The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

John Limotte, Founder and CEO of Mustache Agency, started his career as a film producer making indie and arthouse films. When that business became more difficult (impacted by, among other things, the rise of the internet), John looked for a way to use his skills doing something that looked more like a real business. He saw potential in the field of marketing for "more cinematic . . . epic . . . more longform storytelling." So, he started a very small video production agency and took jobs one by one to see where things would go. Ten years later, Mustache is a creative content agency with client services spread across three lines: integrated campaigns, video production and post-production, and social. The core of the agency's work is content and digital content, with a focus on storytelling and creating epic, engaging video content . . . doing high-quality, cost-effective work. Even from the early days, the agency produced hundreds of videos a month. The client "playlist" includes such "big names" as Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, a lot of tech disruptors, Instacart, Grammarly, and YouTube. When Mustache works with Facebook and Instagram, the agency gets the "inside scoop" on their best practices, new products, what's working on the platform, and how to tailor content for the platform. John says the agency is learning from the platforms "how to hack them," but then admits that the only real hack is creating "really good, sticky content." Working on those platforms has increased the agency's effectiveness and provided the opportunity to work with the digital disruptor brands that heavily advertise on those platforms. John says the key to his agency's success is "hiring good people who are passionate, have expertise, and know what they're doing; keeping the focus on high level storytelling; and demanding that whatever content goes out still moves the needle." He says, "There is no hack. There is no foolproof system." You need to think about who your audience is, you need to think about who you are, and you have to think about what you want them to do and the best way to get them there, and you need to do that . . . through content and storytelling. You still need a hook. You still need to make people laugh. You still need to tell a story, have a journey. Even as the formats and the aspect ratios change, those things remain the same. Mustache has never focused on a single vertical. John sees a lot of upside for his business across a wide variety of verticals. Why? John says industries today are evolving in the direction of increased video content . . . especially since COVID. He sees another upcycle and no end in the demand for and consumption of content. John is best reached on his agency's website at: mustacheagency.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Limotte, Founder and CEO of Mustache Agency based in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. Nice to be here. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Would rather be up in New York, but we can talk about that. Why don't you start off by telling us about Mustache and where the firm excels? JOHN: Sure. Mustache is a creative content agency based in Brooklyn. We essentially offer three lines of services: integrated campaigns, video production and post-production, and social. Our clients are pretty evenly spread across those buckets. But at the core of everything we do is content, video content. We came up as a video production company focused on storytelling and creating epic, engaging video content. Eight or ten years later, depending on when you count the start date, our focus remains the same and it continues to be what we do best. ROB: It seems like you've really had the privilege to work with some clients that others would dream of. How do you make that jump from starting with – I don't know if it's you and a camera or what it looks like, but how do you start punching so heavyweight to work with some of these big names? You can run off whoever you're comfortable talking about. JOHN: Our first client was a plaintiff's law firm in the Bronx, and we were doing some pretty tactical digital marketing and $1,000 videos for him. We dubbed him "the King of the Bronx" and did a lot of man on the street videos of him because he was a true man of the people. From there, it's evolved greatly. These days we're working with everyone from Facebook, Google . . . Netflix is a big client of ours, Amazon, a lot of tech disruptors, Instacart, Grammarly . . . we do a lot of work with YouTube. How we got there is a great question. I wouldn't say that it was any sort of thought-out path. Some of it is just, I think, good fortune. But from the beginning we were focused on content and digital content, storytelling, video storytelling, and just doing that really, really well and cost effectively in a model that was outside the traditional agency model back in say 2012. With that focus, a lot of these companies just found us. We did some viral video campaigns, some YouTube campaign. We were doing some episodic web content that got some attention. In a lot of cases, being in the content business led to the work proliferating because we were creating, even from the early days, hundreds of videos a month. From there, word got out and eventually we found ourselves working with some of these bigger companies. I should say those are not retainer clients; we would be at an entirely different scale. These are all giant organizations that work with tons of companies in different niches and different capacities. So, it's the biggest companies in the world, but sometimes they're just small little campaigns that they hire us for, and we've been really fortunate that they do. One thing I'll add about that, too, is that for us it's created a kind of virtuous cycle. When we're working with Facebook and Instagram and we're talking about best practices, new products, what's working on the platform, and how to tailor content for the platform, we're learning from the platforms themselves how to hack them, really – although the truth is, there's not a lot of hacks except creating really good sticky content. But there are a lot of things you can do that we learn from them, and those make us more effective. I think that led to more work with the digital disruptor brands that are doing most of their advertising on those platforms. ROB: It's interesting because Instagram really has the visibility to look at every video that's made, just about, and decide who they want to work with. It's a pretty high compliment. One thing I want to pull on a little bit is that you mentioned even early on having hundreds of videos in flight at a time. That sounds overwhelming to me. I wonder how you're able to keep track of all of that. I know a bunch of people who have started video agencies, and not many of them that I know have crested that 10-20 person range. So, I wonder if there's some key in how you manage that scale and beyond that has helped you make it over the hump. JOHN: I will say that scaling great creative at good pricing is the bane of our existence. It's a challenge that you never win, in a way. It's never over. There's always the quest to do more and to do it better and to do it more cost effectively. I've never had that feeling of like "Oh, we cracked it. We're good." It's just something that you have to continually be working at. We have a lot of smart people who spend a lot of time thinking on this problem and what kind of systems, what kind of processes. But again, one of my themes is that there's no hack. There's no foolproof system. There's not some proprietary technology that we've developed. At the end, at the core of it is hiring good people who are passionate and have expertise and know what they're doing, keeping the focus on high level storytelling, and demanding that whatever content goes out still moves the needle. People often ask me why we never focus on a particular vertical because we've always moved across verticals. I think for us, the question is easy because our focus has always been content, storytelling – just focused on that. We've built up a lot of expertise around that capability. At the same time, as I said, we're always working on the best workflow, the best system, the best structure. We've done a couple of reorgs over time as we gain new insight. We've also benefited from the fact that it's been organic. It's not like we started Day 1 making 100 videos per client per activation. I think much like the industry itself, it started with a TV 30 and then a couple of cutdowns, and the business has grown from there in terms of iteration and scale. We've had the good fortune of growing – from there it was 10 deliverables and then it was 100. Every client is different. Every circumstance is different. It's not like you need 100 videos or you need 10. But generally speaking, the numbers have gone up, and they've gone up steadily so that we've been able to adapt and adjust as the volume and the needs increase. ROB: I think I have an idea, but for all of us, including me, what is a cutdown? JOHN: Basically just taking a 30-second spot or a 60-second spot, whatever the longer form of the content might be, and cutting it into smaller pieces – 15s, 6s, and so on. ROB: Got it. I think we've all seen that and now we know what to call it. It seems like one key may also be your involvement on the social side. With that as a line of service, it seems like that would give you insights into not just the overall raw performance of the content, but more specifically, you can get into the metrics and look at the performance of the content with the audience it was intended for as well as uncovering unexpected audiences. It seems like that would feed back into strategy. Are the platforms giving you the metrics you need to draw that sort of insight? JOHN: The clients are mostly pretty proprietary in terms of the platforms themselves, but you're able to track in social and digital performance yourself and see how things are working. When we're working with brand clients, often they'll share with us the data and the results, so we're also able to see from that. So yeah, it's been a tremendous feedback loop. In some ways we came into this with a very non-data, very intuitive approach, like "What is an insight that feels resonant? Let's tell a story about that in a way that to us feels compelling and impactful." You never lose that eye towards the content, but then once you start working in social and you start getting more digital execution and getting that information about what's working and what isn't and you start being able to test different things and different hypotheses about content, then you're approaching it from both sides. You're using both your intuitive instincts around content and storytelling and you're able to look at the data. I think that's a pretty powerful one-two punch. ROB: For sure. John, if we rewind a little bit, go back in time even before that plaintiff attorney client, what was it that led you to take this jump and start the firm in the first place? Where did Mustache come from? JOHN: It was born somewhat of desperation, to be honest. I was a film producer back in another life and I was making indie films and arthouse films, the type of things that would go to Sundance and South by Southwest and hopefully find a distributor for it. I loved the business, but it was changing and becoming more difficult. Actually, with the rise of the web, that began to threaten that business in some respects, or at least in the form that I knew it. So, I started thinking about where else I could apply my skills. Is there something that more resembles an actual business? Film has this magical fantasy element to it where you're inspired by a story and you make it and hope that the world loves it. I was certainly drawn to the fact that there is a business that rewards creative and content and needs good stories. Especially at the time, in 2010, it felt like there was a real opportunity for more cinematic and epic storytelling, more longform storytelling. There was some minor identification of an opportunity and a shift. I think it was that combination of me looking for something new, seeing that there might be a place where this thinking might resonate, and then just starting in a very small and taking it job by job way and seeing where it went. ROB: It seems like very good timing. All of these video platforms emerged, and coming from a different perspective, you kind of got to take on being a video agency digital-first, where people probably had more TV experience. It's really interesting timing there, especially as all these video platforms have come around. I think we all know the key video platforms that we talked about and how Twitter has become, to an extent, a video platform, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., and then TikTok is in that conversation as well. Is there anything emerging that maybe is not quite in the mainstream conversation that we need to think about? JOHN: I'll say this. As I think about where the business is going, I feel somewhat stunned by the level of change that I think is upon us and the level of acceleration in technology and platform adaption and adoption. Every industry is moving towards, and evolving very quickly, especially since COVID, in a way that supports and needs more video content. If you think about obviously e-comm and omnichannel thinking around e-comm, if you think about the medical business, healthcare, it's becoming online and more digital. Work from home, IoT, driverless cars are going to need content inside them. I don't have my eye on anything new so much as trends that we've been tracking for a while just exploding, an inflection point on those trends, and the need for content. I think a lot of people think content's had a great run. People have been saying content is king for 15 years now, it's a cliché. But the truth is, I feel like we're ready for another upcycle in the demand for and consumption of content. I just see no end there. So that's our focus. Does that answer the question? It's not exactly something new, but it's what I'm thinking about. ROB: I think so. One thing that strikes me as you get into it is the absolute explosion of different formats and lengths. When you talked about the cutdowns earlier, it used to be a 30-second ad was normal and you knew the aspect ratio. But now you have square, portrait, landscape. Do you want 5, 10, 30 seconds? Are you injecting this ad in the middle of somebody playing a game? Where is this thing going? It seems like that continues to shift. You don't have to worry about Quibi, but you might have had to on ads that had to be able to be rotated to different aspect ratios. JOHN: We had to. Quibi was a big client of ours. [laughs] So yeah, we were very much up in their business and we did social for them. We've been thinking about these things for a while, and I think you're right; it's sometimes overwhelming to think about the proliferation of formats and lengths. Two things I'll say about that. One is that the core of what we do remains unchanged. You need to think about who your audience is, you need to think about who you are, and you have to think about what you want them to do and the best way to get them there, and you need to do that, at least for us, through content and storytelling. You still need a hook. You still need to make people laugh. You still need to tell a story, have a journey. Even as the formats and the aspect ratios change, those things remain the same. At a certain point you realize that it's helpful in some ways because you're like, okay, it hasn't changed that much. We're still doing essentially the same thing; we just need to make sure we have the expertise we need across these platforms, whether it's Twitter or Amazon, so that we know how they speak on those platforms. It also brings me to one other thing I like to talk about. A lot of times you'll hear people say with the amount of content becoming so overwhelming, people's attention spans have shrunk and people don't have time or interest in anything longer form. What you used to have to tell in 60 seconds and then 30 and then 15 and then 6, now you have to tell in 3 or the blink of an eye. I don't think that's true. I think there is an element of having to use the right format and length, the right platform, but you just need to think harder about how to make your content break through, about a hook, about something to get people's attention. Sometimes and in some ways the answer might be longer form content. I certainly reject the notion of a race to the briefest, shortest form content possible. ROB: Certainly understood on that. I've heard some conversations on how quickly you have to hook someone. Maybe they'll stick around, but do you have to set the hook sooner to earn the rest of their attention? JOHN: Well, that's true. It's true because people's thumbs are moving. Attention spans have changed. I do think that notion is very true. You do have to hook them because otherwise you'll lose them. ROB: I appreciate that I think you're holding strong to the value of, as you mentioned, storytelling, of creativity. It reminds me a little bit of these rules in the world of standup comedy. I think you're supposed to make them laugh every 6 seconds, and if you don't, then they'll not like you, and if you do, then they probably will like you. But then you have Dave Chapelle. Dave Chapelle gets to be himself, and he's not going to make you laugh every 6 seconds, but he has his own style that is nonetheless extremely popular. JOHN: I think that's a great point. The rules may be true and relevant, but the real artists break free of them and are able to operate outside them. Some things can be true and not true at the same time, and I think it's true whether it's the comedy rules or the rules of advertising. ROB: Indeed. John, looking at your background, looking at how you built up on the film side, I think that's interesting. This is not your first rodeo, starting a business. JOHN: That's right. ROB: You did that, you started over with Mustache; if you're looking back at what you've done, what have you learned that you might do differently if you were starting clean? JOHN: It's a really interesting question. I often think about myself say 10 years ago, and I often come to the conclusion, "What a dumbass you were 10 years ago. You really didn't know anything. If I had just had all the knowledge and experience then that I have now, I could've done so much more." I think that's true now, but at the same time, all the experiences, all the choices, they were all made in a way that I'm happy with the way they played out. So, there's no one thing that stands out. I will say, though, one thing does stand out and that's diversity and inclusion. I think we've all come to understand the importance of that, and it's something that's been on my radar from the beginning of Mustache, but I didn't give it the attention that I should have in the early days. What I would say is it was very existential. You're young and you're hungry and you're small and you're desperate for any work. If someone wants to work with you, you're like, "Yeah, that's great. Let's go." So you're less discerning. I had less time to think about it and really plan and do the work. I feel like maybe that is one thing that if I could go back and talk to myself 10 years earlier, I would've given myself that one bit of advice. I've found once we've done that, as we've done that over the years and gotten better at it over the course of the last 10 years, how beneficial it's been for the work and for the clients and for the culture. So that's something. ROB: What did the steps look like to start to turn that corner? I think we all understand the tyranny of the urgent, the "I have to solve this problem now. I need to hire this creative by next week or next month" or whatever it is. What did you put in place to get more intentional there and maybe recruit some people you might've otherwise overlooked? JOHN: That's really interesting because it never ends, especially in our business, which tends to be really fast and furious. A good chunk of our business is project-based. So, in some ways it's the realization that the perfect moment never comes. People talk about wanting to have kids but they're too busy, and they keep telling themselves they're too busy. People will say to them, "It'll never be the right time if that's how you think about it." That's how I think about this. There's never a moment where I'm like, "Okay, I've checked off everything on my list. I've got it completely under control. Now I can sit back and do it right." It just doesn't happen. You have to prioritize things and move things around. You have to do the things that you have to do, that feel like imperatives. I think for me, that was the shift. It was like, we're never not facing a client rush/crisis/huge opportunity that I have to focus on because we need to get it. What I had to do was figure out within that context how to move forward anyway with the things that matter. I think once that switch flipped and we were like, we're going to start building that into every choice and everything we do, then we started getting the results that that kind of work suggests. ROB: When you're on that topic, it makes me think back – we had an agency we talked to on this podcast at South by Southwest a couple of years ago. They're a neighbor of yours, but that doesn't mean you've heard of them just because you're in New York. The Soze Agency. Are you familiar with them? JOHN: Yeah, yeah. Isn't it a freelance style, like a loose affiliation or collection of creators or something like that? ROB: I believe they call it a co-op. When I first heard it, it rang as a very Brooklyn thing to say that you were a collective and whatever else. JOHN: I love the Keyser Söze reference. ROB: They're super, super intentional in this area, and I really have appreciated following them since they were on the podcast. But they have an equity model that is interesting. I think they're going to opensource – I don't know if they will or not. I don't mean to speak for them. Everyone vests in ownership, but then they don't take it with them when they leave, so it goes back into the pool and everybody gets to share. JOHN: Yeah, it's very interesting. I've thought about that over the years and struggled with how to pair that with the imperatives of running a small business in an epically fast-changing landscape. But I think it's really interesting, and I've certainly spent time thinking about if it could work, how it could work, what the problems are. In some ways, Mustache was a dictatorship in the sense that if I saw an opportunity or wanted to make a change, I just did it, and there's nothing faster than one person deciding to do something. And that speed was critical at times. But on the other hand, there's things that might've been lost, good choices and good opportunities that might have been missed because we didn't have a more collective style. So, it's a real head-scratcher in some ways. I see the upside; I get stuck on some of the downside. But I think there's something there and I think there's a future there. I just don't think I've figured out how to crack it exactly. ROB: Someone's going to have to pay some lawyers some money to figure it out, and that's a trick too. I think what's interesting is I have been previously very much in tech startup land, and there's a model there that's predicated around growth and around increasing valuations and giving equity. It just doesn't apply in a services firm. You can't hire somebody and give them 1% and then have them walk out the door a few years later. Then your cap table is just a mess. You can't keep giving people this promise of the unlimited upside. When a company goes from a $10 million valuation to a $100 million valuation, they can get away with giving away smaller and smaller chunks in a way that would seem silly in a services firm. JOHN: It's interesting you say that, Rob, because as you were saying, it also occurred to me that the valuations matter. If you have a billion dollar pie, it's a lot easier to split up. The other thing has to do with margins. We're in content/creative. It tends to be a very low margin, tight business. If you're not in the tech valuations, you at least need to have a business model that's geared towards really high margins, really fat profits, because that gives you a little more leeway to do things. And maybe that's self-serving in some way, like if you implement the model, you'll move towards a space that is more profitable. But I think you need one or the other. Those valuations or you need to be in a business that's not razor-thin margins, I think, to make it work. ROB: It's good to have the conversation. I hear from some people who say a services firm, you want 20-30% margins. I don't know how that holds up, but I think what you're saying about setting the sights high – it just gives you more freedom to execute. I think that's what you're hinting it. We went all virtual, and if your margins are good, when you have people coming from six different cities, you can talk about flying somewhere and meeting up. JOHN: That's right. ROB: If you don't have good margins, then you say "We're all going to hide in our caves and never meet each other." JOHN: [laughs] That's right. So true. My reality. ROB: [laughs] John, when people want to get in touch with you and with Mustache Agency, how should they connect with you? JOHN: Our website is the best place to start, mustacheagency.com. There's plenty of different ways you can contact us from there. ROB: And people should go to that website. It's very visually stimulating. I think it puts your work in a very good light. JOHN: Thank you. ROB: I'm glad the work has gone into the front door there as well. Sometimes it's hard to spend the energy on yourself. JOHN: So true. ROB: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, John. I think it's been helpful to learn from your journey and helpful to think about the areas of business, the lines of business you've chosen and how they synthesize together and where all this video, and particularly advertising, is going in the digital land. I really appreciate it. JOHN: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. ROB: All right. Be well, John. 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.

Ashley Logan is the Founder and CEO at Yakkety Yak, a full-service purpose-driven content marketing agency that provides blog writing, social media marketing, video production, and website design and development for brands and organizations that want to make the world a better place. Ashley says that the agency's "sweet spot" is content creation and storytelling. She believes alignment with the greater good and "giving back" are two things that are necessary for changing the world. "You have to be purpose-driven," Ashley says. "You have to stand for something." A writer from age 5, Ashley graduated with an undergraduate degree in creative writing and landed a job selling for a private label candy manufacturer. She was "a creative person trapped in a corporate world." As she traveled around "slinging candy," Ashley saw that widely different companies used the same words talk about themselves in the "digital space." She decided she wanted a "bigger ticket" career and moved to commercial real estate. To appease her creative drive, Ashley volunteered and created content for nonprofit organizations. Social media platforms were just starting to rise. She wondered, "How could you turn those social media engines into a marketing machine?" In 2012, Ashley finally understood that she needed to combine all of her "passions for business, storytelling, content, and nonprofit work." She went back to school to pursue a master's degree in Journalism in a program renowned for teaching people how to write for target audiences. Ashley officially launched Yakkety Yak in 2014 and took clients as they came . . . until she realized she could no longer tell stories and work hard for jerks. The agency now maintains a focus on content and storytelling for a far more restricted clientele: Organizations that "do good" (nonprofits), Have, as a component of their organization, the intention of "giving back" (perhaps a part of the company raises funds to donate to non-profits), or Are amenable to adding a "do good" component to their organization (Yakkety Yak works with these organizations that do not yet have a purpose-driven mindset to help them define and build that "piece" into their company culture). Ashley thinks it is important for its clients to inform people of their "contributions to the greater good" by "putting it out there in your story, putting it on your website, weaving it into your social media, holding your teams accountable, and shouting it from the rooftops." She thinks high quality video will become an increasingly more powerful marketing vehicle. Ashley is working with a designer to "revamp" Yakkety Yak's office space with improved ventilation and flexible seating and intends to "open the doors" after Memorial Day. Ashley sees "the new office" as a safe place where "people can come and work if they want to escape" and gradually get people back together with flexible hours and a combination of in-person and remote work. She misses the "vibration" that comes from having a "team all together" but also notes that COVID has done wonders for work-life balance. Ashley is best reached on the agency's website at yakketyyak.com, where visitors can find links to all of the agency's social channels. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Ashley Logan. Ashley is the Founder and CEO at Yakkety Yak based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the show, Ashley. ASHLEY: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here. ROB: Absolutely. Why don't you start off by telling us about Yakkety Yak and what makes the firm unique? ASHLEY: Yakkety Yak is a full-service content marketing agency based in Chicago. We do everything from blog writing, social media marketing, video production, website design and development – basically any mechanism to help our clients tell their stories, we work with them. I guess what makes us unique is that we focus on working with brands and businesses that care about doing good. We're a totally purpose-driven agency working with brands and businesses that want to make the world a little bit better. ROB: What does that look like when we actually get down to a client? What does a client look like who has this purpose-driven focus? Are there maybe some examples you can share of how they're getting out in the world? ASHLEY: Absolutely. That can be nonprofit organizations, of course. They fall into that category. We work with many patient-facing organizations like the American Migraine Foundation, the American Brain Foundation, and other brands in that category. But purpose-driven doesn't have to be nonprofit; it can be an organization whose culture focuses on giving back. They have volunteer events where they donate proceeds to a nonprofit organization. Ultimately, that alignment with a greater good is our sweet spot because one, it helps with storytelling, but also, in this day and age, giving back is such an important part of changing the world, making it a little better. ROB: Finding that sort of specialization and alignment can sometimes be a journey. How did you come to focus on that as a specialty? ASHLEY: That's such a great question. When I founded the agency back in 2014, we didn't have the luxury of selecting the types of clients that we worked with. I'm sure you've heard this a lot with your guests. We worked with some people that we probably didn't want to work with. Ultimately it came down to that if we're going to tell stories and work hard, we don't want to work with jerks. [laughs] So we didn't. We stopped working with jerks, and that's it in a nutshell. Is that terrible? ROB: No. I mean, who wants to work with jerks? I don't know anybody who says they do. I haven't heard that strategy yet. I'd be fascinated if we have somebody listening who has a strategy built around working with jerks and charging a premium for it. I'm here for that conversation. ASHLEY: [laughs] I love it. So that's really what it came down to. We also help businesses who don't have a purpose-driven mindset to build that into their company culture. Maybe they came to us and wanted to think about "How do we put our story out there in a way that has more employee retention, that we can attract more visibility from our clients?" We always say you've got to be purpose-driven. You've got to stand for something. So, we've also helped coach our clients into getting into this space, too. ROB: What does that transformation look like? Maybe an example of where a company was starting. The purpose is usually there, much like your own firm; you just have to find your way to it. ASHLEY: That's exactly it. Just setting the intention, putting it out there in your story, putting it on your website, weaving it into your social media, and holding your teams accountable too, and just shouting it from the rooftops. That's especially applicable to clients of ours that aren't necessarily nonprofits but are doing something to give back – make sure that their employees know about the work they're doing at an executive level and then down to a grassroots level. A little bit less in COVID time but coordinating fundraising events or teambuilding events around giving back. ROB: It sounds like it would almost pull you towards being involved in – if an organization didn't have core values, you might not even be working on marketing. You might be working almost on their internals before they get to the externals. Do you end up getting pulled in that deep? ASHLEY: Sometimes, yes, we do. But I think that primarily our sweet spot is in the content creation and the storytelling. That's where we really like to be. Certainly, we will help clients define their brand strategy, and that includes core values and messaging. But we definitely like to focus on the story element. ROB: Understood. You talked about not having as much of a focus when you started, but let's even go a little bit further behind that. What led you to have the sort of audacity to create your own job and create some other jobs along the way? How did you get into that lane? ASHLEY: I love that word. I love the word "audacious." Let's see, I've been a writer for my whole life, ever since I was in kindergarten, I think. I won a Young Authors contest for a short story I wrote called "Crystal Met the Ogre." I still have it. Kind of funny. But I've been a writer my whole life, and I loved to tell people stories, but I also had a knack for business and trying to create processes and connect people. After I finished my undergrad at University of Tennessee – I was a creative writing major; I worked at the school paper – I ended up in a sales position. I wasn't expecting that I was going to be in sales, but also that I was going to like it so much. I started off working for a candy manufacturer based in Chicago. It was a great experience. I was 22, had half the country as my territory, was flying all over, slinging candy. But I wanted a little bit more of a high-volume sale, and I moved into commercial real estate. Through that experience, I was a creative person trapped in a corporate world and interacting with people at the C level. What I found was that all of these brands and businesses didn't know how to talk about themselves. They were all innovative. Every single one of them called themselves "innovative." All of them called themselves "streamlined." I realized it was a problem that in this digital space, people didn't have the words to differentiate themselves from one another. You could close your eyes and hear across multiple industries and see people using the same exact words to describe themselves, with no differentiation. So that was an observation. In the meantime, I was volunteering for nonprofit organizations in Chicago and helping them with content creation. This was that sweet spot when social media was just starting to go from being that you needed a .edu email address to that anyone could sign up for Facebook at this time. How do you turn those social media engines into a marketing machine? I cut my teeth on that through nonprofit work and ultimately decided that I was onto something and needed to combine all of my passions for business, storytelling, content, and nonprofit work. So I left my career in commercial real estate and went back to school to earn a master's in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. They have a great program for writing for a target audience. I simultaneously founded Yakkety Yak, and the rest is sort of history. ROB: That's a great upscaling moment on the writing there. I like that. I wonder a little bit – I'm just going to pull on a thread here that's a little random, but we'll see where it goes – if you don't mind me asking, what was the candy? Who were you selling to, and what made it desirable for them to buy this candy? ASHLEY: [laughs] It was a private label contract manufacturing. That's what we pitched. I worked with Cost Plus World Market and Harry & David, and we were doing premium toffees. We would produce it for them under their own private label brand. Coming from Chicago, we'd make the candy and then it would be in like a Harry & David package, for example. They also did those really beautiful Christmas candies, ribbon candies. That was it. No chocolates and no gummies, but pretty much everything else. It was cool. There was a factory. The CEO of the company gave me my first job out of school, tolerated me, trained me in sales. He actually passed away a couple of years ago, and he just made such a positive impact in my life, giving me this opportunity. It was pretty cool getting to walk through the candy factory and make friends with the factory workers and be part of creating something from end to end. ROB: That's very cool. Those are typically, in my reckoning, pretty high end, nice candies. It's a creative process. It's not what it sounds like at first when you say sales. I think we all sometimes miss doing tangible work, something you can put your hands on and something you can see sitting on a shelf. ASHLEY: Yeah, it was cool. And it was fun. It was my first experience in business. We would go to these candy conferences, and I was the youngest by far. I was the only female, interacting at Happy Hour with the good ol' boys who'd been in the business for 40 years. It was fun. It taught me a lot about how to defend myself. It taught me a lot about how to keep composure as a woman in business and overcome challenges. That experience grew me really well for commercial real estate, which was a little bit more of a cutthroat type of industry. ROB: Right. You went from a boys' club to a mean boys' club. ASHLEY: [laughs] I did. ROB: Even trickier. Maybe a little bit gentler in a more creative space. But I think what's interesting is the through line is, as we all know as an agency owner, you are selling, but it sounds like a common thing across your sales experience is you're really helping people get what they want – which is much easier than trying to convince them they need something they're not aware of. ASHLEY: I think so, yeah. ROB: Very interesting. Ashley, as you reflect on – you said 2014 was the starting of Yakkety Yak? ASHLEY: I have two dates. 2012 is when I founded the agency and I went back to school, and I had a few very small clients at the time. But 2014 is when I hired my first employee and Yakkety Yak became my full-time job. So I use that as my real date. ROB: Got it. Over the course of that 7+ year time, what are some things you've learned that you might do differently if you were starting from scratch? ASHLEY: That's a great question. My journey has been really interesting. I built the agency from scratch. I had no outside investors. I'm pretty risk positive; I'm comfortable in a space of jumping and leaping to the next level. It doesn't make me nervous. I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on mistakes made because I do believe that every experience leads you to the next, and you've got to build upon it and take with you the tidbits that help make you stronger. For example, looking at my career trajectory, the candy business, while I knew it wasn't my life's passion, that sales experience helped take me to the next level. Any adversity that I faced in commercial real estate, I took that with me to become a founder and CEO and be gutsy as hell. But one thing that stands out for what I would do differently is I think in the area of hiring. I have worn every hat in the agency, and I wish that I'd had more help sooner because that would've helped me scale faster. I haven't mentioned this part yet, but I've got three really little kids – and a COVID baby. It would've been great – when my second son was born, it was 2018; I was 38 weeks pregnant, and I had an employee resign, which meant that I was not going to get any maternity leave. I had my baby on a Tuesday and I was back to work on Monday. If I had built a deeper bench, then I would've been able to have a little bit more balance early on. ROB: What do you think it was that prevented you from building up that team? ASHLEY: I think when you're an agency starting out and you're competing in a market like Chicago – we have some major players here. I'm going up against, from a benefits standpoint, a salary standpoint, and a credibility standpoint, some powerhouses. It took a little bit of time to earn some credibility and name recognition. People, I will say, do remember the name Yakkety Yak, so I am proud of that. Recruiting top talent takes time and building up a team and building that referral network where people say "Hey, that's a place where I really want to be and where I want to work." ROB: Got it. What were your first couple of hires when you went from a team of one to a team of more? ASHLEY: Oh gosh, one of my first hires was – and he's still one of my favorite employees; he moved back to California and is doing some really great things right now – a graphic designer. I had the way with the words, and I was bringing in the business but also doing a lot of the content creation, and Curtis was doing the graphic design elements. And then support from a writing standpoint, so I eventually started to be able to outsource that and build a team. I shouldn't say outsource; I mean delegate. That's the word I mean. And finally, 2018 was a breakthrough year for me where I finally was able to build – we had more than 15 people. Now we're a team of 20. It's great to have such amazing talent at the agency now. I wish that I had done that sooner. But when you're bootstrapping your own business, it's kind of part of the deal, I think. ROB: Congratulations on that growth. You mentioned a COVID baby, so I'm sort of expecting, by your story, that maybe you did get some maternity leave this time around? ASHLEY: [laughs] I didn't. Well, lesson learned from the second child, but we were in crisis – not crisis, but I didn't think that it would be good for me to have no visibility to my team when we're all suddenly working remotely and in the middle of a global pandemic. So, I made sure to still be around for internal purposes, but I did remove myself from some client-facing work for a period of time. I had my baby Memorial Day weekend, and by Labor Day my clients were seeing me on the regular again. ROB: Got it. I can definitely see a case for visibility to a team in a time where everybody's in uncharted territory. ASHLEY: Sure. ROB: Where are you and your team in terms of office? Did you have an office, do you have an office? Are you going to have an office? Are you keeping the same geographic footprint moving forward? How are you thinking about physical space in the context of Yakkety Yak? ASHLEY: That's such a great question and something that's so relevant right now. We have this awesome office in a loft building right near the train station, Union Station in Chicago, and it's great. I love the space. It's got that brick and timber feel, lots of natural light, open area. But we jammed a lot of people into that space. I'm currently working with a designer, Lauren Ashley Allan. She's a really awesome up-and-coming designer. We're revamping and rethinking our space so that it is comfortable for people when we return to work. Flexible seating options is what we're focusing on, in addition to little booths so that people who are a little more conscious or want more privacy can work in a confined space that has ventilation. The goal is that we're not going to mandate that the team come back to work, but we are going to open our doors after Memorial Day, and I'll be there and give people a place that they can come and work if they want to escape and gradually start getting people back together. I think what I've been noticing is I miss the vibration, like the good vibes that come from having a team all together. So, we're putting some thought and intention into how we're designing the space, and we'll move forward from there with some flexible hours, combination of remote work and in-person. ROB: Right, but you're probably not going to have folks moving to Portugal and being fully remote, that you could think of? ASHLEY: I don't think so. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] It sounds like you're being very intentional about your space, which is compelling, and it sounds like even within the office environment, you're really differentiating that work environment. Knowing Chicago, knowing where you are, you have a benefit of accessibility and transit and that urban lifestyle for those who choose it. And obviously, in Chicago, you can get into the city from very, very far out on a train if you want. And then not knowing the specific block you're on or whatever, during normal times, there's probably a good vibe, good places to grab lunch together, grab Happy Hour together. It's not just some nameless office park. ASHLEY: Right, exactly. That camaraderie is just important. I really felt for people – especially those who are in there, mid to late twenties, single, living by themselves, and stuck at home during COVID. That's a lot for people. I think that we've got a lot of healing to do as a country when it comes to finally starting to emerge back into everyday life. I want to be there and I want to create a safe space for my team to come in and get work done and feel welcome and safe and so we can continue doing the excellent work that we've been doing and build off of that energy. ROB: That sounds excellent. How's your team thinking about that? I know everybody's all over the spectrum, at least from people I know. Some people would be in a closet together tomorrow and some people are waiting until they get a shot or even longer. What's the range of what you're seeing? ASHLEY: A range, you're exactly right. I'm giving people space to make the decisions on their own for now. We continue to check in on it. I've said that in 2021, at this point, we're probably not going to do a mandate to go back to work. But we will open the doors and encourage people to come in if they want to. The beauty of the transition that's taken place from a remote workforce standpoint is that now we see that we can work remotely, that if you've got to coach your kid's softball team in the afternoon, you can work from home, and that's going to be fine. We're going to be able to connect, and no one's going to miss anything. I think this has done wonders for the work-life balance, and I hope at least at Yakkety Yak, that's a trend we're going to really continue to let permeate our office culture. ROB: I love the intentionality of it. I'm a little bit jealous. I'm a little bit more of a "ready, fire, aim" sort of person. Over the course of the past year, the last four people we've hired have all been remote, and we're going to figure it out later. I'm hoping that late fall/early winter, we'll get together and visit one of our team who lives down in Chile. It's completely different. Walking away from the office and loading the furniture into our basement kind of made it real, you know? ASHLEY: How did that feel for you? ROB: I am very comfortable with the change. The thing I don't like in my basement is there's no people there. There's fresh air and light. It's a little rustic, shall we say. I do miss the getting together, but if part of it means that instead of being in the office and doing little things, we get to do something more pronounced like spending a week in Chile and getting some different gatherings, I'm interested in it. It's a change of pace for sure. Ashley, when you think about the future of Yakkety Yak, the future of marketing and how you're working with businesses that give back, what are you excited about in the future that's coming up? ASHLEY: I couldn't be more excited about video. We are doing some really, really, really incredible work when it comes to especially the patient space, telling people's stories about how they've been impacted by various health conditions, diseases, disorders. I love using video as a mechanism for storytelling, regardless of the target audience. There are so many cool things now with TikTok and how to use visual elements to show a progression, and people are doing that every day in their homes as amateurs, and how that's going to translate to professional level videos I think is something that is so cool and something you're going to see exploding in marketing space over the next 18 months. ROB: One thing I wonder about, if you have an opinion on it, is when I think about audio and the way it's going, I see a lot more attention going into the sound on versus sound off experience and accommodating people who might be muted. What direction do you see that going? Are we going towards where every video's going to adapt, or are we going to where we're assuming that so many people have some sort of Bluetooth headset in that they're going to have audio on? How is that trending? ASHLEY: That's a really great question. I'm going to answer it in two parts. One, I think that the pandemic has shown everyone the importance of quality A/V, like when you can't hear someone on Zoom or there's a delay in a recording when you're watching things virtually. I think that high quality video and audio is something that's more of a priority than it's ever been. With that said, I think it depends on the platform. We wouldn't necessarily, for a virtual fundraiser or virtual event, have all of the text scrolling at the bottom of the experience, but when it comes to ads and what's happening when people are scrolling through Instagram, I think it's absolutely vital to have the words there because people are scrolling through Instagram in their beds at night when they're not necessarily wearing headphones and they don't want to wake up their partner, or they have babies that they're feeding and don't want to scare the babies. That's my personal experience, but I think it applies across a multitude of scenarios. And people are multitasking, too. They might have one window open or be on a conference call or a Zoom call and scrolling through Instagram. You can't have that dependence on the audio in those scenarios. So, when it comes to social media, the text is vital. When it comes to other experiences where you're holding people's attention for a little bit longer, then I think you're okay without it. ROB: Very, very interesting. Thank you for illuminating the topic. Ashley, when people want to find and connect with you and with Yakkety Yak, where should they go to find you? ASHLEY: Our website is the best spot to find us because you've got links there to all of our social media channels. You can find us at yakketyyak.com. The spelling isn't necessarily intuitive. ROB: How did you choose the spelling of Yakkety Yak? ASHLEY: [laughs] I don't know. I think it was probably the domain that was available at the time. But it was important that we were Y-A-K and not Y-A-C-K, so we went from there. ROB: Perfect. Ashley, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing your experience. I definitely wish you the best as you get that revamped office up and humming and get everybody back working together in person. ASHLEY: Thanks, Rob. I really appreciate your time today. This was fun. ROB: Thank you so much, Ashley. 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.

Carl Fremont is CEO at Quigley-Simpson, a direct marketing/direct to consumer marketing agency with its roots in longform television infomercials. The agency has pivoted numerous times from informercials to shorter form direct response TV to full-service media with a focus on digital marketing. With an almost 40-year career in direct marketing, Carl joined Quigley-Simpson. Six months later, Covid sent the company virtual. In this interview, Carl reflects on the history of direct marketing. Twenty years ago, the required tasks included setting up call centers, and providing fulfillment, pricing, and promotion strategies for a variety of products. In today's digital world, the agency helps clients determine how to sell their products in different digital marketplaces and the mix of creative and messaging content that will be most effective. Carl explains that over the 18 years this agency has been around, it is well grounded in "in driving sales and building relationships with our clients' customers." While the pandemic has increased many clients' focus on direct sales and short-term revenues because they are trying to "catch up," Carl says that a business will eventually fail if it doesn't also invest in building its brand image and association. What is the right investment balance for building brand awareness, association, consideration, guiding the purchase journey, driving revenue, and developing customer relationships? Carl says brand marketing is an end-to-end process. A careful analysis of data is the only way to determine the right investment balance to optimize the consumer journey and build a brand for the future. It takes a lot more investment and effort (and even bravery) to invest in a brand's image than to go straight for sales. The balance of long-view brand building and quick sales requires a corresponding strategic balance of creative and messaging content and presentation. Every brand is unique . . . and the balance may change over time. Carl believes that brands need to be flexible – to have the ability and willingness to adapt and adopt new ways of working and thinking – if they are to survive and thrive. "Every year is a new opportunity and a new way to accelerate growth," Chad says. Today's brand-building is not just about touting a product's features and benefits. Winning the business is now "deeper" than "What will this product do for me?" Customers are asking such questions as, "What is the purposeful meaning behind the brand?" "What does the brand mean from a social side?" How is it giving back?" "What does the brand stand for?" Chad can be reached on his agency's website at Quigleysimpson.com or through LinkedIn at Carl Fremont. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Carl Fremont, CEO at Quigley-Simpson with offices in both Los Angeles, California and New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Carl. CARL: Thank you, Rob. I'm thrilled to be joining you. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Quigley-Simpson and where the firm specializes? CARL: Sure, that would be great. Quigley-Simpson was founded 18 years ago by two entrepreneurs, and the co-founders, Renee Hill Young and Gerald Bagg, are still involved with the company. Its roots are similar to mine. It's in direct marketing. Today we say direct to consumer. I don't know when direct marketing got out of fashion and turned to direct to consumer, but we were really one of the first direct marketing/direct to consumer agencies. Our heritage, believe it or not, is in infomercials, in longform television. We pivoted. We pivoted many, many times and continue to do so, from longform infomercials to shorter form direct response TV to full-service media, in particular focused on digital marketing. So, our roots are very much grounded in driving sales and building relationships with our clients' customers. But we've evolved as the industry evolved because we needed to. Today, we've taken that heritage from direct to consumer, direct marketing, and applied it in a digital world. Twenty years ago, that meant arranging for call centers. That meant product fulfillment, price, promotion of different products. We're still doing the same thing, but in a digital world. What that means today, to correlate, it's how you sell your products on different digital marketplaces, like on Amazon or Walmart or Kroger, and using a plethora of different channels to market, including the creative and the messaging. The one thing that distinguishes us is that we're not only focused on the revenue creation, but on the brand as well, which is why we say our value proposition and what we stand for is both brand and demand: building the brand's image and awareness as well as driving performance, driving revenue. It's the balance of those two, between building the brand's awareness, building the consideration, all the way through the purchase journey through to driving revenue and customer relationship marketing. So, it's really an end-to-end way that you look at brand marketing today. ROB: It's really fascinating. Much as you're saying that direct marketing made its transition into direct to consumer, I think at some point B2B marketing stole the show from consumer marketing when it comes to the customer or buyer journey. It seems like consumer products have been the original home of the buyer's journey. How do you think about that journey when you're really talking about – you're probably involved in making sure product ranks well, lists well, looks great on Amazon, but you have to start with that awareness. How do you think about connecting the dots where you're going to make somebody aware of something that eventually they're going to see on Amazon and buy? What are the approaches? CARL: That's a great question. Today, as we know, especially with COVID and the pandemic and what's happened the last year, it's hastened the way in which we're marketing brands today. There's even a greater focus on the short-term revenue to make up for where we were. Many brands right away focus on that marketplace, on creating the direct sales without thinking about how they build the brand. At some point, Rob, you will hit a proverbial wall. You will reach a point of diminishing return on sales if you haven't built the brand and the brand association. So, the question, and what we help our clients determine, is what's the right balance for building that brand's awareness, association, consideration, and the demand side? As we all know, it takes a lot more investment and effort to build and sustain a brand's image and awareness than it is in a direct sales capacity. In the short-term world which we are faced with today about driving revenue, it takes brands greater investment and bravery, actually, to build that brand's image. What we do is help through data and analytics to determine what that right balance is between investing and building that brand's image or awareness to driving demand. How do you do that? It's both in the investment in media as well as the creative, the messaging and creating the right balance. There's no magic formula. Not one brand is like any other brand. Each one has its own unique situation for determining that right balance between the brand and the demand side. But using a number of data sources – looking at sales, looking at the marketplace, competitive insights and intelligence, consumer insights – all of that, bringing that all together, plus in many cases some primary research that's done, helps us with determining that right balance, the correct investment level between the brand and demand side. And as we know, Rob, nothing today is static. Everything is very dynamic. We may determine up front the balance between investing in the brand and the demand side, but that balance may change over time. It means also that because you have a message and efforts that are focused on sales and driving sales, it doesn't mean that the brand's image should not be well represented in that as well. So, it's not only looking at an investment; it's incorporating a brand's messaging and image even when you're doing more direct sales. ROB: Perhaps we can get a little bit more practical here, Carl. I recognize that every brand's a little bit different. Is there a brand you have worked with that you can speak about that might be an interesting example of this combination of the market research, establishing the brand, and not overharvesting the low-hanging fruit, but really building towards a good robust, long-term pipeline of demand? CARL: Sure. I'll talk about it from a category side because I don't want to talk about a specific client per se. But from a category side, there's a category I've been personally involved with for decades, which is in the consumer credit card industry. As we know, it's a highly, highly competitive marketplace. There are a plethora of cards and choices and opportunities. Building the brand's image and building the association that "that piece of plastic is right for me" is really critical in building that audience base – but not only getting the share of mind, but then the share of wallet. That's a very highly competitive category. In many cases, the brand features and benefits are very similar. All you really have to stand out and build that long-term value proposition is your image. It's what you stand for. It's how you relate to a consumer. And that's where there's a lot of research and insight that goes in. How do I connect someone to the right card, the right consumer experience that is right for them? If you go at it in the credit card by just the offer, you're not going to get that share of wallet. You may not win over their long-term hearts. You're just going to acquire them, but they're not going to have the longer-term value to you. It's creating that association that that card not only has the right features and benefits, but I associate to its image, I associate to the values that are behind it. And I think today, brands need to go beyond just their features and benefits of building a brand's image. Today that also includes building purposeful meaning behind the brand and thinking about what the brand means from a social side. How is it giving back? It's not just about creating that image and awareness and association. It's purposeful marketing. What does the brand stand for, for me? I think today with so many different social issues that we're encountering, especially in the past year, having a brand stand for something is very important for consumers. ROB: That's a really interesting conversation there. I'm in Atlanta; some folks here – I think an investor, and I think also Killer Mike – were involved in standing up Greenwood Bank. When you think about financial products, there aren't really very many products that can differentiate themselves by saying they're going to serve an underserved community and actually show it and mean it. Something I want to pull on that's interesting – maybe this trend is real, maybe it's not – it seems to me that the marketing world is moving in your favor, is what I would say. It seems like we're moving more and more away from considered purchases and more into habits. That's kind of what you're alluding to with the credit card. But our phones have switched more from a considered purchase to a habit of what phone I'm going to acquire with regularity. Or I even think in a completely different market about the cloud computing market. Amazon Web Services and Google, they're advertising, but they're really advertising for a share of your habit, a percent of where you're going to spend your money on your IT infrastructure. Have you seen more and more things shifting? Even with television, televisions are more of a habit than a considered purchase, I would say, now. CARL: Oh yeah. You mean the actual television set? ROB: Yeah, it's $200 and now $1500. CARL: I just bought one in a big box place – I'm not going to say which one – that was shockingly $100 for a 24-inch television. Who would ever think you can buy that? All of these consumer electronics – and we just had CES, so it's a good time to talk about it – they're utilities. They're part of our connected lives. Just as you talked about the phone, we know for years now that the phone is part of our connected life. It's not obviously just about making and receiving calls. It is connected to our life and how we shop, of course how we communicate, importantly how we receive news and information, how we socialize with our friends and colleagues. It has become a utility. The television is the same way. Now that we can stream, it's certainly a big entertainment, but with streaming opportunities, we can narrowcast, and that's what's happening. It's mimicking in some ways cable, but it's all on demand where we're narrowcasting even further information that is important to us. So, there's a blending of all of these utilities, too, all these devices. Over time – we've been talking about the Internet of Things for many years now, but it very much so will become part of our everyday lives. Now, the question is, getting back to marketing, how do brands participate in it? What is the brand role? Is brand's role this traditional just pushing messages out on all these devices? Does it contribute any value in any of the content that gets streamed? How do brands enter into this in a way that doesn't seem obtrusive, but seems complementary to what we're doing – the habits, as you said, that we have? As consumer electronics, consumer behavior and the way we're engaging with content has vastly changed. It's been doing that for years; it's just been accelerated because of the pandemic. With the way we shop also, that behavior has been changing for years but now is being accelerated. All of this is coming together. The devices, the way we connect, whether that's through brick and mortar or through digital, through the way we receive entertainment and news and information to the way we shop – all of that is merging together. It's all coming together, and in some ways, Rob, it is a little "back to the future" for us. When we started doing infomercials, they were entertaining and you were able to shop through them. So, there's a little bit of lessons learned from the past as well. But all of this is coming together and merging together. What brands are now faced with more than ever is, what's their role in all this? How do they play within all of this? Because the models have been turned upside down. ROB: It's really blinding, and it's interesting – YouTube is the new infomercial in a lot of cases, which is such an interesting shift. I want to pull on something else that you mentioned. You mentioned the firm itself is 18 years old. How long have you been with the firm? Were you the first transition away from being founder-led? Or what did that look like for you? CARL: That's a great question. I joined a year and a half ago, and I had no idea, like everybody else, what was ahead. After 6 months of being in LA and mostly focused in our Los Angeles office, everything turned upside down. I literally believed, Rob, that we would be back together in 2-3 weeks. None of us had experienced in our lifetime a pandemic, so there was no rulebook. I really thought we'd all be back. We were, like everybody else, improvising as we went. We had no rules. We didn't see it coming, so we didn't plan for it. It just sort of evolved and happened for us. So, I joined a year and a half ago, and certainly the last almost year now, being it was March that we had our work-from-home policy that went into effect and have been following pretty much ever since – never really thought that. But for me, Quigley-Simpson was a big comfort zone because my roots and heritage or where I've spent a vast majority of my almost-40 year career (September I mark my 40th year) has been in direct marketing and direct to consumer marketing. Very much so it's my comfort zone. It's where I've always been. I came on, thankfully, by our two co-founders to help evolve the company further. Again, the company was evolving and had many pivots long before I came, but now we have to make another big pivot. We have to continue our heritage of being nimble and flexible and adopting to the times as we always have been. And as we just talked about, the acceleration of how consumers are engaging with and watching television and other entertainment sources, how they are connecting their lives through multiple devices, their shopping behavior all have been accelerated. It has caused us to reflect on the future and look at what lessons we've had in the past and how we apply them moving forward. We're at a vantage point versus other agencies that we've always practiced this direct-to-consumer mindset with a heavy focus on brand and brand building. So, for us, this next pivot isn't that remarkable because we've always done it. Now the question is, again, how do we take our clients along with us on that ride? Because everyone is looking at how that acceleration, that often-used and overused word of "transformation," how do we now accelerate it even faster to catch up with consumer behavior – your behavior, my behavior, everyone's behavior? ROB: It's quite a transition. People often say society to some extent has a reverence for the founders of different things, whether it's your Edelmans or your Steve Jobs or anything like that. But beneath that, within any company, quite often the culture of both the team as well as the client relationships, there's a magnetism. They're working there because they like and respect the people in charge. What do you think are some keys to making an effective transition there so that clients are not jarred and the team is not jarred by such a consequential change of leadership? CARL: I'm nodding my head. You can't see it because we're on a podcast. [laughs] I'm nodding in agreement with what you said. We're all in this together. We're all on the same path forward. For me and for us at Quigley-Simpson, it's about really partnering. It's not you against them; we're all in this together. We all are heading in the same path on that transformation acceleration. Really doing it together and being one team and having that trust with each other that we're going to go through it together and have a concerted roadmap is important. Now, what that entails, as I said before, is a commitment to each other and a commitment to trust and a commitment to open up on all sides – on the agency side, on the client side – information and data that's going to allow us together to assess the market, assess customers – which is where you always begin: with the customer. We're putting consumers in the center and building a roadmap for it. That roadmap and acceleration of the roadmap really depends on many factors. It depends on where you are, where any marketer is in that journey. What have you done before to bring together your whole database of your consumers? Is it all together? Is it in disparate databases? What have you done to put measures in place to protect your consumer privacy? What have you done to assess through all that data who your audiences are? And what have you tested and learned along the way? What roadmaps have you put in place along the way? That's what a lot of this is. It's putting together that roadmap, doing it together, and accelerating at the pace that is most comfortable for the marketer in terms of where they are. There is no one size fits all in terms of building a roadmap and accelerating. A lot of it – you used the word "culture" – depends on the culture of the organization. It depends on how fast they want to move. Today, everything's moving so fast and so accelerated that you really need to get together and have that roadmap established. But I believe that it first comes with a true, true partnership with everyone aligned on what the objectives are, what's going to be measured, how it's going to be measured, and it's always on. We're in a world of always on. We have been, but it is constantly dynamic testing and learning and then optimizing from there. Now more than ever, we have to be testing many different factors of the consumer experience along the consumer journey. ROB: Carl, if you look over your LinkedIn, you've been on quite a journey in some agencies of different magnitudes and size. What are some key lessons you yourself have learned along the way that you might revisit if you were starting over? CARL: That's a great question and a good thought. For almost four decades I've been in this. Adaptability is always key. You have to be adaptable to the times. That also requires a great amount of curiosity. You've got to be looking always at every year as a new year. The brands and marketers I've worked with and had the most success with never look at one year as the same. Every year is a new opportunity and a new way to accelerate growth. There's never a repeat. It's always, what are we doing now? What's new? It's a constant evolution. You're never done. You're always evolving. I remember saying to people who I've mentored and who've worked for me in the past, "This is the best time we've ever been in marketing and advertising." Honestly, I've been saying that for 40 years because every year, it's constantly evolving. So adoptability and adaptability to the times that we're in and being curious about what is next, being curious around data and technology and what that enables, is really how you progress forward. If you are not someone who is adaptable and adopting new ways of working and thinking and don't have a curious mind, then you're not going to succeed and this business is probably not for you. You need to be able to constantly be changing and reinventing every year. And frankly, Rob, that's the exciting part of what we do. ROB: There are a lot of things on a lot of people's minds right now in January 2021, and I think there are some people who are holding on and hoping they can just get back to normal. I think that's never really true. Maybe it's just emphasized a little bit, or maybe it's – I think this is probably a little crazier than it's usually been. I'll just concede that. But if it's changing a little more slowly, you still can't hang on. I think the folks who have tried to hang on and come out of this past year and go back to what they were doing – I don't think that's going to go well. CARL: No, exactly. Now that I've just said things keep changing, there are some things that do stay the same, and that is great brands that tell great stories. That was definitely an art. We've been practicing at Quigley-Simpson, since early days of longform advertising, great storytelling for brands, and that art is on the present and will continue. It is being adapted into new forms based on technology and access to data. But the notion of building great brands through great storytelling will be going on in infinite times. We always need to be focused on that and take that great storytelling and adapt it to new formats, new ways of consumer engagement, new technology, and making sure that we are always connecting it to the consumer experience based on information and data that we know about someone. ROB: It's such a great point. I'm glad you're here to elevate the appreciation of the infomercial as an art – and I mean that, and I mean that in this way. People talk now about StoryBrand, they talk about that being rooted in the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey, that Star Wars story structure. But it seems to me that that's kind of the story of infomercial as well: how do you make the person who will buy this product the hero? CARL: Exactly. ROB: And the product is the guide. The product is the tool. That is their lightsaber. CARL: If you think about it, in this short amount of time from where we've been, in that period for the informercials, you were both telling that brand's story and getting somebody to respond and to connect. Now, if we can take that same notion today about building a great brand through storytelling, through a value proposition, a unique selling proposition, and marry it to what matters to consumers, what's purposeful, and connect it to sales, to driving an action – that's what it's about. Adapting those principles that will always be to new forms of technology, new forms of media. ROB: That's very wise, and I appreciate it. I'm glad you're here to bring the perspective. Carl, when people want to connect with you and with Quigley-Simpson, where should they go to find you? CARL: Quigleysimpson.com is the best place, or through my LinkedIn, Carl Fremont, is probably the best place. I'm passionate about building brands, so the opportunity to talk to anybody about brand and demand – I can do that all day long. ROB: That's wonderful. Glad you have kept an openness while you also stay curious. Thank you so much for putting that out there. Carl, it's a pleasure to talk to you and learn from you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. CARL: It's been fabulous. Really appreciate it. Have a great day. ROB: You too. Be well. Thanks. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Chad Crowe is CEO at Techwood Digital, an employee-owned agency that provides B2B, e-comm, and lead generation services for around 100 clients in a variety of U.S. industries. Founded on SEO, Techwood has over the years added paid search, branding, and some design elements and development – in a gradual transition to becoming a full-service agency. Chad had been doing SEO and paid search in a job he loved when he met Jack Ogilvie, owner of Techwood. Jack wanted to add paid search capabilities to his organization's offerings. How did he win Chad away from his dream job? With the opportunity for ownership at Techwood. In the first month, Chad started changing Techwood by defining four components for the onboarding process: core values, mission, process, and value chain (how does the agency continually add value to the client?). The agency's core values, to which any new clients or new employees have to agree to accept and focus on include: Have a "How can I help?" attitude. "How can I help the situation be better?" "How can I be more engrained?" This attitude promotes growth. Embrace curiosity, knowledge, and improvement. Provide second mile service. Do a "little bit more, a little bit surprising, a little bit extra" to strengthen the relationship. (Hijacked from Chick-fil-A, Chad says, this is NOT scope creep.) Be open and honest – with self, coworkers and clients. Have lighthearted fun (which requires trust) but also have heartfelt sincerity. Be respectful. Chad applies this to his worldview when he says respect is "something the whole world needs right now – this level of respect for everybody that doesn't question so much as it seeks to help." The right clients and the right employees are people who have a "core values fit" with the agency. Chad admits that, in the past, he optimistically hired a few "almost fits" that, over time, did not work out. Today, he says he is "more intentional about slowing down" until he is convinced that the new hire is 100 % before he ever makes an offer. A few years after Chad joined Techwood, the agency was doing very well and had great growth and a few "amazing" employees. Jack and Chad decided it was time to consider transitioning the agency to an employee ownership model. But how to do that without incurring big tax penalties? In this interview, Chad explains how the agency set up an ESOP, or Employee Stock Option Plan, to put agency ownership in the hands of its employees. About two years ago, the agency became 100% employee owned. The cost of conversion was high, but Chad claims the benefits have been even greater. He says there are "a lot of very unique and interesting things that go on when you transition to an employee stock option plan" – among them being the opportunity to create "an evergreen company . . . where everybody can work forever under those core values." Chad can be found on his agency's website at techwood.digital or by email at chad.crowe@techwood.digital. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by someone from my same hometown here in Atlanta, Georgia – Chad Crowe, CEO at Techwood Digital. Welcome to the podcast, Chad. CHAD: Thank you. It's so kind of you to extend an invite. ROB: Good to have you here. You're building something special. Why don't you start off by telling us about Techwood Digital and what you do and where you specialize? CHAD: We are a digital agency. We really cut our teeth on SEO as a product line. Everything we do has a core there. Then after several years in the SEO arena, we expanded to include a paid offering, so we do paid search really well as well. Our philosophy and what we've been trying to do is add services as time goes on. But of course, you don't want to blindly do that, so it's been a slow add over the years. Last year we added branding and some design elements and development to our stack. We're slowly becoming more and more of a full-service agency out of Atlanta, and we service a lot of clients all over the U.S. We've got several in the New York area, Michigan area, and out in California. We don't really specialize in an industry. We've got probably 100 clients that span lots of different industries. We do B2B, we do e-comm, we do B2C lead gen, and we take our learnings and try to focus and become really good at the things we're focusing on. ROB: It's an interesting mix. Is there any common thread between customers? Or how do you end up attracting such a diverse portfolio of clients, both in terms of business as well as geography? CHAD: It's going to sound kind of lame, to be completely honest. As we were talking about before the podcast, we are an employee-owned agency, so really the common thread between all of our employees and all of our clients is everybody has agreed to accept and focus on our core values of having a "How can I help?" attitude and being open and honest and second mile service and all of those things. Really, the common thread that we're looking for through all of that is people whose values align with us and we feel like we can really successfully win. I'm sure all agencies have an onboarding process, a sales process. Our sales process is definitely extremely hands-on. Like I said, we're really trying to focus and find people who are going to be a cores value fit that we can really, really help. I guess as lame as it sounds, that's kind of it. We're looking for people who hold the values that we hold true as well, and I feel like if we're aligned there and we've done our basic research to make sure that we can help you and that there's opportunity there, we'll have a great partnership. And that's been what we've been focused on. We've brought in people over the years, and they just continue to flourish. As they transition to other jobs, they bring us along and we keep the previous client. So, we've really been more of a referral-based growing agency for years. That's the common thread. It's just really focusing on who we want to be and who we want to work with. ROB: That is such a fascinating dynamic that you mention, that employee churn in the marketing industry – if you stick in it long enough, there's a virtuous cycle. There's the dynamic in marketing between agency and brand and vendor that seems to ebb and flow, and vendors can also be clients while you're at it. It's fascinating that longevity can sometimes correlate pretty well. CHAD: Absolutely. I'm also referring to clients. Their senior marketing person, who's a person we interact, that person leaves and goes to another company because they've gotten great results and want to continue up the ladder. They bring us into a new company as well. We've definitely had it from the employee side. Our employee turnover is actually really low, so we see it more on the client side. ROB: Right. I mean even more sometimes one of your clients may get tired of brand for a while and they go work for another agency, but then they pop their head back out, and maybe they actually like you, Techwood, more than they like the shop they were in for a while. But you make a great point that the best client is probably someone you helped earn a promotion by switching jobs, or you helped them success well enough that they go somewhere else and they want to bring you along and take them to the next level there as well. CHAD: Absolutely. ROB: With Techwood Digital, tell me about the origin story. What made you decide to start this company and transition you from whatever you were doing before? CHAD: It's kind of a long and fortuitous story. I'll try to abbreviate it. I met a guy named Jack Ogilvie in college. We met through weird circumstances in that my roommate was Jack's best friend in high school. Jack was going to Georgia Tech downtown; I was going to Reinhardt University all the way up in Waleska, Georgia. There's nothing to do in Waleska, Georgia, so my roommate and I would come visit Jack in Atlanta. That's how I met Jack. It was probably 7 years after graduation – I was working for a large company in Cumming, Georgia, owning their paid presence and their SEO and working there – when I went to a tradeshow in New York and I ran into Jack. We were talking about "Hey, what are you doing? What am I doing?" Jack actually started Techwood shortly after college, so he owned Techwood at that time. He built the company on SEO and was looking to try to focus and own and be really good at the paid space and was trying to solve that. That was the piece that I brought to the table. You're in the Atlanta area; I don't know if you've heard of AutomationDirect, but they've won the Atlanta Business Chronicles' "Best Medium Size Company to Work for in Atlanta" for nearly 6 years in a row. Just a really, really good company. As we were talking, I said, "Hey, here are my specialties. Here's what I'm doing." He's like, "I've got this agency. I really want you to come work for me and figure out the paid side." Like I said, AutomationDirect is such a great company. I had zero interest in switching jobs. So, we left that conference, just reconnecting and talking. Several months later, it was like, "Hey, I really think this is a great way to go." He made me an offer to transition into ownership at Techwood, so that's how I joined. Techwood grew from an SEO agency to a paid agency. Several years into that, things were going really well and we had several very amazing, outstanding employees. We had these core values and this mission statement we were really holding to. The result has been great growth. Looking back, we said that we wanted to be considerate of everyone. We wanted to help everyone. We wanted to have these values that we hold dear. We were looking for the next level of that. As we looked at that, Jack and I decided that it was time to transition the company into more of an employee ownership model. At that time, we were looking through lots of different mechanisms to do that, and we stumbled across a mechanism called the ESOP, or employee stock option plan. Probably about two years ago, we transitioned the company into 100% employee owned through an employee stock option plan. Again, it's just put more teeth to our core values. Every time I feel like we've taken a step to say, "How can we be more engrained there?", the result has always been growth. We're continuing to grow today. ROB: We often get questions and curiosity on this podcast about ways to facilitate ownership. There's a perception, I think, that it's a very expensive process. Talk about how you thought about shouldering the cost. Did you find it expensive, or did you find it to be manageable through some tools you found along the way? CHAD: For us, we found it very manageable. But again, it's based on what you're trying to do. We weren't trying to completely go away from Techwood. I had complete interest in continuing to work at Techwood and continuing to work for the long haul. We're working to build what we're going to call an evergreen company, a company that we want to focus on being a place where everybody can work forever under those core values that we want. So that was our intention. With that, the bill to actually convert it was pretty large, but I think the benefit has definitely outweighed the expense. There's a lot of very unique and interesting things that go on when you transition to an employee stock option plan. For instance, the company is making income, and the company doesn't have to pay income tax on that. There's a lot of cash left at the bottom line. When you go through the process of an ESOP, you can set out how the employees are going to purchase the company from you as an owner as well, so it's not like I just took ownership of Techwood and said, "Okay, now we're all owners." The employees are definitely earning it or have earned it. On the day we transitioned, we made sure there were some people within the company that would gain stock in the first year just because we knew they'd earned it already. The employee stock option plan, is it expensive? It's a big bill to look at, yes. But when compared to the benefits, I think it completely outweighs it. Publix has a percentage of their company that's in a stock option plan. The owner of Publix, when somebody asks, "Hey, do you ever regret selling that to the employees? How much money would you have earned if you hadn't done that?", his response to that question is always, "Probably zero," because the mechanism has been so powerful. That's the reason why he feels the company has grown. His response to "Would you do it again?" and "What would you have had if you hadn't done it?" is always, "Probably nothing. Would I do it again? Absolutely." ROB: Ballpark, is that a four-figure bill, a five-figure bill, a six-figure bill? CHAD: It's going to depend on all the pieces you need to put in and also the size of your agency and where you're going. But yeah, you could see a six-figure bill. ROB: That's a commitment. But I think employees appreciate that sort of commitment. I think I heard you allude to, along with that stock structure, you also have some sort of distribution structure, right? When there's profits, you're aligned and also distributing those to the team. Is that part of the case? CHAD: You work through an ESOP over the course of years, and you set that out when you're setting it up. Once the company is completely purchased from you as the owner and into the trust, the company can pay out dividends on those trusts to people who have stock. We can pay those into the form of an investment account. An ESOP is technically a form of retirement account, so it is a tax-free way to get stock as well and pay taxes when they sell the stock. That's always been something kind of weird. It's like, hey, we found the employees who we want to make partners here. If we wanted to just give them stock, it always came with a big tax bill for them, so the ESOP solved that problem as well, which has been pretty interesting. ROB: Right, it's a very interesting solution to the problem. I think it'll be interesting for folks to get out there and look at that option in the market. You have mentioned core values a couple of times. It's clear to me that core values are important to you. At what point in the business did you establish those values? CHAD: When I came in, it was kind of a hole. Within the first month, that was my top goal. It's just interesting; Jack and I are definitely two sides of the same coin in that he has amazing business acumen. He is probably more of the financial brains, I would say. He understands a lot more and all of that. I've got definitely more of a people capital. Seeing that as a whole based off of what I'm good at and where I can fit in – that's the goal of that. It just has made it easier for us to scale. I saw it as, how can people make decisions quicker and feel like they're making the best decisions? How can people operate without having to go through the eye of a needle, which would be me or somebody else? How can they feel like they have a full sandbox to participate and work in? Core values is one element of our sandbox. We've got four different things that are part of our onboarding process, and everything that we do really outlines what that sandbox for us to play in is. Core values is one, our mission is one, our process is one, and the other is our value chain. How are we continually adding value to the client? We've got a graphical presentation of how we ensure that when a client entrusts us with a dollar, we give them enough value to warrant that trust. Those are the four things that I set up. Like I said, it's been a hole that I saw and I said, hey, we can really scale if we would ensure we have the right people within our organization and tell them what they can do and how they can do it by saying, "Hey, don't go beyond this line and you're good." ROB: Really, really interesting. Can you run back those core values for us, just so we can digest them? CHAD: They're all begged and borrowed from other people, so I don't want anybody to think that I've got some ridiculous insight that nobody else has. It's pretty straightforward, and I think most people would be like, "Yeah, this is it." But we tried to be more intentional than that. Having a "How can I help?" attitude is one of our first and foremost ones. We go into depth and really try to define them. I'm a communications major and specialist, so I am dedicated to ensuring that the team has a unified definition of what that means. It's interesting when you start thinking of the English language and you think of words like "love" that don't really have a solid definition. The definition of it is whatever the shared meaning of it is. So, I really focused on not just saying "Hey, here's our core value," but "Here's how we're going to develop a shared meaning around it." So, a "How can I help?" attitude. We define that as in opportunities as well as in arguments or disagreements or different things like that, do we approach the problem saying "Hey, how can I help the situation be better?" That's what we're looking for. We're not looking for people who are going to approach this to say, "You could do this better," but people who are going to have that level of ownership to it and come to say, "Hey, I'm here to help and I want to make it better" and have that servant heart. So that's first and foremost. Second is embrace curiosity, knowledge, and improvement. We tie those all together when we talk about it because I think curiosity killed the cat and knowledge is fleeting unless it's geared towards improvement. We want people to be curious. We want people to ask questions. We want people to seek knowledge, but we want them to do it with that goal of improving our processes, improving the service we deliver, improving their lives personally. So, we structured it in that way to make sure that we're not just chasing questions, we're not just trying to learn more, but we're doing it with a very intentional intent. Next is second mile service and one that, being in the Atlanta area, I know you're probably aware of. Totally jacked from Chick-fil-A. The idea is that everybody loves to go to Chick-fil-A because of all the special things on top of it. Second mile service is what can we do that's going to be a little bit more, a little bit surprising, a little bit extra to strengthen that relationship or surprise somebody? We don't define second mile service; we try to use language and talk about how this is not scope creep. This is putting extra onto what we're doing. It's taking a deliverable just a little bit further so a client doesn't have to implement it themselves, or so that we answer all the questions we can think of before they ask them. That's second mile service to us. Next is open and honest communication. Do you want me to keep going, or is that good? ROB: It's good. I do like the stealing of second mile service. What's fascinating with that one in particular is, as I understand it, when they first implemented that program, there was even strong skepticism at the corporate level. I actually interned in the IT department of Chick-fil-A when I was in college, and that was before they got in the second mile service business. But it took time and it took pressure within their organization to even sell that through, so it's certainly aspirational. It's something I think we take for granted now, but if you think about Chick-fil-A 20 years ago, it wasn't as remarkable as it is now. And they see it in their results. They make three times more money per location than anybody else in quick service food. It's amazing. CHAD: Yeah, it's ridiculous. My roommate in college, who I mentioned, now owns a Chick-fil-A franchise. During college he worked with Kevin Williams, who is one of the very few triple franchisees for Chick-fil-A. Very, very few people actually get to own three Chick-fil-As. I actually worked for Kevin in college a little bit, and it's interesting; you go in on your first day, you sit down in the back of the employee section – or at least, it was then – and you listen to basically a sermon from Dan Cathy on what second mile service is and the parallel in the Bible where it comes from. It was eye-opening for me in really having that servant heart and servant eyes to look for those opportunities. That was something that was important to me when I was in the position to instill a cultural element within my company. Next is open and honest communication. We talk about open and honest communication in different ways. Like I said, because I really want to define that for people, we talk about how openness is a precursor to honesty. You have to be open for feedback. You have to be open for conversations so that people can trust you with that honesty. There is a level of openness that has to happen for honesty to happen. Again, approaching things with "How can I help you? How can I help the situation? How can I help us be honest and straightforward?" And that heart starts with openness, and I'm going to make sure you know that I'm open for feedback, that I'm open for this. Part of that is going to be that when you give me feedback, I'm not going to jump to the "I'm offended, you suck" mentality. I'm going to jump to the "Awesome, you really care about me and you want me to get better" mentality. So, flip that a little bit, so then we can be open and honest. We talk about honesty at different levels. There's obviously honesty with yourself. How are you being honest with yourself when you talk about your workload? Are you really being honest with yourself? Are you putting in the hours and staying focused that you need to? Do you know that you're slipping a little bit? Or maybe in the COVID world, you get to work from home and so you leave the TV on in the background, so things may take a little bit longer. I'm okay if that's what you want to do, but I want you to be honest if that's what's happening; your workload is not too much, it's just that it's taking you a little bit longer than it used to. If that's what you need for your balance, that's okay as long as we're getting done what we promise we're going to get done. And then there's honesty with your coworkers and honesty with clients. It just expands and goes on. We always want to be honest with results. We want to be honest with what's happening with people's accounts. We don't want to sit on anything. If I have an account manager, an analyst sitting on something saying, "Hey, if so-and-so finds out this, we could get fired," I'll tell them, "Well, if you don't tell them, you could get fired." That's how serious we are with open and honest. There should not be anything at the end of the day that you're worried about because you went and put it out there. I think if you don't, you're screwing yourself over. You're screwing your work-life balance or your family over. You're jeopardizing a lot of things. So at Techwood, we want to really focus on being open and honest. ROB: Excellent. CHAD: Next is actually one of my favorite ones. It's lighthearted fun but heartfelt sincerity. We want to be fun. We want to be goofy. We love each other. Having fun leads to trust, and trust is just so essential to business. If you're not having fun with the people you're with, I guarantee you, you're not trusting them. In order to have fun, there has to be a level of letting your guard down. So we want to be lighthearted and have fun, but we also want to make sure we draw the line. Where we draw the line is we don't want anybody to ever feel like we're not being heartfelt, that we're jeopardizing sincerity for a coworker or for a client. So yes, we want to have fun, but we're heartfelt in that we never want to push that to a point where our clients or our team don't feel that we have their best interest in mind or we don't really want the best for them. Then our last one is respectful and considerate. It's probably one of the most straightforward ones, but we definitely want to be respectful of each other and considerate. We tie those together because there's a level of respect that comes from being considerate that we want to achieve. Again, a proactive thing. We want to be extra considerate as a form of respect, if that makes sense. We want to think through things. We want to be intentional with things. We want to be the first to jump on solving world problems if we can. If there's something I can do at Techwood to help with some of the social unrest, I want us to intentionally look at doing it right now. We've had those conversations in Techwood and we've laid out different things we want to do to be extra considerate and respectful. Again, that comes to that "How can I help?" attitude. We want to approach issues not saying "Hey, you're wrong in this area and you need to change." It's like, "I hear you, I feel you. How can we help? How can we change to make it so that you don't feel that way or so that isn't the case?" As we talk about, I think that's something the whole world needs right now – this level of respect for everybody that doesn't question so much as it seeks to help. ROB: Right. It seems like I can barely see someone trying to say something positive without getting an immediate "gotcha" follow-up. There's a lot more we can do together. I really appreciate the intentionality and the ease with which you work through those core values. It's a question I try not to even ask unless I know the person is very confident and comfortable, because there's nothing more awkward than talking about your core values and you say, "What are your core values?" and they're like, "Um…" [laughs] That's a tough spot that I don't want to put anybody in. Chad, when you look at the journey so far, it sounds like a lot of things have gone well. I'm sure some things have not gone well from time to time. Maybe not too much lost sleep, but maybe some. What are some things you have learned along this path so far of building Techwood Digital that you might do differently if you were starting afresh? CHAD: Obviously start with core values and all of that from Day 1. Maybe not, but if Jack had started that way from Day 1, I think things probably would've grown smoother and he might not have ever hired me. So maybe it's good that he didn't start that way. [laughs] But looking back, I think that's such a staple. And then if I'm being more personal in my own reflections, there have been times when I hired people with speculation that an area of one of our core values might not be a good fit for them. I was like, "All right, they fit everywhere else. We'll push forward." As time has gone on, I've been more intentional about slowing down. If I'm not convinced they're a 100% fit, then I'm not going to say "Let's move forward." I'm going to think, what questions can I ask and what can I do to ensure 100% before we ever make an offer? From there, the people who have gotten their way into the organization and are not a proven fit, find a way to part ways sooner rather than later. Like I said, at every turn, when we've held true to who we want to be and who we are, we've always won. So I guess if I could change or go back and do anything different, it would be to be all-in and fight for those faster and harder every day. ROB: That's really insightful. It's one of those difficult experiences where it's easy to talk yourself into a hire, and it almost seems to me like the moment you start talking yourself into it, you should just move on. CHAD: Absolutely. In agency life, too, we're selling our people capacity. You're always going to hit that stairstep approach, and there's going to be times that are way more stressful than other times. You're going to get behind – which has been one of the biggest things about being employee-owned. Having that extra capital to make sure we're not ever behind on a hiring has been essential and will be really essential to growth this year. ROB: Practically speaking, how do you know when it's time to hire? CHAD: We've got balance and load measurements. We've always said "Hey, once we hit this percentage of revenue increase or this amount of revenue increase for this business line, that's another head." That's the way we've always thought about it, and we've always been way too late on predicting when we got there. So, this year we've intentionally lowered what those numbers are, not to say that that's where we want to be, but to trick ourselves into looking before we need it. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You'll be a little bit happier with that, I think, and a little bit less stressed from time to time. Chad, when people want to connect with you and connect with Techwood Digital, where should they go to find you? CHAD: They can check out our website at techwood.digital. Or feel free to email me, honestly. I'm always happy to have conversations and to make this world a better place. I really want to be an example of a "How can I help?" attitude. Honestly, anybody can email me directly at chad.crowe@techwood.digital. ROB: Brilliant. Chad, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I can't wait to connect in person sometime around Atlanta because we have that opportunity. But I can't wait to connect with a lot of people at some point because it's been a year, man. But it's all good. Thanks for coming on. CHAD: Thank you so much for having me. ROB: Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Melanie Querry owns Beyond Spots and Dots, a full-service advertising agency that frames its work around analysis, keeps client budgets on target, and utilizes proven marketing success in one industry to help businesses in other industries grow. Spots and Dots has been on the Inc. 5000 list five times. In this interview Melanie discusses how her agency helps clients understand the customer journey and how prioritizing and implementing tactics will do exactly what a client wants . . . and meet budget constraints. Melanie claims that, for a roughly equivalent impression count, digital marketing can cost one-third of what traditional marketing costs. Still, all the layers have to work together. "You have to have synergy within your marketing budget," she says. Tactic selection and prioritization are critical, customized to meet a client's needs, and are based on a mix of Beyond Spots and Dots' experience, knowledge, and research. As an example, Melanie talks about geofencing, creating a technological fence to target programmed advertising to a specific audience. Another tactic she presents is secondary search retargeting, which uses proprietary software/connections to capture someone searching for information on a third-party website and then follows that individual with ads on the internet. Melanie informs us that "there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops." Legally, large companies (Oracle, BlueKai) can disperse that collected information. Beyond Spots and Dots is one of only a few companies allowed to utilize the information . . . which they can pass on to their clients so that their clients can target these potential customers. Melanie wanted to be in advertising from an early age. After she earned her advertising degree, she took a job selling advertising at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, then another with a cable station to learn "the cable side." Melanie says these organizations "didn't know about their clients, didn't know about their customers," and only focused on rating points and the number of "spots" they got. She left the cable station almost on a whim (just because it was "time"), started her agency as a media buying firm that would be "Beyond the Spots and Dots" focus of her previous employers, and took on a Pittsburgh mega car dealer as a client "for the cash flow." Melanie convinced the dealer to fund a digital campaign at a time when even car manufacturers were not "doing digital." The car dealer's business grew so significantly that it eventually hired ten people for an internal digital department. Melanie jokes that. while the dealership provided sorely needed cash flow in those early years, she was not able to "use them for profits." Today, Beyond Spots and Dots provides advertising, public relations, marketing, branding, and digital services. Once things are "back to normal," Melanie looks forward to reopening the agency's physical locations in Pittsburgh and Columbus, OH – she prefers working with clients face-to-face "120% over what we're doing currently." Interestingly, even with clients "everywhere," the agency does not charge clients for its travel expenses – Melanie considers travel as a way to reinvest in her company. Melanie can be reached on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and on her agency's website at Beyondspotsanddots.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Melanie Querry, owner of Beyond Spots and Dots based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Melanie. MELANIE: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I certainly appreciate it. ROB: It's a pleasure to have you here. Tell us about Beyond Spots and Dots. Where does your firm excel? MELANIE: We really excel in helping businesses grow. We understand what it takes to grow. We've been on the Inc. 5000 list five times, which we're very proud of, and hope to continue to be there again in the future. We are able to take our experiences and really utilize the marketing efforts and successes that we have had with various industries and apply those to other industries. Our real growth has been in the digital world. We started as a media buying firm, so I kind of laugh and say that we do media buying with our eyes closed. However, the digital media buying is new and evolving, and we've been doing it for 15 years that we've been in business – which is great. Not many agencies can say that. So, we really excel at implementing those tactics for businesses, but helping businesses understand where their budgeting should be. I think what makes us different is that we really stay in line with budgets for clients and on behalf of clients and rein them in when they get out of line with budgets or things that they want to implement. Something that makes us very different is while we have super killer creative and award-winning creative, we really take an analytical approach to everything we do, including creative. That's pretty different from most agencies. Most agencies want to just be creative shops or digital firms, and we really do take a full-service approach. ROB: Got it. Congratulations on the 15 years, on the Inc. 5000 list. Those are all things – it doesn't pay the bills, but it is a recognition of that ongoing growth that you also seek for your clients. You mentioned being able to transfer tactics and strategies from some industries that we might think of perhaps to some industries we might not think of having such successful digital and media tactics. Is that the case? Are there some unexpected industries you've found yourself in the middle of? MELANIE: Yes. We really don't want to put all of our eggs in one basket. We started in 2006, and in 2008 had the economy fall out beneath us. Nothing like COVID, but certainly at the time, and through those years, we learned a lot and a great deal. What we did learn is not to put all of our eggs in one basket. We pride ourselves on working in various industries. Business is business, and while industries do have niche audiences or niche ways of advertising or marketing, there are still businesses that are being run through operations that really follow through all types of business. We have been able to successfully help businesses grow in various industries, but some of the industries that have been unique that we didn't seek out, if you will, have been property management, for example. That was one where we didn't seek it out. They sought us out. But we were able to be very successful with one property management company, and it filtered through to many others because of the tactics we implemented at a low cost and we were able to help them grow. ROB: In that case, were they seeking more properties to manage? Were they seeking tenants, renters? Not to focus in too deeply, but as a means of exploring what you do. MELANIE: Sure. Their goal is to seek out renters. They have several properties around the country, and near one of our offices – we have an office in Columbus and also Baltimore. In the Columbus market, they wanted to sell out a particular building, which was very specific, and they did it so quickly when they started working with us that they actually shut their advertising off early, but then diverted their dollars to a completely different market. That was really interesting and fun. It's fun for us. ROB: And probably meaningful for them. Behind the scenes, not always, but a lot of times in the real estate world, having something fully leased or above a certain percentage is a meaningful financial milestone. It lets you collateralize or sell the property. It's a big deal beyond just filling the space. But then on the "who you're targeting side," finding a place, whether it's an office or a residence, is a customer journey. What does that journey look like, and how do you tackle people along that journey? MELANIE: That's a great question. You're speaking my language, Rob. [laughs] We do take that customer journey fully into consideration when we are making a recommendation for any type of creative assets or messaging and also the placement of the ads themselves, and whether it's a recommendation to do PR versus traditional marketing or advertising versus some kind of new media. In targeting, it's really fun to look at the customer journey because you have these five steps, if you will, from the point of time when someone is not even familiar with your service or product all the way to the point of no return where they have to make a decision and their decision is either "let's do it / buy it," whatever it is you're asking them to do, or "let's not." That customer journey has steps throughout in between those two aspects or behaviors, and there are advertising tactics that make sense for certain parts of that journey. In the very beginning, when you're trying to just make someone aware of your product, your book, your property that you have available or whatever it might be that you're selling, there are tactics that work better for that part of the customer journey versus the middle of the journey where they're now aware, they might be talking to their friends about you, they're doing their research, which is part of that journey – and then they're trying to figure out what makes sense for them and what's best for them, and whether or not they're going to buy. We utilize that customer journey for everything that we do, and we're always presenting that to businesses to understand the different parts of the journey. A lot of people will come to us and say, "We just want an awareness campaign," and I ask them, "Why?" That is valid and relevant, and sometimes an awareness campaign is all they want or all they think they can afford, so we help them to understand that journey so that they understand the different tactics within. ROB: Right. It would seem deeper in the funnel, there's some tactics you can't afford to not do. I can imagine – and I'm just making things up here, because I don't run, let's say, an apartment complex – but if someone comes and they book a tour, they're so deep into that funnel, two things seem true to me. Number one, it seems like a lot of businesses – and I'll broaden this beyond real estate – would find it hard to operationalize the information of who has booked a tour in a timely manner. But it also seems like one of the best ways you could possibly spend your money is, let's say, remarketing to an email list of people who have visited you in the past X months. How do they operationalize that successfully? Or am I way off, number one? Number two, if I'm in the neighborhood, how do you help people meet some of those time-sensitive communications that would need to happen to execute on that sort of thing? MELANIE: We try to implement new media because of the technology behind it. Depending on a business's budget, our job is to help them understand those tactics that they can implement to do exactly what you're asking within the budget. Based on our experience and based on our knowledge and based on research, we will help that business to prioritize those tactics. For example, a tactic might be geofencing, which is one of the new ways of advertising through programmatic advertising. We can literally draw a fence, if you will – it's technology for sure, but you are drawing a fence around something. We've drawn fences on roads before, trying to reach people driving into a college when a competitive college wants to reach those potential students. We have drawn fences around convention centers, trying to target tradeshows for particular audiences. So, the geofencing is really cool. That's one tactic that we can utilize to grab people now. With COVID, obviously things have changed with geofencing because people aren't out and about and aren't going to these big events or aren't going to big tradeshows. That will start again, but there are other tactics. There's another tactic that we can utilize called secondary search retargeting, and that's one of the newest and latest and greatest, and a lot of fun to work with. We had a company that was very niche; they were implementing services to small to medium size businesses for Mac users specifically, but for companies frankly like ours, where we have mostly PC-based computers, and we have a few Macs because we have designers, and they need their Macs. This company would target businesses that were utilizing both PC and Mac, and they were specialists in the Mac realm. When you buy a Mac at the Apple Store, you can go online to search for companies like this to help us network the Macs with the PCs. A lot of companies are getting into this because people do like their Macs and they're very loyal to their Macs. This particular company was able to utilize secondary search retargeting by targeting third party searches. This is outside of the Google world and outside of just your search bar in Google. We've also been able to utilize on the spot, like you're asking, secondary search retargeting for students. College students are searching online for lots of things, for different programs, for different schools. they're searching in all of these third parties out there, and we're able to actually tap into those searches. It's really wild. ROB: What does that mean? Explore the tactic with me a little bit. Does that mean you're on something like US News, World Report, looking at college rankings, and you're searching for something and somehow that's able to feed back into search targeting? Where does this information come from? MELANIE: That's right. To give another example, probably an easier one to visualize is real estate. We have worked in the real estate realm and been very successful with that industry as well. A secondary search tactic that's really cool allows us to target – let's say you're buying a home and I'm a real estate company, and I want your business because you're buying a home and I've got homes to sell. But you are really hard to catch unless I can catch you through geotargeting by visiting other open houses. Right now, during COVID, we know that's not happening so much around the country. There are open houses, but they're few and far between. So. a different technology you can use is this secondary search retargeting. You might be searching on Realtor.com, and if you're searching for a home value or the home sale price, then I can capture you doing that search on that third party website. And when I capture you doing that through my technology, I can physically follow you with ads through the internet, which is the retargeting part. The way that that's done, to answer your question, is there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops. All of our actions are being collected through this data, and huge companies such as BlueKai and Oracle now legally are allowed to spit that information back out. Companies like ours – and there are only a few companies like ours around the country that are allowed to utilize this information – we're able to use that data of that behavior from someone like you and give it to our real estate company and target those people. It is wild. It's pretty cool. ROB: That's remarkable. There's great power and there's great responsibility. I feel like I need to go close my blinds or something. MELANIE: Yes. [laughs] ROB: It's really just what I type into the computer that's probably the problem here. Take me back a little bit, Melanie. Tell us about where Beyond Spots and Dots came into existence. What led you to start running your own business that was not by any means guaranteed to be a multi-time Inc. 5000 company and so on? MELANIE: As a young child, I always wanted to have an advertising agency. And I don't know that I even knew what an advertising agency was at the time or what an agency really did, but I followed that. I probably at the time thought of more of the creative side, which is what most people think of when you think of an advertising agency. I really followed that through school. I got a degree in advertising. Back then, there were only three colleges across the country that actually offered a degree in advertising doing creative and media buying. Not many colleges and universities offered that then, but they do now, which is great. Once I graduated, of course, at that time I learned that TV was the most complicated of all media, and when doing media buying, TV was the most complex. So, I really wanted to learn about the inner workings of TV. I graduated from college, I moved to Pittsburgh – being a Penn Stater, I got to know Pittsburgh when I was very young – and started at KDKA-TV, which was the first TV station ever. That was really powerful to me. I worked like a dog as an entry level person. At the time, they also didn't allow entry level employees, so I really had to show them what I was made of to be able to even keep my job. I barely made a salary at the time. I think I made more in college waiting tables than I did at my first job at KDKA-TV. [laughs] I was going to power through it. After KDKA, I went to the cable side because I wanted to know and understand both sides of TV, broadcast and cable. One day I decided, okay, there's never a real good time, so it's as good as any. I put in my four weeks' notice and I just quit. I resigned cold turkey. I didn't take clients. I didn't do anything like that. I just stopped one day and resigned, and the next day I said, okay, I've got to figure out how to start a business. I started making phone calls to the state on how to register a business, and "What the heck is my name going to be?" When I worked in these big mammoth companies, Comcast and CBS Network, I worked with big agencies, global agencies, and they didn't know anything about their clients. They just didn't know about their customers. All the media buyers cared about were rating points and "How many spots am I getting?" The name actually came pretty easy to me. Beyond Spots and Dots became the name because I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to go beyond the number of spots someone's getting and the rating points they're getting. And the name stuck. The first day of the business, I went out to celebrate and I met who would become my husband, which was awesome. ROB: Wow. Good day. MELANIE: Yeah. He was a finance major and he helped me with the books, and as I got revenue in, I needed someone to help me with that side of it, the business side. He ended up coming on board, we got married, and now we're a full-service firm. At the time, he was already developing websites and doing Google ads. So, Day 1, we picked up website development and Google advertising, which was really great. ROB: What did those first few customers look like? Who did you start working with initially? MELANIE: I made phone calls, of course, Day 1, and said, "I now have an advertising agency. I would love an opportunity to work with you and to handle your advertising." I was willing to do what it took to get business as far as services that I wasn't familiar with. I was willing to learn new services. One was a mega car dealer in Pittsburgh. I had talked to them about some Google advertising, and at the time, manufacturers weren't doing that. So, I implemented a digital campaign for them 15 years ago. In order to get their business, which was big, I needed the cash flow. They needed someone that knew digital, and it was a win-win – except that from a cash flow standpoint, I was able to use them as cash flow; I just wasn't able to use them for profits. [laughs] I felt that it was a necessary evil. I loved working with the general manager there, and I knew that I could help their business grow, and we did. We were able to take their business to a digital standpoint that, at the time, neither manufacturers nor car dealers were able to do. They were able to hire 10 internal people as a digital department, which was unheard of at the time. This was during the time right before the fallout in 2008, so yeah, pretty cool and definitely a good story and something that I look back on, for sure. ROB: Right. What did the budget of a car dealership like that look like at the time for traditional media? Has their overall ad budget changed much, or has it just shifted a percentage to digital? MELANIE: Certainly, the traditional media spend was big. It was bigger. That's the beauty about digital; you don't actually have to spend as much in digital. You just don't, and you can reach – the impression count is similar by spending a third of the amount. Traditional media is more expensive on a cost per spot basis or a cost per impression basis. Our job is to help the client understand all of that and what that means and how they should be spending their money. So there always was a bigger spend for them specifically in traditional, and at the time, of course, the digital was just really hitting. I mean, 14-15 years ago, digital wasn't that big. You didn't have to have it. You dabbled in it and you knew it was coming and you knew it was out there. So, we helped them to utilize some of this new media at the time. ROB: What was someone like that spending on traditional per month? Was it $10,000, $50,000, $100,000? What's the ballpark? Or am I even low? I don't know. MELANIE: This particular dealer had multiple manufacturers, multiple brands, and each manufacturer would offer them incentives, and they had budgets that they had to spend by manufacturer. So, it would vary. In general, a dealer like that could spend anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 a month. It truly varies. It varies throughout the year, it varies by the incentives the dealer is receiving, and it varies by the number of cars they have on the lot. There're so many variables when it comes to spending for something like that. ROB: It's helpful even just to know a general direction. I've certainly seen an increased appetite for digital, and I've seen even new real estate developments looking for very sophisticated website buildouts and that sort of thing. It starts to make sense when you put it in the context of the traditional ad budgets. If they've started to turn the corner on digital, you can start to understand that increased degree of investment in some of the places – a website used to be an afterthought. You might not even have one for a development, and now it seems to be a hub of activity. MELANIE: Sure. A website is a walking salesperson. I don't care what you're selling or what you're offering, any industry should have a decent website because that's where people go. And even social media. We find, in our experience – and I'm kind of floored by it, but it is what it is – people will go to social media. They'll go to a business Facebook page before they ever even get to the website. Which is also very interesting in my mind. To your point, the layering of dollars so that you can layer your tactics – your marketing tactics, your advertising tactics – the layering is what's really critical. When you have a budget – and we've worked with very small budgets and have put people on TV before, even with a smaller budget. It's all about the layering and where you're going to run and what the messaging is, and it all works together. It really has to be cohesive. I feel like the word "synergy" is so cliché, but it's true. You have to have synergy within your own marketing budget. ROB: Really interesting threads to pull on there, Melanie. When you look back at the history of Beyond Spots and Dots, what are some things you have learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting anew? MELANIE: I wish I would've started sooner. [laughs] I had this in the back of my mind. I'm very fortunate to have started when I did. Today's my birthday, actually. ROB: Happy birthday. MELANIE: I'm turning 45, and I'm blessed to have what I have and to have been able to work this hard thus far. I have a child now. We have a little kiddo. But prior to that, working your tail off – I wish I started sooner. I wish I'd started earlier because having the energy and not having a family at that time and being able to work the 80 hours I used to work before kids – it's hard to do that. As you get older, it's tiring. So, I would recommend just doing it. You only live once. I think that's one thing. For the future, growth. Growth is important. We plan to get back where we were. We were on a roll. We have good planning. We've got the tools internally to be able to expand and scale at this point. So, we do plan to open other offices. We have an office in Baltimore and Columbus right now, and Pittsburgh, obviously; that's our headquarters. But we do want to keep growing. We want to continue to help mentor others and also continue to grow and help businesses grow. ROB: How do you think about that office planting strategy? Is it rooted in some of your clientele having a local base and being able to be in person with someone? Do you spin up a small lease, or are you in WeWork land? How do you think about the planting strategy? MELANIE: Part of it is a real estate strategy with respect to investing, and that's a whole other conversation. As we diversify our own portfolio, if you will, personally speaking – and from a business standpoint – real estate is important to us. Long term, I don't plan to purchase real estate all over for office buildings. I do have to tell you, you kind of hit the nail on the head with respect to having an office and then working with a local client. We've lost business, presentations we've made, because businesses want an agency that's right in their backyard. When COVID hit, I thought to myself, does this change the way businesses believe they can do business? For example, we own our building currently in Pittsburgh, and we have an empty building right now because we have our whole staff working from home. We will keep them working from home as long as we feel that we need to, to keep everybody safe. Hopefully, that ends soon, but the reality of it is, we are doing business and conducting business all over the world from home. There are a lot of securities that go behind that, and we're dealing with a lot of data and customers' data and customers' information. The security has changed, of course. But does it change the way businesses think in the fact that we could do business – I don't have to be right in Columbus to do business for you or to handle your native or your advertising. It's an interesting open question that I ask myself as well. ROB: I understand that. I think there will always be a certain scope and scale of client that you're going to want to go see in person. When everything's normal, there's just a certain size of client that you're going to win more or not lose if you're giving them some attention in person. MELANIE: Agreed. ROB: I'm a firm believer in that. I agree, it's a whole other topic that I think we'll probably pass exploring on this podcast. Most people don't want to talk a lot about profits, but profits are important. I come originally from a software background and now also have some services work that we do, but within a services firm, there's only so much reinvestment back into the business that makes sense. It's not like a software company where you're infinitely scaling and pulling additional capital. So, figuring out what to do with profitability is its own interesting topic, I think. MELANIE: Yeah. And to answer that, for us at least, I agree with you fully. We prefer to be in person. That is why we opened offices in Baltimore and Columbus specifically, because they are nearby; it's quick and easy for us to travel there. I do have family in Baltimore, so selfishly, I'm thrilled to have an office there. [laughs] It's an excuse, anyway. Doing business in person is way better, I believe. I prefer it 120% over what we're doing currently. And we do reinvest our profits into travel. We don't charge our clients for travel. Our hourly fee has been the same for 15 years. We know what it takes timewise to do business. Now that we've been in business 15 years, we're more efficient at what we do, so it doesn't take us as long to do things. So, I don't feel that I have to gouge clients. It's just not necessary. Those profits we do roll back into travel, and we travel to our clients as much as we humanly possibly can. I think the same goes for getting work done in person. There's something to be said for our staff to be able to walk upstairs and go talk to the designer real quick or go downstairs and pull our copywriter in and say, "Hey, what do you think about this tagline?" There's some camaraderie there, and that's missing during all of this COVID. But that's reality, and we divert, and we will – I'm positive; it's a new year, and we will get back to where we were. We definitely will. I think the world will as well. But as a business owner right now, you just have to go with the flow and figure out your plan and keep at it and stay positive as much as you can and be able to stay on top of it. ROB: That's excellent. I really do like that thought of travel as a means of reinvesting in the business. I think that's a solid way to think about that, investing in relationships there. Melanie, when people want to find you and when they want to find Beyond Spots and Dots, where should they go to connect with you? MELANIE: Sure. I'm a believer of connecting. I certainly have a LinkedIn page, and I appreciate when people do connect. I love to mentor, so I love when young people reach out. I probably volunteer a little too much for mentoring, but I'll take it. I'll do it all day long if it helps someone young who's trying to get into the business and break through. As long as they're a hard worker, they're going to be successful. Beyondspotsanddots.com is our website. You can also google us and find us. Lots of places. We have a Twitter account, Facebook page, and all the good things. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Melanie. It's been excellent connecting with you and learning for you, so thank you for coming on and sharing. MELANIE: Thank you so much. I certainly appreciate it. ROB: Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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

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

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

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

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