25 people in our agency. Our roots and our base are in New York City, but we are hybrid. We also have talent across the country. I think what makes us unique is – we phrase it as "intelligence and imagination," and I'm sure Paul will jump in and add to that, but it's really born from the partnership that Paul and I have. I'm a strategist originally and Paul is a creative originally, and we both own 50% of this business. It's very much about the fusion of two sides of our business that are usually not seen in equal partnership very much in the agency landscape. PAUL: Yeah. We got to the intelligence and imagination – for a while we were talking about "we have strategy brains and creative brains working together," and it sounded a little clunky. It also felt quite limiting as well. It feels as though creatives can't think and then strategists don't have a creative thought. It's just not true. The idea of intelligence and imagination is something that we do collectively as a team. It's not one team, one person owns that. It's everybody, whether it's the strategists, whether it's the creatives, but also whether it's our client experience team, whether it's our marketing team, ops team, whoever it is. That's how we think and how we approach life. It's a broader philosophy which has stood us in good stead for the last, gosh, 21 years, Catherine. CATHERINE: It's been a journey. PAUL: Yeah. Awesome journey. ROB: Congratulations on that alone. That's quite a journey. You mentioned building brand architecture. When someone goes to your website and looks at the range of brands that are on there, we see quite an array of impressive top-level name brands. How does that play out? I imagine you can talk about some of those brands that are on the site. What does brand architecture look like for one of those examples that we might see looking at the firm? CATHERINE: I could pick a couple of examples. Architecting a brand is really about getting into what it stands for and then really thinking about how that impacts in all the ways it expresses itself. One client we like to talk about a lot is the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team. We worked with them for a number of years, really helping define their purpose, why they exist, how they uniquely do things, what it is they actually do, and then thinking about how that manifests in all kinds of ways. It could be a campaign, a tagline, some visuals. It could also be the player experience. How do you greet a new player when they show up at your team? Or it could be about the arena itself and what the experience is like. PAUL: Even their internal culture as well, how they talk to each other, how they hire. It's from the inside out. Sorry, Catherine. CATHERINE: No, no problem, Paul. This is our two heads thinking together, like we do. [laughter] So that's how we would talk about being brand architects. It's actually a little bit like an architect thinks about creating a building that is influencing the way people live their lives, the way they interact with each other, the way that building leaves a mark on the landscape. It's really bringing a lot of things together. Another manifestation of our work might be some work we did with Starbucks, restaging Evolution Fresh, which is their juice brand that was doing really well. They had this incredible, beautiful design, actually, that won some awards. But then the whole landscape changed around them. That's what happens when we get brought in to do brand transformation. It's like, "Hey, we've got this thing. It was doing great and now it's hit a wall." We would help them from the get-go in terms of understanding, what is the problem? Who is your audience? How do we change the way you position yourself and tell your story? Then we're able to bring it to life. In that particular instance, it was mainly packaging. The packaging was their main source of communication; they didn't have any advertising. So that's where we applied all our efforts, into the visual expression, and it turned their business around. They went from major decline to double-digit growth. PAUL: They were getting delisted. Even from their own Starbucks stores, they were getting delisted. That's how dire the situation was. Through the work we launched, they were doing double-digit growth. They had the biggest growth I think they'd seen in the brand itself, and actually outpacing the category itself. So a pretty dramatic transformation. ROB: What was the timing of your engagement with Oklahoma City? Were you there right when they were moving and that transition? Was part of the brand design around the new team name? Or was it downstream from there? CATHERINE: Downstream. We came in at the Kevin Durant free agency time. I can't say too much about all of that, but you can imagine that that team was going through a lot of soul-searching in terms of what they stood for, and if that player was going to leave – which he ended up leaving – how do you make sure you define that team so that it has a real sense of purpose, regardless of the outcome they can't control? So we came in at that point and really helped them articulate what makes them different. And as Paul was saying, impacting their culture internally. They made this incredible bounce-back as soon as he left. And they're always changing and there's always players coming in, coming out. How, with a brand like that, do you help them to find what they stand for, agnostic of the players that might be there, knowing that the players are actually a huge part of the experience? So trying to create some stability and a sense of agency, if you like, for themselves outside of wins and losses and players. PAUL: I think it's interesting. They have a very progressive team way of thinking. I'm impressed with the GM, who we worked closely with and Catherine has a very good relationship with. He's super thoughtful about everything, not wanting to be just another sports team or thinking like another sports team. I think they're the folks that we do really well with, those clients that really want to push the boundary, thinking ahead – not just reflecting the status quo – and wanting to do something different, wanting to make a change, wanting to think differently, wanting to think fresh. There's a sophistication in the way they think, but also a progressive way of thinking about their own industry or their own business. We create wonderful, productive relationships with folks that are wired that way just because we're wired that way as well. CATHERINE: Just to build on that, a lot of agencies in our business are used to helping their clients narrow down their bull's-eye, target audience and all those good things. We've had to do the same thing over the years and say, "Hey, what kind of clients do we work best with?" Because you can't be everything to everyone. That's really been the thread: people who we consider to be visionary, who really want to do something different, transcend their category, push the boundaries, but at the same time have this very human side to them. We're a very casual agency in terms of how we present ourselves and how we work with people. So there's a real human side. We know we do better with clients that want that very personal, intimate relationship versus clients who are maybe looking for a big agency with lots of fancy style of working. We're in a category where there's lots of different people doing different things, and if you can really define your niche, you're more likely to be successful and be able to focus on that. ROB: Right. There's a big piece of the story there that I would like to come back to, because I think you look at a lot of the brands you've worked with, and I think a lot of agencies would look at the overall top-level brand and say that that brand is untouchable, that you really have to be a big holding company shop to engage with them. But I'm going to put a pin in that for a moment. I want to get back to the origin story a little bit. Clearly, you two teamed up and you're combining worlds of your own strengths. But how did ClarkMcDowall come to be in the first place? What's the origin story? PAUL: [laughs] This is a story that we actually didn't tell from the get-go because I think it would've scared our clients, but we were literally next-door neighbors, literally over the garden fence. Catherine was running the UK side of a London branding company and I was doing my own thing with somebody else. I was very dissatisfied; I was on the creative side/design side, very limited. Wasn't really allowed to ask a lot of questions. I'd inherit a brief and then respond to that brief. Catherine was on the flipside, doing all this incredible thinking with innovation thinking, strategic thinking, and then it would be mistranslated or turned into – just lost, just melt into the ether and never see what happened to it. We had a conversation one day – I think our spouse and partners were like, "The person next door, you should talk! They do what you do!", whatever. And eventually we did. I remember Catherine sharing her insights. Catherine is extremely eloquent, as you can tell already. Very intelligent, bang-on. I just exploded and was like, "This is incredible." It opened my mind to things. Likewise, Catherine, different side, "Here's a creative that thinks differently about the industry and is dissatisfied and doesn't just want to be a designer," all those sorts of things. It was literally a meeting of the minds. It was happenstance. It was one of those magic moments in your life that is transformational. And I mean that in the biggest sense of the word "transformational." Then we built the business from there and basically shared thoughts and insights. We started in the East Village because that's where we lived. As your audience will know, running an agency is a 24/7/365 job. We had babies at the time, or babies to come, so we wanted to stay close to our families. The human side, as Catherine touched upon, is super important to us, and recognizing that and trying to make it work for people. By the way, Catherine, jump in at any time. You've heard this story a thousand times. You don't need to hear me warbling on. CATHERINE: But you tell it so romantically. It's amazing. [laughter] I think what Paul's saying is incredible because we ended up having two girls, two boys, they were the same ages, they all went to school together. It became kind of like a family thing. The company never felt like a family business, but there was definitely a sense of community. We were very proud to have an office open on E 11th Street between A and 1st back in 1999. It was a complete scary neighborhood, and we were like, "This is where we live. We love it. We're doing it." Our clients were a little freaked out at first, and then as soon as they got into our office, or past the front door, they were like, "This is awesome. I feel energized. I feel like I'm part of something." I think we really stuck to who we were, and that's carried us all the way through. Then we ended up in various spaces on the same block. We couldn't really expand the space. At one point we had an apartment, we had a storefront, we had a studio, all literally on the same block. We called it our little village. That's how we grew. We started with some big clients that I'd inherited from my previous employer, Unilever – that then turned into Mars that then turned into other companies – just literally following people around. So we started really having what I would call big clients right from the get-go, and then over time actually had to work to try to get smaller clients – which is the opposite of maybe the journey a lot of other agencies take. They start with the smallest startups and then make their way up. We started literally with the big corporations and had to make an effort to go and acquire startups or mid-size companies that are actually really important to work with also, because they keep you nimble, they keep you fresh, they keep you entrepreneurial, and you have a higher chance of getting stuff out the door and published and all of those things. But it's been definitely a very organic journey for us. PAUL: Yeah. And it's not being afraid to evolve, I think. It's interesting because even after 21 years, we'll stop and do a brand refresh or want to choose our narrative or whatever it is, and we go back to those original core tenets, those values. Maybe the language around them changes, but the essence of those things, what we believe in, is still really true to who we are – this idea of being original, this idea of evolving and problem-solving and going with the times, this idea of having an optimistic outlook, because you have to in order to keep in business and keep going. The idea of community, the idea of taking care of people, nurturing people. Those things were baked in from the start. They weren't things that we made up. They're just true to who we are as people. I think that's something, if any of your audience are new business owners as well, really doubling down on what you believe in and your values and being brave and sticking to them. When you start off, you're a bit insecure. You think you need to be something else than you actually are. We had that, right, Catherine? We said, "Oh, we need to be like this agency," and in the end it took a couple of years to be like, "No, people are buying ClarkMcDowall. They're not buying the other agency." Then it was like, "Oh, we are who we are." You embrace it more and you really go with it. That quirky little storefront we used to have or whatever it might be, it becomes part of you, and then that's what you build upon. ROB: It's really a key point. Maybe since you've made it through 21 years and probably continue to actually refine your authenticity – sometimes you think about building up layers; it seems like it's almost the opposite sometimes. It's peeling away the layers of what people made you think you were supposed to be and finding who you can authentically be. How have you figured some of those moments out? Because it's really, really hard when you think about the expectations that people have upon you when you say, "This is us, this is what we do. We're in the market." CATHERINE: There's something about knowing your values. I think it was helpful that Paul and I met as people and shared values, so it's easy for us to return to, if you like, as opposed to maybe people meeting through a business lens. We just genuinely wanted to do work together and respected each other's ways of thinking. So there's a human side. I will say the tension comes when you want to change. For example, when 2020 hit, we were really quick to say – I think it was like April or something, a month or two after lockdown – "You know what? Just go hybrid and start building it. Whatever that means, we'll define as we go, but let's commit to that." So we've changed in the last year and a half probably more ways of working than we've ever changed. Basically moving everything to Google, using different systems, different ways of working, having maybe 25% of the company remote. But somehow, I feel like we're even truer to ourselves in our values. We've really doubled down on the way that we treat people, the way that we integrate into our community, some of the pro bono stuff that we're doing. So there's this weird thing that the more you innovate, in a way, the easier it is to be true to yourself. You have to change a lot in order to really notice that anchor that you have. ROB: Have you hired in a particular secondary location, or has it really been anywhere, everywhere, or maybe just North American time zones? What's the range? CATHERINE: We're in North American time zones. We have had some team members go abroad for a month or so, and that's fine, as long as it doesn't exceed let's say the 5- or 6-hour time range. But in general, it's across the U.S. We have some people on the West Coast, which is great because we have some business over there as well. But there are some other people in places where we don't have clients. What we're noticing, though, is there's a fair amount of movement. Everybody's like, "Do I want to move?", or they move and then they miss New York and they come back. I think what's been nice for people is that they've felt that they had the freedom to go and explore and not feel like, "I have to not move because we're going to have to go in the office next month" or something. We've allowed people to also discover what works best for them, and I think it's going to take a while to settle, because we're still in this very unexpected, volatile time. The more we allow people to try to find their own rhythm and their own environment, the more we're able to retain them and get the best out of them. That's our attitude. ROB: It's been an exciting opportunity. To your overall point, I think it can almost help when you're not trying to choose "Who's the best person we can find that wants to commute into the East Village?", and instead you say, "Who's the best person that aligns to our values and needs who wants to work remotely?" It's a different question, and I think the numbers are bigger. The candidate pool is bigger. In our experience, at least, you can hire faster in a lot of cases. CATHERINE: Absolutely. We've also experimented with different hiring models, getting people on short-term contracts so that they're more willing to say, "I'm usually freelance, but I'm going to try to have this full-time experience for a period of time, but I'm not fully committed," or people working part-time. I don't know that we've cracked the code yet, but we're very much in an open mindset around different ways to engage people, and that's been super successful for us. We've been able to attract people and retain people that maybe in the past it would've been like, they're not local, they don't want to work on these hours, and we might've passed them by. And actually, they've contributed tremendously to the business. PAUL: It's like constantly learning. Same with the space as well, like Catherine said. We gave up our lease. The timing worked out. We've got other pals who are big agencies who are locked into leases and they're like, "Gosh, what do I do with this now?" I guess we were in a fortunate position of being able to give that up, which means that we can experiment and we can learn and beta test. We keep saying we could never imagine – if you were to create an office from the get-go, there's no way you would put people in desks side by side, 9:00 to 6:00. You just wouldn't build it that way. So we're thinking about if and when we have the space – don't even want to call it an office, but what would that space be? What's its role, what's its function? How do we design around people? How do we design around the team? How do we design around people's lives? Because it's not just about work. It's not a transaction. I think work can often become, or has been in the past, a transactional relationship. We want to make it much more integrated and thoughtful in that sense. So that's the sort of experimentation. Do we have the answers? No, not at all. The same way Catherine said we don't have the answers on the hiring. But we're super open. We're not afraid of testing things, and we're not trying to be rigid because "That's the way it was." It's, "What could it be?" And then we'll try to figure that out. ROB: It's fascinating that you were able after 20 years to hold the office lease even somewhat loosely. But I'm sure maybe because you've moved around so much, it's been possible to recognize that there will always be someone who will let you sign a lease when you show up with a signature in hand. But this moment is unique in what you can learn from it. We talked a little bit about some other lessons along the way around peeling those layers back, but Catherine and Paul, what are some other key lessons you'd say you've learned along the way that if you were rewinding 21 years, you'd tell yourself to consider doing differently on this journey? CATHERINE: Maybe I won't answer fully the doing things differently, but one thing that has been a big thing is how much brands have changed and how much our clients' needs have changed. For a long time – I would say for at least 10-15 years – I remember we used to do some work for a client, a big corporation, and you'd be educating them on this innovation process. They'd never done it before. Then six months later, you work with somebody else in the same company and they also don't know anything. The years would go by. I'm like, when are they going to figure out that they keep learning the same stuff? And suddenly, all of a sudden, I would say maybe five to six years ago, we started to see a shift where a lot of our clients became very sophisticated. They in-housed a lot more things, and all this stuff that we tended to have to educate them on, they know. What it means is you really have to make sure that you're adding value on top of what is basic 101 for everybody now. So the level of sophistication has really increased in the industry – which is great, actually. Different agencies are going to bring different things. For us, it's really about joining the dots. I think having a company that's owned both by somebody that comes from a creative background as well as someone who's coming from a business and strategy background has meant that we've created this culture where one doesn't trump the other. We don't have a design-led culture where strategists are post-rationalizing, or the opposite. That confluence of thinking, of different minds, is really, really rich. We find that harder to replicate in-house for clients just because they're not built that way. They're coming from a business perspective. So we're able to maybe crack things, join dots between things in ways that really add value, and we understand that process really well. But every agency is going to need to be finding how they add value over and above clients being much more educated. So if you ask me what we would do differently, I don't know if I have an answer to that other than just keep staying ahead and making sure that we're always attuned to what our clients really need and where the gaps are for them. PAUL: Yeah. I think about doing differently, maybe things to avoid is avoid limitations. Don't feel as though one has to behave and operate within a box. You can define that box yourself. I think there's more – well, not just you're able to do it; there's more need to do it, to really redefine what those parameters are. I think that is super important, whether you want to call it evolution or whatever it might be. And not just talking about services. That's a part of it, but how you do business is really important as well. And then going back to the transactional nature of business – and we see it with other agencies. I know great agencies. I'm not going to name anybody. They do fantastic work. But what we hear is they're still in a transaction with those folks. They have slots, they have people, they do the job, they go, they quit, they stay, whatever it is. They do great work. We believe that's really shifting and it's really putting the human being first. You need to craft a different kind of relationship with the folks that work for you and work with you, and putting those at the center, and then how do we build around those needs and how do we support those needs? Because if they're doing well and they're feeling fulfilled and they're feeling really good and energized, then your work product, what you do, your clients and your experience, is better as well. I think that's how we think about our business tool. ROB: It's healthy. Definitely, as you get the team in there and aligned, it really lightens the load as well as they become more capable. You don't have to always fill every hat that you've been wearing since the year 2000 or 1999. CATHERINE: Yes, that's definitely – and that's probably been our biggest challenge, getting to a team that is really empowered and that works well together. I look back over the years; we've had incredible talent, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get to a place where you can look at your leadership team and the rest of your talent pool and go, "Whoa, what an amazing bunch of people, and they work really well together." Actually, we have an all-female leadership team at the moment, which is amazing, and they're really empowered. We have a Head of Client Services, a Head of Creative, a Head of Strategy, a Head of Operations, and a Head of Growth, and they have incredible relationships with each other. A number of those people have been with us a long time and some of them are newer. I think what's been really amazing is exactly what you just said, finding ourselves not having to wear absolutely every hat every day. I think when you do that for too long, it's hard to have big ideas when you're running around basically taking care of millions of different things. As an agency owner, allowing a team to grow under you that can really take some of the responsibility and ownership is huge. I think Paul and I spent a good 10 years running around like headless chickens. [laughter] Suddenly we hit a wall and it's like, "We have to have a reorg," all these kinds of things that we had to do 10 years ago. But we've really managed to build this incredible team under us, which enables us to do things like this and reflect and think about where we want to take the business. PAUL: It's an old adage, but hiring people that are really good at what they do and in certain things are better at you. There are certain disciplines where I'm happy to hand that over because you're really good at that thing, and you're going to make us better and up our game. Advice to anyone starting a new business is don't be afraid of that. As business owners, your ego – you say, "Oh my God, I've got to be the best at absolutely every single little thing." You can't. Nobody's that good. Nobody can do that. A lot of it is just trust and support and letting those people do what they do, and letting them shine as best they can. Like Catherine said, we have an awesome leadership team as well, a bunch of very intelligent, motivated, lovely human beings that I think have really helped us think about our business and move our business forward about the way we do things. Right, Catherine? And brought ideas to the table that we said, "Wow, we never thought of that" or "That really helps," or building on ideas that we have and going with it. We call it "yes, and-ing." That really energizes you, and it pushes us all forward. It's exciting when that happens. You get off one of those calls, those sessions, like "We just did something really good. I feel as though we've made steps forward here. I feel really good about this." Those are great moments. ROB: Gosh, all sorts of lessons in there. I'm grateful to have you both on the podcast here. Paul, Catherine, when folks want to get in touch with you and when they want to connect with the firm, ClarkMcDowall, where should they go to find you? PAUL: If you go to our website, clarkmcdowall.com – that's "McDowall" with an "A," not an "E" – you'll have contact details there if you want to get in touch, for talent. And then there's also LinkedIn as well. We're happy to connect with people. ROB: That's excellent. Paul McDowall, Catherine Clark, congratulations on what you've accomplished together, at the meeting of the minds known as ClarkMcDowall. Thank you for sharing your journey, and I wish you all the best moving forward with this new hybrid adventure as well. CATHERINE: Thank you for having us. It was a great conversation. We also appreciate the forum that you have for other agency owners and talents to hear about agencies and get a little bit of an insight into the underbelly of these different companies. Really appreciate that focus on the industry. PAUL: Totally agree. Thank you so much. ROB: That's wonderful. We all need each other. Thank you, and be well. CATHERINE: Take care. PAUL: Awesome. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye. CATHERINE: Bye. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Ken Magma Marshall is Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen, an agency focused on helping high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn . . . to get real leads that actually convert. Ken started his agency four-and-a-half years ago. His first milestone was developing a successful, process that worked and that he could pass onto another person with his SOPS and get the same results. Instead of waiting for clients to request particular services like keyword research or gap analysis, Ken could tell a client, "In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients." The second one, he says, came about when the repeatable system evolved to the point where he no longer had to tweak the system himself to continue to get targeted outcomes. About six months ago, Ken's agency reached its third milestone, when it was aqui-hired by RevenueZen. RevenueZen, with a traditional focus on lead gen, appointment setting, and LinkedIn, got Ken's agency's assets, his knowledge of inbound technology, his presence on the executive team, and his agency's book of business. Complementary strengths have proved win-win. ReveueZen's clients are typically established professional, mid-market service companies that have good revenues . . . but may or may not be profitable. All but three B2C "outliers" are B2B technology companies, with 60-70% in SaaS (software as a service). Most of these companies have marketing teams, but are not problem- or solution-aware with respect to RevenueZen's methodologies, don't know what kind of solution they need, or don't know the right provider. What do they know? They want results. Ken says it is imperative for the agency to qualify its potential clients through the discovery process – if clients don't understand customer lifetime values /average lead values, they are likely to have unrealistic expectations of the value of conversion or question whether they will get a positive return on spend. Ken will be moderating a HubSpot's Inbound2021 session, "Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos." In answer any participants' subjective blanket assertions, such as a statement that "Chatbots are the future," Ken will be asking such probing questions as: "For whom are chatbots correct?" What other marketing stack does the company use?" "How will the company measure effectiveness?" The objective is to dig to a deeper level . . . to determine which use cases are appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. This year's online HubSpot Inbound conference is scheduled for October 12-14. Ken is intrigued by some of the newer technologies: Lead-qualifying software that captures online prospects' form data, qualifies leads programmatically in real time, filters their information to match rep data, and immediately either notifies the appropriate sales rep or establishes a live video chat. Conversion.AI software that generates scripts based on user inputs and expectations "learned" over time. Alex Boyd (RevenueZen founder and CEO) and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II (a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall), can be reached on LinkedIn or on the agency's website at: revenuezen.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and it is that time of year once again. It is almost time for the Inbound Conference. Much like last year, it will be virtual, but what that means is this is the time of the year where this podcast gets a little bit more salesy, but in a good way. It's just a different flavor of the agency services world that we like to cover. I am joined today by Ken Magma Marshall, CGO and Managing Partner at RevenueZen based in Portland, Oregon, though he himself has newly moved to Brooklyn. Welcome to the podcast, Ken. KEN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Really excited to dive on it. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about RevenueZen and the agency's superpowers, what you're known for, where you succeed well for clients? KEN: There's the 10,000-foot view elevator pitch, which is that we aim to help high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands to generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn. Or in layman's terms, we help our clients get real leads that actually convert. Really, the company itself is the story of RevenueZen before Ken and then my agency. I actually started an agency four and a half years ago, and about six months ago, RevenueZen acquired it. So now, whereas they were focused on lead gen, appointment setting, LinkedIn only, I brought the inbound methodology with me. So now we've got a hybrid and best of both worlds. ROB: Is that maybe also where some of the SEO flavor came in? I would say it's a little bit atypical for HubSpot agencies in the whole ecosystem, lead gen agencies, to know SEO as well as you're articulating. KEN: That's exactly right, and that's why we utilize the terms "demand gen" and "lead gen" very intentionally, because with SEO agencies you get the whole "These are our deliverables and our clicks and our keyword increases." We're former salespeople. Three of our executives out of four were cold calling back in the day, so we understand how to map that search intent into pipeline, how things are going to go from each perspective that actually leads to those people converting, not just being users and clicks and searches. So full funnel knowledge helps inform the strategy. ROB: I'm going to pull on a thread that you mentioned in there. You mentioned being acquired. What does it look like to be acquired, and how does that happen? KEN: That's a fun conversation. If I were a startup in Palo Alto and I was a kid in college, that might look like somebody buying me for a certain undisclosed amount of money. But for me, it was more about joining a team that was a little bit established. My run rate at my old company I think was around 600,000 ARR. When RevenueZen acquired me, it was basically acqui-hire situation – they get all of my assets, my knowledge, me on the executive team, and all of my book of business. But the strength of it and really the allure for me, or I wouldn't have done it, is that they understood these lead gen methodologies and channels and had these systems that we didn't that strongly complement the inbound engine that I taught myself and learned how to build over the years. It was really that complementary partnership with a slightly mature agency where I could really hone in those growth focuses and new innovation initiatives. Because I'm a mad scientist at the end of the day, Rob. That's what I love to do. [laughs] ROB: Not to project too much of this onto you in particular, but in general, there's a certain amount of confidence and ego that flows into starting a business, starting an agency, and then layer on top of that the degree of confidence and resilience required coming from a sales background. How do you navigate that into – there is a mutual admission of need and benefit. You have to get past the outer defenses to even have the conversation of "Hey, maybe we should get together," and number two, "How does that look so we can all feel like we have the right seat at the table when we're together?" KEN: Absolutely. My ego, to use an analogy, went into the boxing ring and did not come out on top for the first few fights. I had to sit down with my wife, my friends, family members, and we really chewed on it. I even chewed on it with the CEO of the company. Now I'm the CGO. We lived in the same apartment building. What it came down to was really just that I understood that he has a finance/sales – he worked at a revenue-based software company, very high growth. He has a ground level understanding of what it takes to scale, whereas, like I mentioned, my strength is in customer success and product development. I'm really gangster when it comes to those two things. So I had to look at it and say, he knew that if he could just bolt on these assets that have taken me six years to create, and I knew that with his ability to understand scale and the other two executives taking on those things that I don't do well – I hate this word because it's overused, but we could create some real synergy and grow a lot more quickly. It just came down to that: being able to do what I love and a little bit more stability. ROB: Especially early on, we all want a little bit more stability. Maybe not too much, but definitely more than that early entrepreneurial journey. KEN: Exactly. ROB: Paint a picture, Ken, of what a typical customer looks like, a typical client for RevenueZen. Is it B2B? What's the mix and focus there, and maybe the size as well? KEN: At this point it's all B2B except for three companies. Upwork is one of our clients; Nalgene is one of our clients. But they're the weird B2C outlier as far as consumer goods go, Upwork being this monster that it is. But most of them, 60-70% are B2B SaaS companies. These are technology companies. They have Series A, usually, investment. They've got a marketing team, but the marketing team are not problem- or solution-aware with our methodologies. They just know that they need to turn those levers because their investors or the CEO or whoever is talking to the, VP of Demand Gen or Marketing, and they just want results. They have money to do it, but they typically don't have the knowledge of what kind of solution they need or the right provider. So we can attach ourselves on as the Chief of Digital or an ad hoc CMO and guide them not only in knowledge-gathering, but lay the strategy out and then literally bolt on our team to execute it for them. Really, it's those kind of companies who are more mid-market. They're already established professional service companies, but as far as the SaaS companies, they have a go-to-market somewhat defined; they understand product-market fit. They might not be profitable, but they have good revenues. They really just need somebody to come in, tell them what to do, and have the army to do it for them. ROB: Do they typically have an understanding – you said product-market fit, but they might have a general understanding of customer lifetime value so they can measure you that way? KEN: Yes. Actually, when I'm qualifying them, and same with our CEO, we actually still do all of the sales. At my old company I sold every deal, and now it's just us two closing every deal. But when we ask them about CLV or even their average lead values if they have lead storing and they understand the value of a lead, that's actually done in the discovery process to qualify them as well. Because if they don't understand those values, they'll have unrealistic expectations when we start getting those conversions as to how much they're worth or if it's even going to return on their spend with us. Yeah, that's pretty imperative. ROB: I would imagine once you have provided a lead, that's an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Then there's that sales qualifying that happens after that. Is that typically on the client side? Is there an element of going further down the funnel that you get involved in? Where does that boundary start to happen? KEN: Yeah, we do lean more heavily on inbound these days. I would say it's about a 70/30 split as well. But the furthest we'll get is when we are doing let's say an inbound/outbound hybrid LinkedIn content marketing and outbound service – happy for you to go on the website and check out if you guys want to – the furthest we'll get is setting those appointments with them and then letting them take over. It's part MQL or SQL depending on how they define it, but it's appointment setting as far as how far we go. ROB: Which still can be, with the proper – it sounds like potentially a real blessing for a sales rep. You're hanging out and stuff shows up on your calendar, and it's people who seem interested in buying your software. That's a good way to wake up in the morning. KEN: Right. That's why we love inbound. Not that outbound doesn't have its place, and in fact, for a lot of startups it does in the beginning. There's urgency. But that's why we love it, because these people are coming to you saying, "You've built my trust, you've educated me, I've compared solutions and then learned about your solution, all on your site. All you need to do is not give me a reason to put my credit card down." ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned a little bit about the merger, but if we go a little bit further back, what led you to start your own business in the first place? And you got it pretty far along. That level of bookings is more than just typically one person in their closet. What led you to get started on the journey? KEN: Not that amazing, but I'm pretty proud of it. For me, I think I'm the cliché entrepreneur without any background in it. Nobody in my family, none of my friends. But I was that kid with the lawnmower, I had lemonade stands. I used to take my neighbors' trash and put it on my parents' lawn and sell it at a yard sale. I always knew I was interested in making money and seeing what I could do, but I didn't really have the background, or I would say some of the mentorship, to know that's what it was called and how to start a company. I went to school thinking that I would be a salesperson. I was personable, I understood psychology to a certain degree. Right around my junior year, I believe, I asked a counselor, "What should I be doing? I don't really like this sales thing" when I saw my first sales job that I could get. She's like, "You seem like one of those kids who should go check out that digital marketing thing." That really was the spark, when I started to understand if I can reverse-engineer this thing called an algorithm, nobody knows what that is. I asked a bunch of people, I asked business owners – that's actually how I got my first client – and they had no clue. So that was my first lightbulb moment: I could start a business doing this. However, I've always been geared towards being an entrepreneur, and I always knew I would. That's why I quit my last agency after only being there for about two years total between both of them. ROB: As you got into the starting and progressing the business journey, were there any key inflection points? Obviously, the merger itself is a key point of validation. But before that day, there had to have been some key inflection points in the business, some points where it really seemed to be materially different than just rubbing two sticks together, making some phone calls and getting some clients. What were some of those moments in the growth of the business that were memorable? KEN: Obviously, I still have the first dollar I ever made. Still have that first check. That's the big one. That's the pure validation of "Somebody's willing to pay me money for this thing." But apart from that, I think the first milestone that sticks out was going from freelancer to having a repeatable process that worked and involving another human being. That was the first big thing for me. I was on Upwork – like I said, they're now our client, so it went full circle. But I remember doing these projects, and I'm like, instead of people telling me what they want me to do, like keyword research or a gap analysis, I'll just say "In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients." So I had this system that was starting to form. I could give it to another person with my SOPs and then they could do it, so it's now an actual business. That was the first one that was really exciting. The second one, I would say, is when I evolved from doing the work. I had downloaded this repeatable system to a point where I didn't have to actually implement the changes or the recommendations myself for us to still get those desirable outcomes. That required a coach, who was not cheap [laughs], and a lot of hours and mistakes. But we finally got it dialed. Other than the merger, that was one of the most exciting. And then your first six-figure year is always exciting too, as far as validation. ROB: I think people often underestimate the value of what they can do in terms of documenting a process, having people execute on it. The good part is you mostly don't have to think about it. I think the risk after that, however, is that that process gets stale. How do you go about ensuring that a process you've understood and documented can then be also maintained as the landscape changes over 3, 6, 12 months, etc.? KEN: I think I'm going to answer that in two parts. When I was still general managing the other company, I am so obsessed with strategy; I'm a technician, I'm a strategist by trade. I'm not a banker, I'm not a programmer. So it was always easy for me to have that layer of QA and innovation just because I was reading this stuff every day. I remember – shout out to Rand – after one Moz Local, going to a wine bar and having a bottle of wine and getting to chop it up. But I always found that very easy because I loved that stuff and was interested in it. But now that I'm with this bigger organization and there's four executives, our COO might say, "Here's how we can squeeze out this operational efficiency." The CEO is like, "Here's how we hedge against risk." I'm sitting here – and I think that's why it's such a blessing to be in my position – as the Chief Growth Officer, all I think about all day long is how we can ink out that efficiency for the team, make our client have less friction but also stay on top of effectiveness and industry trends. So for me, the answer is simple. It's my job, and that hasn't changed at three companies. [laughs] ROB: That's a critical job, for sure. I would be remiss not to mention the reason this is an Inbound episode is because you are, in fact, moderating a session for Inbound. The session you're moderating is "Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos." Inbound is in October this year. I think it's usually Labor Day week, if I'm not mistaken, but things change in a pandemic. Tell us about that session, what you think you're going to talk about, and especially how you're thinking about moderating that session. KEN: I'll talk about the moderation aspect, because it speaks to who I am as a person and my temperament. Whenever folks get into very sensational language or subjective language, I like to systematically remove that and dive into the concrete, the nuance of what they're talking about and why it's effective. For instance, if somebody says "All hail chatbots, chatbots are the future," I'm not going to give them a response. My first instinct is to give them a question of, for whom are chatbots correct? And what other marketing stack do they use? And how are they going to measure their effectiveness? That's how I'm planning on moderating things, by having these specific questions to get to the bottom of what use cases are each appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. I want to make both people frustrated to get the most out of them. [laughs] I haven't talked to them about that, but now they've heard. That's my style of moderation. That's how I talk and that's how I do business. As far as forms versus chatbots, I go back to when I talk to clients who might come in for inbound, and we convince them they need to do an outbound hybrid on LinkedIn. Or they come in for only appointment setting and they want 10 SDRs tomorrow. I'm like, "You're so niche, and there's this clear keyword opportunity that you can own these terms and have a better ROI. Why are you hung up on that?" There's no right or wrong answer. I've actually used chatbots effectively, and I think forms and demos are perfectly appropriate, especially for a self-serve model. So chatbots have their place, forms have their place, but let's dive into the nuances of it to parse that out. That's my philosophy. ROB: There's a certain attention to that at any sort of conference. I know HubSpot goes to pretty good lengths to make Inbound not all about them, but it is to an extent still about them, and they will hop up there and talk about what they're doing, and they'll certainly talk about it in terms of their agencies, their clients, and the customers they're looking to acquire. They are very visionary in terms of looking outwards, but inevitably, they're also going to unveil some new toys, some new shiny objects, and it will be easy for that to be the topic of the next year, the chatbots – you name it, really. KEN: Yep. ROB: What are you hearing from the ecosystem? Is there anything, whether it's on the agenda at Inbound or bubbling up through the product roadmap, and even outside of HubSpot in the broader lead gen space, what do you see coming that's important? Certainly that isn't a shiny object, because the shiny objects are in service of an objective, as you highlight. KEN: While we're on this topic of qualifying leads and once something's in the pipeline, helping sales ops with their objectives and making their lives easier and helping them be more effective – and shout out to Chili Piper. I'm actually very intrigued by these softwares that are, once somebody fills out a form, qualifying them programmatically, and then based on that response, immediately notifying the correct rep. I've even seen softwares that will allow somebody to live video chat right after they've gotten qualified on the form. Those kinds of technologies that remove friction – and again, chatbots can do this, forms can do this; you can integrate both with these other softwares that I'm describing like Chili Piper – those are the things that I'm interested in. Sales ops is, I think – you see these crazy valued companies. I think that's the future of this stuff. Taking the friction from that person who's a user that might be a lead, quickly and programmatically qualifying them, and then diverting them to the correct part of your sales process or person or folks on your sales team and reducing that friction. I think that's where a lot of opportunities get lost. It's the classic somebody taking 72 hours to follow up with a lead that's inbound. Why? And the same thing as sending the templated email. That's also played out. People don't want that. They need a hybrid of both. That's what I'm excited about and what I'm hearing and seeing. ROB: That's really, really interesting. You may know their product a lot, you may know it a little, but when I speak of shiny objects, one of those shiny objects out in the world is AI and machine learning, but it also seems like this area where Chili Piper is playing could perhaps be a legitimate application. Are they looking at the history of the rep, the history of accounts, the history of places where they've been effective? Is that part of the routing of how they're getting the right reps to the right leads? KEN: Yeah, the cool thing is that they plug directly into the CRM. HubSpot, let's say you have a rep assigned to certain accounts based on – native to HubSpot, within HubSpot, let's say if the person comes in and they typed in "SEO" for their focus, or it includes in the form XYZ terms, then they can automatically say, "This person is qualified as a mid-market opportunity who has X, Y, and Z criteria. Give them to the rep based on our different filters that we've created within the CRM." And then pushing it to the email address of times that are open for that rep in an automated fashion. We're talking about logging into something, back and forth emails, a form for somebody that might not be qualified – all these components are broken down into very seamless automation. That is what I think the uniqueness of their platform is. Those kinds of automations. There's lots of platforms that do one-off of each of those thing, but it's the fact that it's seamless and it directly integrates with the CRM. That's where I think the benefit is. ROB: It's almost a way to see how the things that they've announced over time, the tools that get rolled out over time, how it's accretive and how it starts to come together. Something like scheduling has been in some CRMs for a while. I recently logged into a CRM of one of our clients, and I was in there because they emailed me. I looked it up and they have our number of employees and our revenue. I'm like, man, I don't think I've seen that in someone else's CRM before. How'd they get that? Because we're a vendor. They're not going to go in and enter that data on us. That was entered for them. KEN: Exactly. ROB: You combine that with – you have some rules engines, you have some AI. It all comes together in a pretty meaningful way. KEN: I was going to say, that's so spot on. It's that accumulative knowledge put together in a way that's seamless that's the benefit. As you mentioned, calendar scheduling tools, integrations with CRMs, those have been around for a while. Even certain routing has been around for a while around automation of sending certain things out based on criteria. But the strength is really in the nuances of those experiences, like when somebody fills out a form, prequalifying them based on their responses in real time. How many different form softwares haven't taken advantage of that very simple opportunity that saves the sales folks so much time? Me and Alex, we're still selling. Every 30-minute call that we do is a pretty big part of our day as executives. So if we can, without even thinking about it, take care of that, have them go through and get that messaging out that they need within a really short period of time, we dramatically increase the chance that that lead will close without lifting a finger. ROB: It's really interesting. It's really meaningful. I think something that's also underestimated – in a lot of our processes that we document out, we put a lot of emphasis on humanizing the language of templates. I don't know if anybody's doing some good work around that. That is the hardest thing to do, but I daresay it might be one of the most important things to do: to write templates that don't sound like templates. KEN: Yep. ROB: I need tools for that, I think. KEN: We have lots of SOPs that we've attempted to do, and thank goodness that every software, even Gmail, allows you to do templates that you can drag and drop and place. But I've also been toying around with Conversion.AI to write these scripts based on inputs that we give it, but over time it obviously learns what we're expecting. That has been a bit of a game-changer in terms of templates as far as email follow-ups and responses with prospects. Or even in our SEO work, making sure that we can do optimizations at scale without having to burn out the strategists or charge these companies an ungodly amount of money. I am very fascinated by continuing to tweak and make automation work for us, and machine learning but without losing that component of human that all of us still look for. ROB: Super sensible. Ken, when we zoom back a little bit, across your founding journey, across your merging in with RevenueZen, what are some lessons you have learned on that journey that you might go back in time and tell yourself, if you had a chance to do them differently? KEN: What a question. Something I chew on regularly. I think the first would be that – Alex, our current CEO, my good buddy, has hammered home a lot that you can create a line of best fit, of effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. I was so focused on the effectiveness, being 99.9% effective, that I forgot about that aspect of "I'm only ever going to be able to help X amount of people, and I actually can't help them that well because I'm personally burnt out from doing too much work." I think that's a trap that creatives and agencies often get into, which is that we're so heads down on the custom, we forget about the scale and making it efficient enough to come down at a price point that's affordable to a broader market. So that's thing #1. Again, took a coach and a lot of money and a few years to learn that. The second thing I would say is when I go on a discovery call and I set the tone with the prospect, I tell them, "This is to make sure we're a good fit." Salespeople have been saying that for years. Used car salesmen say that. But we've taken that in as a value of the company. I am so quick to disqualify in our CRM, in the pre-opportunity stage. That just saves headache for the strategists, it increases the lifetime value of our clients with us, and it's just better for our reputation. Good fits, good case studies. So that's the second thing: disqualifying them. I would say the third thing is the benefit of really good partners who complement your skillsets. As a solopreneur in the beginning, I think I had to learn a lot of hard lessons myself and chew on a lot of hard things without the aid of somebody. Whether it's a mentor or a co-founder or a really good book, just being insatiable about learning and getting help from others, external help, is invaluable. You literally cannot calculate the time and headache that it'll save you. ROB: Disqualifying almost seems like a subset of an SOP. What I mean by that is if you have to look at every lead that comes in and you have to think about all of their constraints and you have to say, "This person's in a closet by themselves and they haven't built a product yet, and they have $1,000 a month that they want to spend on inbound; what can we do for them?", you'll kind of lose your mind trying to fit yourself to that opportunity, versus understanding when to say no, and maybe even sometimes "Here's someone else that would be a good fit for you to work with" and focusing on the things you do know how to solve. It keeps you from overthinking and getting paralyzed by choice, really. KEN: Ain't that the truth. Preach. Part of that, not only will we say this business/person is not a good fit, but what could we give them or how could we use the network effect to create value and have them go give a referral? So we do have templates of like "You're not a good fit, but here's some standard resources and here's a good one of our vendors as far as our partner program that we partner with." That's exactly right. A good ICP defined, having that defined will save you a ton of headache and make your marketing better. ROB: As we round the corner, Ken, I can't help but highlight – you've mentioned a couple of times working with a coach and paying some real money for it. I know what that's like. How did you go about finding a coach that worked well for you, and to an extent justifying the cost? KEN: I'll start with justifying the cost. For me, I audit my time, and I audited my time in terms of how much dollars it was likely to bring in based on the activities. I started to hit this ceiling. Like, "There are all these operational inefficiencies that are holding me back, and I don't actually know how to solve them. The problem of why this is a bad thing, I have no clue. I guess I could learn about this or go get an MBA, but I'd rather just expedite that by paying somebody." The ROI for me I knew would come because I knew I had a good system. I trusted in my "product" back then. But as far as knowing who was the right person, I always tell people to look for somebody who's done it multiple times but isn't so far ahead of you that they can no longer relate. I wouldn't want Jeff Bezos as a coach, even though he's clearly taken over the world. So this guy was a former founder three times over, but currently just wanted to give back. I mean, he charged money, but really it wasn't that much compared to the market and his expertise. I did a little bit of research. I got a beer with him. Those two components – he's done it before, I can sit down and have a conversation, and he's not too far ahead of me in my industry in the service business to be checked out and just in it for the money. I think if you look at it from that perspective, it's often worth it. That's what I would say. ROB: That's a great point also. Price is significant, but it's not always an indicator of quality. When I was interviewing coaches, I talked to – might be a wonderful guy, but he was a coach in a box. He literally had a box with a coaching methodology, and I think he was doing a career change. He was actually more expensive than the guy I ended up working with, who coaches execs of SalesLoft kind of legitimacy. SalesLoft probably pays him a lot more in total. But the credibility did not always correlate with price, is my point there. KEN: Hundred percent. ROB: Ken, when people want to catch up with you, connect with you and with RevenueZen, other than online for Inbound in October, where should they go to find you? KEN: You can check out either my or Alex's LinkedIn. Alex Boyd and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II, a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall, on LinkedIn. RevenueZen, we're building a new website, so if you go to revenuezen.com any time in the next quarter, we'll have a lot of goodies in our Resource Center. That's always a great place to start. I'll say it now and I'll say it until the day we sell this thing or we keep doing it off into the future: I am always geeked to jump on a call with somebody who isn't our ICP to have a strategy conversation. It's not a sales pitch. It's me in real time, fixing stuff on your site and your pipeline and your methodology. I could do this just with my brain because I've been doing it for a while. So it's always good to get in touch, regardless of if you think you have the money or need SEO. I'll give you something to walk away with every time. ROB: That sounds like a YouTube channel. You let Ken give you help for free and you just agree it's going to be on YouTube in real time. KEN: I used to do that. That's how I used to prospect. That's how I got my first few clients. I would do a real-time, off the top of the dome analysis of their site and fix three to four things. I'd give it to the developers, not even the marketing contact, and the developers would be like, "You increased our page speed by like 60%. How did you do that? Aren't you an SEO provider?" I'm like, "Exactly." [laughs] ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Ken. Hopefully we can meet up in the skin at Inbound some year when it's back in person. I wish you and the RevenueZen team all the best. Thank you for coming on and sharing. KEN: I would love that, Rob, and you're welcome to come to Brooklyn any time for a beer. Cheers. ROB: Brooklyn's awesome. Cheers. 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.

Josy Amann is Co-founder at Media Matters Worldwide, an analytics-driven, brand-power-focused omnichannel media buying, and planning agency serving B2B and B2C clientele. In 2005, Josy and her co-founder left a large agency where they had been providing media buying and planning to start Media Matters – with no money and a two-pronged plan – to get their own clients and to freelance with other agencies. Their first client was a "gift" from their prior agency. Josy says referrals sustained the agency for the first ten years. In 2019, MMWW hired a leadership team to help scale the business, to be able to serve larger clients and to meet the variety of technological demands. Completely remote from day one, MMWW tripled its employees from 20 to 60 in two years – during Covid! Omnichannel marketing encompasses both traditional and digital advertising. Traditional advertising includes linear (scheduled broadcast) TV and radio, outdoor displays, direct mail, and print. Digital advertising may involve: Programmatic purchasing (using automated technology to buy advertising space) OTT (over-the-top) delivery (customized, precisely targeted content on online streaming channels, CTV [cable TV], digital radio), or The utilization of banners, videos, and social media. In this interview, Josy explains that digital outdoors has increased in importance because this adspace is: More available than in the past, More trackable, and Can be purchased in dayparts as is done on TV . . . increasing efficiency and reducing costs by buying the time and location that reaches your target (commuting?) audience. Josy says buying advertising to promote brand power affects strategies, the types of media purchased, "and even sometimes the audiences." Josie finds the need to adapt to constant technological change is both a challenge . . . and exciting . . . and notes, in particular some current issues that will affect her industry. Internally, the MMWW media team leads the overall strategy of the business and provides thought leadership and communications planning by: Consulting with clients to define target audiences Researching where the audience lives and how they consume media Determining what the client can afford and the most efficient way to use the client's budget Establishing a strategic messaging framework that seamlessly aligns audiences with the messages, types of media used through the consumer journey, KPIs, and client goals Traditional media (which requires relationships with channel representatives nationwide) and Programmatic and social media (which requires experience on all the different platforms). Purchasing a client's strategic mix of: Utilizing analytics and attribution reporting to ensure the interrelationships between the various media channels are supportive. Josy can be reached on LinkedIn or on her agency's website at: https://mediamattersww.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Josy Amann, Co-founder at Media Matters Worldwide, headquartered in San Francisco, California. Welcome to the podcast Josy. JOSY: Hi, Rob. Thank you so much for having me. ROB: It's wonderful to have you here. Why don't you kick us off by telling us about Media Matters Worldwide and what your superpowers are as a firm? JOSY: Superpowers, I love that question. I always tell my kids, "Focus on your superpower, focus on your superpower!" [laughs] Media Matters Worldwide, we are a media buying and planning agency. We've been in business since 2005. We are buying omnichannel media across all different types of businesses. Half our clients are B2B, half are B2C. But we play in the media buying and planning space and the analytics. It's kind of the dorky side of the business. ROB: [laughs] Perhaps dorky, but very important to get right and also probably quite easy to do wrong. When you say omnichannel, right now in 2021, what channels are encompassed in "omnichannel"? What should people be thinking of? JOSY: The landscape is shifting very quickly, but omnichannel traditionally means traditional – how you think about linear TV and radio in your car and outdoor and direct mail and print – and then everything digital under the sun. It can be programmatic media, it can be OTT or CTV or digital radio or banners or video or social media, all of that. Omnichannel is truly everywhere where you can possibly consume media, we are buying it. ROB: I know even out of home is getting very digital these days. Is that increasingly in the mix, or is it static but different formats? How does that fit into the puzzle? JOSY: Digital outdoors is much more in the mix because it's (1) more available, (2) more trackable, and (3) you can serve up ads on digital the way you do on TV. So you can buy dayparts. If you just want to buy when people are going to work and coming home, you can buy that. It's little ways, a little bit more affordable and more targetable. ROB: That absolutely makes sense. You look at these digital billboards, and sometimes I wonder – I'll see a local restaurant advertising that they're hiring, and I don't even know how the economics of that work, but I suspect maybe there's a branding component to it as well beyond just the hiring. But it's a little crazy to think about a little seafood restaurant running a billboard ad to hire somebody for their kitchen. JOSY: Yeah. You asked about superpower, and brand performance I would say is our superpower. Thinking about, exactly to your point, a restaurant trying to hire someone, that's really lower funnel type of advertising. That's very pointed. It's not trying to say "We're the best restaurant in the world." We're trying to get someone in the door to get hired. That's brand performance. Brand is a whole different world of types of media you buy, the strategies behind it, even, sometimes, the audiences. So linking those two and providing analytics, providing the thought leadership and the strategy behind that – that's our superpower. ROB: Someone's got to be a superpower. That sounds overwhelming. That sounds like a lot of different goals, a lot of different channels, a lot of different objectives to pull that together. How do you structure your team to be able to manage that range of channels, of thinking, of objectives, even just picking from the menu of options for a given campaign? JOSY: That's a good question because that has evolved so much over the last 16 years that we've been in business. Structure of the teams is that you have to have your media team as the overarching strategic group. Part of that media planning team is comms planning. They are setting up that framework. They're going to clients and saying, "Who do you think your audience is? Let's think about it in a media buying landscape. That might look a little bit differently because we have different targeting abilities and things like that. Let's set up that messaging framework that aligns the audience with the types of media, with the messaging, so that everything is aligned through the consumer journey." We're thinking about how these people are consuming media. We're thinking about what messaging aligns with them, and that could look very different for the audience. So that comms planning team is really in charge of heading up that overall strategy. The media department as well leads overall strategy of the business; however, underneath that you have to have people that have traditional buying experience, that have the relationships with all of the different stations in the country. You have to have programmatic media buyers and social buyers that know all of the different platforms. So it's a really, really specialized skillset of people we had to hire along the way. Programmatic media is new to the scene – what, seven years ago now? To keep a media buying agency in-house and really have all the chops in-house takes very specialized people to hire. But you have to have that overarching media team that brings it all together. ROB: Talk about the relationship side a little bit, because that sounds almost counterintuitive. We're all used to just firing up our web browser, we go over to Facebook, we push some buttons, we have a campaign that lets us do the same thing. And then you're talking about TV, you're talking about radio – I'm sure you're even talking in some cases about print or detail newspaper – and needing a relationship to get that work done. What does the structure of that industry and those buys look like? It's a different animal, for sure. JOSY: Yeah. There's a lot of nuances to media planning, and a lot of it has to come down to budget and audience. Doing the research, getting back to that at the beginning part comes planning. To think about where your audience is living and how they're consuming media is Step #1. Step 2 is budget. What can you afford? You can't run nationally TV if you don't have budget north of $80 million. So you really have to start thinking about the most efficient way to spend your money, but also aligning with the audience's media consumption habits. That's the relationship that's really the most efficient. Then when you're talking about KPIs and goals and all of that, all of that has to align as well. ROB: That budget part I think brings us to an interesting intersection. It sounds like a lot of moving parts. It sounds like I have to have a big budget to play in this game. Maybe it helps, just for context, for us to understand and think through a particular client or two and what an overall campaign looks like for an example client. What kind of messages do you have, where, to facilitate that overall buyer journey? JOSY: A typical client could look like – I guess it would be pretty different for the budget ranges. We have some clients spending $10 million a year; we have some clients spending $100 million. That looks pretty different. The $100 million might have a lot of TV that's happening, linear TV. A lot of connected TV. A lot of video is great across all different audiences. Then you might have a layer of programmatic media, especially doing a lot of private marketplace deals or retargeting, and then 30% of the budget could be social, 20% could be search. It's broken up to support each other. There's a relationship between media that supports each other, and that comes through when you're doing analytics and attribution reporting, looking at the relationship. If you run a CTV campaign, you'd want to see your organic search and your paid search lift. Seeing that relationship between your paid channels is really, really important as well. ROB: That definitely helps us understand how you can keep eyes on it, because there's a lot at stake, and what a tremendous responsibility as well to be managing that sort of budget for a client. What is interesting to pull on here – you mentioned the relationships on that traditional media side. You've been doing this thing for a while. Take us back a little bit in time. What led you to start Media Matters in the first place, and what does that origin story look like? JOSY: It's always a funny one to me a little bit because I'd just moved to San Francisco from New York. I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn't even have an interview yet. A girlfriend of mine from college called me and she said, "I have this agency that you should go interview for. The boss is great." I said, "Okay, let me go do that." Went to go interview at Lowe & Partners, big holding company, and I had no idea what I was even doing there. I thought I was getting a job in creative. I had no idea what media was. I got the job. Not sure how, but I got the job. [laughs] That was my entrance into media. From there, I worked at the big holding companies where it's a very different life. It's great in your twenties. You work an unbelievable amount of hours, and I learned a lot, fast. But then I realized, "I'm 29." I'd gotten married a few years earlier. I wanted to have children, and I couldn't see how that was going to be possible in the big agencies. I had met my business partner; we'd worked together at an agency for four years. We had a really, really good balance of our backgrounds and also a balance of the way we think about the world. We both talked about it for years. "How are we going to start our own agency? What is that going to look like and how are we going to build an agency that we want to work at and can work at, having families and children and all of that?" That was really the biggest impetus. ROB: Wow. What did those first few years look like? I think all statutes of limitations are over on this. Did you have some clients that were ready to follow you away from the holding company world? How did you scrap together those clients that made it make sense to make a run in those early years? JOSY: We had a two-pronged approach. One was to get our own clients and the other was to become a kind of a super-duo of other agencies. We worked for a really large agency and did all of their media buying and planning. That was a great way to get involved and get billings up, because we came into the business with nothing. We didn't have any money. We didn't raise any money. We didn't have any money from family. [laughs] We just had the shirts on our backs and that was it. So that was one approach, and the other one was getting our own clients. Our boss that we had worked together with at that agency, Roger Becker, ended up giving us one of his clients that I had worked on. He said, "You guys are starting your own agency. Have this client. You guys would be a great fit for them." That was really kind. Really, it was the kindness of him getting us our first client and then the freelancing option. ROB: That's wonderful, and I think that is one of the stories of, overall, the marketing and agency industry. There's not a lot of room, I don't think, for sharp elbows. It all comes back around. All the people flow through the industry and you end up being tag teams more than enemies. One of those transitions that a lot of agencies struggle with from the early stage is getting from – a lot of agencies will come up and do those sub-deals for other people. A lot of agencies will get an occasional referral. But at some point you have to sharpen the tools and go out and hunt the elephants yourself. What did the development of that capability look like for you all? JOSY: Definitely developed through the years. I'll tell you, referrals have been our best friend. Very, very lucky to have wonderful people surround us, our entire experience. Really early on, I guess I wouldn't say it was that hard, but it was a little bit hard being a woman in business, starting your own business, back then. We were very careful early on to have our website, and we didn't really want too many pictures of us on the website. We wanted the website to look a little masculine. Our logo looked masculine at the time. So we hid that until the last minute, till we could show off and actually go to a meeting and show them we know what we're talking about. That was tricky at the beginning. But then once we got clients and built those relationships and they saw, I think most of all, that we were authentic and we were not salespeople and we really cared about their business and cared about media, that took hold. So I think the referral side of the new business development is what sustained us for the first 10 years. But after then, I think you get to a certain size and you have a lot of people on payroll. We have over 60 people. Even five years ago, we were at 20 people. You have to start thinking a little bit differently. If you want the larger clients, business development starts to look different. ROB: Is that something you're still largely handling? It can be one of those challenges you see sometimes; for a services organization to scale that business development away from the founders can be challenging. How have you handled either scaling yourself or getting someone else up to speed? JOSY: We made a decision early 2019 to start hiring a leadership team. It was a huge investment in general and a big leap of faith that this type of model could work, because we were so used to being the Josy and Taji show. We did that. We hired a leadership team, and they are phenomenal. It was 100% the right thing to do, and they are responsible for the new business development. We still show up for the pitches. We still are I guess the face of the agency, but they are the substance and what really leads all the new business development now. It's just been a wonderful transition to have more of a team in place for that. ROB: Some things are easy to hand off. If someone else wants to build a deck or something like that, have a nice day. Some parts of that transition, though, are a little bit harder to get your hands off. What are the pieces that were the last to leave your hands and your calendar, if you will? JOSY: Hmm. I think it's managing the decks, managing the flow of conversation. We were so used to being so closely tied to that; that was really hard to let go of, that control. But once we did, everything became better. [laughs] Better than it was before. I was just so thankful. ROB: It sounds like a relief. It sounds like an opportunity. Goodness, even what you're saying about going from 20 to 60 people requires a leadership team, but it's even a little bit messy no matter who you've got on the train. How do you think about scaling the organization, scaling culture? How have you been able to triple the company without breaking everything? JOSY: Yeah, and that tripling has happened in two years. [laughs] It's been a wild, wild ride. I think the honest truth is always be looking at your architecture. We went from a place where our agency – and I know, Rob, you have a background in analytics – we would have a client that would have one or two analytics people on their account. They would basically do everything. They'd pull all the data, they'd help with the data viz, they'd do all of that. Now we need three people to do that job, one, because the technical side of the business has gotten a lot more fragmented and hard to manage, but two, working on bigger clients, you have to have a different architecture to support them. Again, I go back to our leadership team really taking a close look at their departments and how they're set up. And we've had to reengineer that, sometimes in six months' time because that growth was so fast. Having that strong structure is what I think makes you build for scale. And being flexible in that structure, because it might have to change pretty quickly. ROB: Absolutely. That makes sense. It sounds like it's still probably a whole lot to think about, but at least you're able to think about that structure and not as much about the decks anymore. JOSY: Yeah, that's true. [laughs] ROB: Josy, as you reflect back on the journey so far, what are some key lessons that you have learned in building Media Matters that you might tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you were starting over? JOSY: One of the key pillars of our agency – I don't know if it's really a lesson, but I think it's a lesson to other business owners and agencies – is that true transparency and honesty will keep your business alive. Over the last 16 years, there's been a lot of ups and downs in the market, in our company, in our lives, and to weather those storms, the honesty, the transparency, but also what we were just talking about with the team structure, the flexibility and being able to adapt and evolve – and we've learned that in the past two years with COVID – to scale a business during COVID… [laughs] It's like a double whammy. I don't know if I would've done anything differently, but that would be my biggest advice for people starting out. Remain flexible. Don't be tied too closely to things, and be honest and transparent with yourself, your clients, and your employees. ROB: Absolutely. You didn't really harp on it too much, but the mix of media that you have been handling has changed remarkably over the life of the company. If you're starting something early to mid-2000s and up until now, you didn't have social media. How people even used pay-per-click was remarkably different. The quality of what you can buy and display and how you buy and display has changed dramatically. If all you were doing was calling up TV stations and newspapers today, you'd be – somewhere else, is what I'll say. You wouldn't have 60 people. JOSY: Out of business. [laughs] It's remarkable. Our industry is so cool. The second you think you have a grasp on it, the second you're wrong. It's about learning and moving quickly. It's exciting. ROB: For sure. Something I think you bring to the table that's also interesting is a lot of us are kind of new to this working from home and building a company remote, but you have been distributed for a little while. What are some of the key tools and key cadences and ceremonies that you have found to be essential to building the kind of company you want to build, but not to meet everyone in an office? JOSY: It was built out of stubbornness. My business partner, Taji, and I live 40 minutes from each other. I was not going to commute to Marin; she was not going to commute to the city. So it was really out of stubbornness that we were going to figure out how to work from home, and that's how it started. Then everyone we hired after that point wanted to work from home, loved to work from home, loved the culture of working from home. So for us to grow organically since 2005 till now as 100% remote always, and we're hiring people across the country, we've always had the true culture of loving working remote. I think that's different because a lot of people are trying to get used to working remote, or companies are struggling with hybrid. You have the "us versus them" mentality, the people in the office and the people at home and how they're going to solve for that. When you have a culture that's always been remote, it's a whole different world. I think the advent of video and Slack and all the collaboration tools have really helped that throughout the years, but also, especially pre-COVID, getting together in person and really spending the time with each other, whether it be a new business presentation or a client QBR, whatever it is. Getting together in person whenever we can, it lasts forever. It really does. ROB: What does getting together look like for you? Has it been visiting people in different places? Has it been getting everybody together in one place? How does that work? JOSY: It's hard because a lot of our employees have families, so getting everyone together in the same place – we'd have to plan it years in advance. [laughs] I would love to do something like that. But it usually looks like either regional hub parties – we might have one in New York, we might have one in LA, Seattle, wherever it is – and then people will drive in for those hub parties, or it looks like "Hey, we have a client QBR or new business. Please fly in" and we all get together. It's a little bit more fragmented instead of having a whole company thing, but it works. ROB: It's interesting to hear what different people are doing. Maybe the good news of where we all are is that we're going to hear a few more people with ideas, best practices, trying things and all of that. I'll certainly say it's been strange adding people to our team that I've never met. But it keeps on happening, and you're probably used to it. JOSY: Yeah, we are. It is really strange, especially when you meet people in person for the first time after working with them for years and not seeing them, and then they're taller than you thought or whatever. [laughs] ROB: I think that popped up in my LinkedIn feed the other day, an article on "You look taller on Zoom" or something like that. We know what that's like. Josy, when you're thinking about what's next for Media Matters Worldwide and the areas of marketing that you touch, what's coming up that you're excited about? JOSY: I think the whole media world is changing yet again. Deprecation of cookies, how we're thinking about personalization with our audiences, and just even the media types in general – a new social platform will be invented in the next year or so. So really thinking about how to make authentic – and I always go back to transparency and honesty, but it's true for brands, too – how to be truly authentic with your customers. I think that is the biggest struggle for brands, and they're missing the mark, some of them. But some of them are doing an amazing job, and that's because they're getting to the root and doing the research about their audiences and really figuring out what makes them different and what makes them excited and thrive. To me, figuring that piece of the puzzle out, having the research tools, having the analytics that pull it all together, and the artificial intelligence that's involved in advertising now – that to me is all really exciting. ROB: There's a lot going on there. How do you keep those data people and data tools together? It's a lot to wrangle. It's a lot to bring into one place. What's in your toolkit? JOSY: It is. We have an amazing analytics department, and that's our toolkit: their knowledge, their understanding of the market. But also obviously all the technology that goes along with that. And it looks different for every client because a lot of clients come to you with their technology that you have to integrate with. There's a lot to unpack with new client relationships and how to integrate their technology into yours, and really how to make things as seamless as possible. That's the tricky part. ROB: That's right. When you're talking about the budgets, I'm sure there's many a data lake that you have to feed into, many an internal analytics team that you're accountable to as well. JOSY: Exactly right. I love that you know "data lakes." [laughs] ROB: [laughs] The data lake where you put the data and nothing ever comes out, maybe. JOSY: Very murky. ROB: Makes absolute sense. I think it's very relevant what you said there, Josy, about that transparency. In services, we have technology, we have tools, we have things that we're buying, but a lot of times what they're buying is people. I congratulate you also for being able to scale having what I would perhaps strangely say is buyable people. You have people on your team that clients can buy into that are not just the founders. That's a real challenge to get past. JOSY: Yeah, it's something that happens organically, and only with the vision of hindsight can you say "That was a great idea." [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Josy, when people want to connect with you and connect with Media Matters, where should they go to find you? JOSY: They can find me on LinkedIn, or go to mediamattersww.com. ROB: WW. Worldwide, right? JOSY: Worldwide. ROB: Excellent. Josy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's good to meet you in this remote way, like you talk to your team all the time. Someday we'll all get out of our houses again. We'll figure it out. JOSY: Yeah, I'd love to meet you. Thank you so much for having me today. ROB: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Josy. Bye. JOSY: Have a great day. 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.

Julie Koepsell came into Horizontal Digital as President of the North America division in December 2020 at a time when, due to Covid, the company was "fully remote." Horizontal Digital is a 17-year-old global, "experience forward" consultancy that puts people at the center if its efforts by creating deeper, end-to-end-connected, seamless, relevant, and personal customer relationships that boost client ROI. Because Horizontal is a boutique consultancy, clients get a "very high touch experience." Julie says it is important for leaders to "listen." One of the first things she did after joining the company was to connect one-on-one with all 50 division employees. Due to continued growth, the division has hired an additional 150 employees over the first part of this year. Globally, the consultancy has 500 employees. Many of Horizontal Digital's B2B clients sell through multiple distribution channels and dealer networks. The desired push-pull challenge is complex – companies want their dealers to recommend their products . . . but they also want customers to ask for the company's products. Horizontal Digital strives to: Create promotional programs that build meaningful relationships with end customers so those customers will go to dealers and ask for a company's products. Build a martech stack so the customer journey experience is cohesive from sales and marketing through digital POS, web and experience portals, and customer service. The goal is to understand what customers want, anticipate their needs, and grow relationships "at a life level." Provide client education and get client employees to understand the need for internal changes related to demand generation, customer experience, or "internal digital transformation" initiatives . . . and help them understand how those changes will be implemented. She says, if a company's message is properly set up across all channels, companies can simultaneously control expenses and grow revenue . . . customer lifetime value is increased, customers will advocate for the company, and there will be an increased opportunity to cross-sell and upsell. Julie is passionate about providing women with the opportunity to advance, especially in technology. She believes it is important, as the Horizontal Digital grows, to build the infrastructure and internal scaling to support that growth, to "create an amazing employee experience," and to make sure clients' experiences with Horizontal Digital surpass their expectations. Julie can be found on her consultancy's website at: https://www.horizontaldigital.com/ . Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Julie Koepsell, President – North America at Horizontal Digital based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome to the podcast, Julie. JULIE: Thank you, Rob. I'm so happy to be here. ROB: It's awesome to have you here. Why don't you tell us about Horizontal Digital and the journey the firm is on, where you specialize, and what we should know about it? JULIE: I'd love to. Horizontal Digital is an experience-forward consultancy. We operate as a boutique consultancy, which really means that our clients get a very high touch experience from us. And we do it with global teams so we can actually deliver at scale, which is pretty unique. When I say that we're experience-forward, what that means is that we put people at the center of everything that we do. More specifically for our clients, we help them build deeper relationships with their customers so they get better ROI, and we do that by creating end-to-end connected experiences that are seamless, relevant, and personal. If you consider that customer journey, we are able to deliver a cohesive experience all the way from sales and marketing through digital POS, web and experience portals, and then customer experience, and we do that so we can better understand what they want, anticipate their needs, and grow the relationship. ROB: Got it. A lot of the services you're talking about are things that a lot of people are in the business of, but it seems like what might elevate that to the level of a consultancy is the holistic, the big picture, the customer journey not in the sense – some people think of customer journey like "I'm going to send you different emails depending on where you are in the purchase process." But it sounds like you're talking about more at a life level. JULIE: That's absolutely right. Through the entire experience that any brand has with its customer. ROB: If we zoom in to that just a little bit, is there an example of a client, some touchpoints, what my experience might be in a client that Horizontal has been involved in? JULIE: A lot of things actually come to mind. One of the things is in our conversations – we had a conversation yesterday with a prospective client who is thinking about how they can digitally transform their business. They're selling through multiple channels; they've got distribution channels. They want to make sure that they are building relationships with their end customer so the customers are going to the dealer and asking for them. Through that entire process, they're going through an internal digital transformation. So not only are they working to make sure that they are building a martech stack that enables them to deliver the experience that they want to for their customers, but they also have a lot of internal education that they need to do to make the case for it. There's a lot of misconceptions about what that actually means in terms of whether you're talking about demand gen or digital transformation or customer experience. So there's a lot to it in terms of not only how you're building your technology stack to deliver that experience, but also how you're going through the change management internally to make sure that everybody understands why you're doing that. ROB: I know you said prospective customer, so I don't want to pull too deep into the identity here, but you said dealer. Is this some sort of vehicle? Is there some kind of picture you can fill in to help us contextualize? JULIE: Yeah, a lot of B2B clients right now are selling through dealer networks. What they really want is the end consumer to go to the dealer and ask for them. They want that push-pull, where they want the dealer to be recommending them, but they also want the customer to be asking for them. And then ultimately, they want to make sure that the experience the customer has, if they come to their website or through any other experience, is seamless, anticipates their needs, is transparent, and is really meaningful. Because at the end of the day, customer experience is really what lends to long-term loyalty. One of the things that we talk about a lot around here is that two-thirds of customers actually switch brands not based on prices or features but because of the experience they have. That's really the holy grail of business today. ROB: Absolutely. It's interesting that why you were involved as a consultancy instead of an agency is – I'm going to say something that could be wrong, but if I'm thinking about a car, if I'm thinking about a snowmobile, if I'm thinking about a motorcycle, if I'm thinking about a dealer of just about anything, digital creates the opportunity for an ownership experience. It creates an opportunity for that relationship to start when I announce a new product. It's much more long-term than "Did I show up at a dealer? Did I ask for this thing or not?" My journey may start with my previous ownership experience with that product. How does that tie in to digital? JULIE: That's exactly right. And if you can set it up properly across all channels, you can actually control your expenses and grow your revenue at the same time because you're increasing that customer lifetime value. Not only that, but they're also advocating for you on your behalf, and it creates – I think where you were going is the opportunity to continue to cross-sell and upsell. ROB: Right, because you're talking about digital platforms, you're talking about customer experience, you're talking about social listening to an extent, probably, social customer support, all of those different lenses. Absolutely makes sense. Julie, I think something that is perhaps interesting and unique to your story is the difference – a lot of our guests are founding partners, founding CEOs, and you have a unique story of coming into a business that is successful with an opportunity also to continue making it more successful. What is the background of Horizontal and the origin story there, and then also your personal journey into the firm? JULIE: Horizontal Digital started about 17 years ago. Chris Staley and Sabin Ephrem started the company. I'm going to use a term that you used earlier in our conversation, Rob – it's been a rocket ship ever since they started. It's such an inspiring and amazing story about what they've built, and it's a true testament to the way that they have run their business, the vision that they've had for it, the way they invest in talent, and the way they understand technology and what our customers want. Because it's a relatively tight community, I've known about Horizontal Digital for years, and I actually ran into them at a conference at Sitecore Symposium about three years ago. They were sponsoring a panel about women in technology, and I was actually sitting on that panel, and I got the chance to meet them. I've always had great respect for what they do. They've built an amazing culture here. So I was excited but a little bit hesitant about a year ago when they first reached out to me. I was happy with what I was doing, but as I started talking to them, their ability to deliver globally at scale and yet have a company that feels like a tightly knit family was really inspiring to me. In addition to that, I'm really passionate about advancing women, and particularly women in technology, and they're very supportive of that. What we're really trying to do here is to create an amazing employee experience. We talk about being an experience-forward consultancy, and experience-forward is really about – I mentioned this a little bit ago – putting people at the center. In addition to how we do that with our clients and their customers, it's also got a couple other pillars for me. One of them is making sure that the client experience that our clients have with Horizontal surpasses their expectations. Certainly we expect to deliver on their business needs, but also we want that experience that they have with us to bring a lot of value and, frankly, to have them enjoy the experience along the way. Then the third pillar is – and I just mentioned this – employee experience. Talent is the most important asset that we have in this business. I believe that if you create an amazing employee experience, they will in turn create an amazing experience for our customers, and then that result is growth. So I joined this company with the aspiration of making Horizontal the best career experience that our employees have. ROB: It's a particular challenge. I've seen leadership elevated from within, but how did you approach that process of coming in with a requirement to lead, but also with – you said you were familiar with the firm, but there's a different familiarity that comes when you're actually on the inside every day. How did you balance the movement into leading with the need to acclimate? JULIE: That's such a great question. What I appreciate is all the conversations that Chris, Sabin, and I had in advance about how we were going to do this, approach this. They've been unbelievably supportive every step along the way. But the most important thing to do when you come into a company in a leadership role is to listen. I came in in December, so everything was fully remote, and when it's fully remote, I will tell you it takes so much longer to build that rapport and trust with people because you have to be so purposeful with every experience you have via whatever video technology you're using rather than just running into people by the proverbial water cooler. So I very purposefully did a series of – I think I did more than 50 one-on-one introductions with people. I joined each individual team meeting. We actually hired Gallup to do an employee engagement survey. We went on a listening tour to start to understand what the needs of the team were. One of the challenges is coming in and listening. You get excited and you want to make change, or you want to advance the ball in whatever way you decide to do that. Finding the balance of moving at a pace that feels like you're making progress, but not going too fast that you aren't being thoughtful or purposeful and you aren't damaging something in the organization – it's a tough line to walk, I'll tell you. I actually made a few decisions probably quicker than I should've, perhaps should've moved a little faster on some things. But it's kind of one of the things that I love about it: it's a learning experience every step of the way. ROB: What I hear in there is a recognition that sometimes there are not shortcuts. There's no shortcut – having 50 one-on-one conversations, by some people's reckoning, that doesn't scale well. That doesn't look like an org chart. That looks like 50 one-on-one conversations. Are there any other aspects of getting in and rolling up your sleeves and leading that maybe didn't scale well, but yet were key to getting into the role? JULIE: That certainly was the big one. One of the other things that I am doing around here is weekly having a session with about five or six people from different teams within the organization, and I purposely do it with five or six people because I want it to be small enough that people feel like they can speak up and yet have enough people that I feel like I'm making some progress and getting a group together. So we get together once a week, and I call it "bring your favorite beverage." We get together and we introduce ourselves and we talk about non work-y stuff. And sometimes it turns into work stuff. But what's been really interesting is since the pandemic started, we've hired – gosh, it's got to be closer to 150 people by now. So not just do I not know a lot of people, but a lot of people don't know each other. One of the things I know – and this isn't specific to Horizontal Digital, but in general – people really miss that sense of community, and people miss the culture. I don't think that means they want to come into the office every day necessarily, but they want very thoughtful and meaningful and purposeful moments of connection to build and feel the company culture. So we try to create opportunities to do that. And selfishly, I want to create opportunities where I can get to know people on a personal level because I believe that my job is not to tell people how to do their job, because they're all quite capable. We hire amazing people. But my job is to support and enable them to do their job, and I can't do that if people don't know me and feel like they can trust me and are willing to come talk to me. ROB: It seems to me that with you coming into the firm and that degree of growth, it almost seems like the company as a whole discovered another capability, another core function, another gear. What do you think is driving that engine so remarkably? JULIE: Well, there's a couple things. Companies understanding the importance of building an amazing customer experience and digital transformation is certainly a thing that's happening beyond our company. That's an industry-wide movement that's happening, so that is a big part of our growth. In addition to that, I have to give the owners a ton of credit because we are independently owned, and their ability to drive the vision for where we're going and see ahead of where we are today, and their willingness to invest in that, is something that I've actually not experienced in over 25 years in this business. I think that's another thing that sets us apart and truly makes us unique. And then again, back to the idea of community and relationships. I believe that relationships are at the center of everything, and when you do a great job, like I was talking about – if we create an amazing experience for our clients, then we're going to grow through that as well. There's just a lot of things that Horizontal Digital is doing right that also made it really exciting to join, and I joined and I'm just trying to continue to build on the momentum. One of the things that we talk about a lot around here is not only keeping up with the pace of growth – because there is an all-out war for talent right now, especially in the digital space – and creating an amazing employee experience, but also, we have to make sure that as we are growing, we're building the infrastructure and scale internally to enable that growth. ROB: One of those key things you mentioned very close to your heart and your passion – it seems like it's really hard to create a substitute for having women in very visible and top-level senior roles. That has to echo down through the organization. It has to be authentic. You can't do it in this demonstrative way. How have you thought about it? You've obviously had to structure for growth and refactor the organization probably a few times in the pandemic time. How have you thought about the thoughtful, intentional establishing of women in leadership as well over that time? How do you do it well? JULIE: That's a good question. I think the important thing is to meet people where they are. And I am all for advancing women, not at the expense of men or anybody else. I believe that all boats rise with the tide. But I think understanding where people are in their careers and their lives is super important, and then meeting people where they are. There is no delineation – in my life, anyway, even prior to the pandemic, there was no delineation really between work and life because when you're passionate about everything that you do, it all kind of melds together and you've got to try to figure out ways to make all of it work. I think the pandemic has exacerbated that, and I think it's been really hard. This is not me; this is clearly very much out there, but it's particularly difficult for women, and moms in particular, which I am as well. So understanding that and making room for conversations around that and – this sounds so simple – asking people how they're doing. Talking to people about their personal lives. Making sure that you are bringing empathy and listening in all those conversations. It seems like things that sound so easy, but they're also the things that are really easy to forget about in the pace of everyday stuff. And particularly, again, if you're not just seeing people in the hall in passing, you get on a call with somebody, you've got a half-hour, you've got a list of things you've got to cover off on, and you want to dig right into that list – when what you really need to be doing is making sure that you're taking time to check in with people on the human side and see how they're doing. Because everybody's at a different point in their journey. ROB: Right. That really is one of those superpower advantages. When people know that you care, when they know that on some level you know the names of the people that are important in life – I will fully confess that I have places where I write this stuff down. There's a lot of things I don't write down, but I write down people's names and what's important to them because I don't want to leave – I still care. I care enough to write it down. I care enough to ask about it. JULIE: Yep. ROB: It makes a difference in where people work and where they stay working. JULIE: I agree with that. I think it was Maya Angelou that said people will forget what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel. ROB: Yes. JULIE: I think the fact that you make an effort to remember somebody's name and something personal about them makes people feel seen. And that stuff is really important and can't be underestimated. ROB: As you mentioned, that war for talent is real. It's really excellent, I think, that in Minneapolis, you've been able to sustain and grow as an independent business. I'm sure the owners – how many people do you have on board now? I think LinkedIn said over 200? JULIE: Yeah, globally it's nearly 500. ROB: You don't get to that level without a few people coming in and offering to write you a nice check. So there is some intentionality in staying that way, and that also feels very authentically Minneapolis. A lot of the Midwest, I think, has lost some of their anchor tenets. It's a city that seems to have some businesses that they're proud of, and it seems like you get to be a part of that. JULIE: Yeah, and I've done the other side of it, too. I have done the being part of a holding company. At this point in my career, when I made a decision to come here, it was very purposeful because the owners not only fully own the business, but they're very involved in the business, and they care very deeply about it. Like I was saying, they're willing to invest in the future and have vision for where we're going to keep going. That's what drives the inspiration, I think, for a lot of the team in terms of the longevity of careers here. ROB: Wonderful. Julie, this is not even your first time, as you mentioned, running a shop. What are some things you have learned along the journey that you would maybe go back and tell yourself to do a little bit differently if you could reset? JULIE: I think about that question a lot because I have twin girls, and it's really important to me that they have opportunities that I didn't necessarily have. One of the things that I am already talking to them about that I wish I had done more of is just speaking up. Over the course of time I have learned how to ask for things when I need them, and I wish I had started doing that sooner – whether that's asking for the next role or asking for mentorship, asking for help – not easy to do, really important – admitting if you might feel like you're in over your head, and having the courage to call out bad behavior when you see it, making sure that you're listening to your instincts. All of those things, I feel like I wish I would've learned a little bit sooner, and I would encourage people to absolutely do. I'm constantly saying to everybody here, every time I get a chance to address the company, I'm always asking them to please reach out to me. I don't care what channel it is, whether it's Slack or you want to text me or email me or call me, whatever it is. But I really want to hear from people because the only way that we're actually going to make this a truly amazing employee experience is if we understand what's going on in the minds of our employees. So I think it's really important to speak up. ROB: I think that's super helpful. I think that's great for your girls. I think at least a lot of us want to work in a workplace where that is the default behavior. There may be some generational baggage there; I don't think my grandparents wanted that kind of job. But I think about my team, and if someone's going to say when they're in over their head, if they're going to ask for help, if they're going to ask for where they want to go next and help me participate in their future, it seems like that's what a lot of us want. And we want more people to want those things so they can get out of the jobs where they can't have those things. JULIE: Rob, you may be a lot younger than I am, I don't know, but I will tell you I was raised "Don't question authority. You don't ask questions. You do as you're told." So it took me a long time to try to find a balance with that. I think as a society, that is changing, but I think it's a really important thing to continue to remind people. ROB: Yeah, and it's our opportunity to build workplaces that differentiate by being that kind of place. It's a tremendous opportunity there. JULIE: Absolutely. ROB: Julie, as you're looking forward for the future not only of Horizontal Digital, but also in overall experience for brands and their customers together, what are you excited about, looking into the crystal ball? JULIE: Broadly, I'm just excited about where technology continues to take us and the opportunity to really, truly create amazing experiences. Not only am I trying to help our clients create amazing customer experiences, but I want to experience that with all of the brands I engage with as well. So I get really excited about the pace technology is moving and how that's becoming better and better. As it relates to Horizontal specifically, I'm not even a year in yet, so I'm really excited about the momentum that we continue to have, and again, the way that our founders are willing to invest. But I also hope that in many ways, this year is a building year for me. We set the benchmark on employee experience. We're hiring some new key talent. We're continuing to evolve our capabilities. So my hope is that we can continue to take this to the next level in terms of building a vision that the team gets really excited about, continuing to foster and grow the talent, and then building the infrastructure to scale and grow. Beyond even what we're doing for our clients, we also want to make sure that we're doing purpose-driven work that people are getting really excited about as well, so we have an organization called Horizontal Cares where we give back to our communities. I'm excited about all the opportunities that we have to build community with our employees, with our clients, and with the broader community within which we work. ROB: Horizontal Cares sounds like one of those things that I think any of us would probably wish we had started sooner within a firm. How do you think about allocating resources to that? Is there a rule, is there a budget? And where would you think about starting if you were even quite small? JULIE: Oh, that's such a good question. This started prior to me being here, but you get a few people together who want to change the world and anything can happen. To this point, it's pretty scrappy and entrepreneurial. We do internal fundraising efforts and look to our employees to help us figure out where the need is in our communities. I will tell you we are looking for how we can take this to the next level in terms of scale, so that is very much on the horizon for us and one of the things that I'm excited to work on. ROB: One thing I think probably that comes up repeatedly – it happens in every growing firm, and probably especially for you and Horizontal – is thinking about what types of either new capabilities you're going to say no to versus what you're going to say yes to, and what opportunities you might have taken on three years ago that don't fit with the firm anymore. How do you think about the things you say yes to and the things you say no to? JULIE: Boy, that's a good question, and it's an ongoing conversation that we have at the executive level. ROB: Has to be. JULIE: Of course, you want to make sure that you are continuing to be relevant to your clients and to your future clients, and at the same time, we also have to be really purposeful and thoughtful about not biting off more than we can chew at any given moment. When we are making sure that we are hiring as quickly as we can to keep up with the demand that we have – everything's a balancing act, Rob. It's a balancing act with where we are adding to our capabilities to make sure that we can not only deliver on the work that we have, but then build the future. So really, it's an ongoing conversation, but again, that's one of the things that I get really excited about because the owners here are so well-entrenched in that and willing to place bets where they think it makes sense to place bets. ROB: It sounds like a wonderful journey to be on, an excellent season to be there, in spite of everything everybody's been facing over the past little while. We still have some rough waters around us, but it sounds like you've been able to help Horizontal to be part of the bright spot in your life, and for some other people as well. Thank you for hopping on and sharing that journey. I do appreciate it. JULIE: Thank you for having me on. It was really fun talking to you. ROB: Sounds good, Julie. Be well. JULIE: Thanks. ROB: Bye. JULIE: 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.

Ten years ago, Ryan Frederick, became a partner at AWH, a now 26-year-old firm that builds net new software products, solves data problems, and integrates systems across platforms and products (phones, the web, Internet of Things [IoT] devices). The client mix is split in thirds: Funded startups building disruptive products to capitalize on unique opportunities Midmarket companies (manufacturers, distributors, or nonprofits/social enterprises) who don't have much technological knowledge or "horsepower" and a one-time or only sporadic need to build a "digital fix." Enterprise clients that need prototypes and proofs of concept for corporate innovation initiatives (e.g.; leveraging blockchain technologies, integrating machine learning, and utilizing artificial intelligence). These companies have the resources to build the needed system but need guidance on how to approach a problem and what needs to be done. To ensure the best outcomes, AWH consults with clients and establishes advisory boards to iteratively build products that resonate with customers and provide value. Ryan started out his career as a software developer but migrated to the "business, human, and creative side of things" – because he was interested in utilizing a more complete mix of skills. In this interview, he talks about how developers have been maligned in the past for not caring about the quality of the code they wrote. He admits that a lot of bad software was written when developers were a "background assembly unit" and the practice was to "slide the requirements under the door" and direct developers to build what they were told to build. Ryan says today's developers, designers, and QA professionals demand interesting, challenging, impactful work and need to be involved from the beginning – in defining the problem and in the planning, design, and user experience processes. Losing team members mid-project destroys process, teamwork, and collaborative continuity and chokes progress as "replacements" need "ramping up." AWH's focus, particularly in the last 5 years, has been on creating an environment where team members feel valued for their work – in order to "get and keep the most talented, capable team" possible. AWH often works with funded startups that often come up financially short at times where continued development is critical. To address this problem, AWH formalized an internal financing mechanism where AWH lends monies to cover continued development work in exchange for client royalties or equity. Ryan says AWH has done this 20- or 30- times, not so much by choice as by necessity. A few "loans" have "gone south" – but the company, to date, has accrued royalties or client equity of almost $2 million. Ryan authored The Founder's Manual, an experiential exposé of things Ryan has seen work . . . and not work . . . in the development world. His second book, Sell Naked, covers his experience over the past 10 years of owning and leading a professional services firm. Ryan says a lot of service firm representatives sell "propaganda, paraphernalia, and crutches" and 999-slide capabilities decks rather than starting with an open, authentic conversation about client needs. He says, "No prospective client cares about how awesome you are until they believe that you understand their problem and that you can . . . help them alleviate the pain of the problem. He also explains the informal proposal email process his company uses to quickly and effectively close contracts. Ryan can be reached on his company's website at: AWH.net. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Ryan Frederick, who is a Principal at AWH based in Dublin, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Ryan. RYAN: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. ROB: Wonderful to have you here. If we're looking up AWH and what you focus on, it says "building great digital products." But why don't you give us the big picture of AWH and what that specialty really means when you talk about building a firm around that? RYAN: Essentially, we do one thing, and that is build net new software products for clients across the spectrum of startups to midmarket to enterprises. Around the building of net new software products, we also do a fair amount of data work, solving data problems, data plumbing to support those products, integration work – because rarely do software products now exist on their own without talking to other products and other systems – and then we do a fair amount of product consulting as part of it, too. We help clients establish customer advisory boards, for example, to be able to work iteratively in building a product to ensure that it resonates with customers and they find value from what's getting built. So some wrappers around that core of building software products, but at the core, we build net new software products that run on phones and the web and IoT devices and various places for lots of different purposes and to solve lots of different problems. That's our day job and how we butter our bread, so to speak. ROB: Got it. Is there a typical sort of firm, a sort of client that's looking to engage you? Are we talking about seed stage funded companies, are we talking about enterprise, are we talking about all of the above and then some? RYAN: Our business is mixed in about thirds. About a third of our clients are funded startups trying to build a net new disruptive product in many cases, where they're going after a space and a problem or to capitalize on an opportunity that is fairly unique; otherwise they probably wouldn't be starting a company around it. About a third is midmarket clients. Those are manufacturing companies, distribution companies, and in some cases nonprofits or social enterprises that are trying to become more digitally capable. Often, they are digital laggers. They don't have the technology teams, if any technology teams, and they need things like customer portals built and they need design tools built and they need customer apps built, etc. So in the midmarket, it's really I would say them becoming digitally capable if not exceptional to fuel their growth. If they're a $50 million company, how are they going to get to be a $100 million company? If they're a $200 million company, how are they going to get to be a $500 million company? And that answer now is almost always digital and technological in some way. So that's where we typically play in midmarket space. Then with enterprises, most of our enterprise clients and engagements are around some sort of corporate innovation initiative, trying to figure out how they're going to leverage blockchain, what they're going to do with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Then we engage with them to build some prototypes and some concepts, and they'll then take it and run with it moving forward. We don't want to, in the enterprise space, do a lot of uninteresting work. We want to be able to stay true to our DNA and our desire to build interesting things, because frankly, that's how we keep really smart, talented people – because they want to build interesting things. So we tend to shy away from enterprise work that is just "upgrade something that's been running on a mainframe to something that's now modern." We tend to stay away from that sort of stuff and focus more on the corporate innovation stuff inside of enterprises. ROB: Obviously, with a new company, I can certainly understand how they would look at what they need to do and say, "We don't know how to build technology. Let's call up Ryan and his team." What do you think is the missing ingredient, perhaps – when you get to the mid-stage in an enterprise, I would imagine in a lot of these cases, you're talking about standing up a team of two, five, ten people to accomplish something that you would certainly imagine could be in the reach of such a company. What do you think it is that keeps them from sometimes even building that capability, or wanting to, when innovation is so important? RYAN: I think it's different between the midmarket and enterprise. In the midmarket space, clients will engage with us because they don't have much technological knowledge or horsepower. They also don't envision getting a substantial amount of it, either, because if you're a bolt manufacturer, there is a point where technology needs to serve you and you need to leverage it, but you also then don't need a team of 10 technologists running around that you're paying a ton of money to not do anything of consequence on a daily basis. Most of our midmarket clients build one software product that would be considered a custom software product. They build one of those in the entire history of their company. If you're a $50 million company and you need to build a customer app for ordering or what have you, it's probably the first time you've ever actually built your own software product, and you probably aren't going to have to do it again for a very long time because you're filling a gap that has now become so painful that you have to address it. But you're also probably not seeking to run around and build a bunch of new software products. That's the reason the midmarket clients often don't have their own teams and don't have a desire to implement and build out their own teams, because it's sort of a moment in time for a midmarket client. ROB: It's not as much of a sustained need, but it comes in bursts, and they need to know who they can trust to come back to it time after time, even. RYAN: Yeah, absolutely. But they are moments in time where there's a problem that has to be addressed, and then once it's addressed, the pain has subsided for some period of time. Enterprises are a little bit different, and that's why we mostly focus on innovation work inside of enterprises. Most enterprises have IT, design, product capability, either internally or through staffed augmentation or contracting firms. They have more people and more resources than they know what to do with in most cases, frankly. That's why we don't really want to play in that area, because it's just not that interesting to us. But we will come in, and enterprises often use us as like a special projects firm, where they're trying to figure out, "We've got this problem; our existing team doesn't know how to address it. We need help figuring out how we approach this problem. What's the right technical solution? What's the right digital solution? What's going to add that value for the business, and what's going to align with our customers and our users?" We do a lot of enterprise work, frankly, where we're just helping them concept things from a design perspective and a problem statement perspective and to build out customer advisory boards. There's a lot of cases with enterprise clients where we don't write one line of code and we have no engineers from our team actually engage with enterprise clients. It's more about helping them figure out what the right thing to do and the right thing to build is in the right way than it is actually doing a lot of wrenching on the product behind the scenes, if that makes sense. ROB: For sure. Ryan, it looks to me like you just might've celebrated a 10th anniversary for the company. RYAN: I did, yeah. ROB: Which is pretty exciting. Congratulations. If we rewind 10 years, how did you end up in the direction that the firm is in now? What led you to start it in the first place? RYAN: The firm's actually been around for 26 years, and I joined 10 years ago as a partner. I was coming down off of something else, and I was looking for something to do, frankly. I reached out to my network and said, "Hey, I'm looking for something to do," and my now-partner Chris said, "Why don't you just come here?" I said, "Oh, didn't know that was on the table." We talked for a few weeks, discussed what that might look like, and then we came together around it. I think the biggest evolution for us as a firm has been that software and data continue to eat the world, but you have to pick and choose where you want to dig in and where you want to leverage your team's expertise and experience. For us, we could be doing lots of different things in and around technology and software products, and we've said we're going to focus on building net new products. That's surfaced well because we really want to make sure that we're adding value for our clients. We also want to make sure – and this is becoming increasingly more important – that we're adding value for our team. Our team could work anywhere besides our firm, because developers and designers and QA professionals, everybody in our team is desirous and a value to work at, I don't know, 100 million other places. So. for us, we have to be way more intentional about creating an environment that they feel valued in and that they can ply their craft in and that they can do exceptional work on behalf of our clients. That's been a significant evolution. The days when you could get a developer or designer and hang on to them forever just by virtue of staying in business and continuing to have a paycheck deposited into their account, those days are gone. If you're not doing interesting work that they find challenging but also impactful, you're probably going to have a turnstile of team members. As a services firm, a turnstile of team members is one of the worst things you can have happening and going on because you have no continuity of process, you have no continuity of teamwork and collaboration. Client projects get upended because somebody new has to come in and get ramped up, etc. So our focus, especially over the last five years, has really been on how we get and keep the most talented, capable team that we can. Everything else is a derivative of that. ROB: Any one of those sharp developers or designers can go out and get into a bidding war and they can pit Google against Amazon, and it can ring the cash register if that's their priority. So it certainly has to be something different. I am a bit curious; if I'm looking at your background a little bit, it looks like you come from, pre- and maybe even with AWH, more of a sales background. Is that fair? RYAN: Yeah, I started out as a developer and then realized I didn't want to write code every day. I then migrated over to the business side and then got fortunate and hooked up with a startup fairly early in my career. I was the third person into the company. Learned a lot about business and also how to build software products. It was a software company. We had some success with that. The company ultimately got sold, and then I started another company with the investors that were behind that one. We had that for a short period of time because we ended up getting an offer to buy that, so we sold that one. I enjoy the technology aspects of things, but for me personally, I enjoy the human side of it and the creative side of it more than the analytical bits and bytes side of it. So I migrated over to the business side because I wanted as much of each side of the brain as I could get on a daily basis because that was the most interesting to me. ROB: And that early background as a developer helps put everything in perspective. I was certainly wondering – I come from a software development background; I have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to motivate and retain software developers, and what you were expressing resonated with me and showed an empathy for that developer mindset. If you came from purely a sales background, I was going to ask how you came by that understanding, because it is deep, it is resonant with my own experience. Having your feet in the technology early on helps tie it all together. It's a really fascinating journey. RYAN: Yeah, absolutely. Developers are often maligned for not caring about what code they write and what the application is and what problem the application is solving, etc. That's true to some degree, but my experience is that most developers actually do care about what they're working on and why they're working on it and what the problem is and what the value of the software is going to be. I think coming from a developer background initially, I have a little bit of empathy for their perspective and their role. It's also been the case where in a lot of organizations, developers are treated as the assembly line in the background that "We're going to slide the requirements under the door, and you just write code against what we tell you to build." That's how a lot of bad software products got built. And now we realize, if you're going to build great, successful products, developers need to be involved from the beginning. They need to have as much context as they can have. They need to be part of the planning process. They need to be part of the design, the user experience process. This is not you figure out what to build and then pass it off to the development for them to build it. We discovered that that really didn't work, even though that's what we kind of wanted to have happen. So development, even as a craft, has evolved too. It's certainly less cookie cutter, and it's become valued to the level that it always should've been valued and not some smarter people than developers figuring out what would need to get built. Developers are now at the table, working with the other members of a product team to figure out what should get built. ROB: I'm interested; you mentioned that a significant portion of your business is in early stage. I note that you also invest in companies at times. I think a thing a lot of services firms face when they're dealing with early stage is they get asked to invest some portion of their fees into their clients' companies, essentially. As someone who invests and has a services firm serving these companies, how do you think about those tricky conversations? They're challenging, I think, from a valuing the client well perspective, from what you communicate, how it's perceived, all that. RYAN: Absolutely. They're tricky conversations. My base position is a services firm should never discount services and should never trade services for equity unless there are special circumstances and there's awareness of the client and what they're trying to accomplish and there's good reason to do so. With that said, we got into a situation – we have formalized our work then and now because I didn't want to do it haphazardly. To your point, if you're going to have clients that are early stage companies as part of your client mix, the question around services for discounts, services for equity, services for delayed payment, etc., it's going to be a real and present thing that you're not going to be able to avoid. We got to the point with a client a few years ago – probably five years ago, maybe six now. They were a funded startup, but they were in between funding rounds, and we were working on their product, and still are their outsourced product team. They said, "We're not going to be able to raise our next round if we don't continue to work on the product, i.e. if you guys don't continue working on the product." So we were at a crossroads. We said, well, we can either stop working and they can go out and see if they can raise more money with the product where it is. If they can't, that means the whole thing comes to a screeching halt, so that's not a really good outcome for anybody. Or we can continue to work and we can essentially finance the work until they raise their next round of funding and then we get paid back. We thought that was the better option, so we actually put a promissory note in place and we financed the work under the framework of this promissory note. It all worked out and it all played out as we hoped that it would. We've now done that probably 20 or 30 times over the last couple of years, where we've actually put a financing mechanism in place with some clients. I would rather have not done it, but I'm glad that we formalized it and we didn't treat it haphazardly, because you're talking about real money. Services firms are cash flow monsters. You pay your team to show up today, to ply their craft, to do their work, and then you collect from clients at some point in the future. By the very definition of that, every services firm is a bank. If you then pile on top of that some clients need extended terms and relationships, like we're talking about, you'd better at least treat that dynamic and those monies and that relationship as formally as you absolutely can so that everybody knows what's at stake, what's happening, who's committed to what, who's on the hook for what, etc. We now have this little financing arm inside of the firm that we've now financed and in other ways taken royalties or actually taken equity in some clients, up to at this point almost $2 million. I would rather have not done it, frankly. But we didn't really have a choice with one client, and then over time, we've now had a couple dozen clients that have gotten into a similar situation. And knock on wood, most of them have gone well and progressed well and the deals have made sense. We've had a couple that have gone south, but from a percentage perspective, it's mostly gone okay. But it was really out of necessity less than it was out of "Yeah, we're stoked to do this." ROB: Yeah, it's challenging. It sounds like you're looking at a way to be a good partner to a company that trusts you to be a good partner in other ways. But that's a two-way street, and that's not to be trifled with either. You've been sharing all along some good lessons, but I think it would be remiss not to mention that some of these lessons, you have written down and put into book form. What led you into the path of writing and publishing? Tell us about what you've been sharing lately, book-side. I see a 2021 date on one of your books on Amazon, even. RYAN: Yeah. I was just writing notes and thoughts down, and I got to the point where there was enough of it where it seemed to be the construct for a book. That was the first book, The Founder's Manual, about providing some experiential exposure to things that I had seen work and not work. I said, "All right, there's no point in jotting these notes down over time if you're not going to do something about it." So I then reached out to a publisher who had worked with somebody that I know, and I said, "Hey, I want to do this book." They said, "Okay, we'll do it with you." The first book is not a super long book. It's been relatively well-received. My publisher would like me to get better at selling books now than just writing books, so that's always an interesting conversation with them. [laughs] The second book was really the same thing. After I finished the first book, I started writing down notes about my experience as part of AWH the last 10 years. This was my first time owning and leading a professional services firm, so I learned a lot over the last 10 years. I saw some things work well that we tried, and I saw some things that were just abject failures that we tried. I've gotten to know people that also run and lead other professional services firms, and professional services firms are a tricky beast to make work. There's virtually no scalability. Your people are your product. You're selling time. To forecast where the business is going beyond like three months is almost nonexistent. And most services firms, because of a lot of the things I've just mentioned and more, have a really hard time growing and becoming what they want to become. One of the epiphanies that hit me was, it is really easy to start a services firm. All you have to do is say, "I've got a craft. I've got something that I can help people and companies with," and you put up a site and boom, you're "in business," so to speak. But the challenge is not starting a services firm; the challenge is, how do you grow a services firm? That's a very different animal than starting one. Super easy to start, very difficult to grow. ROB: I may have to pick up that. I can get the Kindle version. I have some credits I can use on the Kindle version of Sell Naked, and I might have to go grab this myself. What's maybe one of the key principles you'd pull out of that book as a teaser for folks who might be thinking about picking it up? RYAN: There's a couple that I would say. We titled it Sell Naked for a reason, because that's one of the chapters in the book, and the publisher felt like that was the lead chapter. The theory there is I see a lot of business development people for services firms, either leaders of or business development representatives at services firms, who sell with lots of propaganda, paraphernalia, and crutches. They've got these capabilities decks that are like 999 slides. They have these elaborate portfolios, etc. And in some services firms, I get it. Those make sense. But I think by and large, for a lot of services firms if not most, those things are just crutches because what those do is force people to focus on the tools and the propaganda and the paraphernalia rather than going in with a prospective client and sitting down and having a very open, authentic, transparent conversation about "What are you trying to accomplish? Are we a fit in any way to help you accomplish that? And if we are, now let's start peeling back the layers." But if you go in with a capabilities deck and propaganda and all this other stuff, you're delaying getting to the crux of the matter while you pontificate about how awesome you are, and no prospective client cares about how awesome you are until they believe that you understand their problem and that you can share some insights and some value that might help them alleviate the pain of the problem. So I think people get selling services mostly wrong, I guess is the sum of that. ROB: That sounds very aligned. I can certainly understand especially how a peacocky sales culture and teams of very capable developers and designers – that's probably more oil and water than most organizations. But I think most people, outside of a very slick sales organization, appreciate that genuineness, that straightforwardness, building the connection and trust, more than building a shiny deck. RYAN: Yeah. I think the other thing we have figured out and that we do is we also don't do elaborate proposals. When a potential client says, "Yeah, we're interested in engaging with you," then we send them – truly, and in the book I actually put some of the copy that we use, and the format – we send the client a bulleted list of the essential terms of engaging together. I call that estimating informally or proposing informally. The last sentence in that bulleted email is essentially, "If you're comfortable moving forward, let us know, and we will take this and wrap it in an SOW." The reason we do the informal emails to engage is because there's no point in spending hours and hours and hours on an elaborate proposal when the prospective client is only interested in really two things at that point: how long and how much? If you've built enough value and enough credibility to that point, you don't need an elaborate, flowery proposal reiterating how special of a snowflake you are. Just get to the point and then engage formally by sending them an agreement to actually engage. Because if a prospective client responds to that informal proposal email saying, "I think we're good to move forward," guess what? You just got a verbal that the deal is closed. But if you send a big, elaborate proposal asking people, "What do you think? Are we in alignment?" and all of these things, you're still trying to build value when that ship already sailed. Does that make sense? ROB: Oh yeah. They don't even know what they're saying yes to in a giant contract. They might float it over to procurement before they say yes to a dang thing in the enterprise context. There's a lot of hazards that just keeping it human – that makes complete sense to me. Ryan, when people want to connect with you and AWH, where should they go to find you and see more? RYAN: AWH.net is the easiest place because they can get to me from there and of course get to the rest of our team and the great work that our team does. That's probably the best place, and then jump off from there. ROB: Sounds perfect. Ryan, thank you so much. Congratulations to you and the team and what you're building together. We will look for more excellent digital products coming from you and the team for your clients down the line. RYAN: Thanks, man. Appreciate it. ROB: Be well. Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

In 2006, Angie and Will Scott, COO and CEO and co-founders, started Search Influence as a technically oriented search, social, and digital marketing agency, supported with tracking and attribution, and demonstrating value across very complex systems. Challenged at the beginning to find people with the needed skills, the agency outsourced its production work and developed an intensive training cycle and "robust" documentation for new hires. Will claims that, to this day, the agency's internal-facing superpower is training and education. For the agency's first six years, SEO required seeding web content with relevant keywords. Will says that today's content has to be more nuanced . . . that SEO is now "more about meeting the customer where they are in the buyer's journey." The agency concentrates on three verticals: midmarket healthcare (driving patient visits to individual practitioners on up to regional medical centers and, on the practice side, generating more leads), higher education, and tourism – market segments where the strategically complex buyer's journey is characterized by "multiple systems between a customer's first interaction with the brand and actually closing the sale." When the real estate market crashed in 2008, two years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and decimated the region's small businesses, the national economy took a downturn. New Orleans was still rebuilding. Tourism was booming. Medical and – in particular, elective medical – remained strong. At a time when many companies were failing, Search Influence . . . grew. Unlike many agencies, Search Influence does not try to "do it all." Outsourcing work that is not in its areas of concentration (SEO and paid advertising) and bringing on partners to provide services complementary to its quantitative efforts keeps the agency focused and nimble. Client websites are built by a cadre of website development partners. Early on, the agency built a process, an internal editorial team, and platforms to manage external freelancers who produced as much as 10,000 pieces of content monthly for a large direct-to-SMB digital marketing company. That creative management arm is still in place today. Angie questions whether it makes sense to try to develop "side skills" when the agency can so easily partner with "top talent." With its practice built around content, the Search Influence developed an internal tool, UpScribed, that morphed into an external-facing platform. Through UpScribed, other marketers (including those who are not Influence clients) get direct access to the Search Influence content team. When Covid "shuttered" a lot of New Orleans's small businesses, the purposely overstaffed agency went to work for its clients . . . for free. That's taking a rare, long-range view on things. The same clients they keep afloat today will be tomorrow's even-more-dedicated customers. In this interview, Angie, who has an accounting background, talks about maintaining organizational balance. Will identifies a valuable list of free business development networks and ecosystems available to help small enterprises. They can be found on their agency's website at: searchinfluence.com or on their blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Angie and Will Scott. They are the COO and CEO and co-founders at Search Influence based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Angie and Will. ANGIE: Thank you. We're excited to be here. WILL: Thanks, Rob. ROB: It's a treat to have you here. We don't always get a little tag team like this, so that is an exciting change of pace. Why don't you start us off by telling us about Search Influence and what the agency's superpower is? WILL: Search Influence, Angie and I started it together more than 15 years ago. We started rather technical. I had come out of a position where I was very focused on SEO, so that's what we started with. Over the span of time, though, what we have decided our internal-facing superpower is, is training and education. Because we started in 2006, it wasn't really easy to go out and find folks who had the skills we needed, so we did do a lot of training. And to this day, we remain robust documentation and a training cycle for all new hires. Externally, we feel like the things that we do really well are still more in the technical realm. Our name is Search Influence, so search is a big part of where we spend our time. But we've also spent a lot of time thinking about tracking and attribution and how we actually demonstrate value across very complex systems. Our top verticals in which we work are healthcare, higher ed, and tourism. And in almost every one of those cases, there are multiple systems between a customer's first interaction with the brand and actually closing the sale, in whatever way that happens. ROB: I can certainly think that through. We're talking about healthcare – what part of healthcare? Obviously, it's a journey. We're not going to the ER here. What segment of the healthcare market is representative, would you say? WILL: Our focus has historically been on the midmarket, so think a handful of practitioners up to say a regional medical center. Very much about driving patient visits, and on the practice side, more leads. ROB: This is I'm coming to an area, I'm trying to figure out where I should go, or it might have an existing doctor and it's an evolution over time of where my loyalty is going to go. There's a journey there. There's a journey in travel. All of that makes sense. I can certainly see – you talked about 2006; there was I would say a lot of science around SEO, and it has evolved into art and science, to an extent. How have you thought about evolving your team and the documentation as there has become more of – I would almost say Google and the search engines have moved more towards searcher satisfaction with what they found, which is kind of an art. WILL: Yeah, in the early days, say 2006 through probably 2012-2013, it was easier to be a little more heavy-handed, to think about content primarily as a vehicle for keywords to correlate to what people were searching for. I think in the time since then, we and any company that tries to practice SEO in a serious way have learned that the content actually has to be more about meeting the customer where they are in the buyer's journey. And that's a much more nuanced piece of content than one where you're trying to have an appropriate keyword density and blah, blah, blah, and highly targeted internal links and that kind of thing. ROB: Right on. You started in 2006; a few years in, we hit a weird economic spot and the market of search was rotating at that time as well. How did you think through and evolve through that transition to emerge healthy on the other side? Maybe it was always healthy to an extent, but I don't know. The tourism thing was probably down a little bit if you were in that market at the time. WILL: New Orleans is interesting on a lot of levels. In 2008, when everybody else was suffering from the real estate market crash, we were booming because it was two years after Katrina. Where everybody else was seeing people drop the keys off at their mortgagor and walk away, we were still in a heavy rebuilding phase. Also, with the focus on medical, particularly elective medical – that was really a heavy piece for us at that time – there wasn't much of a downturn. We actually grew through that recession. ANGIE: Right. Our largest focus, though, at that point was medical. We were – I don't know, lucky or saw something coming, I don't know. WILL: I prefer brilliant. [laughs] ANGIE: [laughs] We almost felt bad at that time, I remember. It's like when your baby is sleeping through the night and no one else's is and you don't want to say that they are. I think we would talk about if somebody asked, but we just didn't talk about it because we felt bad. It was like, "We're growing." ROB: And that's been an echo for this year for a lot of people. This past year, this COVID, 15-16 months now, some people – restaurant industry, they're just scrapping to get by. A few restaurants figured out how to nail takeout and delivery, and they're doing better than ever. And then some folks in the digital realm are just doing great, growing. But it's hard to talk about. WILL: Totally. Sadly, we are not among them, because we did have a bunch of revenue in tourism and attractions leading into COVID. ANGIE: But they're starting to come back as the recovery comes. WILL: Yeah. And we did this thing where because we were intentionally overstaffed – we didn't cut nearly as much as we should have if we were trying to meet revenue. So we had staff and we reached out to our customers who were paused because of budget, and we created this thing – our core values spell CHARGE. We marketed it as the "Recharged Fund." We put our team to work for free for those clients who were effectively shuttered because of the pandemic. ROB: That's a pretty bold move, and I wonder, when you first started doing that, how long did you think it was going to be before things echoed back, and when did you start wondering again? WILL: A handful of weeks. [laughs] ANGIE: Like everyone else. WILL: I was actually out of town and Angie was responsible for shutting the office down on March 13th. I don't think at any time until many, many weeks later we thought that it was going to be more than a handful of weeks that we were out of the office. ROB: That was a rude awakening for a lot of us. "Oh wait, this basement setup I'm in? This is a lifestyle." That's when I went back to the office and I grabbed some tables and chairs and I said, "Okay, this is going to be for real. I'm bringing home a screen, I'm bringing home anything I want to see for the next few months." ANGIE: Right. I think everybody had that happen. We did the same thing. We plotted out a very careful schedule for everybody to be able to come one by one and meet me at the office to get any equipment or furniture or anything that they needed so that they could set up some sort of workspace once you realized this may be life. [laughs] ROB: If we rewind a little bit, we mentioned earlier that you are co-founders. Talk about the journey that let you both into a place at the same time where you're like, "Hey, let's start Search Influence and drop whatever we were doing before." What did that jump look like? WILL: At that time, we had come from working together – we actually met at work, which is I think part of what makes it so effective for us. But what happened was we found ourselves at the beginning of 2006 still in that Katrina hangover, if you will. I had actually just exited another company, and we were looking for what we were going to do next. We had the good fortune that Angie and I don't have the same skillsets. Angie is a businessperson. She has a degree in accounting and has spent her whole career in that side of the businesses, whereas I, oddly enough, have a degree in architecture, but I've spent my whole adult career on the more creative and development side. We saw this opportunity, especially post-Katrina, that there were a lot of small businesses that were decimated. It actually wasn't too much unlike right now, except that the infrastructure didn't exist for these companies to go online as they had to after Katrina. Angie's family runs a chiropractic clinic, and we saw them as sort of a prototype. They had been located in a place called Chalmette. They were the Chalmette Chiropractic Clinic. Chalmette is a New Orleans suburb that you really don't hear enough about in the context of Katrina, but it flooded from two directions, and one of those directions came through an oil field. So it wasn't just wet; it was wet and oily. We really had to restart their business online. For a little while, the Chalmette Chiropractic Clinic was practicing out of our garage. And then, because it was 2006, we were able to build their brand rather quickly online, rebuilding them as New Orleans Chiropractic and ultimately the Maple Street Chiropractic Clinic. ANGIE: And making sure that their patients could find them. At that point in time, it wasn't just about cellphone service and so forth. People were searching online for where did they go, where did they set back up. Thankfully, Will had exited; I still had my current role, an accounting and HR role at a business, so we were able to not only have the time, because I had moved into consulting, but also have the funds and also the time to really get it going and truly focus on the business between both of us. I think we were lucky and we also had an agreement that we would only start a business that didn't require going out and finding investors or getting loans. So we were able to get it going just between the two of us and devote everything we had to it. ROB: What sort of business were you working in together when you met? WILL: That business morphed over the time that we were there. It was originally a website business, and then we moved into online Yellow Pages. You remember Yellow Pages, right? ROB: I do. I sure do. WILL: We actually put them online so that they looked like the book, which was – ANGIE: Weird. [laughs] ROB: It reminds me a little bit – I had a friend in the agency business who exited his agency, and what they used to do was take the corporate earnings reports and he would put them on CD-ROMs and make it look just like the real thing, but on a CD-ROM and maybe a little bit interactive. He built a good business of it. So you can never underestimate what that looks like. You can see how that would lead adjacently, then, to the search side where you would have some of those technical chops of how to do that right. I can see the transition there, for sure. ANGIE: Right. WILL: It really was. I remember having a conversation with a guy who was at Yellow Pages. It was shortly after I'd exited that business and I was thinking about maybe going to work for them, and I said to him, "What's your biggest priority for these phonebooks?" He said, "Anti-scraping technology." He turned it around and asked me the same question: "What would be your biggest priority?" I said, "Making our data as accessible to Google as humanly possible." So clearly, I didn't get that job. ROB: Yeah, there's a little bit of a strategy delta there. But somehow those businesses managed to wander around. I knew some folks here a few years ago who were working for YP.com, which is YellowPages.com. I don't know if they're in there selling to car dealerships and TV stations or what they're doing, but those businesses remain around. There was obviously at some point a step where it made sense, Angie, for you to join full-time as well. What did it look like when you started growing the team? Who did you need to join? At some point I'm sure it came from "We're doing this, we're not taking investors, we're not taking on debt" to "Hey, this is kind of a good business. We can grow it." ANGIE: Right. If I had to guess, looking back, I maybe spent six more months consulting within the other company. Having two of us full-time devoted to it was not necessary when you only had – we weren't even employees; we weren't even getting paid. So once we started having employees, you start to have to build all the processes, the handbook, the payroll. I was bookkeeping sitting at night for an hour, no big deal, super easy. But once we started having employees and growing that side of the business, that's really when I think it took over for me. Our first employee was actually somebody who stepped in and worked with Will really closely on what we now would look back and probably call account management, because it was strategy, and then we had – at the time we were outsourcing all of our production work. They would basically strategize with our production teams outside of the company. ROB: Got it. That's an interesting little strategy there. Different people still recommend, even at scale, having different percentages of the work go outside the firm and then have some burstable capacity outside of there. I think probably one part of your journey where you've had to make a lot of decisions is what to add and what not to add. You mentioned you're in three verticals now, but you could be in 12 or 20, and there's probably some services you've added over time and some you haven't. How have you navigated that decision of "We're going to add this line of service; we're not going to add this line of service. We're going to add this vertical; we're not going to add this vertical"? How have you navigated the temptation to do everything? WILL: I think it was about 10 years ago that I coined the phrase, "If we really want to lose money, we'll take a website client." The thing is, there's a very different skillset there. What we do instead is we have partners that we work with to build websites at different scales for different clients if they need them. But the things that we do really, really well are much more quantitative. We also developed a practice around content, so much so that we built an internal tool that we ultimately turned into an external-facing tool that we call UpScribed. It's a platform that other marketers can use to have direct access to our content team. We had a period in time where we were the backend for a company that has been acquired – and they may still have the same name – Yodel, who was one of the big direct to SMB digital marketing companies probably between 2007 and 2013-2014. We were doing as much as 10,000 pieces of content a month for them. ROB: Wow. WILL: As you can imagine, we didn't employ the writers and editorial staff to do all of that, so we built a process where we had an internal editorial team and platforms to manage external freelancers for the actual creative of that. ANGIE: That we will use today. WILL: Yeah, that we still use today. And UpScribed has clients using it external to Search Influence as well. ANGIE: Because it turns out that is an agency problem. [laughs] Which is probably not a surprise to anyone. I think right now – it's funny; I was actually chuckling inside my head that you maybe were a fly on the wall in the last few weeks, because we've been discussing literally writing out the services that we are going to spend all of our focus and time on. We do quarterly planning, we do annual planning. These are the services that we should be planning around, and that's SEO and paid search. Sorry, SEO and paid advertising. I have to get my words right. Then those other services that we do still offer, like website builds and PR and so forth, we would find really good partners if we don't already have them. A lot of it we already have a great partner for. And to your point of what things we outsource, we outsource and partner with different people who are really good at that stuff. There's people out there who are very good at video production. Why would we build that? That would be silly, because there's some really great video production companies out there that we can use, and use their strengths. WILL: And it turns out that somewhere in the last decade, people have forgotten how to do SEO. I think as everybody's gotten on the whole inbound content marketing bandwagon, we've forgotten the basic blocking and tackling of SEO. Oftentimes, we'll come across a site that has great content that's completely inaccessible to search. I think of myself as having grown up in SEO because back in 1999, we were using GoTo.com to try to figure out what keywords we were going to stuff into the metatags. So really, for us, when we think of the things that we've trained our team on historically and where we feel like we're adding a lot of value, it's in those places that are technical and quantitative and ultimately that we're able to demonstrate very good return on those investments because of that tactical focus. ROB: Has there ever been a service area that helped teach you some of these lessons? Like you dabbled in it and you realized – maybe it was websites, maybe there was something else. Sometimes our eyes get a little bit big for our appetites and we say, "Oh sure, let's do that too," and then we get our hand smacked one way or another. ANGIE: I think maybe it wasn't services and it was more so certain clients, probably, that led us down "Yeah, we can figure out cross-domain tracking for this and that," and then you get into it and you're like, whoa, this was a much bigger thing than we thought it was. But then you're there and you've got to figure it out. So I think it was probably more the client side that drove us down some of these more technical areas. ROB: That makes sense. If we broaden that a little bit, what are some bigger picture lessons you've learned along the way that if you were picking up the phone to yourself 15 years ago, you'd be like, "Hey, you're going to want to do this. Don't do that. Do this differently"? WILL: This is one of those things – and I think time and maturity allow you to really look at these things in the right way. Almost all of those lessons helped us to better understand the kind of company that we want to be. A great example is we spent about five years with a single reseller representing way too much of our business. The kind of work that they needed was much more fulfillment, much more high throughput work, and it was not as satisfying for our team to execute on. It didn't make for the greatest work environment for some of our team for a while. And then after all that, they decided to take that business in-house, which meant that they were taking a really big chunk of our revenue with them. I think that was a really good lesson learned. When you find yourself with too much concentration in one customer, you've really got to get busy making sure that you're doing the business development work that makes them not so monolithic. I think anybody who's ever worked with customers knows, when a customer comes to you and says, "Hey, I want to give you five times as much money," you don't say, "Hey, sorry, we can't take that because that would screw up our customer concentration." ANGIE: Right, because a lot of people do talk about that. They say, "Don't let a single customer get to X percentage of your revenue." It's like, don't let them? So, say no? Who's going to do that? No one's going to do that. So really, the answer is not that. It's when they offer that, you go and you find more of that in other clients. ROB: Notoriously – I'm here in Atlanta, and one of the bigger agencies here for a good while has been Moxie, and they're owned in a holding company now. But when they were acquired, at least if the street reports are to be believed, they had 200 or 300 people and 70% of their business was Verizon. Every time a new iPhone launched, they had to do all the in-store collateral, just fire drill. Are you going to say no to that? You've got 150 people you can put on the payroll to serve this client. You figure out how to grow out of it. I think what is often the case with some of these reseller, these channel relationships, these subcontract relationships, is sometimes they're selling a deal that you haven't quite figured out how to sell yet. Was that your experience? Or did their business look a lot like business you were bringing in yourself? WILL: It actually didn't look like the business we were bringing in ourselves. In fact, we found ourselves with two account management teams, one that was serving our direct clients and one that was serving this reseller. And there were a couple of other smaller resellers as well, and their lived experience day to day was very different, and their understanding of the work that we did also was very different. So it was hard to move somebody from that partner account management team to the direct account management team or vice versa and have them be Day 1 ready. ANGIE: The reseller was selling packages because you could sell them – you didn't have to understand everything. If you have a large sales team, it is much easier to hand them a package that says, "This is what you're getting on this month in Month 2, 3, 4, 5, 6," whatever it is. It was the same work over and over, whereas our direct clients were much more about the marketing funnel and creativity and so forth. ROB: So even some of those clients may have been – would it be fair to say they were a little bit smaller where the direct engagement might not make sense? Was there a delta in deal size, or was it just a matter of the relationship? WILL: I think generally speaking, those that were coming in through our reseller partners were smaller than we would've approached directly. ANGIE: Yes. WILL: They were much more true SMB. The other thing that we talk about as an opportunity and that we try to tell new business owners about when we encounter them is that we didn't know how many services were available for small businesses when we started this up. Things like SBA's Small Business Development Center and all of the different networks and ecosystems. We literally had a meeting with one of those organizations, the local big entrepreneur ecosystem entity, and we sat down with them and we were like, "Hey, you guys are doing great things here. We'd love to get engaged. How can you help us out?" As we were talking to them, they started asking us questions like, "How many people do you have? How much revenue do you have?" At the end of the conversation, they were like, "You seem like the kind of people who could really help us out." ROB: [laughs] Wow. WILL: Yeah. Not the plan. But I think there are so many of those services available that smaller entrepreneurs who are coming up in that classic startup ecosystem don't really have a sense of. ROB: What are a couple more of those that you would say someone should at least take a look at and not miss out on? Maybe New Orleans driven, maybe more national in scope. What should people pay attention to? ANGIE: Later on – probably much later on, I went through the 10,000 Small Businesses program, I guess you would call it. It's put on by Goldman Sachs, and I would say that's a really good one. And it is everywhere. They're all over the place. They do a really great job of walking through – you don't have to go there with questions. They assume you don't know anything and you're going to learn it in the classes. So that's a really good one. WILL: I was going to say we have a number of purpose-driven organizations that I think are opportunities as well. There's one called the Good Work Network that tends to work mostly with smaller businesses primarily in marginalized areas, and I'm sure that there are sort of sisters around the country. There's one called Vet Launch, which is focused specifically on veteran entrepreneurs. I would say that there are going to be dozens of these, and if you can find one that you can plug in consistent with their affinity, the resources are going to be invaluable. ROB: That's a great thought, to think about plugging into the affinity. It creates that extra link. Sometimes it's hard to ask for help, it's hard to ask for mentors, it's hard to ask for advice. Sometimes that linkage can be a relationship you incubate over time, but it sounds like a great shortcut you're talking about there, about navigating through a shared interest. That's a really great thought there. Angie, Will, I'm sure when people want to find Search Influence, I'm sure they can search for you and find you pretty quickly. But if people want to connect to you, how else should they go about finding you, connecting with you, and keeping track of what's next for Search Influence? WILL: Our website, searchinfluence.com, and our blog are really great places to start. We are pretty active as a company on Facebook and LinkedIn, and Instagram as well. Those are all great places to connect with us. ROB: It's not to be missed. LinkedIn in some ways seems to continue in effectiveness, even though – you probably have this worse than I do – the random connections. I don't know how you handle them. I get a lot more than I'd like to get, I'll put it that way. WILL: What's funny is that I've been getting a lot of them – a lot of my random connections lately have actually been somewhat relevant. So if I do choose to connect with folks, I'll say, "Hey, I connected with you because I'm interested in this thing that's in your bio. I'm not a buyer today, but I wanted to have you in my list of connections." ROB: Nice. WILL: Especially when you're working B2B. When we're approaching folks who work in higher ed or who work in hospitals and health systems, they're on LinkedIn and they're paying attention. So from a cold outreach to start a conversation perspective, I find LinkedIn to be the most effective. ROB: Makes so much sense. Angie, Will, congratulations on building, growing, sustaining a meaningful business through making it through some challenging times and some good ones. Thank you for sharing your journey with us. It's really helpful. I think it's motivating, and there's great little tips all along the way to learn from. Thank you so much for sharing. ANGIE: Yes, thank you for having us. WILL: Yeah, Rob, thanks for having us on. I was glad to be introduced to your podcast because in prepping for this, I came across a number of episodes that I thought were really useful. ROB: Well, thank you. We all need to get outside our head sometimes, and that's part of it as well. Thanks for coming on. Be well. ANGIE: Thank you. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Scott Couvillon is CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising, an agency that strives to create purpose-aligned, believable ads. Scott says that companies succeed with their advertising, not only because their creative product promotion is compelling, but more so when the ads "compel an honest connection between a person and a brand." Scott says there is a lot of talk in the advertising industry about purpose. What is more important is "What do you do with it once you've got it." Scott holds that advertising needs to be aligned with a company's core beliefs. Organizations need to think holistically and ask, "If you put purpose in the center, how do you: Get the company culture aligned with that purpose?" Get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose?" and Get the customer experience aligned with that purpose?" Advertising agencies typically work on communications – but may neglect a company's culture and customer experience components. Focus on product characteristics does not build relationships with customers, instill customer loyalty, or keep a company's product from becoming a commodity. Trumpet clients have a common understanding – "They will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for." Scott explains, "Brand connection is an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional." Holistic alignment is what sells premium brands like Apple phones and BMW SUVs. If you don't have holistic alignment, Scott says, the best you can hope for is that people will not dread the absence of holistic alignment. The product is okay . . . and the customer only hopes the experience won't be bad. Because transformational organizational alignment involves a deeper client-agency relationship beyond mere "communications management," Trumpet typically engages with organizations in one of two ways: High-level management will bring Trumpet in to force "purpose alignment" on its marcom operations. Trumpet will start out working with marcom. Once Trumpet has proven itself, it uses its analytical performance to talk with the leadership team about a more holistic brand and organizational alignment. Scott presents the example of one client, a "very profitable credit union" that Trumpet turned into "a very meaningful credit union." "Meaning" made the credit union "even more profitable." Although increased profit wasn't the first goal, it was the result of the client's focus on purpose. He refers to Raj's Conscious Capitalism, and these "firms of endearment," as "the companies that we don't dread." Communications should be locked in with company culture and customer experience, all three driven by clairvoyance and purpose. Scott asks key questions. "What is the core belief?" "What would the world lose if this company went out of business?" and then delivers an indicting punchline to the last query: "If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. He warns that commoditization often happens when companies internalize the advertising function, communicate on self-serve platforms, and focus more on selling product than on "what they stand for." Scott can be found on his agency's website at: https://trumpetadvertising.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Scott Couvillon, CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Welcome to the podcast, Scott. SCOTT: Nice to meet you, finally. ROB: Yeah, awesome to have you on here. Sometimes these things can take a little bit to schedule, but this is the moment. Why don't you start off by giving us the rundown on Trumpet Advertising and what your superpower is? SCOTT: I guess the thing about a superpower is normally the world can either see you running really fast or a human flying, and ours is maybe a little more backstage than that. But it's nonetheless clear to us and to the clients we're working with. It's pretty simple. It's the focus on believability and being purposeful as an organization as an underpinning for the things that we actually do every day, which for us is being an advertising agency. For them, it's running operations and trying to grow their organization. We just try to do that a little bit more meaningfully than I would say agencies that we've all worked for, and even in some cases the agency that we were 10 or 12 years ago. The idea that agencies are responsible for compelling creative is a prerequisite, and let's just assume that all good agencies can buy media and do the analysis and reporting and optimize and come up with great ideas for that engaged attention. But there's a difference between compelling creative and trying to compel an honest connection between a person and a brand. The most successful companies right now are doing a better job of that. Advertising works. We know that. Analytics tell us. America being overweight and in debt, advertising is alive and well. But not every business is able to truly create the connection that allows month over month growth to be sustained in the long term. That requires a more fundamental relationship than just window to window promotion success. ROB: That sort of strategy, to really execute it, it seems like that would require necessarily partnership from the client as well. How do you think about that and that initial client-agency dance of figuring out if they're really interested in that level of connection and genuineness in what they're doing? SCOTT: There's a lot in that. How do we proactively go after business? What is our posture or the conversation when we're, for example, answering an RFP or an open call for agencies? The reality is that if we are dealing exclusively with marketing communications, it would be very difficult to think so holistically about the spirituality of an organization in order to bring some level of alignment between what we're saying externally through communications and what the experience with the company is ultimately going to be if our only connection to the organization is marcom. So yeah, frankly, it requires involvement and buy-in from the leadership team. The relationship's got to go a couple of ways. Either we have a very legacy-oriented, thoughtful, and extremely intentional CEO that brings us in and forces us upon marcom, or we'll work within the marketing communications sphere for a while, really prove our practical worth, that we have good ideas and good tactical execution that shows that we know what we're doing, and then we almost use analytical performance with the leadership team to start having conversations about more of a holistic brand alignment at the organizational level, not just within communications on its own. And again, it clicks for some organizations and definitely not others. ROB: If we can, let's get a little bit more concrete with an example. Is there a particular client you can talk about that typifies what the engagement looks like, what the structure is, as well as the go-to-market message? What's that look like? SCOTT: We are not category specialists. This is a methodology and a perspective that is applicable to a very specific mindset of an organization. What our clients have in common is that they believe they will sell more product by selling that product within the context of what they stand for. They're not constantly just putting something to buy out there; they're being clairvoyant on what people are buying into via that purchase. Structurally, from a relationship standpoint, we have a big financial institution in Texas and expanding out into more and more markets every year, it seems like; we work in healthcare, we work in tourism and destination management, hospitality, but what they all have in common and the structure that's the same is by identifying the purpose of the organization – what is truly the core belief? Our industry has beaten the tar out of "figure out your why and your core motivation" and all that stuff, but what our industry has done a very poor job with is getting beyond the cosmetic application of that "why." It's easy to turn why we exist into beautiful brand creative, but if the brand, if the company, isn't living that in any real way, it's disingenuous at best and a lie at worst. Our scopes are focused on articulating what that belief is, getting that right and bought into by every level of the organization. When we were working with that financial institution, it was very much led by really, truly an unbelievable CEO who pulled his executive team along with him and really got them all bought in. There were years of internal transformation about "Look, this is the organization that we were, and this is the organization that we are going to be. We're going to move from a very profitable credit union into a very meaningful credit union, and that meaning is going to make us even more profitable." The profit didn't come first. It got relegated to a result. That became really, really clear, because there became a spirituality at that organization that employees, stakeholders, customers, everybody was truly able to validate and then buy into. They were more than just checking account for a free toaster. The way that process went was getting very clear on that narrative, figuring out what the utilitarian expressions of that narrative were going to be – what products were they going to stop offering? What were the kinds of products they were going to develop? Because their product offering was going to be truly a manifestation of what they stood for, not just different ways for them to make money for shareholders and stakeholders. That kind of internal, truly product holistic thinking first prior to a total renaming and a new identity, new uniforms for employees – how are we going to retrain those employees in the new spirituality of the company while we're handing them a new shirt, as opposed to just handing them a new shirt? That's really how these things, in a perfect sense, go when people are buying into it wholly. There's been plenty of clients that we've talked about this upfront, we've gone through the purpose identification in each standpoint, and it inflects in some of the product expressions and some of the customer experience in a retail sense – certainly we're talking to it from a content standpoint in advertising, marketing, and social media stuff – but never really get invited into the inner sanctum of operations and HR practices, orientation and internal transmission to every employee at the organization. As an egomaniac, those aren't my favorite scopes because we're not able to do the true holistic alignment with every element of the business with a core belief. But it's better than just offering free shipping and extra cheese and hoping for month over month improvements. ROB: Right. It's necessary for you to have the conversation at a higher level in the organization, which is usually where you want to engage. Maybe not sometimes; sometimes the CMO has tons of power and big org. But when you're talking about essentially a credit union, a bank, it's a commodity to people, just like an airline can mostly be a commodity to people unless you are let's say Southwest and you do the work over time to sustain a differentiator. Even when everyone else is charging you for a checked bag. SCOTT: I think you look at the companies that get put into a very specific cohort that we pay a lot of attention to. It's really these believable, more purposeful companies. Raj Sisodia, great TED Talk, talks about conscious capitalism, talks about these firms of endearment. It's the ones that always get talked about at ANA and every conference in our industry. It's the Caterpillars and the Starbucks and the Disneys and of course the Apples and Intuit. It's that category. It doesn't have to be consumer. But these are organizations that are truly aligned, inside and outside, with an idea, not aligned more practically with an IP or a product or a manufacturing process. You bring up Southwest; identical equipment, flying from the exact same building as other companies. It's as commoditized as rice. But there is an affinity and a preference for airlines that we all have and that we use for specific purposes. Yes, there are times that we pinch the nose and it's the cheapest or it's the only one going where I need to be, but we're dreading that experience. And when we go in as a consumer with dread, the best you can have is the absence of dread. I defy you to find a leadership team whose mission statement is "Let's provide an absence of dread to the world." That's not going to make our stock price soar. But that's where they're landing, whereas Southwest, as you bring up – JetBlue I'd say is another one. They've got a commodity product, and they've really focused on the only thing that there is to focus on, which is the morality and the spirituality of the organization and allowing people to really buy into it. Their turnover is lower. Vendor relationships are better. It is an easier company to run because there is alignment beyond the practical. Don't be late and don't lose bags. ROB: How disruptive – you talk about that feeling of dread. Names pop to my mind. Airline names pop into my mind when you say "dread." What a heck of a brand. You're the airline of last resort and of dread, but hey, it's cheap. But let me digress a little bit from there. Walk me through the origin story of Trumpet. How did Trumpet start and get to be where it is now? What's that journey look like? SCOTT: Trumpet was founded in '97. It fell out of another agency. Just three guys took the phones and ran and opened up a new agency. That's kind of the late '90s agency founding story. It was a designer and a writer and an account guy, and they started with some real clients, and despite being in a Tier 3 city like New Orleans, over the years they've done some great work for clients like Gatorade. Not nobodies. Launched FreshDirect in New York. It wasn't just car dealerships and plaintiffs attorneys. In fact, those are the two categories we won't work in. They really grew into a creative powerhouse when I was exposed to them in the late '90s and met the founders. At the time, I was in San Francisco. I'm from New Orleans, but I was working out there for years and was loving that, and every day being the dumbest guy in the room and just trying to stay on my toes and not get discovered. But then when I came back to New Orleans, I got reintroduced to Trumpet. The idea at the time was they had amazing creative, but really not a strong, or as strong as it could've been, strategic underpinning. So I joined, maybe narcissistically, thinking that there was an opportunity to bring some strategic scaffolding together with the creative superiority they were wielding. It took a while to be heard and understand it and figure out how our personalities were going to coalesce, but getting into about the last four or five years here, we were on a clip, winning advertising agency accounts like an advertising agency does, talking about case studies and making result promises and case studies that are completely non-verifiable. But we didn't really have a perspective that made us different. We were frankly commoditizing ourselves with all of the other agencies that are able to execute, come up with ideas and get them into the market. But the development of this perspective – and not only adding the brand consulting mindset, if not the brand consulting scope to our scopes of work with clients, but that shift of perspective to, how do we stop lying? How do we stop running ads that test well and analytically prove in the near term that they work better than the old stuff? How do we let advertising be not a short-term tool, but really have a long-term impact? And how do we stop talking about things like brand ads as unmeasurable? How do we start talking about brand ads as being really the only promise we're making? Advertising, when it's seen as a trigger or stimulus for sales, if that's how you see it, that's what it's going to be. That has become the most ignorable stuff in a consumer's day to day, when they're seeing on average 3,600 ads a day in different format. And we're calling three from the day prior. There's a ton of waste. Advertising agencies say, "Yeah, but the waste is so cheap, you can afford it." But when you look at advertising as truly an invitation to participate in a culture of a company – even when you're promoting, even when you're doing something of a more retail nature, but definitely when you're doing it in a brand sense – you have to be making plain and clear what experience you're going to have if you were to engage with this company via a product or social media visit or whatever those things may be, so that that experience can actually validate the promise we made in advertising, because that's when you get the connection that Raj is talking about in Conscious Capitalism. Those are the companies that we don't dread. In fact, those are the companies that we re-purchase from. The Apple phone that costs twice as much as a Samsung is not twice as good. It just costs twice as much, but we don't think twice about it because we have an affinity. We have a preference for that company, and if they tell us we need a watch – I didn't, but many people did go and get one. People don't want an SUV from BMW. They want the ultimate driving machine. They want the connection with BMW, and they just had too many kids. That brand connection being meaningful isn't throwaway, unmeasurable stuff. It's frankly the most important stuff, especially when the organization sees it as an invitation to participate in a culture that is very intentional, because the leadership that's approving the ads is also using the same idea that's easy to capture in ad creative and doing the harder work of trying to figure out how to keep that alive or to program that into the organization itself and into the customer experience itself. ROB: That's definitely a very compelling challenge. I think one part of the journey that's worth underscoring for you is – we're always talking to the challenger, the independent agencies, not the holding companies. But you've got even a different perspective. Those are quite often typically operated by somebody who was there on Day 1. Talk about your own transformation from joining the agency to being the CEO now. SCOTT: There's been a lot of leadership and structural capitulations over the years. Let me start by saying, too, that while we were a small agency in New Orleans – at our biggest, we were under 50. We really enjoy remaining at about that 20-to-25-person range, because we focus primarily on creative and strategy and project management. We do not have PR and social media and media planning and buying under roof. Now, we have media planners, but they're working with external groups in our network to plan and buy media and reconcile and optimize and all that stuff. The reason for that is because every place that we've ever worked, when you have a media department, that media department's mentality is kind of what every client that we win gets. And while it might be appropriate for consumer packaged goods, it might not be right for pharma or a healthcare system. But tough; that's our media director and that's your plan. Not all flowcharts look the same, but they could. That's the risk. We don't think downstream execution is unimportant; we just don't want to subject a client we haven't met yet to a downstream execution philosophy. That's how you wind up becoming a categorical agency, and we're trying to avoid that in order to fully administer the perspective regardless of category. That said, when you see the agency that way, it's not like you have a CEO sitting atop all these profit silos, because the only silos that are at Trumpet are really creative and strategy, and then the execution that comes from our client services division, which is split between project management and relationship management. But regardless, it's not a very complicated business to run. That said, the leaders of these disciplines are really empowered. The distance between CEO and the leaders of the silos is not very distant. But in order for the vision to not be lost in day to day execution, that's really where my focus remains. Right now we're in the process of trying to extract ourselves to the degree that we can from the day to day so that we can focus on the collective vision of the day to day. I say, how do we think a little less about the busyness of the agency and think more about the business of the agency? Not to be cavalier, but clients come and go, but the agency is either going to be defined by our relationships and whether we're right about to get fired or our clients love us, or we're going to have an idea as an agency that clients are going to find valuable or they won't. That's really what we're shifting to: trying to make it very, very clear, inside and out – just like we profess to our clients – let's make Trumpet a place very clearly inside and out that our employees and our clients are all clairvoyant on our value. Because if they want it, we'll be around for a while, and our retention increases and our connection with our employees increases the more transparent and clear we are about what's different about working here and working someplace else. There's no greater commodity than an advertising agency. ROB: It doesn't take a lot of capital to stand up something. SCOTT: Yeah. It takes three people and a client, and sometimes not a client. And sometimes not three people. [laughs] But there's a lot of talk in our industry right now about purpose. This should not be the 75000th purpose podcast because there's plenty of that. What this should be is one of the few that says, what do you do with it once you've got it? If you take it and run it into brand ads that are beautiful but aren't what the company is really rallying around, I think you're frankly doing a disservice. You're probably better off sticking in promotion land. That's been around since the '50s. ROB: Oh yeah, that's a well-trod lane as well. I think what's interesting maybe also is stepping into that CEO role, what are some things you might wish you had done sooner stepping into that seat? SCOTT: Actually, I've thought a lot about this. I mentioned this to you, but there's a difference between showing up to work every day as an account person or a team member or director of a discipline and trying to do the whole. But I think what has happened successfully here, in my personal path and matriculation, is we didn't miss the opportunity to shift from being in the mailroom to being an account guy to being a strategist to now being CEO. It's not like strategy is king now, like the ops guy takes over the CEO role and now ops is king, or the marketing guy takes over the CEO role and marketing is king. We are being disciplined enough to have Trumpet become associated operationally with an idea. There is very intentional alignment between Trumpet as an organization and the products and services that we provide. So those products and services being rendered on behalf of this portfolio of clients does not wholly define Trumpet. There's an idea of Trumpet: how do we make companies more believable? Advertising has a role in that, but advertising is a very narrow solution to that. Brand consulting or internal operational consulting has a role in that, but operational consulting is a narrow solution to the complex problem of how you get the customer experience, separate and apart from the company culture, separate and apart from the communications from that company, aligned with not a product, but a belief. Product innovation: awesome, you need it. But it's a very narrow solution to the satisfaction of that complex problem. There's three legs to that stool. If you put purpose in the center, how do you get the company culture aligned with that purpose? How do you get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose, and how do you get the customer experience aligned with that purpose? That requires very intentional, top-down commitment from the organization, and in our case it requires us challenging those organizations to think that holistically. Advertising agencies typically just exist in that communications third. I think we have a responsibility not to take over the whole, but to understand or to be able to provide a perspective that not only should communications be tied, locked in with the company culture and the customer experience, but all three should really be driven by clairvoyance and purpose. What is the core belief? What would the world lose if this company went out of business? If the answer is a product, then you're a commodity and somebody else can do what you do. But how you bring that product to market and what you stand for more spiritually than practically – you get that right and you will be more successful. Ironically, you will sell more product by talking about what that product is a means to what end. Becoming the CEO of the organization of Trumpet has been a challenge to not just let this be, "Oh my gosh, what clients are we about to lose or which ones do we really want to get?" and more, how do we keep this idea clear and alive internally and externally so that everybody, from our employees to our partners, in whatever executional hallway we partner with networks, and our clients – that idea of Trumpet is alive in all of those conversations? So that you don't get lost in the execution and confuse successful execution and analytical awesomeness with the idea of the company. Because that's not the idea of a company. That's the commodity part of advertising agencies. None of us should be bad at creative, buying and measuring and optimizing media and reporting on results. We should all be good at that. But that's all short term. What's the long term? Long term comes from brand, and not the unmeasurable ads. ROB: Right, and it's at a fractal level. Most individuals don't want to just buy and sell ads and measure them, and most organizations would be better not to. There's an alignment from client to organization to person that is going to put off some people who want to go in a different vision, but at least you're not adrift without direction and just commodity all the way down. SCOTT: And look at what the industry has done relative to that mentality. It's why agencies have been complaining for years that they're being marginalized. I don't lament marginalization. I think frankly, our industry deserved it. We allowed ourselves to be commoditized. The media commission structure lived on way too long and was disproportionately beneficial to agencies a long time ago, and has just been eroding and eroding and eroding over time. Now bring in the democratization of media buying and content development and clients can internalize a lot of this stuff. That democratization of the ability to execute elements of communications through self-serve platforms, and you don't need IPG anymore to run national broadcasts. Ironically, the democratization of the ability to participate in advertising, from a local one-off car dealership to a global superpower, is moving businesses farther away from a focus on purpose. They're like, "Man, this advertising thing is something we can just do. Let's internalize it. Let's run this with greater control." What winds up happening is that the distance, the separation, the space between consumers and companies is widening because there's just less and less focus on companies being clear about what they stand for. They're providing consumers fewer and fewer opportunities to have a referendum on whether or not they like them, so products get commoditized. You'd better lower your expenses if you hope for net profit. ROB: Thank you for all that, Scott. When people want to find you and connect with you and with Trumpet, where should they go to find you? SCOTT: The internet is an awesome place, so you can google Trumpet. If you just scroll past the instruments for sale, you'll find us. But we're not hard to find. We're in downtown New Orleans now. We love our hometown, but we just as much love airports. We do not restrict our client base to here or really even the region. Have perspective, will travel. We're really just looking for those types of companies that are interested in holistic alignment, if not holistic transformation from where they were to a much more intentional place of where they want to be headed, and then right size our relationship to what makes sense for the individual company. ROB: That is excellent. Scott Couvillon from Trumpet Advertising, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing the transformation of your firm and thoughts on how we can all be transformational individually, organizationally, and brand-wise. Thank you so much. SCOTT: Thanks for the time. Love what you're doing. ROB: Be well. Thank you. 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.

Mary Patrick is CEO and Managing Partner at Jasculca Terman (JT) Strategic Communications, a 40-year-old public affairs firm that provides issue education and crisis management and builds support for its clients' controversial legislative, regulatory, and public policy issues. Over the past few years, crisis management has been close to 50% of the firm's business. "Topping the list" over this past year were Covid and social issues, but the agency's scope is broad: workforce and labor issues, leadership misconduct, immigration, environment, non-Covid healthcare, protest and rally management, and contentious leadership changes . . . anything where there is controversy or two or more sides to a story. Organizations might engage JT at any time – when they want to plan ahead to avert potential problems, when they know something is coming and want to put the key pieces in place to manage it, or . . . when the news chopper is overhead and news media are banging on the door. Mary believes storytelling is the most important tool in JT's arsenal. She advises organizations to be the first to tell their stories. Even if news is "bad," being first to talk about it provides the opportunity to better define your narrative, bring forth your mission, present your position, and paint the picture, making it "resonant and memorable." Story "examples" showing the human-interest side of an issue are most compelling. "People remember how an issue impacts a person or a family, or I guess even the world," she says. JT comes with a full toolbox and creates for its clients a lot of videos (some even award-winning), infographics, animations, social posts on all platforms, vignettes, testimonials. and talking points. Stories are also communicated directly in person, through Zoom, and in written material. The firm's major events division brings people together with turnkey, end-to-end solutions – from booking venues and speakers, planning breakout sessions, and providing all levels of seamless, onsite technical support. Covid and "going virtual" meant the firm had to add an additional technological layer. Does the client need their event to be interactive? How will people raise a hand, ask a question, put things in the chat? What needs to be done to keep "zoomed out" audiences interested and engaged? The most challenging PR question? What can an organization do when things have gone catastrophically bad and the story has gotten really big? Who should the organization contact directly to help people understand its perspective, its point of view, the scope of the issue, and what the organization is doing about it? When is "strategic silence" appropriate? Handling this kind of crisis is where JT excels. Mary says there are times when mistakes have been made or things have gone bad for an individual or organization, and the entity (or JT on its behalf) has to own the responsibility, apologize, and tell people what will be done to correct the situation. . . if it wants to rebuild trust and credibility. "You can never say that it'll never happen again," Mary warns. Mary can be reached on the Jasculca Terman website at JTPR.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mary Patrick, who is the CEO and Managing Partner at Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. MARY: Thanks, Rob. ROB: It's good to have you here. Why don't you start off with a little bit of an introduction of Jasculca Terman and the focus of the firm? Where do you all excel? MARY: Sure. Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications – and we'll make it easy for everybody; we typically call ourselves JT – JT was founded by Rick Jasculca and Jim Terman 40 years ago this year. We're a public affairs firm, which means we focus on issues like legislative, regulatory, public policy, areas where there might be controversy or two sides. We do a lot of educating around issues, and we do a lot of crisis management work. I would say over the last few years, crisis management has been at least 50%, maybe more, of our business. ROB: Wow. MARY: Big picture, to describe us, I would say what our superpower is, what we're great at, is storytelling. That's how we look at the world. Storytelling in all its forms and all its situations. You can imagine, for instance, over the last year, if we are doing a lot of crisis management work, we've been working on COVID in all its iterations. We've had a lot of social justice issues that our clients are managing and trying to communicate around. Those currently top the list, but we have several crisis projects that don't touch either of those issues – things like workforce and labor issues, maybe misconduct by a leader. We've done a lot of work in the immigration space, in the environment, in other aspects of healthcare besides COVID. We've helped people handle protests and rallies and controversial leadership changes and a whole lot more. But storytelling is really where we excel, and we look at it, honestly, as defining the narrative on your terms. It's about bringing your mission, your position to life and really painting a picture, making it resonant and memorable. And we think examples really make a difference, especially the human interest side of an issue or what you're trying to do. Those are the most compelling. Those are the most connecting. Those are the things people remember: how an issue impacts a person or a family, or I guess even the world. And we tell those stories through a variety of vehicles. We have an in-house creative director and video producer, so we produce a lot of videos – some even award-winning. We use infographics and animations. We do social posts on all different platforms. We create vignettes and testimonials and talking points. We have a major events division, and we see that as a really important companion in terms of our public affairs work bringing people together. And of course, that has pivoted to also doing actually quite a few virtual events in the last year and a half. The other way we tell stories is directly in person or through Zoom, and of course, with the written word. We obviously put a lot of stock in what we write and those kinds of materials. ROB: Dig in a little bit on – during normal times, and maybe coming up, what does an event that you're involved in, that JT puts on, look like? What's an example or a big picture, at least, of who it's for, who comes to it, that kind of thing? MARY: We're working on a major event right now for a major not-for-profit that focuses on women's issues. They've done this for years in person, and it draws 2,000 people. The issues around missing that level of networking and how we bring that back through a virtual lens – they have a major speaker who I can't share yet, but they have a major speaker who we will bring in via satellite. There will be breakout rooms so people can have a little bit of that experience of networking with each other. We helped them produce some video vignettes around the women who have received grants through this organization for the amazing work they're doing in a variety of spaces. We'll package that all – our team works with a variety of platforms, depending on a client's needs. Do we need an event to be interactive? Are there places where people will be able to raise a hand, ask a question, put things in the chat? All those aspects are considered as we pull these things together. And what we've discovered in the many events that we've been doing over the last 16 months during COVID is that interaction is important. Visuals are important. Getting a lot of variety, so you've got some live components and then you also have some prerecorded components. Making it as interesting as possible for people who are experiencing Zoom fatigue at best. ROB: Got it. It really is turnkey, end-to-end. In normal times you're talking about everything from booking a venue, booking speakers, planning for breakout sessions in reality. It sounds like a turnkey, end-to-end, and very complicated situation. And then to also have to turn around and evolve that online while you're at it. MARY: Exactly. I think it's all about asking the right questions and really thinking about what it is our client is trying to accomplish with an event and managing all the logistics that go into pulling that together seamlessly, smoothly, and mainly, if we do our job right, then you're just troubleshooting the live aspects. And putting the technology into the middle of it in the last 16 months, there's an extra level of holding our breath a little bit. [laughs] But we've got some terrific people in-house who have really pivoted very well, and our event business is as strong as it's ever been, which has been in some respects a surprise to me. ROB: I'm sure when we dig into the crisis side a little bit, that seems like every day could be a fresh and new surprise and an opportunity to jump in. What does the life cycle of a crisis look like for you? MARY: Everyone is different, and people bring you in at different times. We have actually worked with clients who want to plan ahead, which we think is a great idea. That's even before the beginning of a crisis, when a client is thinking about their potential vulnerabilities and what they want to put in place so that they wouldn't have to scramble at the last minute. We've come in at that time. We've come in when someone knows something is coming and they're anticipating it and they want to plan for the real event and put all the key pieces in place. We've been called when the news chopper is overhead or the media is already knocking on the online door, asking the client for comment or pointing out the tough issues. And we've also been called when a client had thought or hoped that they could manage it internally, and a couple days into it they realize that they really could use some outside expertise. There are some wonderful, wonderful organizations, corporations, that have terrific communications staff, but a lot of the communications staff doesn't have crisis experience. So we often work hand in hand with an in-house communications team, helping them manage the crisis with the expertise that we can bring to the table. And it starts with asking all the right questions and thinking about scope and scale and audiences and who we can try to get to, to share your story before things get really big in the media. If things have already gotten big in the media, who do we need to reach out to directly to help make sure people understand your perspective, your point of view, the actual scope of the issue, and especially what you're doing about it. There are absolutely times when things have gone bad for someone, or mistakes are made, and you have to step up and own them. You have to step up and apologize for them. If you want to build back trust and credibility, you have to tell people what you're going to do. You can never say that it'll never happen again. ROB: [laughs] Can we highlight that and tell people that? Because some people want you to guarantee it will never happen again. MARY: Right. We're very careful about how we talk about that. But we do help a client put as many things in place to hopefully avoid it happening again. ROB: I think in any firm, there's a potential for conflicts between individual people on the team and the clients. You can imagine a marketing firm where someone's an ethical vegetarian; they have to market for a hamburger chain. These things happen. But here in your world, where you're talking about things where, as you say, stuff is out in the media, it seems to an extent unavoidable that your team and you – bringing your whole self to work – will have feelings about a topic that might be in tension with a client. How do you think about that / handle that? Does it impact who gets work on what client? MARY: Generally, I think everyone who works at JT believes in this idea that everyone should have a chance to tell their story. JT is 40 years old; I've been there for 36 of those 40 years, and in those 36 years, I've only been part of probably two experiences – and it wasn't even me – where we were working on issues that people either had a strong feeling that they could not represent a client as well, or they'd had a personal experience that made them feel they could not tell the story for the client just based on what the client was dealing with. But that's two experiences in 36 years. ROB: It resonates with the similar role of – not to say that someone's charged with a crime, but the defense attorney and the public defender. There is a right to being represented fairly and accurately. You did reference – I think it's interesting – that you've been with the firm 36 out of the 40 years. It's notable that you are not Jasculca or Terman, but you are the CEO and managing partner. How did you come to be involved? And how did you end up in charge? MARY: When I got out of college – I studied PR and communications at Miami University, and I thought as I was studying it that what I really wanted to do is agency work. I sort of thought that was the only path. Literally maybe a month before I got out of school, I went to some presentation or lecture where someone was talking about not-for-profit PR. It opened my eyes. I started to realize that agencies aren't the only place to practice; there are people who do PR for hospitals, for universities, for not-for-profits. I decided that what really interested me was the not-for-profit side. So when I moved to Chicago – and this will tell you how very, very old I am – I literally went to the library to look up all the not-for-profits that had headquarters in Chicago. I sent them my letters and I pitched them and called them, and my first job was with the American Red Cross in their Midwest chapter downtown. In my first year of being there as the Public Affairs Blood Services Specialist, the AIDS crisis hit. You can imagine what sort of baptism by fire that was for a 23-year-old fresh out of college, dealing suddenly with the safety and sanctity of the volunteer blood supply as it related to AIDS. I ended up doing lots of interviews and essentially learning, by being in it, how a crisis works. Our job was to keep people continuing to voluntarily donate their blood, because it very, very, very much matters in terms of the health of the world. And people were afraid. AIDS was so linked to needles and so linked to blood. So that was my first taste of this issues management piece, and I really found that I liked it a lot. So when I was thinking about a next step, I looked at agencies that were smaller and that might have some sort of political or cause-related path. I honestly, truly lucked into JT in its – I guess it wouldn't be infancy. In its toddlership. It was four years old. It was smaller then. I really got the ability to grow and then eventually help shape the agency over the years. And I think what keeps people there – I'm not the only one with such longevity. We have a number of people at our firm that have been there for 20 years or more. And its' honestly because of two major things. One is the people at JT, who are incredible and brilliant and strategic and passionate and compassionate. I think that's what really makes the firm. And secondly the variety of issues. As you said, sometimes you don't know what you're doing day to day. That's been 36 years for me. I mean, I think I know some days, but there's going to be a twist or a turn, or there's going to be something that comes up, a new issue to manage or a new way that someone has impacted what you're working on, and you need to address it. That variety, that adrenaline, and the people are what keeps us there. ROB: What did that transition look like from the original partners to – it seems like they're probably less involved now than they were initially. How did that manifest itself? MARY: Interestingly, that's not true. Most people assume that, and in fact, when my announcement went out when I became the CEO, we made sure that front and center, people knew that Rick and Jim weren't going anywhere, not even partially. They remain heavily, integrally involved. I've had a lot of people outside of the firm say, "Oh my God, don't you wish you could get those guys out of there?" And I don't wish that at all. They're fantastic and smart and supportive, and have been very, very good to me in terms of letting me lead and stepping back from those issues, but still with a great passion and drive to do the work. It's been a really wonderful experience for me. I've worked at every level of the firm, and as – the partners would probably kill me for saying this, but once they turned 70, they really felt like they needed to take a look at what was next and how the firm should be led going forward. So I've been the CEO and managing partner for a little over three years. ROB: That is excellent. Thank you for clarifying. Congratulations. It reminds me, actually, in some ways of an agency I know of in Atlanta called Nebo. These two guys started it together, and they had someone who came up through the business, and they put this awesome woman in charge as their president even though she didn't start the thing. I think they have benefitted from it, probably much as you have. And not for nothing, I think it has also really helped their entire organization to feel like they have a little bit more balanced leadership and it's not just two guys running the show. There's a woman in power all the way up to the top. MARY: I think that's true, and I think both J and T have always been very supportive of growing people internally. And again, that's why people stay as long as they have. I can't honestly think of a time in the recent past where we brought someone in at a high level. Our high level people are homegrown. And even when we're hiring an AE, it usually comes from our intern pool. When we're adding to the team, it's usually folks that have done some work with us. In the past, one of our more recent hires was an intern with us, went off and did something else for a couple years, and came back. We didn't have a job for her at the time when her internship was completed, but when we did, there she was. It's that training and that passion and, again, working with a group of people that really support each other and have the clients' best interest at heart. ROB: Got it. Mary, as you reflect on that journey, your past few years particularly in charge, but certainly all along the way, I'm sure it's been a journey of growth. What are some things you have learned in leading JT – some lessons you might've done differently if you were starting over today? MARY: I've given that a little bit of thought. There's so many things I've learned over the years – mainly, again, from my wonderful colleagues at JT, and often from clients and the issues that they entrust to us. Frankly, I say this all the time, but I actually mean it. It's true and authentic that I'm still learning every day, because the issues we manage and the crises we work on really test our skill, can often surprise you and can certainly stretch those strategic muscles. Obviously, over the years, social media has really changed the practice, often for the better but sometimes not so much. We're dealing with lots of issues right now that start in social media, and it's misinformation. In the past, you didn't have that as much because news was supposed to be vetted. People had a news cycle to confirm or test information. Those are newer and different challenges. The shrinking traditional newsrooms play a big role in how we approach media. The whole "it bleeds, it leads" mentality and "the first to get the scandal out there" has made our jobs different and more difficult. I guess one very key learning which is fundamental – I hope I grasped it from the beginning, but I may not have – is this idea of telling your story first. Even if it's bad. Your ability to shape and control the narrative is very important. So whenever you can, as much as you can, playing offense rather than defense is important. Another tried and true colloquialism around the office is that trouble fills a vacuum. We've learned and we've seen with our clients that if they put their head down and pretend something's not there, then someone else is going to define the story for them, and it's not going to be, generally, the way you want it to be. So again, getting out there first and defining things. And then a mistake that I feel like I made that I learned a lot from, and I thus far have not made it again – I worked on a project once where I never met the CEO, who was ultimately going to be the main speaker at a press conference that we were pulling together. Then the press conference that we had planned got overrun by protestors. It was a fairly controversial issue that was going to be shared. The mayor of Chicago at the time was going to be part of our press conference, and these protestors really took over at our venue. When that happened, I had no credibility with the leader because honestly, I'd never met her. So in a time of great turmoil and when there was a need for a lot of debate and conversation and decisions, she didn't trust me because she didn't know me. I mean, how could she, right? And so I vowed that I would never let that happen again, and it hasn't. ROB: That's such a good point, too: the value of relationship with clients, the value of investing, the value of having that connection. You do highlight something that plays very much also into the future of PR and marketing as well. I think it used to be, to an extent – and you know better than I do – most controversies that got any legs had some degree of substance to them. It almost seems like now, there are secret rooms on the internet where people just make up stuff for fun and see what sticks. Do you feel like that's an actual trend? Is that something you think is growing or shrinking, or is maybe overblown? MARY: Oh, absolutely. I don't know how to judge these back room making-up-things, but I will say that we have managed a number of issues that started with literally completely false information. Just completely false. And because it struck a chord or because people wanted to believe it or something, or God help you, goes viral, it puts a company or an organization or a person in a very, very difficult place. We're often balancing issues of you don't want to give something credibility by having your organization enter into the social media fray, but how far does it go before you have to do something? We actually call it strategic silence. Often, we're going back and forth with boards of an organization, for instance, who are like, "Oh my gosh, why are we not fixing this? Why are we not correcting this?" But you can actually elevate an issue by engaging. So we have to make sure that people understand, no, we're not ignoring it. No, it's not that we don't see it. We're actually making a decision to be strategically silent – to a point. A lot of times in those instances, we try to really think about, who are the audiences that matter most to you? Let's make sure they know the real story. ROB: What a tricky, tricky balance. Mary, when people want to get in touch with you and with JT PR, where should they find you? MARY: Well, you practically almost said it. JTPR.com is our website, and that's where you can learn more about JT and you can see case studies and clients and videos that we've produced and meet the team that makes up Jasculca Terman. ROB: Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Mary, for sharing your expertise, sharing your journey. You have really been a long hauler in building this firm up, and I congratulate you on everything that you've accomplished together. MARY: Thanks so much, Rob. I appreciate it. ROB: All right. Be well. Thanks, Mary. 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.

Bill Durrant is President at Exverus Media, a paid-media agency (TV ads, print advertising, sponsorships, and other types of media) that serves culture-creating, growth-stage brands. The agency's focus is not so much on big-budget, long-term brand building as it is on consulting with clients and recommending "how best to invest" to produce significant, trackable and measurable short- to medium-term results. Bill says, "all media is performance media" and that it can be very challenging to quickly determine the effectiveness of branding efforts and traditional marketing media. To address this, his agency tries to establish a "performance mindset" and "a structure to capture things that aren't directly trackable." Bill finds it exciting that today's solutions for modeling are "significantly less expensive" than those that were available in the past. He says modeling has been "democratized" – that you can build and launch a model in weeks, update it continuously with sales and investment data, and track performance across a variety of marketing channels. Work that used to be done over a period of months by costly data scientists and analysts can be done now by utilizing a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The agency's name, Exverus, is Latin for "from the truth." In this interview, Bill explains how the name reflects the agency's values and the importance of transparency in how the agency conducts business, manages its clients' finances, and builds, over time, trust-based and truth-based client relationships. In a typical engagement, the agency consults with growing-brand clients and follows a step-by-step process that involves: understanding at a deep level client needs and stakeholder goals curating campaigns rooted in science and best practices incorporating customized measurement solutions that prove campaign impact even when immediate, vendor-driven measurements aren't immediately available. The agency's "roots" are in a consumer-facing infrastructure. Over the past year, B2B clients have increased as brands "tired of being bland" seek to get more involved in being "adjacent to culture, creating culture, or participating in culture" in order to increase their visibility and cultural involvement. Bill can be reached on his agency's website at: www.exverus.com or on Linkedin at Bill Durrant (with two "R's.") To make it easier to find him, add "Exverus." Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Bill Durrant, President at Exverus Media based in Los Angeles, California. Welcome to the podcast, Bill. BILL: Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me. ROB: I'm excellent, and it's good to have you here. Why don't you start off, Bill, by telling us about Exverus and what the firm's superpowers are? BILL: Yeah, we do like to think of ourselves as superheroes every now and again. The first question we always get is "What does Exverus mean?", so I'll start there. Exverus means "from the truth" in Latin. I think that as a paid media agency, which is our area of expertise, that can extend to things as rational as transparency in how we do our business and how we manage our finances for our clients to really the crux and the core of how the agency has been able to thrive over the past several years, which is trust-based and truth-based relationships with clients, building that over time. As we think about the mission for the agency and what the agency stands for, it's right there in the name. As I mentioned, we are a paid media agency. We like to think of ourselves as the paid media agency for culture-creating, growth-stage brands. I guess that's really where our superpower comes in. Our superpower is growing culture-creating brands that don't necessarily have the eight and nine figure budgets to invest in paid media and need their dollars to work harder. That's not only what we've found we're best at, but it's also what we've found gives us the most personal fulfillment as an agency team and as a leadership team within the agency. So it's something that's really easy to stick to, and that's something that we're very proud of as well. ROB: Does that pull a little bit more then towards consumer? Or do you also see some B2B brands you would also dub as culture-creating in their own way? BILL: It's funny; we've been having more interesting conversations with B2B brands probably over the last year. So it does extend to that space, even if it certainly has its heart, and certainly our roots, in more of a consumer-facing type of communications infrastructure. But yes, it's really interesting to see how B2B brands are now saying, "The idea of being adjacent to culture, creating culture, or participating in culture is to help stand out, to help gain association and equity from existing cultural platforms; why does that necessarily exclude us? Why does everything that we do need to be so bland, so to speak?" It's been really fun having those conversations. ROB: You mentioned a judiciousness required around the resources. Is it possible maybe for you to dive down into a client or two and share what it looks like to spend those budgets in a way that really has to deliver in a near- to midterm-way, where they can't just say "We're investing in brand, we're investing in brand"? I assume you're not posting Coke ads for Coca-Cola, right? BILL: We do some work with Coke. We can't say exactly where or how, but we do some work with some of their brands in Atlanta, your hometown. But yes, you're right; it's not about having that long-term branding campaign that's on a very long leash from organizations that are used to having the discipline and the budgets, frankly, to be able to support that and not stress about what their investment's immediate return was. That's a constant conversation that we're having with our brand partners, and helping them understand how best to invest. As we think about that, there are two axioms that we like to share with our clients. Number one is "all media is performance media." Whether it's something that feels like a longer term-ish, traditional branding campaign, there is still a performance that's being associated with that. There is still a short-term lens that is almost always associated with that. So we want to make sure we're understanding that to satisfy and appease the stakeholders in their organization who are looking for those short-term or more "prove it to me" type results. As we think about what the science tells us, what an analysis of the world's most successful and least successful and average-success brands tells us about how to invest dollars, we know there is a huge economic argument to be made from having that kind of brand-led communications. It really comes down to how you measure it. If you have appropriate measurement in place that can measure things that aren't as immediate as "tell me what the return on ad spend was for my campaign on Amazon," for instance, then you're going to be in solid shape. So what we try to do with our clients is really understand what their needs are, what their stakeholders are looking for, and then curate a campaign that is rooted somewhat in science and in what works best at growing brands, but does that in a way that also has measurement incorporated so they can prove the impact of what they're doing if it's something where that immediate, vendor-driven measurement isn't right away available. That's how we approach that, and it is absolutely central to our conversations with our brand partners. ROB: Does that focus on measurability in any way impact the selection of marketing channels? You mentioned selecting for the measurement and thinking about the measurement of the channel correctly. Is there anything that's completely out from a measurement perspective? BILL: That's kind of the knock on a lot of traditional media, that it's very challenging to measure them in a more immediate way. Really what you're looking at there is you're trying to put a structure in place that can capture things that aren't as directly trackable. That's where you're looking at, what kind of marketing mix model is my organization using? If my organization spends $10-20 million plus on media or on other important marketing channels, I may already have a marketing mix model in place. Let's figure out how we can align with that and ensure the decisions that we're making are able to be picked up by that measurement. But if you're not, then you might say "I need something that can help me understand what the impact was of a TV spot or radio spot or an outdoor ad" – all things that we know work but are really hard to pin down exactly how they worked for me exactly last month. That's where we're looking at more customized measurement solutions, and that's stuff we can provide directly to a client, to one of our brand partners. We're very proud of being able to do that, but it does require some – we'll call it hoop-jumping. I think that the prize is absolutely worth it, because you've now got a more balanced media mix that's proven to be more effective, 100%, in driving a return for the brand. So jumping through those initial hoops around measurement and setting that up is always worth the investment of time and energy and money. ROB: That's such a neat area to pull in on. I do think a lot of marketers, when they hear "media mix modeling," it sounds like a high-class tool. Is there a size of brand or a size of budget where it's more viable? Or is it really just a limitation on thinking and it can start from just one or two channels? BILL: I grew up in my career to some degree working with Nestlé. Nestlé has a number of billion-dollar brands and significantly more nine-figure annual sales brands. Those brands very often had access to marketing mix models, and it did feel like a high-class tool, especially at that time. What we've actually been able to figure out over the last three years is that there are now solutions in place for modeling that are significantly less expensive. They're essentially utilizing what we hear about when we hear about AI and machine learning. They're essentially utilizing machine learning in a very efficient and democratized way where you don't need to have expensive data scientists and data analysts running analyses over the course of months. You can now actually build a model over the course of weeks and then have that model in market and be continuously updating it with sales figures and investment figures across different marketing channels, not just media. The fact that that's now democratized is a huge win for brands who aren't spending $10 million plus in their advertising and marketing efforts. We've actually had success modeling out the impact of a campaign that was in the low six figures for an extremely well-known national client, a Fortune 5 client that was really looking to drill down for one of their subsidiaries and understand what the impact was of their spend so that they could then scale it out further, but didn't know where to scale it. To be able to show this channel versus this channel versus the third channel, and this was the relative impact and this is how they all work together – which is another important element – in a way where they spent five figures to have that analysis and had it done in less than eight weeks is a very powerful example of how that works best. ROB: It certainly seems democratizing not only for the brand, but also on even the agency side, because this sort of tooling sounds like the thing that you had to be in a holding company agency at some point, or a very large brand or house of brands, to even consider having access to. BILL: Yeah, that's exactly right. I grew up in that space, working with Nestlé, working in a large holding company for whom I still have a lot of heart and love, and that was the case. It was also the case back then that you really needed to be in part of one of those infrastructures in order to get strong rates for your brand. That's shifted now as so much of our media inventory has become biddable. The standards around how we negotiate, how we manage media for clients, have changed. It really is a golden age for the small- to medium-sized brand or marketer, the growing marketer or brand, to get into the marketplace and to be a meaningful player from Day 1 and not feel like you're being outgunned by these massive organizations. It's very exciting for us. ROB: Indeed. Let's pull on that origin story thread for a moment here, Bill. How did you go from that Nestlé, that holding company agency world, and decide to jump off the cliff and start Exverus? BILL: This is always an interesting question to answer because there was no real one point where it all happened, which is usually the case for most agencies. It happened very organically. I had decided to shift from going full-time, working in one space, to freelancing and to working as a consultant, maybe 10 years ago. As I was doing that, within about three or four months of doing that, I got a phone call from one of my favorite people on Earth, a client of mine from Nestlé, who said, "Hey, I'm over at Clif Bar now. We're really shaping up how we look at media and advertising across our brands. Would you be interested in taking a stab at essentially being a one-person media agency for Clif Bar?" Of course, in my mind I was thinking "there's no possible way I could do that," and my mouth was somehow saying, "Yes, I'll give it a shot." [laughs] That began a really wonderful relationship with Clif Bar, and that relationship grew as their investments grew and their need to grow new brands and new product formats grew. Between them and Creative Artist Agency (CAA) and their extremely wonderful, award-winning marketing team, which is now known as Observatory, I think they hit a point where the amount of work was too much for one person plus a few helpers on the side to handle. We had a lot of built-in credibility, working with an organization that's probably over a billion dollars in sales annually in Clif Bar, and CAA, which is the world's best-known talent agency from a marketing standpoint. Impeccable reputation. So there was a lot of built-in credibility. There was new demand. We just made the decision – I still remember my Head of Operations saying, "We have to go for it," driving to a soccer match one Wednesday night. And thus Exverus was born. We said "we're really going to give this a go" about five and a half years ago now. ROB: Wow. Congrats. A lot of companies don't even make it that far. You've got a team around you now, and it feels probably pretty real. I think the timing that a firm starts always confers some advantages and disadvantages. Your firm started around I guess 2012-2014, depending on where you are in that slow-motion window that you referred to; in performance marketing, that's an interesting time within the evolution of the different channels. How do you think that timing informed how you attacked the market? BILL: It did a few things. At a macroeconomic level, I think unfortunately it created a scarcity mindset because we had just gone through a massive crash in 2008. By the time I really started, there was no very clear boom and very clear recovery happening. That was a more recent thing. So there was a bit of a scarcity mindset, which took a long time to work out of and to shift into more that abundance mindset. I think that can keep you conservative, which is a good thing sometimes, in some years. In some years that holds you back. So from a macro standpoint, that's how the timing maybe helped and maybe slowed things down over time. As I think, too, about where the industry was, really from Day 1, it reaffirmed that even though it was much more straightforward to start a media agency and to focus on digital channels – there was much more access; it was a much more equitable system with a lot less in the way in terms of gatekeepers like there are with some traditional media – even though it was a little bit more challenging to have those other mediums in place, being media-neutral and being able to offer all media, even if we were still digital-first, was a really smart strategic decision. As the rise of performance media has come in, and now for many organizations performance media has overtaken brand media by multiple times over – knowing that that trend was happening and having a strategy and a perspective of neutrality really helped us a lot. It helped us to build more trust-based relationships with our clients because we weren't trying to push them into the latest fad or the latest channel or the latest tactic for its own sake. We were always trying to do that based off of what was best for their business, what was best to grow their brand. That helps build trust rather than saying "We're focused in this particular area which is hot right now." So I think that can be great to be a particular specialist, even within the specialty of paid media, but I think that our timing really reaffirmed our strategy and our approach to market, and it's one that's seen us continue to grow and be successful into and beyond 2021. ROB: For sure. It's an interesting time. You got to start past the social for the sake of social, social as the source of infinite free growth, but also social as the bucket of infinite budget without accountability. It's interesting you mentioned the gatekeepers. It's almost easy to forget the times when if you wanted to manage let's say your Facebook ads, there were only a handful of companies you could talk to about that. BILL: That's right. ROB: That's a whole different world. BILL: And to see how much – at one point I was doing the Facebook ads, 9 or 10 years ago, and it was exhausting keeping up with the changes. Every three months, something minor would change that you used daily, and every six months it seemed like they were completely renovating and revamping the entire process. It was so funny to see that TV couldn't change fast enough, print certainly couldn't change fast enough, and here you had social and other channels that were changing so fast that it was almost impossible to keep up with them. It was certainly an interesting time to start things up. ROB: A friend of mine used to work for one of those vendors. They had to keep up with all the changes, and they used to call every Tuesday "new bug Tuesday," because there would be something new they had to go out and fix. You probably had to deal with the other end of that stick. BILL: That's right. ROB: Bill, as you reflect on the journey so far with Exverus, what are some lessons you've learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting clean, from scratch? BILL: Things that I would do differently. I think that we were never slow to meet our clients' needs, but we were sometimes slow to say, "This is a macro trend and we should have a whole staff around it." One of the examples is more performance-based media. The reason I say that is because we have plenty of team members, particularly today, who are world-class experts in performance, but a few years ago we kind of missed the boat a little bit because we thought that by satisfying our clients' immediate needs and performance, we were doing our jobs. What I missed was that this was a strategic exercise. There needed to be a strategic team of people that were focused in the performance space. One of the reasons why was that it wasn't that they needed to have a particular technical skillset; in many cases we're talking about the same media channels that can be used for very different purposes, like search, like social, like digital video and digital display. But what we were doing was missing the mindset. Those folks who really excel in performance have a completely different mindset and approach to how they manage media and how they manage client relationships to get to specific results. There's plenty of reasons for that, which all make sense. But missing that mindset was number one in terms of what we could've done better, going back probably 3-5 years ago. The other thing, too, is I think really understanding the business and the business side of being an agency leader. The ups and downs are not communicated to you when you are working at an agency in a way that's terribly transparent, or frankly often necessary. You're usually hearing the very big undulations of the waves. "Things are amazing. We won this huge account" or "Things aren't great and we need to have layoffs." Those are the types of things you're hearing. What you don't realize is that as an agency owner, things are up and down on an hourly basis, some days on a quarter-hourly basis. There is a mindset and there is a psychological helmet that you need to put on to be able to manage that in the context of doing all of the wonderful work that your clients are contracting you to do. I think that is one thing that I certainly didn't know about, and that's something that lives alongside what all business owners learn, which is that you're responsible now for every element of the business. I was ready to do the accounting. That's easy. [laughs] I went to an accounting school for college. But it was the psychological aspect of being in our business and being comfortable with the way that our business works that, if you're someone without a very risk-tolerant mindset, might be a bit jarring. ROB: How do you process that over time? I know certainly initially, a lot of your team, you feel like you can't tell them a lot of the gusts. Sometimes they'll surprise you and they'll have a great solution, and sometimes they won't know what the heck to do and you might just freak them out a little bit. How do you think about processing, learning some of these blind spots, those shifts that we all have to make? BILL: That's a great question. From my standpoint, we try to be as transparent as possible with our team. Today we actually just had our quarterly state of the union. This time we didn't go into as much detail as normal, but we try to be transparent. "This is what's going on. This is where we're struggling. We're struggling to fill this particular role. Do you have any solutions? Do you think you might be able to help? Or if nothing else, please know that we're working on it still, because we know that's had an impact on some people's workloads." We'll be very forthright with everything that we can. Without being obligated to or sharing specific numbers financially, we will share where we are in terms of reaching our goals and what it means to reach our goals. Is it just profit for the sake of profit? Or does profit open up new doors and new opportunities to all of us for strategic partnerships? That's a very different conversation, and it's one that I think our team appreciates hearing. One great piece of advice that I got during COVID was actually from Simon Sinek, Start with Why, very famous guy. Incredibly intelligent. Everyone knows his public persona. He's a family friend; he's been good friends with my wife for over a decade. We were chatting about there are certain things that we just don't know what to do and how to move forward in COVID, and he said, "Put it on your team. Share it with your team. Do that in a thoughtful way and say, 'I don't know the answer to this. I'm not going to pretend that I'm the person who has all the answers all the time, and I'd love to hear what your input is and what your feedback or solutions are.' You'll be surprised as to what you get back. Your team isn't necessarily thinking about your business all day long, but they are working in it, and they are people that you hire specifically for their intelligence. So see if that helps." And it really did. I also think it made for more open dialogue, which in today's age of transparency is really valued by employees and by myself and the rest of the leadership team. ROB: All such really good points in there. Reminds me of a very recent experience where for a long time, I had been suggesting a certain sort of client engagement model. I tried to communicate why, but I maybe wasn't really getting my point across. In a totally different conversation, I expressed a particular business goal in terms of margin – and to your point about profit margin, the key of telling people where that goes and what that gets us when you're growing – you need cash just to be in cash reserves. You need to have good financial cushion on the business. You need to invest in growth. You need all those things. Helping them know why you need profit helps instead of just thinking you should break even and everybody should take all the cash out. But I shared a particular goal in terms of profit margin, and I had somebody super brilliant on my team who said, "Oh, why don't we engage more in this model?" It was exactly pretty close to what I had suggested before, but without the full picture and the rationale and the transparency, it was just hanging empty. And everybody does things better when they think it's their idea, and that's okay. I don't have any problem with that. So really good point. BILL: From your standpoint, where do you feel the line is in terms of transparency, in terms of how you communicate with team members? ROB: That's a great question that I'm still learning. I have typically been a tremendously private person on these sorts of things, and over the past year I engaged with a business coach about a year ago who came recommended by people who have billion-dollar companies. That was good enough for me, and I could still afford them. He's just continued to push me on the value of what I'll get by sharing more with the team. Where that stands for us right now, to be real specific about it, at an exec team level, we're talking about – in a services organization, on our services side, we're talking about revenue per employee. We're talking about target profit margin. We're talking about what that actually looks like. And that's uncomfortable for me. I could regret it. I could learn something from it. But it's going in the right direction. BILL: That's great. I think we've probably had a very similar experience. I may not dig into some of the KPIs that you do quite as in-depth, but sharing that information can be liberating when it's done properly, and it can show a lot of faith in the team. For me it was a great learning experience, and it was a great moment of growth starting to share that information. ROB: I'm glad to hear and gain some comfort. The worst story we ever had on here about somebody sharing stuff was someone who had an employee suck out $300,000 in payroll taxes that they were personally liable for, and they had to drive ahead and build the business and dig their way out. But that's a different lesson to be learned. BILL: Yes, and I don't necessarily think we should be giving access to the finances to everyone. [laughs] ROB: Totally agree. Bill, when people want to track you down and track down Exverus, where should they go to find you? BILL: Probably the best place for Exverus is our website. It's www.exverus.com. For me, I can be found on LinkedIn. I'm Bill Durrant with two R's. No relation to Kevin. I'm pretty easy to track down if you add "Exverus" to the end of that in the search queue. ROB: That's good. It's good to know we can't track down KD through you. We'll have to find our own way. BILL: Just want to set expectations. ROB: [laughs] Thank you so much, Bill. Congratulations to everything you and Exverus have accomplished so far, and I wish you the best. BILL: Appreciate it. Thanks, Rob. ROB: Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

1984. Maybe '85. Take a 26-year-old art director who loves her work. Put her in a big agency where she is surrounded by middle-aged white guys. Strangle the agency's creative work with politics and bureaucratic overhead. Ask a simple question, "How long can this last?" Sue Kruskopf's answer? When both the employer's and her futures looked bleak, it was time for change. In 1988, Sue and the copywriter she worked with started KC Truth, with a focus on truth, simplifying the complex, and serving clients by – getting to that core truth about their businesses, stripping away all the B.S., and making the message as simple as possible for target audiences. Sue says, "Simplifying things is always a lot more difficult than complicating things." Her ideal client website is one the communicates what the company does and why they are different from everyone else . . . and does that in the shortest (simplest) way possible, which is both an art and a science. The large companies KC Truth works with have multiple siloed business units. Sue says the way to get to a company's "truth," align the organization and build a strong strategy is to get everybody in the same room and listen to what they all say. When all the various departments – marketing, sales, engineering, researchers – see their part in creating the truth, they become invested in the collective work that follows. After that, Sue believes, "Great strategy requires great creative." Maintaining the creative resources of a world-class agency is critical to KC Truth's work with such big, complex clients as Cargill, 3M, and some Minneapolis-based global companies. That might be a challenge. However, KC Truth belongs to a strong network of independent agencies, AMIN, which means they "can collectively buy all the tools we need." Sue says that building strong relationships, hiring the best people, the smartest people (smarter than you are), and treating people as you would want them to treat you are a big part her agency's success. She supports treating clients with respect, "not trying to shove ideas down a clients throat," and "walking hand in hand down the same path together." Sue can be reached on her agency's website at https://kctruth.com/. Transcript Below: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Sue Kruskopf, CEO at KC Truth, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome to the podcast, Sue. SUE: Thank you. Good to be here, Rob. ROB: It's wonderful to have you on. I'm eager for all that you have to share. Why don't you start off by telling us about KC Truth and where the firm excels? SUE: Thank you. First of all, we excel in longevity. We've been around since 1988, which in advertising years is about a million years I think, pretty much, in this day and age. We've always believed at our core, our mission has always been to rid the world of B.S. and get at the core truth that companies stand for. As we all know, in this day and age, truth is more important than ever before. So, I'm glad that we have stuck to our guns and had this in the foundation of our business for over 35 years, since way back in the day. ROB: Truth certainly has a habit of falling in and out of fashion, so the longevity there is certainly admirable. If we can drill down a level, if there is a typical type of client, type of engagement – obviously everyone's a little bit different, but what does a median client, median scope of work look like for you all? SUE: One of the things our clients tell us is we've always been really good at simplifying the complex. I think anybody in our business knows that feeling when a client comes in and you've looked at their website 10 times and can't quite figure out what it is they do exactly, or the word "solutions" is in there too many times or whatever else. We're really, really good at – Truth is all about getting to that core truth about their business and stripping away all the B.S. and getting it down to the simplest thing we can determine based on the audiences we're trying to reach. Typically, we have a lot of big, more complex businesses like Cargill, 3M, a couple global companies that are based here in Minneapolis. I'd say that's our core sweet spot. We've had experience that runs the gamut across all kinds of industries, but at this point that's really where so much of our growth has come. Simplifying things is always a lot more difficult than complicating things, that's for sure. ROB: Absolutely. It's interesting that you mention websites, because of course, that wasn't really a thing when KC Truth started. It strikes me that the website creates a space, whereas in an advertisement of some sort – print or even billboards, etc. – you're kind of limited in what you can say. The website has more room. It has unlimited room, which may be a curse in some cases. But it almost seems like there is a set of truths that you can put onto a website that may encompass everything you're trying to communicate elsewhere. How does that track from the early days of the firm? SUE: Obviously, we started back in those early days when there wasn't any of that. But I come from the creative side of things, and I always felt there was nothing better than a great creative brief that you could really get in and dig into and you understood there was a really strong strategy there. No matter what it was, back in the day we'd always go, if you don't have great strategy, you don't have great creative. That's really been the basis of what we've done for all of these years. I would say even on websites, I still want to go to a website of one of our clients and be able to understand what it is that they do and why they're different from anybody else. I still think that's what people are looking for in the shortest way possible. There's an art and a science to that, that's for sure. ROB: You take a client like 3M or – I don't know if you work with them at all, but Metron – people may have heard the name, but it's a very abstract thing. It's kind of like the myth of the blind men touching the elephant and everyone has a different experience of what that elephant is depending on if you felt the elephant's trunk or tail or leg. It's a different thing. How do you think about taking something like 3M and making it tangible and helping those individual places where it really does touch people's lives make sense rather than just being a house of brands or of chemicals or products? SUE: I think anybody out there in the B2B world knows that in most big companies like Cargill or 3M, there are multiple different business units within each one of these organizations. One of the things that we believe in, and it's part of our foundation and our process, is that finding the truth involves getting people in a room from all different parts of the company. For example, when we work on a product within 3M, we want to get in not only the marketing and sales people, but the engineers, the researchers, the product people, getting everybody in a room to really understand the totality of the business. What's interesting is, especially in this day and age when people are so siloed into their specific disciplines, it's amazing how much alignment comes from getting everybody in a room and hearing what others have to say. That's something that we do and we believe in. You have to hear all sides of things. That helps us create a strong strategy, because everybody has been heard. So when we come back with a strategy, the engineers have played a part in it, besides the marketing people, and the salespeople had a part in it. Everybody sees themselves in it in some way, and that's really the magic of what we do with finding the truth. Everyone has been a part of creating that truth, so they all have a share in the collective work when it comes back. They see themselves in it, and I think that's one of the things that we've found really works. You're not trying to shove ideas down a client's throat or anything like that; you're all walking hand in hand down the same path together. ROB: Right. That's a very meaningful approach and process. If we rewind the clock a little bit, Sue, what led you to start KC Truth in the first place and take that leap? You mentioned coming from a creative background. SUE: Yeah, I was a frustrated art director. I was at a big agency in Minneapolis at 26 years old, and I just didn't dig the politics. The politics and all that got so much in the way of doing the work, for one thing, and it was really frustrating to me. I felt like there were way too many people involved. I think we used the term once that there were a lot of brilliant minds within this organization surrounded by a lead shield. You couldn't get any good ideas out of the company. That was one thing. The second thing was I was 26 years old and all I saw around me were – I hate to say it, but middle-aged white guys. I thought, my goodness. There were no women. This was back in 1984-85, and there were no women that were middle-aged. There was one woman and a few account people, but there certainly weren't any creatives that were older. I thought, "Wow, I don't know if this business is going to have a very long life. I'd better find a way to ensure a long career," because I loved what I did. So my copywriter partner and I – we weren't making any money at the time anyway. I don't even remember, but it was an amount of money that we thought, "All we need is a few more $5,000 projects and we're going to be golden." We literally quit, and we were having a good time doing a bunch of freelance. Brick by brick, things just kept growing. We went out of business a couple times. I'll proudly say that because I think that you learn more from your failures than your successes. We thought the account people could run the business because they were in charge of numbers and we were just going to do creative. Well, that was a false thing to believe. [laughs] All of a sudden we had no money left for rent or anything else, so I figured, "I'd better figure out the business side of this, too." It was just lessons learned all along the way, and I think that's why perseverance and grit are probably at my soul. When you pick yourself up a few times and dust off the ashes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? Next time around. So that's what happened, and we just kept going back at it. Lucky to be here today, that's for sure. ROB: It's quite a dance, that balance not only of personal transformation – which is ongoing – but also, when you look at when you started the business, of repeated reinvention. I mean, there's just been wave after wave after wave of change in the market that, if you didn't adjust to it, you were going to be a dinosaur. SUE: Oh, for sure. ROB: Even in TV advertising. I haven't talked to anybody about this on the podcast – would love to find them – who didn't survive the jump from broadcast to cable, much less websites, much less social, much less video and the ubiquity of video now. How have you navigated the necessary reinvention to keep the firm relevant? SUE: Yeah, how many times have we heard that TV spots are dead and all that? Went through that probably 10 different times throughout the years. I have always tried to stay ahead of the curve in everything. I'm a very curious person. It's one of our values at my company. I always believe you've got to be ahead of the game – and you're right, Rob; that's really what has kept us relevant for so long. Part of that is we belong to a network of independent agencies. There are many networks, I know, like this that agencies belong to. Ours is a really strong one called AMIN. It has helped us because we can collectively buy all the tools we need. Honestly, this is where I really sound like "OK, Boomer," but back in the day, all we had when John and I started out was markers and sketchpads we stole from the art department at the agency. [laughs] Then we had the first Mac, that little shoebox Mac. That was a huge thing going forward. It was so much art back then, and now it's art and science. I still think it's more science sometimes than art. But we've had to stay ahead of the science game now, too. We do have all these data and media tools that really, really help us be accountable for our clients' success. I honestly think if you don't have that as a creative-driven shop, if you're not proving results all the time and constantly measuring and optimizing, then you're not going to be in business, because clients and CMOs more and more are held accountable for that. We have always stayed ahead of the game to make sure that we have the resources of a world-class agency at our fingertips so we can work with big global clients. That's like 35 years in a nutshell, but it really is the truth. I think that's one part of it, and I think a lot of it is you really appreciate how important relationships are and building relationships and all that. That's another huge part of that. And also hiring really good people. I always do what my dad told me, which is "hire people smarter than you." That's what I've always believed in. That and "treat people as you want to be treated yourself." I've always loved that we have a great culture and really good people. That's core to being a good agency. ROB: It's certainly a fear some people have, walking in the door of really any independent business. You might have a bad boss in a big company, but within an independent firm, you could really be exposed to some person's full crazy. What a privilege it is when you can be a good place to work, even for a part of somebody's career, for that season for work. SUE: I totally believe in that. I totally believe in finding not the best skillset, but the best mindset. It's not who they are maybe today, but who I see the potential in the future being from that person. We've had a lot of people stick around because we've let them evolve into the position that they feel most comfortable in. Somebody that started out as an account person decided she was better doing the agency work, and now she's Director of Business Operations for us, for example. So, I always think you have to watch where people excel and where they're finding their passion and their happiness and try to nurture that as much as you can. On the flipside of that, I also think it's about making sure people don't get too comfortable. You always want to make sure that people are continually curious and trying to do better and be better. I think that's another side of the coin, too. ROB: Just to take a snapshot at the moment of where we are right now, if you have a new client, a new total brand messaging package or a new campaign that's pushing out into the world, where are all the places that you are seeing that push into now? Where are you having to manage and have your team ensure that they're aligning that message to each place? What does it look like? SUE: It's crazy the amount of channels that we work in. You name it, from LinkedIn to TikTok. You have to look at every single channel as a place where a message might play, all depending on what's appropriate for that audience. We're like 100% digital right now. I don't even know that we've done anything traditional, which is kind of ironic, in a long time. Video is the new TV, there's no question about it. We don't have one niche or whatever, one type of thing. I would just say what we're good at is being a chameleon; we can adapt to whatever channels those are to reach people. A lot of times with the audiences we work with, it's the long tail. They might be chief technical officers, and how we find them and serve them programmatic media, for example, so we're following them where they live. There's all kinds of things like that. Sometimes it's a channel, sometimes it's following that person to see where they consume media and following them along their journey. There's just so many right now. Believe me, our media people can speak way more on this than I can. [laughs] I had a client say she feels like she's got a firehose pointing at her all the time, trying to figure out what everything is, and I think that's true. I think clients really need help understanding where they're going to spend their money and get the most bang for their buck. There's so many choices out there, and you need somebody that can help you wade through that and find the right audience at the right time, for sure. ROB: I have an unsubstantiated but sneaking suspicion that out-of-home digital billboards are going to be more than they are now. SUE: Interesting. ROB: I don't know if you're seeing anything yet. I know some companies now that are doing – you see online people talk about account-based marketing, like Terminus and all that sort of thing, and people looking at buying billboards near the headquarters of the client they're going after. SUE: Oh yeah, I can totally see it. Especially digital, obviously. That would make a lot of sense. Maybe all the old school will come back in all these new forms, like it sort of seems like it is. Could be, Rob. You predicted it here first. [laughs] ROB: I'm just curious. I may enjoy those sorts of things more than some people. It may just be my own interest there. We're in Atlanta, and MailChimp is of course based here. MailChimp had this habit – they're wonderful people, but they're also tremendously competitive and cutthroat in certain ways. They would paint murals on buildings across from their competitors of nothing more than their little chimp mascot winking. It didn't say MailChimp. It didn't say anything. SUE: That's great. That's a super smart idea, that's for sure. It all comes down to the art, right? Art and science. It's all art, too. That's a brilliant strategy that they have. ROB: Sue, you mentioned earlier some lessons learned. You've certainly survived through probably a number of them. What are some things you have learned along the way of building KC Truth that you might do differently, that you learned from or suggest someone else learns from it? SUE: I can say what I've learned from, which is I don't take no for an answer very well. That's for sure. That's probably my number one thing that I do. I'd say what I've learned is in the early days, just to learn, I used to call up the head of another agency and tell them I really respected them and ask if they'd go to lunch with me or go have coffee with me. I learned so much from listening to them. I didn't know what I was doing. I was an art director trying to start an agency. When I think back on those days, I think, oh my gosh, I gained so much from going to talk to people. I wish I would've kept that up more throughout my life. Now I learn so much from the people that I work with and all that, but I think getting knowledge from other people that are older than me was always really smart. I do think in our business, there's ageism that goes on, in my opinion. There aren't a lot of people that are older in the business as much anymore, and I think they have so much to offer. I would always encourage people to have lunch more often with people with wisdom, because I think you can learn a lot from that. that's one of the things I'd do differently. Also, I wish I would've been a little humbler at the beginning, because I thought I was pretty cool having my own agency at 28. You can only imagine. I just think, God, sometimes I just wasn't very humble. That kind of bugs me now when I think back on it. Humility I think is key in everything. Believe me, I've been slapped down so many times in these years. You've always got to be humble. I think I learned early on, but really practiced it later, hire the best you can at every single level in your company, in every single discipline, and make sure that you aren't being complacent and resting on your laurels ever, ever, ever, because you never can. That is for sure. You can never sit back and go, "I've got it made now." It's like, nope. The minute you do, something's going to come along and slap you upside the face. That's not going to happen. Gosh, I don't know. Those are some things that come to mind when I'm thinking about it right now. ROB: Sure. How do you calibrate, then? There are times to accelerate the business and there are times to not overheat your ambitions of growth. How do you think about calibrating well when you need to chase versus when you need to sit on it? SUE: I know, right? Because we're not a huge company, and I never, ever – every agency has been through layoffs; we've been through very few. I can think of a handful of people we've had to lay off in all these years. Financially, I try to run the company very conservatively. But I'm also making sure that we've never, ever been a sweatshop. I said by the time my kids were six and eight, which was a long time ago, I was going to be home after school with my kids. I've always believed in having that work-life balance. It's walking a fine line, like you said, calibrating, making sure people have lives. I believe that's where you get pure inspiration, from your personal life. You don't get your inspiration from work. You get your inspiration from when you're not working and your brain can wander. It's a very fine dance, honestly, and I wish I had an exact answer for you of how I calibrate. But I have a certain gut feeling about things sometimes. Sometimes I rely on numbers. It's all a combination of touch-and-feel and trying to figure it out, and listening and taking advice. I've got a really good team of people I work with, and I love to discuss things and talk about things. I always rely on other people's opinions. That makes me smarter. Nothing concrete there, Rob. It's just a touch-and-feel, and history. You always learn from what you've done in the past and failed or done well. It's a constant balancing act, like you say. It's balanced by all those different things we just talked about. ROB: I think at the same time, though, you probably have some knowledge. You probably know almost more than you would ever think to give yourself credit for, because you've learned humility over time. If you were talking to someone who's just building, setting up, thinking they're going to grow an agency – you mentioned you can be on the conservative side, but do you have any rules or recommendations for someone to set up financially? Like cash reserves, practice – I don't know. Do you have any guideposts you use that you think someone would do really well to listen to if they were earlier in their journey? SUE: Yeah. I'd start out really small. It takes a lot more money to start an agency today. When it was just – I hate to say it – markers and pens, sketchpads, and the first Mac, that's way cheaper than what you need today. Today, you need more people. The people that are good at analyzing data, media people. You really do need – if you don't have them within your company, you need to have partnerships with outside resources that can help you. Because clients are going to hold you accountable. It's not just about it's a good idea; it's got to work. Ultimately, it has to work. I think the investment in people is the biggest expense today, more than anything else. So I think you do have to have a strong financial base to be able to have the people that can really hit the ground running. I think that's it more than anything else. It's not like it was, where just an art director and a copywriter could come up with some ads and go sell them to somebody. [laughs] That was easy. That was way easier. All the agencies that started back when I did – none of them are around anymore that started at the same time. You've got to have the really smart people or the competition is just too fierce. ROB: Sue, it's a good journey so far. What is next for you and for KC Truth that you're excited about? What should we be looking for? SUE: Oh, my goodness. As you've heard from probably every person you talk to, getting through this past year is like a historical milestone. Now we're all just going through the headlines about the turnover tsunami. We've experienced some of that. Our clients have experienced some of that. That's a place we've never been before, so that's a whole other deal. But I have to say, we had our first in-house meeting at the Truth Bar downstairs at our place with our clients. I think people were genuinely glad to see each other in person again. It felt so natural and so good. I just think we've missed relationships, and I'm looking forward to – that's the hardest thing for me, feeling like I can't build on these relationships with the people I'd like to see and hear what's going on. Now I think we're in for a whole renewal of how important it is to build relationships in our business. Our clients need to trust us and know what we're going to do is going to work, so you need to have a good relationship. And that's where trust comes, out of good relationships. We all need to get back to that basic stuff. Face time not on FaceTime, but face time face-to-face, I think is what's key. I don't believe that as an industry, we can live on Zoom calls all the time. It's just not possible. It's not sustainable. That's what I'd say, Rob. That's where my head is. ROB: Did you have any hesitancy from any of your clients, or were they like caged animals ready to come out and hang? SUE: They had to see if it was okay with their corporate people, to see if they were allowed to. There were a few other hoops, maybe, to get through. But no, not so far. We've only had one, but we're going to be back to work a couple days a week soon. I think people are feeling – they really want to be back, I think. With flexibility and all that sort of thing, it's going to be good times, I think, again. ROB: It's certainly new times. We brought in our team from all over the country – we've been hiring distributed over the past year. We started off wanting to have a team retreat, and then we realized we still had a lot of our clients local, so we invited our clients out to dinner. Everybody wanted to get out. I don't think I had anybody who said, "No, because I'm being cautious." For the most part they either had shots or never wanted one, one or the other, and they were ready to come out and play. Our team was all vaccinated up. SUE: Same. Hands off the handlebars. That's it, for sure. ROB: Wonderful. Sue, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I think we would all aspire to build such an enduring firm that continues to be relevant well after the initial playbook was probably in the trash and burned up. SUE: Oh yes, for sure. You should've seen that first portfolio. That was something, way back in the day. [laughs] ROB: You kind of wish you could frame it somewhere in the office now. SUE: It's frightening, it's frightening. Well, thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate that. Let's just hope we continue to move ahead in that way. ROB: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Sue. SUE: Thank you. Bye. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. 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