The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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