John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner and Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you, host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details of truth and like nobody tells it. Fact. A recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas They Got Down In the Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jason Feifer. He’s the editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine and the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today, build for Tomorrow, an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast and future proofing your career. So Jason, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So I’ve always wondered what is an editor in chief at a magazine Actually do it. It is confusing. I mean all of media is confusing to people. I totally understand that. So I mean, look, it’s a little bit different at every publication, but generally speaking, an editor in chief is responsible for the editorial direction of either the whole brand or you know, at least certain parts of it. And in my case, that means that I am directly overseeing the day to day operations of the print magazine.

(01:54): I also am very involved in the editorial direction of digital, though we have a digital director who’s involved, who’s really running that day to day. And then I’m involved in very high level decisions about the brand more broadly. And I, I work very closely with the ad sales team. I’m often on calls meeting with clients and I’m also the face of the brand. So I’ll go out and represent the brand on television or radio or in podcasts like this. So that’s, you know, that’s what it means. Basically I’m, you know, part of, I’m part a director of brand, I don’t know, connection. I’m trying to come up with corporate language here, but I don’t, you know, I don’t really know. But basically I’m the guy who decides what we should be covering and why and the tone and feel of the brand. Yeah, so you might be the one saying, you know what, sometime in the next quarter we need to do an issue on AI or something like that.

(02:46): Yeah, that’s exactly right. And then what are those stories exactly gonna be and who should we assign to write them? And now that they’ve come in, let me read through that, you know, and give feedback and work with the other editors to make sure that everything is really up to stuff. And also make sure that, that I’ve set the tone for, you know, well if we’re gonna do a thing about AI then we gotta make sure we have a nice mix of these stories and who’s gonna be on the cover and now I gotta go negotiate with some publicist about which celebrity we’re gonna put on and on. And you were, uh, as if Memory serves me, you were a fast company in that capacity at some point as well. I was not as editor in chief, I was a senior editor of Fast Company.

(03:21): Yeah. So that, you know, sort of in the middle of the totem pole there. Okay. So let’s talk about your book. I’m gonna jump right into the middle of it. You talk about change, which essentially that’s what the book’s about, right? Part of the subtitle Embracing Change, you, you talk about it in four phases, panic, where do I have it? Panic, adaption, new Normal wouldn’t go back. And it’s funny, but as I read that component, I was like, well that’s exactly what we’ve been doing the last two years, isn’t it? It sure is and, and I, and that’s exactly where the observation came from, was watching how everybody went through the same change at the same time that started the Pandemic and then all I think went through the same emotional journey but all diverged quite radically in how they responded to it. Yeah. What’s interesting about that is, I mean, rarely do we get the chance to experience that so sharply and maybe in such a quick timeframe, right?

(04:12): I mean often, I mean, change is happening to us all the time, but in sometimes it’s just so slow we don’t really perceive it. So, so that was a great exam. I mean that was a great sort of laboratory, if you will, for, you know, how it actually happens, wasn’t it? Yeah, it sure was. And it was incredibly instructive. I had gone into the pandemic thinking a lot about this subject and I had come to this conclusion that the thing that drives success more than anything else is somebody’s ability to be adaptive. But I hadn’t quite gotten down to what they’re doing and my big theory of the case, and that really came because of the pandemic. And in particular, funny enough, it came because, you know, I had mentioned a minute ago that I have to go on all these or have to, is not the right phrase.

(04:59): It is my pleasure to go on all these sales calls with entrepreneurs, sales team talking to clients. And I was being asked all the time during those calls, especially in the first year of the pandemic, well what is, you know, what’s on entrepreneurs’ minds and what are they doing and how are they reacting? And because people kept asking me, I was trying to come up with a kind of simple narrative of what it is that I was seeing. And as I told this story over and over again, it just sort of coalesced into this little four phases of change thing. And as I said it, people responded very positively and said, you know what, that makes a lot of sense. And I started to share it with entrepreneurs who were going through major changes or had gone through major changes and they said, yeah, I think you’re really right about that.

(05:40): So I started to try to map on top of that all the lessons and insights that I was gathering from people and it just felt like a real progression of, of what the experience was. And I came over with a couple things from that, but one of the big ones was how incredibly powerful it is to be able to take observations and turn it into narrative form. That when you’re trying to share insights and information with people, whether it’s in a sales call or a book or anything in between, being able to map insights on top of a story is incredibly valuable because it helps people understand conceptually what you’re talking about. And it also helps them find themselves within your story. And that’s where I think you can really hook them and start to have more interesting conversations. Well, you probably have become possibly become more aware of that in the editorial copy that you write, that you read I’m guessing, is you start looking for those, like where’s the insight in this?

(06:39): Oh yeah, all the time. I mean, I am obsessed with how my theory of media for whatever it’s worth is that I don’t think that anybody wants to read a magazine. I don’t think that anyone wants to read a book. I don’t think that anyone wants to listen to a podcast. I think what they want is valuable information that they can use and or a useful experience, right? Right. I mean, sometimes people are just doing things for entertainment and that’s fine, it’s an escape or whatever the case is. But you have to be aware that the medium by itself is not the reason that people come. Nobody picks up the magazine because they love a magazine. They pick up a magazine because they love useful information and a magazine just happens to be a good delivery mechanism for them. So I try to take that insight and really remind myself of it on a minute by minute basis.

(07:25): So if I’m having a conversation with somebody or if I’m, you know, if I’m on stage being asked questions, I understand that even if you’re asking a question about me, you’re really asking a question about yourself. So I better in my answer, make sure that I’m taking insights and then turning them back and making them useful to you. Um, it’s, it’s why, you know, if you ask me on this podcast, you’re welcome to. So sort of personal question I’ll answer it. But what I’ll try to do is instantly search for the way in which whatever you asked me, whatever I’m talking about myself, how can that offer some kind of insight for an audience? Like how could this be useful to you? Cause again, I’m thinking just like, I don’t think that you care about picking up a magazine. I don’t think you care about me or there’s no reason that somebody’s listening to this right now because they care about me.

(08:09): What they care about is that I might say something that’s useful to them and that’s great. That’s exactly how we all should think. So I and everybody else who creates any kind of content or anything that people consume, we should be very aware of that at all times. So, so now we are going to continue our show on cynicism. , it’s not cynicism it’s, but you know, it’s funny but people sometimes interpret it like that, but it’s not cynicism, it’s optimism. It what it is. It’s a belief that you have an audience that is deeply engaged in something powerful to them, right? Everybody is trying to build something for themselves and they should. And so what they’re doing is they’re going through the world looking for insights that can be useful to them. And we, we, as the people in front of them, in whatever way we’re in front of them, whether we’re trying to sell them something or market something to them or speak to them or write something for them, we have to be incredibly aware of what is so important to them so that we can make sure that we are paying off on that.

(09:05): It’s funny cuz I, that reaction that you gave is one that I get a lot when I say things like this, but I don’t mean to say that this is, this isn’t a cynical thing at all. This is like, know your value. Yeah. Because if you know your value, you can pay off to people incredibly well. Yeah. And I was completely getting, um, you know, I understand because it could be interpreted that way, but I’ve said for forever as a marketer, you know, nobody wants what we sell. They want the problem solved. And that’s really how we have, that’s absolutely the right framework to look at it. Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients.

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(10:31): Going back to these phases again. Yeah, I, my personal favorites panic, I mean I like the messy, but you, you’re talking about wouldn’t go back as really the payoff, you know, for going through the change.

(10:42): So maybe two, two part question here. Maybe describe that idea or that you know what’s in that and then maybe talk about, you know, put you on the spot a little bit. What’s a wouldn’t go back moment for you? Yeah, so wouldn’t go back is what I say is the real payoff of the four phases of change where you reach a moment where you say, I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn’t want to go back to a time before I had it. And what this really is recognizing that there was more than one way to do something and that in fact that these other ways that maybe you were forced into through some kind of crisis or disruption or that you were proactive in trying to figure out how to grow beyond whatever it is that you initially built. That this requires discovering something that wasn’t on your original roadmap, but that once you get there you recognize it has tremendous transformative transformational value.

(11:37): And, and one of the ways I think people can do that is to do what I like to call to reconsider the impossible, which is to basically take stock of the ideas that you had discarded because they possibly are actually the ones that are gonna be the most transformational. I think we all build these filters for ourselves and, and we say the good ideas are in here, the bad ideas are out there, but you know, those filters are faulty, they’re understandable. We can’t consider every idea at every moment of the day. We don’t have the time for it. But we have to recognize, especially as we build systems and we start to incentivize the people around us to, you know, do everything better, faster, and cheaper, that we also have to make sure that we’re building systems that take into account that, that people are gonna have new needs.

(12:18): That, that the way in which we operate is going to shift and change and we better make sure that we’re alert to how to be adaptive to that or else we’re gonna become irrelevant. You asked about me, I mean, one of the things that I, when I started at Entrepreneur Magazine, my background is in media. So I was at, as you mentioned, fast Company, but also me, men’s Health Maxim. I freelanced for everybody from GQ to Slate to whatever. And, and so I got to entrepreneur, I really thought of it as a media project. You know, I’m here to remake the magazine, I’m here to make media and, and then people, when I would go out into the world, they wouldn’t treat me as a media person. They would treat me as a thought leader in entrepreneurship. And I was deeply uncomfortable by that at first because, you know, I just did, I felt like a fraud.

(13:01): But eventually I realized there was a massive opportunity if I could just understand what it was that people wanted for me and also find the honest way in for myself. Because look, I’m not the guy who can tell you exactly how to grow your business from a, you know, $1 million company to a $10 million company to a hundred. That, that’s not me, that’s not my background. But my background is in people. I understand people, I understand how they think, I understand how they process information and I can take those lessons and I can turn them into value for other people. So I wanted to figure out where’s my place in all this and if I could do that, then I could remake the way that I think about myself and also seize the larger opportunity, which is really the reason I’m talking to you right now.

(13:43): Nobody asked me to write a book, nobody asked me to be on all these podcasts or to go, uh, you know, do keynote talks for companies. But that was the opportunity available and I wanted to make sure I was able to rise to meet it. What would you say is one of the greatest, ultimate benefits of change? I mean, sometimes change is hard, sometimes change hurts, sometimes change ends you up somewhere that wasn’t as lucrative, for example, as you previously were, but there’s a payoff isn’t there to going, having gone through that or can there be Oh, I think, yeah, certainly there can be, and I think that there often is, you know, I mean look, oftentimes when we’re talking about people navigating change is sometimes of their own making a decision. And a lot of times it is reactive. It’s that we were doing something for a long time and it stopped working and so we had to do something else.

(14:32): So look, part of part of the value of it is not drowning is is building this kind of knowledge that things are going to change into the way in which you operate so that you don’t leave yourself vulnerable to a disruption that is incredibly hard to overcome. That’s really the power here is to be thinking is the reason I called the book Build for Tomorrow, is like, what are you doing today that is anticipating tomorrow? Because Harvard Business Review ran this piece a couple years ago that asked this question, which is why do big companies stop innovating? And the answer that was offered was because big companies start with an innovation and then over time they shift all of their energy and all of their incentives towards efficiency. How do we make things better, faster and cheaper? And that’s fine, nothing wrong with efficiency, but the problem is that if top to bottom everybody’s incentivized towards efficiency, then nobody is thinking about how this company is gonna have to change because you know, your blockbuster and Netflix is coming along and that’s how you see complete destruction, not just disruption.

(15:41): So I think that’s one, one way to think about it. The other way to think about it is that, is that they’re, I think oftentimes we sell ourselves short. I think that successful people sell themselves short because they say, you know, maybe the reason why I have this level of success was some combination of luck and timing that doesn’t exist anymore and there’s just simply no way that I could recreate it. And I just don’t, I just don’t think that’s true. I think that’s a good, that’s a way in which people end up holding onto old things for too long. But if instead you give yourself some credit and you own some of your success, then you say, you know what? Maybe I have something here and I could build even more than I have right now. Or I could build even bigger. I could solve problems that I can’t just let sit around until they eat at the foundation that I’m standing upon.

(16:26): The more that we just accept that new does not equal bad, then the more I think we can liberate ourselves to try to build that new ourselves. Well, I mean in a way it sounds like you’re advocating that, you know, if somebody’s been in a job, been in a career, been doing something for, you know, a certain period of time, that it may still feel comfortable, but maybe you almost need to force change that to put yourself out there to say, Hey, I need to do new things because I’m starting to do mediocre. I mean, I think this is a concept to call work your next job that I think everybody should be doing. Whether you own your own company or you are working for someone else’s company work, your next job is to remind that in front of you you have two sets of opportunities.

(17:12): Opportunities set a opportunity, set B opportunity, set A is everything that’s asked of you. So you have a boss or you have clients, whatever it is, like your ability to deliver on their expectations is opportunity. Set a opportunity set B is everything that’s available to you that nobody’s asking you to do. And you know, that could be within the work structure you have that could also be outside where you say, oh, I like podcasts, maybe I should start a podcast. My belief and the way that I built my career and the way that I watch others do too is that I think that they, I believe that opportunities set B is always more important. Opportunities say A, you know, doing the things that are expected of you, those are not unimportant, you have to do those. But opportunity set B is where growth is gonna happen.

(17:58): That’s where you’re going open up additional opportunities that you hadn’t seen before. I mean, you know, you look at the greatest companies in the world and what they tended to do was start in a very narrow space, prove their model and their understanding of what their value was, and then start to expand outward from there by understanding what people need and therefore building that back into who they are. And companies transform as a result, right? What you’re watching is really people who are, uh, leaders who are recognizing that the greatest thing that they can do for their company is test something now so that they can understand what’s going to be of value tomorrow to people. There’s just, you know, look, there’s nothing wrong If you have something and it works for you, I’m not telling you to throw it away, that’s ridiculous. But what I am telling you is that the, there’s a high likelihood that the thing that you’re doing right now is simply not going to work as well tomorrow as it does today because the world changes.

(18:52): And if you don’t change with it, then you become outmoded slowly but surely. So let’s build that reality into what we do. Let’s build systems in which we’re recognizing what’s changing around us and then running little experiments. Let’s make sure that, you know, if we’re running a business, that we’re constantly talking to our customers and understanding where they are moving towards so that we can take those insights and build them back into the way that we serve them now. Because everything has to be an evolution. And if you don’t think of it that way, then you’re gonna be stuck in the past. Yeah, and you know, again, um, subtitle the book, future Proofing Your Career. I mean, what you’re talking about there is really, I mean there’s probably always gonna be a market out there somewhere for that plan B, bucket B stuff you’re working on, right?

(19:37): If it’s not appreciated where you are, that’s really how you, I mean, I’m guessing that’s an element of future proof proofing your career, isn’t it? Oh yeah, without question. And I think that you, if we’re just talking about individual people and individual careers and individual skill sets, then, you know, then, I mean just to simplify it then it’s so interesting because what, look, think about your own career or the careers people who you know you’re close with are very impressed by it. And what you’ll see is this kind of wacky zigzag, right? Where they did one thing and it led to something that seemed completely different, which led to something else. I mean, how am I running Entrepreneur Magazine? It, it’s not because of some straightforward path, it’s because of like all of these random roles that I held over time that, that, that have a logic to them because I worked at Men’s Health and that taught me this particular kind of writing style.

(20:25): And then, and then I went to Fast Company, which fine, I worked at a magazine, but really the value there was that I worked at the video team and, and I got in front of the camera and I learned how to present, which many years later, the CEO and president of Entrepreneur Media would see that stuff and say, oh, this guy can be a good representative of this brand and that helps us feel confident that he should be an editor in chief Chief. So the more in which we are embracing this little zigzag path, while being mindful that some of the greatest opportunities are the ones that we aren’t going to have anticipated, the more that we’re really clearing the way for success. Malcolm Gladwell told me, I interviewed him, you know, bestselling author and podcast her and all sorts of things. Malcolm Gladwell, he told me when we were speaking for the magazine a couple years ago, he said, self concepts are powerfully limiting.

(21:15): And I mean, I just, I love that so much. I wrote it down and stuck it on my wall. Self-conception are powerfully limiting that if you have two narrow a definition of yourself, then you will turn down all the opportunities that don’t meet that narrow definition and therefore you will actually limit your ability to grow. I try to take that to heart pretty much with everything that I do. His audiobook with Paul Simon right up there with one of my favorites. Malcolm Glad was what you just said is interesting though, because there’s a fine line between that idea of limiting yourself and staying focused on, you know, not just chasing every new thing that comes down, you know, and that’s, that’s the real trick is under, is understanding where to get off path, what to chase, what not to chase, where, how to stay focused. And I think that’s, that that’s the part that many people stumble and have trouble with.

(22:06): Yeah, I think you’re totally right and look, it depends upon your circumstance, right? I mean, I hear lots of different versions of that problem from, I’ve been speaking to a lot of college students lately and cuz of the book, I’m going to a sort of college tour and there was a kid at Drexel University who just came up to me and he was like, you know, he wants to do seven different things and they’re all like wildly different, you know, and so which one is he supposed to do? And, and I hear that and then I also hear companies who have 10 different ideas of what they should be doing right now is not the resources to pursue all 10 of them. And one of the, I mean look, there’s, there’s all sorts of ways to answer that question, but I think one of the foundational things to think about is it came from conversation I had with Katie Milkman who studies sort of how people change and make decisions at Wharton.

(22:55): She’s a professor there and she said, you know, one of the greatest mistakes that we make is that we think of everything that we do as permanent. And, and so, you know, she told me, she was like, look, this advice is not gonna sound revolution. It kind of is because people often overlook it, which is to just give ourself, give ourselves the permission to run experiments to, to simply think, you know, I’m going to try something and it might be of value and it might not be of value. And both of those are, okay, so let’s go into something and maybe let’s set a three, three month check in and a six month check in and see if there’s value here and if there is, let’s continue. And if not, maybe we move on to something else. But you know, there’s no fault in having tried it. The more that we can just think of what we’re doing as experiments, the more in which we give ourselves the freedom to just explore some of those avenues and see whether they’re worthwhile. But we have to pick some of them and we have to go down that path. It’s the only way to know whether there’s value there.

(23:53): Speaking with Jason Feifer, the author of Build for Tomorrow, Jason, you wanna tell people where they can connect with you, obviously in other than the mass head of the magazine, there are other places you might send people and of course to get a copy of your book as well. Yeah, sure. So built for Tomorrow, you can find in any format you like. So, uh, hardcover, audio book, ebook, what basically any retailer you like. So anyway, again, it’s built for tomorrow. And then otherwise my website is JasonFeifer.com. It’s got links to all sorts of stuff that I produce from podcasts to free audio guides and, and also you can find me on LinkedIn or Instagram where I’m extremely active and responsive. Awesome. Well thanks again for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Hey, appreciate it.

(24:38): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner and Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you, host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details, the truth, and nobody tells it. In fact, a recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas, they Got Down In The Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain, wherever you get your podcast.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Debbie Howard. She is the co-founder and CEO of Senior Living Smart, a full service marketing agency focused exclusively on the senior housing and care industry. It’s also a proud member of the Duct Tape Marketing Network for the last three years. So guess we’re gonna probably talk about that too. So Debbie, welcome to the show.

Debbie Howard (01:20): Thanks, John. Such a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:22): So tell me how you got your business started. Not everybody wakes up one day and says, I think I’m gonna start a marketing business that caters to the senior living space. So how did you come to where you are now?

Debbie Howard (01:34): Yeah, never my dream either. John , so well, myself and my business partner Andrea. We grew up in the senior living industry, and we both started at the single community location. I was in sales and marketing, and Andrea was in operations and dementia care. And we just kind of rose through the ranks with some of the largest senior living operators, publicly traded companies in regional divisional, and then national VP positions. And before starting Senior Living Smart, I was a national VP of sales and marketing for Five Star, which was the fifth largest senior living company. And we just decided that we thought we had something that we could bring the industry from the perspective of having worked in the industry and then translating that into solutions that were more realistic than what people were proposing who really hadn’t grown up in the industry.

John Jantsch (02:25): Yeah. So it’s funny you were kind of on the other side. I mean, you were being pitched by people like you right now to now today. And so did you have that kind of moment where you just said, what people are pitching us is not where we could do so much better? I mean, was it kind of that aha, I guess?

Debbie Howard (02:45): I think the aha was just that we always had to bring them the ideas. They were a marketing agency that just kind of said, oh, well, what do you want us to do this quarter? ?

John Jantsch (02:55): Right, right,

Debbie Howard (02:56): Right. So because they didn’t know the industry, they just didn’t have that ability to come into the conversation with something innovative. And so we just found that the industry was just borrowing examples from other people within the industry. And we are not a tremendously innovative and technology savvy industry. So all that we’re doing is looking inside of ourselves to get those ideas and concepts and marketing strategies. We’re probably just gonna look a lot like everybody else. And it was very just vanilla. It was all very generic. We thought there has to be a way to really elevate the conversation within our industry.

John Jantsch (03:37): As anybody with aging parents will probably tell you certainly. And that’s again, a lot of the people that are making the decision with their parents. Hopefully it’s a really emotional purchase, probably one of the more emotional purchases anybody will make. How’s that kind of color your thinking in terms of marketing? Obviously you’re not marketing a $29 product or even a very expensive course or program. You’re marketing something pretty expensive, but also something terribly emotional.

Debbie Howard (04:05): It is. It’s so emotional. It’s not transactional at all. And so the approach has to be relational. And I think that the difficult thing is you’re really pitching to two audiences kind of simultaneously. So mostly for assisted living in memory care, which is more needs driven, your primary audience is the adult children, usually the adult daughter, John . The guys are like, well, maybe my sister will take this conversation. And so mostly it’s the adult daughters or daughter-in-laws, but then you still have to have a compelling message for your future residents so that they’re going to see the value and benefit of moving into a community environment. Whereas if you’re dealing with active adult 55 plus Margaritaville, it can be a lot more aspirational, a lot more creative, and a lot more fun. And those messages, the primary audience is then the older adult who’s gonna be living in the community, but they’re always gonna have to be supported by their adult children. Influencers who still need to be part of that conversation.

John Jantsch (05:06): Well, when the decision’s been made and it’s time to call somebody to put the move together, you call the guy then though, right?

Debbie Howard (05:13): Oh yeah. You call the guy . Yeah. And when it’s time to sign the contract, pay the bills, .

John Jantsch (05:20): So you know, mentioned the idea that the industry was a little behind in the digital space, a lot of industries, again, you talked about this relational aspect, the fact that there’s a physical location as opposed to say a virtual purchase. Do you find that in some ways, while they need to come into the modern age and digital is here to stay, do you also find though that some of what we might call old school or traditional or offline kind of hybrid approaches are a significant part of what you need to do?

Debbie Howard (05:53): Yeah, it’s definitely a hybrid approach, and certainly direct mail is still in the mix and is very effective. Our audience still gets the newspaper and still goes out and gets that mail and responds to it. It’s just a matter of integrating it. So use of QR codes, things like Bit Lees that can track the engagement event, bright other event type systems that you can get RSVPs where maybe the initial point might be a traditional marketing might be newspaper or direct mail ends up being a digital transaction. But the fact that it is so relational and it’s so emotional means that you have to be on all channels all the time, but with different messages. And I think that’s really the compelling part. And the length of the sales cycle, especially with the assisted living, has increased their sales cycle by about 36%. It takes, wow, over 200 days and 22 touch points to go from maybe a realization that I’ve gotta have a different solution, or dad’s not as being successful at home as they were. They needed a more supportive environment, 22 touchpoints in like 200 days to get to decision. And so there’s a lot of marketing within those 22 touchpoints,

John Jantsch (07:07): . So let’s talk a little bit about your journey some more too. You know, start your business five years ago

Debbie Howard (07:13): Ish. Actually it was 10 years, but we just became a marketing agency five years ago.

John Jantsch (07:17): Okay, so let’s start there. What’s been the hardest thing as you’ve grown? And again, maybe it’s like, well, next week is the hardest thing, but , what do you find that has always been a constant struggle for you?

Debbie Howard (07:32): I think for us is just trying to differentiate and then scale. And I think that’s really why we entered into conversations around Duct Tape Marketing Network because we were trying to figure it out on our own. We’d never owned a marketing agency. It wasn’t our intention that it was really just people kept saying, Deb, your background is all sales and marketing. We just need leads. We just need occupancy. Why don’t you just focus on marketing? And so it was really external forces that kind of narrowed our scope of our work, which was more general consulting in nature operations and dementia care and everything else. So we landed about five years ago on, okay, all you need are leads. Okay, great. I can do that, we can do that as a team. But then we really lacked, I think having the system to scale. And to me, we were looking for, okay, now we’ve gotta figure out how to do contracts and what our processes is and how to document our ways of working and how do we make things turnkey and scalable, and how do we onboard new clients and how do we onboard new team members?

(08:36): And we just didn’t have the time to start from scratch. And so Duct Tape Marketing really offered us the ability to go into versus that our, it’s much easier to be an editor than to start from scratch so I could go in and download something and then make it work for our team or for our industry. So that really became the biggest focus for us was I feel like we’ve licensed a system that gives us a framework. And that framework resonates with prospects who most of the time don’t understand. Marketing feels kind of fluffy into a system that they can really understand. You can’t argue with the fact that you need to be on all these channels and they need to integrate. No one can argue with that. And it also gives us a framework as a team as well.

John Jantsch (09:19): Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held, visit dtm.world/workshop. That’s dtm.world/workshop.

(10:20): So as you’ve grown your business, I guess the flip side of what’s been a challenge, what’s really been the most rewarding aspect of where you are today?

Debbie Howard (10:28): I think it’s just really seeing the results. Talking to, we’re into our quarterly or our quarterly reporting and talking to clients saying, thank you for bringing us these ideas that we would never have thought of on our own. It’s, it’s really helped. Other agencies have just executed to what we’ve kind of laid out in terms of a roadmap, but you’ve really come in and said, Hey, why don’t we try this? Whether it’s virtual events that was totally new to our industry before it was all driving people into the community and we had to reimagine that whole experience. And so being creative and innovative within the space that probably isn’t known for being creative and innovative is probably the most rewarding. You

John Jantsch (11:15): Have chosen a fairly narrow niche that’s a lot of people give that advice for marketers. I’d love to hear your opinion. Do you feel like working in one very narrow niche? I mean, are there pros and cons to each? I mean, do you sometimes wake up and go, oh, it’s great we got another new client, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had a client that did something we weren’t familiar with ? So again, obviously you’re happy where you are, you love the niche you’re in, that’s why you chose it. But I’m just curious if you have ever thought to yourself, there’s kind of pros and cons to that, that

Debbie Howard (11:53): There definitely are pros and cons, and I think you would go crazy in a niche industry, John, you’d be like, I’m bored. I need to learn something new. For us, we’ve grown up in this industry, we know it inside out and backwards, and it just really makes sense. I don’t need to go out and learn about people who have carpentry companies or car repair companies. It really is that expertise. I think where it can really be a con is if you allow it to get kind of that wash, rinse, repeat, yeah. And you end up, there’s advantages to being turnkey and to have some packaged strategies that work consistently, but then you’ve gotta tie into each individual client and really understand their personas, their better and different story. And then I think you have to constantly be intentional about innovation. And that’s another thing I really appreciate about being part of the network is I don’t have the time always to go out and demo a million solutions. I get pitched a lot. I’m sure you get pitched a lot. And to be able to go and have a network and say, Hey, has anyone tried this? Are you using it now? Or can you gimme some insight into how you’re applying? It’s a great time saver because we have to constantly be fresh to keep our teams engaged and keep our clients engaged for year after year. From a retention standpoint,

John Jantsch (13:14): And I’m sure every industry has these players. I know that in your industry there are people that focus on that niche also. But I, you’re right. I think some people take that approach and think, oh, we can just template this entire thing and we’re basically just selling a product then without any strategy behind it. I’m sure you encounter that all the time, don’t you?

Debbie Howard (13:32): Yeah, especially we have in our industry, some website providers that, here’s five templates, pick your website. They all look alike. They’re terrible, they don’t perform well, but people feel like it’s an easy button and you’re basically renting your website. You really don’t own it. And so I think for us, we’ve kind of developed three sub niches. So we have the for-profit senior living space, which is rental. We have the Not for Profit, which is a buy-in kind of life plan guarantee. And then we’ve actually evolved into business to business companies that serve the senior living industry. So we kind of have three different sub-verticals, and that also keeps it really interesting and really fresh.

John Jantsch (14:17): And one of the things that drives me crazy when I’ve come across some of those, the legal profession is notorious for them as well, is that they also lock people into these websites. And then if you wanna leave, it’s like, well, okay, see you later. But you’re starting from scratch now, and people don’t realize 3, 4, 5 years down the road how damaging that’s gonna be for their business, do

Debbie Howard (14:37): They? They don’t understand the consequences. And in our industry, they do two year contracts, which autorenew, if you miss that window, you are stuck . And we’ve had clients that have had to pay $60,000 to buy out so that we can build up something good on WordPress. And really, it just breaks my heart that people are still kind of falling for that, oh, here for 500, $600 a month, we’ll do your website. And then you try to get reports and they’re like, oh, you don’t need those . And then we try to get in to run Google AdWord campaigns, and then the client finds out they don’t actually own their Google ad account, they don’t have access to their Google Analytics. This website company really owns them, which is not a good place to be .

John Jantsch (15:25): Well, I mean, it’s basically extortion . Yeah. Quite frankly. So let’s call it what it is. So talk a little bit about the growth of your organization because you’ve shared some numbers with me or some percentages with me, and you’ve had pretty significant growth over the last couple years. What do you attribute that to?

Debbie Howard (15:43): So yeah, I think when we first started, John, we came into the network, I think there were four people. It was myself, my partner, and then one full-time person, and then one con contract person. And now three years later, we are a team of 26 full-time employees. And then we do some outsourcing of copywriters, graphic designers, just kind of for overflow when our full-time team might get overwhelmed. And I would say bringing things in house. I think when we first started, John, the reason we were able to do that is we did outsource a lot to some white label agencies that would kind of do the work. And that worked for a while. But honestly, I think as an agency owner, we just came to realize that the only way that you can really maintain the quality of your work is you have to bring it in.

(16:31): And so making that decision was a huge thing for us. And frankly, conversations with you and other mastermind folks really kind of gave us the conf to go ahead and make that adjustment. But we double in size every year in terms of revenue. And I think a lot of that is we have found a way to make it scalable, to leverage the Duct Tape Marketing System, mapped out the prospect journey. Retention is really important. So we have clients who’ve been with us for five years, which I think is unusual for agency life. But I would say that those are the things that have really kept us, I think, competitive.

John Jantsch (17:13): So you talked about, I think, coming up in the industry, but that you’ve really had this approach where you want to continue to be innovative. Are there any trends going on that you’ve spotted over the last year or two that you’ve been able to take advantage of or that, or maybe they’re even, it’s just a gap in the market that people aren’t filling?

Debbie Howard (17:33): Yeah, there’s a lot of gaps. I mean, senior housing and care, it seems to be kind of the last adopters. So probably things you were talking about five years ago on this podcast are things that our industry’s going, Hey, there’s chat and there’s bots, and there’s these other things that maybe we should try out. So in our industry, I would say 2023, really leveraging SMS is something that we have to do. People just, that’s where folks are, right? Search, social, email, and text. And so I think building those types of campaigns and really using video more creatively or two of the things that we’re focused on, we just had a call with a vendor who was, we’re all trying to figure out about the anonymous traffic and the traffic that we can no longer track and we can no longer retarget. And I think that’s gonna become an increasing need is, I think right now we can only probably track and retarget to about 30% of our website traffic.

(18:29): Google Chrome is kind of the last bastion, and only 50% of people are on that, and 40% of those folks block the tracking. And so really you’re down to about 30%. And so things like being able to reverse IP match back to physical addresses, or using longitudinal longitudinal to get a household address, whether that’s to serve up direct mail or to even serve ads to the devices that reside at house. I think some of those types of things where you’re really blending that hybrid marketing model and really personalizing, to your point, it is a relational sale. And you’ve got to personalize that journey down to the individual and their motivation and their timeframe and what level of care they’re interested in. And so I think the better job we can do with that, hopefully the more we can impact that very long sales cycle to build trust a little bit quicker.

John Jantsch (19:23): It’s funny, of course, this is gonna come to SMS and it’s certainly email marketing, all the privacy things that are mm-hmm. coming out there in terms of what you talked about retargeting. But it’s funny how the old school direct marketing, you and I’ve talked about this, I mean, you can go by a mail list that has a lot of data on it that you could never get or capture or track or keep online. And I think that we’re gonna maybe see a resurgence of direct mail because of that.

Debbie Howard (19:50): Totally. I mean, we can get, unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess for us, it’s a good thing. I don’t know , but we can get ailment criteria. So I can purchase a list of people who have self-identified and have agreed to share certain diagnosis and dementia and all of the things that typically trigger the need for a more supportive environment as people age. And we can even look at people who have a senior in their home . So we’ll be able to know that this person is probably taking care of a family member. And we know that there’s a timeframe where that may not be possible. And we can have a very specific campaign that just goes to those households where there is one senior within a household, or people who have different diseases or certain needs. It’s amazing how much information, there’s no privacy on the list side. And if you have a really good, we have a great list, guy .

John Jantsch (20:47): Yep. And again, this is, you’ve been a great member of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. You’ve been a great collaborator and share, and I appreciate you saying kind things that you say about Duct Tape Marketing. Having said that, what are some other places where you get personal development, business development, what some places you like to turn for that?

Debbie Howard (21:09): So I do listen to a lot of podcasts and webinars. I would say just from a timing standpoint, the in person things, unfortunately have certainly minimized in our industry. So it’s really, it’s reading and it’s webinars and it’s podcasts. I would say even listening to master classes, they have amazing master classes, which, you know, can always find those nuggets in those types of learnings, I think. Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:38): I don’t commute anywhere and , so I sometimes find it tough. I’m not a person that can sit down and watch a video course. I get bored very quickly, but I find that going out, walking or driving for a long distance or something, if I ever end up having a trip that I’m making or something, that’s really where I can consume a lot of audio content. But I do find it, this is really sad for a podcaster who’s done as many shows as me to say I don’t listen to many podcasts because I just don’t worked into my habit.

Debbie Howard (22:08): Well, you’re a big reader though.

John Jantsch (22:10): I am a big reader, .

Debbie Howard (22:12): Yeah, and I think you read and listen at the same time, so you’re doubling your intake.

John Jantsch (22:16): I do that sometimes. You’re right. You’ve heard me talk about that not really not listening and reading two different things. I’m actually listening to the audio version while I’m reading it. And so I feel like I really retain a lot more by doing that. So Debbie, I certainly appreciate you taking time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna, is there anywhere you want to send people, if they heard this and they thought, oh, I’d like to follow that, Debbie, or connect with her anywhere you wanna send folks to learn more about what you’re doing. So

Debbie Howard (22:44): Probably LinkedIn, very active on LinkedIn. That would be a good spot. Or on our website, senior living smart.com.

John Jantsch (22:50): Awesome. Well, Debbie, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon again, out there on the road.

Debbie Howard (22:56): I hope so, John, thank you so much.

John Jantsch (22:58): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co,. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00):
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner and Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you, host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details of truth and nobody tells it. In fact, a recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas They Got Down In The Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain wherever you get your podcast.

(00:56):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Becky Blades. She’s an entrepreneur, writer, artist and philosopher of creative, adventurous living. Since selling her first company and award-winning public relations firm, Becky has studied what she has coined Starry, the Art of Creative Initiative. She’s also the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today. Start More Than You Can Finish a Creative Permission slip to Unleash your Best Ideas. So Becky, welcome to the

Becky Blades (01:28):
Show. Thanks. Glad to be here.

John Jantsch (01:30):
I have to warn you that when my wife saw this book come through the door and saw the title, she said, You’re not allowed to read that book because nobody needs to give you permission to start more than you finish. So I have to tell you that, you know, have one person out there that thinks this is a terrible title to a book stuff sure that because it is sort of counterintuitive, right? I’m sure you’re getting some similar pushback from people.

Becky Blades (01:54):
Exactly. But you know, are my people, John and my people get it. And it’s also tongue in cheek. In my first book was the title, Do Your Laundry or You’ll Die Alone. And sometimes I ask people why they bought it and they say just the title and they, they hated it, but they wanna know what it was about. So no, I mean the bottom line is when our parents said all those things to us, don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s not what you start, it’s what you finish. They were likely trying to prevent us from making a mess, getting out the paint or starting a Legos project before dinner. And they did not accomplish getting us to finish more. They just got us to start less. So the beginning there, I’m not saying don’t finish, never anywhere do I say don’t finish. But the more you start the more you will finish. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:56):
Again, I don’t wanna push back on this too much, but I know that some pushback you will get from people. I mean, is there a little danger in then us just constantly treading water because we have that mindset of like, Oh, I’m gonna go over here and do this now. Oh, I’m gonna go over and do this now. And Lord knows there’s enough things distracting us as it is

Becky Blades (03:15):
That, That’s a valid question, . I think when we know treat starting as a skill and a strength, which I think it is, then we will get better at kind of curating our ideas. I mean, you’re an excellent curator of ideas, don’t done, you’ve made a lot of stuff. I’ve only seen your finished stuff, so I’m sure that you have a lot of things that didn’t get finished. But don’t you think they led up to two things. One, you making better calls on the ideas that you do initiate and two, they likely led to richness in new ideas and a courage three, this is three things. a creative courage just to move forward.

John Jantsch (04:00):
Yeah, It also led to me having to added a detached garage to store some things in. But the money line from the book, my favorite line from the book that I wrote down is Take, when we take action, we bump into answers. And I think that probably in some ways is at the heart really of what I think you’re trying to say is that sometimes you’ve just gotta start some things before you realize what’s the right thing,

Becky Blades (04:26):
. Exactly. And does the idea have legs? And I mean, I think in organizations especially where you’re sitting in a meeting and the goal is to make more money and it’s time is money. And so the initial instinct is to shut things down, stay on the road, but we don’t know what we don’t know. And until we know can answer a few questions, we don’t really know what the idea’s made of. And so what we do in organizations and some of us personally is we plan them to death. And we all know, especially in lean organizations, that the finish is never what the plan originally designed. Yeah. It’s hopefully better. So we don’t, do you wanna wait two months to look perfect plan is in place, or is there a way that we can talk to the customer now? Is there a way that we can fashion a prototype now?

John Jantsch (05:27):
Yeah. I love these folks that start out by saying you need to have your 10 year vision to me. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with having a goal of what you want life to look like maybe in 10 years, but boy, how would you have a very clear vision of even next quarter sometimes it feels like.

Becky Blades (05:43):
Right.

John Jantsch (05:45):
I read in your to the term Starer Street, you want to talk a little bit about what you mean by that? How address that, what that implies?

Becky Blades (05:55):
. Well, starry came out of the term Stardust, which came kind of out of a situation at home where my kids were trying to figure out what I was after I sold my first company and I’m a visual artist. And after I sold my first business, I came home and amped up the painting studio and I was an artist, but I also had some projects in the work. I was mentoring some entrepreneurs and stuff. And so every once in a while they’d see me dressed up like a business person. And one daughter came down and said, Mom, what are you now? Are you a business person? Are you an artist? And my other daughter from another room said she’s a star . Or I think I said, I’m starting this and I’m starting that. So the other kids said, she’s a star. And I love that word.

(06:47):
And to your earlier points, not finishing things did not make me feel good. And I wasn’t proud of, at that point in life, in my forties of all of the things that I hadn’t finished, I didn’t really know where they had taken me. But after some study of my own unfinished work, I realized that I am, if there’s one thing I am good at, it’s starting things and I start pretty fearlessly. And there’s all kinds of reasons for that. And I was starting to shame myself for such a that some of that. So I started then to go the other way and to really try to find the dignity and worth in that and found it in spades. And it’s just like the term artistry. It’s this vague kind of, it’s a skill and a strength and an art. And I think it deserves its own word be because starting is its own process.

John Jantsch (07:51):
So this is a little bit of a segue or off topic segue, I should say. Since you mentioned them, have you’ve, you certainly are a creative person. In fact, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the beautiful illustrations in the book. Should somebody get the book, which you did as well. But you’ve also raised a couple pretty creative kids, haven’t you?

Becky Blades (08:08):
Yes, I have two daughters. And

John Jantsch (08:10):
Go ahead and brag cause you’ve got some stuff to brag on.

Becky Blades (08:13):
Oh, well they’re both kind of in, honestly, they didn’t take after me. They took care after their hus. I’ll restart that. Honestly, they didn’t take after me. They took care after their dad, who is a speaker and performer. I mostly write and do art in my basement. So one of them produces comedy shows and improv, musical improv. Places like the Edinburg Fringe. And then the older one is a writer for the John Oliver show, her dream job. And she just got this year and she won an Emmy for comedy writing. And I talk about ’em both a little bit in the book because we had a lot of their statistic skills were inspiring to me. If they wanted to start a play, they’d start a play .

John Jantsch (09:09):
Well, so part of my point in going there is that I think a lot of people would look at what you’re talking about as being a trait of a more creative person. Creative people are always coming up with ideas and new ways and probably are more guilty of starting things that they don’t finish. I don’t have any research that suggests that, but So how about that person that’s out there going, Yeah, okay, I can see the validity in this, but I’m just not that creative.

Becky Blades (09:35):
Well, I think we all have to read up on creativity. . It’s not art and music only. That’s certainly the fun part of it. But creativity is problem solving. It is. It’s the product of our imaginations. And our imaginations are the best of our lives. I think the best of us lives in our imaginations. So we come up with ideas that we might not think are creative out of the sum of our experiences, our knowledge. And so those ideas manifest only if we can be creative, cuz that’s, we’ve gotta make something out of nothing. That’s all creativity is walking up to a blank page. And anybody who does that has to admit that they’re creative. Anybody who doesn’t do that, I think might have to admit that they’re not living their best lives. I know I started the book kind of thinking, Ooh, I’m gonna find the accountants who are poets and I can’t think of those.

John Jantsch (10:46):
Pick on

Becky Blades (10:46):
Engineers, very linear jobs

John Jantsch (10:48):
Pick on engineers. They’re easy ones. But

Becky Blades (10:50):
Engineers, no, they’re the inventors. Oh my gosh, I found out the most fascinating people are engineers, but they work differently. Their ideas emerge differently and the creative process looks different for them. But the tinkering, I think we just need to take this out of thinking that creativity is art now. Yeah. So I think I just learned this. Are you a woodworker or something? What are your, what’s in the garage that you were just talking

John Jantsch (11:23):
About? I do. I build furniture. Yeah. Yeah.

Becky Blades (11:25):
. So I mean, you are still, you’re creative in your business, but I think of you foremost as a business person, but you’re an artist as well. And can you see how one that your artistic skills in one area maybe helps you and the others?

John Jantsch (11:45):
Oh yeah. Yeah. I’m not the problem. There’s other people out there that we have to work on. I have a whole, Oh, I see musical instruments on there.

Becky Blades (11:53):
Oh cool. Okay.

John Jantsch (11:55):
Let me ask you a few things. Do you feel like what differentiates your business from every other business out there? Can you confidently charge a premium for what you offer? Are you working from a plan, a marketing roadmap that allows you to know precisely what to do next? Look, don’t worry if you can’t answer yes to any or all of these questions, you’re not alone. See marketers today get so focused on the tactic of the week, staring them right in the face that they forget to look at the big picture. The overarching strategy needed to consistently grow their business. Over the years I’ve worked with thousands of businesses helping them do just that. Create the perfect marketing strategy and plan that gives total clarity about what to do next, Confidence to charge ahead and charge more and complete control of the marketing tactics they choose. I would love to help you and your team do the same. Look to find out if our strategy first program is right for you, visit dtm.world/grow and request a free consultation. That’s dtm.world/grow.

(13:04):
All right. So let’s get back to, I’m sure there are people out there listening that 10 years before Uber was designed set, had the idea for Uber , just did nothing with it. So you hinted at this a little bit, but what do you think stops people from taking action on or starting things?

Becky Blades (13:27):
Yeah. Well I think it’s, it lurks in the finish whether or not they think they can take the idea where it needs to go. So if somebody has a big idea like that, they honestly will. Smart will. Honestly, we can start our smaller ideas easier than our big ideas. But what I found, this was a survey of art and art students. I started asking them why they didn’t start their best ideas. Cuz I thought, these are creative people, they don’t have any responsibilities. Do they have things they haven’t started? And they all did things they wanted to start that they hadn’t. And I asked them some open-ended questions and then I paired it down to seeing that it was a question of enough. They didn’t have enough confidence, they didn’t have enough money, they didn’t have enough space, physical space, whatever it was. There’s a list of about 10 most common. But then when I ask, Do you have enough just to start, the answer was always yes. And then they went to the work of figuring out, well what is the start of a bridge mural? Oh, I guess it’s a sketch. And then I guess it’s getting permission to paint on the bridge. And once they start the momentum, just another whole process. I mean that magical switch that flips everything from neuroscience to providence supports us in that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:06):
You know, mentioned some of the reasons that they said not enough. I mean I would say most entrepreneurs would say, I’m just too busy to start something. Not

Becky Blades (15:13):
Enough time.

John Jantsch (15:13):
Not enough time. Not exactly. Not enough time. So I mean, if you are that entrepreneur that it actually maybe your life or growth or whatever you want to call it, depends on you creating some new things. How do you prioritize, decide if time is truly an well?

Becky Blades (15:29):
I think we all have to build our own processes. And I talked through that in the book. One easy one is to chunk it down to the very smallest way you could begin and feel like the idea has a little spark. But let’s go back. The decision to start, I think for busy people has to start to rely a little bit on a gut and a process that you’ve set up and declared for yourself. One year I declared, I’m gonna say yes to any idea this year that somebody else gives me. Or that how people are always saying, John, you should write a book about this. . Yeah, . So I didn’t say yes to any books, but my rule that year was if somebody suggests something and it’s really doable, I’m just gonna say yes. I’m not gonna think I’m not overthink it. So anyway, that is, I think the decision and picking the best ideas are key. And so somebody that just has says is at that place where I cannot handle one more thing then and an idea comes along. And that might be the big idea. That might be Uber. Yeah, I think that’s where we separate the men from the boys and the girls from the women is you have to put, you can delegate something. I mean, one guy runs ge, how does he get it all done? delegation.

John Jantsch (17:01):
. Well, you know, I mean I’ve, a practice I’ve always had is that whatever you have on your task list will fill up the day. And so I’ve always time blocked impact time is what I call it. Or I will intentionally, because I can get my to-do list done in four hours or I can take eight hours exactly. If I don’t have anything else that’s planned for the day. But if I block off that what I call impact time, I’m gonna do it and I’m gonna get my to-do list done faster. So I think that’s a practice that certainly worked for me in that category.

Becky Blades (17:33):
. So just to one other answer that one rule I set for starting new ideas is if it’s gonna overflow into another idea and make it better. So in business, yeah, if I think of an idea that has a collaboration with somebody that’s a good client or somebody I could benefit from spending more time with, there’s an ancillary benefit and

John Jantsch (17:57):
Natural multiplier.

Becky Blades (17:59):
I don’t know why your time management thing made me think of that, but it’s kind of killing two birds with

John Jantsch (18:04):
One of the other things. I think again, this idea of new ideas, innovation comes for me. I can spend all my time talking to marketing consultants, , and we’re gonna all talk about the same thing. I mean we’re gonna all copy what we’re doing. So what are some of your practices for getting outside that bubble? Because I think that’s where innovation really comes from.

Becky Blades (18:28):
I think the ideation process comes from ideation. And so we have to bark up some really strange trees. I think that’s where our art and our extracurricular, extracurricular activities come in. And I also think cross training with other star. So just getting away from the business and the recommended thing I call a star salon, which is something I just do as almost, it’s almost a book club group I have where there’s a musician, there’s an inventor, there’s a woman who has these cool popup book clubs. It’s just people who are start things in different ways because I know I’ve learned things from doing my art that I apply to my business. And I think, well if I’m both people and getting ideas, what could I get from a lot of other people? It might feel like a waste of time. It might feel like a luxury, but I think it’s a good practice.

John Jantsch (19:34):
Always tried to, I mean, I’m not the greatest at it and now that I’m old I’m really bad at it. But I really try to force myself into new things, new places new. My book reading is so eclectic. I read about wolves and I read about calculus and I read about architecture, which has no seemingly practical application for my work, but I always get amazing ideas from those other places.

Becky Blades (20:00):
Exactly. And ahead. Go ahead.

John Jantsch (20:04):
I was just gonna say, I want to end with giving you the opportunity cuz I think that there is no question a lot of things are people that are wired this way, maybe, or they grew up in an environment where it was very encouraged and so they, it’s quite natural. But I think that you, not justly, you say in the book that you can get better at this, that you can practice this, this can become a habit. So talk a little bit about how we practice.

Becky Blades (20:31):
I think it’s making a game of it. Start as many things as you can. Maybe keep a log, make it a 10 in a day, Start a limerick, start a conversation, Start acknowledging the things you’re starting. Because what I think people don’t realize is how many things they’re already starting and how much courage they’re using to do that. And pretty, the stakes of every start reduces. If you start a hundred things in a week, the stakes of that one thing are lower. And so pretty soon starting that big idea and talking to a person you’ve never talked to, part of it is muscle memory. It’s like stage time when you speak. And in the book I go to, I offer some examples and it’s hard to do this because you don’t wanna tell somebody sketch, you lose ’em. Because if they don’t fancy themself an artist, well this is just for artists. So you really have to go into your own world and remember the things you started when you were a kid. I mean, we could all do a drawing, we could all do a limerick. We could. And after this book is launched, I wanna probably start some kind of repository for those ideas so people can get go on and have a menu.

John Jantsch (21:51):
Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. I’m speaking with Becky Blades, the author of Start More Than You Can Finish. So Becky wanna invite people to where I know the book’s available in a lot of places, but to where they might connect with you as well.

Becky Blades (22:02):
Yeah, go to becky blades.com. That’s Becky and Blades. Like Razor Blades. Awesome.

John Jantsch (22:09):
Well it was great catching up with you. I appreciate you spending some time with the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Becky Blades (22:16):
Okay, thank you John. I’d loved

John Jantsch (22:18):
It. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner and Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details, the truth, and nobody tells it. In fact, a recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas They Got Down In the Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain wherever you get your podcast.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Laura Goldberg. She’s the chief marketing officer at Constant Contact. Before Constant Contact, she served as the chief revenue officer for Cabbage, a leading cash flow management and data platform for small businesses acquired by American Express. Prior to that, she was the chief marketing officer at Legal Zoom and has held leadership roles in product and operations with leading e-commerce companies such as the NFL and Napster. So long line of marketing officer jobs. Welcome to the show Laura.

Laura Goldberg (01:34): Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (01:36): So let’s start there. With CMO role in the span of your career as a cmo, how how’s that role evolved? I have a lot of leadership folks in marketing and I always like to ask when I get that chance for you. That role evolved.

Laura Goldberg (01:50): It’s evolved a lot and in fact I don’t have any of the cred of of building my way up through marketing. I build, my early career was in finance and product and sort of operations slash general management. And it’s funny, when I was offered my first marketing role, I was like, I’m not a marketer, why do you wanna hire me? And the answer was, we need someone who thinks about the customer and someone who is numbers oriented. And so specifically on your question, I think the role has evolved certainly as internet marketing has evolved, as e-commerce has evolved to having to balance both what we think of as traditional marketing brand and image and what do we look like and what messaging are we conveying. But coupled with how are we doing, what’s the ROI on our spend, how are we using media dollars, email, text, the messaging in our product to acquire, engage, and retain our customers. And so 20 years ago, no one would’ve hired me as a cmo. But now as what’s expected has changed and maybe shifted it a bit, it’s perfect role.

John Jantsch (03:14): Well what’s so funny, I mean I’m talking to chief marketing officers now that roles that we’re traditionally in HR are falling under them. The employer branding and even diversity plays. I, I think the role is and just the fact that you spent time as a chief revenue officer. I mean there are a lot of organizations that think maybe marketing ought go there. So if you were sitting in front of a room of peers, what would you tell them that you think the missed opportunities are in the marketing, especially in the chief marketing officer role?

Laura Goldberg (03:48): I think marketers sometimes sell themselves short in terms of strategy and analytics. And it all depends on the story you wanna hear. There are sometimes the less interesting stories. But I think marketing, particularly in commerce led companies, it very much depends on the company has a role that is strategic across functions and is really driving through revenue and top line, the p and l, it’s usually marketing is driving the revenue, it’s generally the bulk of the non-human costs, right of it and pretty large portion other in my world other than tech and maybe support of the human costs. And so I think there’s an opportunity for marketers to sort of step into that broader voice, if you will, of the strategic direction of whatever company they’re in.

John Jantsch (04:55): So we’re in agreement that every department should report to marketing then

Laura Goldberg (04:58): Definitely not

John Jantsch (05:00): . So let’s talk about email as a channel has certainly matured over the last, I don’t know, let’s say 20 years for sure. When you talk about email now, what’s the state of email marketing in the overall mix today?

Laura Goldberg (05:16): I think you’re right. It’s sophisticated, middle aged. I don’t know how we’d say that, but it is, I mean always tried and true when we survey customers, we just did in our small business now survey, when we ask people how they wanna hear from the small businesses that they do business with, they say email right Over half of ’em say email. And I think it’s comfortable if it’s from someone, someone you’ve opted into or a company you’ve opted into, it’s there. You open it, you look at it, right? Open rates are high, ROIs are high now it is low dollar to get into. I also think we think of email marketing as the silo thing. I send you an email with a coupon in it and you either click on it and transact or not, but it’s kind of the gateway to lots of things.

(06:17): So I may send you a happy birthday email just because I may use email as a way to get you to sign up for event that I’m having. And then you go to the event and your affinity for my company or my product increases, we use email to confirm that you’ve signed up for a list. I think we think of it as, oh, email marketing, I offer you something and you respond or you don’t. But it is this much broader communication channel that I kind of view as the center point of everything you’re doing. Now you may also do advertising or SMS or other kinds of marketing, but it’s really this key part and it’s such a, I don’t wanna say easy nothing. It’s relatively has that relatively easy and low risk to get started.

John Jantsch (07:14): Since you mentioned sms, I kinda wanna throw that in there because I’m seeing a lot of people moving. For me example, I’m, I’m a terrible example cuz I’m a boomer who thinks a millennial when it comes to some of this stuff. But particularly younger audiences mean they would actually rather they wanna schedule that appointment and get the reminder and never talk on the phone they wanna text. So how is SMS as a preferred behavior channel now impacting your thinking as an email channel?

Laura Goldberg (07:45): So we agree, we think it’s very important. We see that SMS is becoming a little more used in the small business space, still nowhere near as much as email, but when you talk to consumers, right? Something like 83% of them read texts that are sent to them by a business. And it’s generally with the feelings about it, almost 75% are say things like it’s helpful. Now I do think you have to balance that. How much of it is functional? I need an appointment, remind me my appointment, maybe send me that NPS survey versus buy now, et cetera. So I think marketers need to find that balance, but it is absolutely growing in importance and we need to make it easier and easier for small businesses to get started with sms. The hurdles are a little higher than email, but we added it to our offerings in August and we’re super excited about it. We think all of our businesses would benefit from implementation.

John Jantsch (08:58): I think it’s a lot of things. I mean if you have a segment of your market, of your client base that that’s how they want to communicate, then you have to be there. It’s just a gap if you’re not. Right. All right, let’s go to another technology. How is AI going to impact what you’re doing in constant Contact and you know, see a lot of people AI washing right now. So how is it really going to make a meaningful impact in terms of learning? Right.

Laura Goldberg (09:23): Well so I think, so learning is exactly the right frame because if you think about the data that we have from the billions of emails that our customers send out, the responses that opens, you know, can learn about what works. And so I think a lot of the applications for AI are around, they run the gamut from as simple as subject line suggesting you may type something and an engine can say back to you, Oh this line might be better. There are certainly ways to test what you’re sending out to people. And then I think really interesting more around list segmentation. When should I send you the next email? Maybe you’re an occasional buyer, can I space my emails? Or maybe you tend to buy on Fridays, so can we send emails around that? So I think there’s a lot of ways in terms of list segmentation, when to send what messages to send. And then also AI gives you a way to personalize. You can say, John, you may like the red sweater, I really like a green sweater however. So there are a lot of great applications that can be applied to email and other parts of the digital

John Jantsch (10:48): Marketing platform. I mean is that currently on the concept contact roadmap to have more of that kind of learning technology built in?

Laura Goldberg (10:56): And we have some of it now I do not to our customer marketing saying things like AI powered, cuz it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s like subject line suggestions and smart reporting and things like that. So it’s absolutely sort of part and parcel what we do. I I think how you market it is another interesting, yes, I think it’s a very investor buzzwordy, but it’s, you think about the intel inside if you will, right? Which is like I try in our marketing to market the benefits of what our product does as opposed to the sausage making.

Mike Michalowicz (11:40): It’s Mike Michalowicz here and you are listening to Duck Tape Marketing the podcast. Now here’s two things that probably came to mind. First of all, who the hell’s Mike Mcit? It doesn’t really matter. I’ve been a guest. What does matter? Is this your other thought? I’m not subscribed to Duct Tape Marketing, I’m not downloading it. Should I? Yes, yes. This is the authoritative podcast on marketing Done. And your guide, your host for the show is John Jantsch, the Authority on marketing. The first marketing book I ever read was Duct Tape Marketing and it transformed my life. Small business leaders, business owners, anyone can effectively market on a duct tape budget. You can compete with anyone at any size if you simply follow the method you’re about to learn. And this show reveals all, it’s not the carte blanche, hey this is what people do on social media, you should replicate and do the same thing. It is the essential stuff that works, the timeless strategies that differentiate you, that make you become the authority in marketing and get noticed. So there you have it. Two things to note. John Jantsch your host and you should consider yourself lucky. And secondly, for all that’s holy subscribe to Duct Tape Marketing the podcast.

John Jantsch (12:58): Yeah, it’s real tempting I think for the tech space because we sit around in Bubble and we talk about this stuff and we think it’s cool, but the tip concept contexts built literally on real small businesses, the backs of real small businesses and they could care less. They just wanted to do solve the problem that they want solved. And so I think it actually gets in the way, doesn’t it?

Laura Goldberg (13:20): And I think as long as you benefit, we’re gonna save you time, we’re gonna make your emails more effective, we’re gonna improve your roi, then you’re, you’re talking about the right things. That’s

John Jantsch (13:31): Right. Cause now you’re solving my problem with it .

Laura Goldberg (13:33): Exactly.

John Jantsch (13:35): One of the trends, if you will, that I’m seeing we swung so far to digital that I’m actually seeing a return to. I mean, who gets mail anymore? I’m seeing a return to some more, I don’t even wanna call ’em traditional because digital is traditional now. So let’s say hybrid market. What are some of the effective ways that you’ve seen people merging digital and non-digital?

Laura Goldberg (13:58): So we don’t do a lot of it at Constant Contact, but at Cabbage we were big direct mailers. And it’s interesting when you don’t get as much mail, you actually see the male that you get. It’s interesting, I just got one from Cabbage from Constant Contact. So poor targeting, but interesting that, and that’s what worked for us was like that letter that looks like the bank was sending it. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities. Look, we at Constant Contact at Cabbage, at Legal Zoom, we use linear television. Yeah, it’s more news and sports, but it still gets watched. And if you’re talking news live sports, there’s less recording of that so people are watching. So I think there is an opportunity to blend those things. Look, people still go to trade shows, so I think it’s always healthy to keep an open mind to what worked in the past, what’s coming in the future, and how do you balance those things. Cause I don’t know anyone who’s successful just marketing one way.

John Jantsch (15:18): Yeah, I mean, as goofy as it sounds, cuz a decade ago we were talking about QR codes and we were kinda laughing at how people jumped into it. But now simple thing, sending out a postcard with a QR code, just subscribe to a newsletter or to donate to a non-profit or to get a personalized video. I mean, that kind of blending I think is really effective.

Laura Goldberg (15:39): A hundred percent. We ran an outdoor campaign where, yeah, you’re on bus stops and we had a QR code there and there was special content and fun stuff, so absolutely.

John Jantsch (15:49): It’s kind of funny because they kind of died out and then the Pandemic basically made them. Yes, really, again,

Laura Goldberg (15:57): You can’t go to a restaurant

John Jantsch (15:58): Anymore, can’t order your food. Right, exactly. So now everybody knows how to use that was always one of the hurdles was you had to get a reader to do it first. I mean, it was like when podcasting first started, people, it was just as hard to get people to listen as it was to produce a show. But then once it became ubiquitous, it’s like podcasting took off. Let’s talk about trust because I know that at Constant Contact, you guys talk a lot about building trust with email, but it’s also an amazing way to erode trust. So how do you deal with the fact that a lot of people, because we get so much spam, we get so much stuff we didn’t ask for. So our trust is way down on brands necessarily on email or a lot of channels. How do you use this channel to actually build trust?

Laura Goldberg (16:50): Yeah, so I would say a couple of things. So one, it helps that we serve the small business market. I think when you look at those, do you trust these brands? It’s definitely skewed to bigger brands. And in our small business now Survey, you see this amazing propensity of consumers to wanna want to support small businesses. So that just helps in general, Constant Contact has been in this business for a long time, which is a plus and a minus, but we’re really good at delivering email. Yeah, we are very good about email hygiene, about making sure you can’t buy a list and put it in constant contact. You have to grow your own list. And we offer a lot of services and whether it’s through humans or articles about how to email, how to construct a good email, how often to email, et cetera. And our customers are amazing. They’re really great about it. And if you, it’s like any trust relationship. If you as a small business owner respect your customers, they will respect and trust you back. And so I know it sounds potentially simplistic, but that’s how you build trust in any situation.

John Jantsch (18:17): Just don’t do crappy marketing. Okay. Have you noticed a generational difference in terms of what I want from email? So does Gen Z particularly want something different than all the way up to maybe my generation?

Laura Goldberg (18:31): Yeah, I mean look, I think your I’ll say are, and I don’t know what the exact age cutoff is, the older generations are definitely reading their email and they’re on top of it. I think the younger ones are more, Yeah, I got to that today and oh I have to, right? It’s not urgent, but I think that’s okay, right? If it’s urgent, if it’s like, hey, your package is outside, come get it, that’s text, right? Yeah. But if it’s, Hey, we’re having this sale for a week. If you don’t read that immediately, that’s okay. But they still read it. It’s not sure you’re having a two way conversation through email, but it gets read and it gets processed. I think it might just be on a different timeframe.

John Jantsch (19:23): Well, and can we also make other very broad generalizations instead and say shorter is better?

Laura Goldberg (19:30): A hundred percent,

John Jantsch (19:31): Yeah. Okay.

Laura Goldberg (19:32): That I think that’s true for everyone. I always do. If I don’t get the gist in this much, you’ve lost me. So I think it’s graph, visual, visually arresting to the point, relevant, personalized. I think that’s not even generational. That’s what matters no matter what. And those are the important things no matter how old you are or frankly what the medium is.

John Jantsch (20:03): Yeah. So it’s probably too late if you’re listening to this show right now, but I’m gonna ask Laura anyway, what should we be doing as email marketers for the holidays?

Laura Goldberg (20:13): not too late. Now is the perfect time though. It’s so interesting not to keep bringing up our survey, but we did find that people are on it earlier. You see advertising earlier and earlier, but people are getting on holiday. I think it’s one, you know, wanna engage your customers and remind them that you’re there and the great offers that you have. I think you also wanna assure some reassure people. I always think about this, Should I buy this now or should I wait for the big sale that’s gonna gonna be after Thanksgiving? Reassure them that this is great and this is great for you at the right time. And to just be, I think the other thing is, particularly if you’re in a retail business, being operationally ready for the urgency speed and then sometime, I don’t know, not great behavior that happens around, happens around the holidays.

John Jantsch (21:12): Well, and I was half kidding being too late, but it just feels like the big players are black Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, in October. And it can feel like the holidays just get pushed on us so much for sooner.

Laura Goldberg (21:25): Right, Agreed.

John Jantsch (21:27): Well Laura, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and sharing some thoughts on the state of email. Is there any anywhere you wanna invite people to connect with you or check out Constant Contact?

Laura Goldberg (21:38): Yeah, people should check out Constant Contact, constant contact.com and we are there to answer questions and I am Laura Goldberg pretty easily findable on LinkedIn.

John Jantsch (21:49): Awesome. Well again, thanks for taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Laura Goldberg (21:55): Awesome. Thank you so much. It was really fun.

John Jantsch (21:57): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner and Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you, host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details, the truth, and nobody tells it. In fact, a recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas They Got Down In the Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain, wherever you get your podcast.

(00:54): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest Clare Price. She’s the president and CEO of Octane Growth Systems, the systems, process and tools company that helps you take control of your marketing through smart execution. And she’s also the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today, Smart Marketing Execution, How to Accelerate Profitability, Performance, and Productivity. So Clare, welcome to the show.

Clare Price (01:23): Thank you John. Very nice to be here.

John Jantsch (01:26): So gimme a little bit about your, I gave kind of the bios scripted bio, but gimme a little bit of your backstory, your entrepreneurial journey. How’d we get to here?

Clare Price (01:36): Well, I started developing the system about 10 years ago. I released a series of what I would call playbooks about for small business marketing because you see, well first of all, I wanna say something why I’m so honored to be here with you , because I consider you to be the pioneer of small business marketing systems. And I think everything that I have in my book and what other people have done was really built on the foundation that you laid. And before I get into my stuff, I had to say that. So looking at that, about 10 years ago, I started seeing an issue with small business marketing. And that is a lot of small business owners lacked strategy. They lacked a ability to do, they got goals, whether they worked with a marketing agency or with a coach or whatever. They got goals and they dived right into implementing those goals. What I found was missing was that there was a gap between strategy and action. And I started looking at ways to help business owners close that gap. And that is what led eventually over the last 10 years, really experimenting with different approaches, different systems, to being able to develop something, which I believe right now anybody with marketing experience, a little bit of marketing experience can take the book and really learn how to develop a strategy for a smaller, medium sized business.

John Jantsch (03:16): Obviously you’re preaching to the choir here. I mean, I’ve said strategy before tactics probably 6 billion times in the last 30 years. But one of the challenges, and I’m curious how you’ve encountered this. One of the challenges I find is that you can say the word strategy to people until you’re blue in the face and they don’t really know what it means. And in fact, the part of the challenge is that if you Google the term marketing strategy, you will find a list of blog posts that basically 15 tactics will be listed. So how do you get somebody, do you differentiate between a tactic and what you’re calling strategy?

Clare Price (03:49): Well, the way that we do it is we’ve developed six canvases that focus on six core areas of business growth. And that’s brand development, brand power, customer acquisition, message clarity, market expansion, sales enablement, so marketing and sales working together and product marketing or product innovation. And the way that we develop strategy, I think is very unique for small businesses is we ask a series of discovery questions. And the way that we get to the answers of those questions is by having our clients work through a series of worksheets, assessments and tools. What that does, John, is that actually has them developing strategy while they’re thinking everything through. And at the end they do have a strategic blueprint for those specific areas.

John Jantsch (04:40): Right. So what have you found, and you have a section on this, so I’m gonna go there and let you kind of talk about it, but what have you found are some of the biggest growth killers, particularly for small businesses?

Clare Price (04:52): I think the biggest growth killer is the trial and error marketing churn and burn marketing going out. And imagine, I know you’ve had this experience, I bet everyone in your audience has had this experience where you, you gotta do goals. Okay, we’re recording this at the end of October, so everybody’s thinking 2023 planning. So people get into the room, it’s an offsite, maybe there’s great food, there’s pastries, and everybody settles into their chair in front of a huge whiteboard and there’s a facilitator, sometimes not, and they scribble furiously for two or four hours and the whiteboard is completely filled and everybody’s got their goals and their desired approach or the direction circled. And at the end of that exercise, the CEO or the CMO marketing director stands up and says, Okay everybody, let’s get it done. What happens then is everybody jumps outta their chair and goes and does what they know how to do, what is missing.

(05:49): And what we really focus on in smart marketing execution is looking at the alternatives. Not just jumping into the tried and true, let’s go do social media, let’s go do Facebook ads, let’s go do you know, video advertising or whatever. But let’s look at the alternatives for the goal that you wanna set or that you have set. And then we benchmark those alternatives using a set of data. And that data includes looking at team capabilities, looking at resources, looking at timeline, looking at budget. In fact, in my book in chapter nine, smart execution chapter, there’s actually a formula where you can benchmark the projected revenue minus the cost, divide that by the timeframe and come up with a growth score. And when you do that, you can actually literally using data show what is likely to have a better return on investment than something else. So that’s the approach we take.

John Jantsch (06:54): So one of the things that I certainly found early on working with small business owners is that I had my toolbox of traditional marketing things. But when you work with a small business, and you’ve alluded to some of these, I mean, you get into operations, what is traditionally seen as operations, maybe you get into what is traditionally seen as finance. I mean, how do you manage the fact that somebody is hiring you to do marketing, but you can’t really do marketing if you don’t get into every aspect of their business?

Clare Price (07:24): And that’s why one of the things that I’m doing with is developing what I call a ecosystem of right partners. And so if somebody does, I do see a finance problem, I do an operations problem, I have perhaps a fractional CFO that I can refer them to or a fractional business coach that can address that problem. And the key part of having the ecosystem is we work together. We don’t just hand off a referral and say, Okay, you go do your thing and then when you’re done, we’ll come start, we start marketing. We’ve worked really out the team and I’m really looking for preferred partners that, and some are already listed on my website that can be part of this ecosystem.

John Jantsch (08:09): And I actually think that’s a practice that more marketing consultants, more consultants in general ought to do. You know, think about all the various areas that every client you work with, whether they probably have an accountant already and they maybe have a coach, an executive coach. And I mean, I think all of these professionals that serve a client, wouldn’t the client be served better if we all work together

Clare Price (08:27): , Exactly. 100%.

John Jantsch (08:31): And it’s odd because they’re rarely done and sometimes what you might propose gets pushback from another professional. And I always pick on accountants cuz it’s so easy to do that where if they truly understood what you’re proposing, they might be behind it. And so I think it really, instead of being counter, it’s like you’re all working for the mutual good.

Clare Price (08:54): Exactly. And one of the things that we say that Octane is really a marketing operating system because we are not looking at it from a standpoint of just being, let’s find a program, let’s find a campaign and try it and see if it works. It’s a combination of strategy, execution, and in our case automation. So we will also look at the automated systems that are in place when you can explain to a financial professional or a business professional the idea of marketing from an operation sense, which is very common at the large corporate level, not so common that the mid-market level, I think they have a better understanding and I think they’re more willing to get into that partnership.

John Jantsch (09:41): Well, and I think that your growth score, for example, that you just mentioned, you know, take an account in the growth score and basically say, we’re talking about this investment because it will return x. I think that’s as opposed to, oh marketers just wanna spend money on ads. I mean, you’re now basically showing here’s what this investment is going to return. And that’s obviously, that’s an argument that’s gonna go a lot farther with a financially business owner, but certainly with an accounting professional, isn’t it?

Clare Price (10:11): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (10:13): So I meant to actually ask this a little earlier. You know, specifically have the word execution in the title of the book. How do you differentiate between execution and say planning?

Clare Price (10:24): The way that we differentiate it is that we call the planning of the blueprint, our strategic blueprints. And the execution is the roadmap. So the blueprint is how are we gonna build this? And the roadmap is once we know what we wanna build, how are we actually gonna get from where we are today to the destination? And the key part of smart Execution is actually building that roadmap out so that people are, again, not just doing what they know how to do or what they’ve scrolled on a napkin or a whiteboard, but we’ve actually, we do roadmaps for clients that are similar to customer journey, similar to a product development roadmap so that they actually can see month by month what their goal, goal is, where they’re going.

Jay Baer (11:11): This is Jay Baer marketing and customer experience, author, advisor, and expert. And I’m not just an occasional guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I’m also a listener. Why? Because in my estimation, the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is one of the finest business resources available in any medium. The guests are tremendous. John knows just about everything about marketing and business. And if you can’t improve your business after listening to this show for a while, I don’t know what can.

John Jantsch (11:43): So we do similar, have done similar kind of approach for years. And one of the things that often happens is there’s huge gaps, there’s huge things they’re missing, they wanna do it all. How do you help a business owner prioritize? Again, if they throw enough money at something, obviously everything could be a priority, but in real life, help somebody prioritize what’s on the roadmap.

Clare Price (12:06): And that comes into, comes, the gross score comes into that. And it also just in general, what the likelihood of success is, also what the urgency is. Those are some of the ways that we help them priorit. Yeah,

John Jantsch (12:20): You mentioned the accelerators and really there’s a good half of the book is really built on unpacking those. And by the way, great tools, worksheets in the book. I’m sure that we’ll at the end all invite you to tell people where they can find those in real life as well as in the book. But let’s talk about a couple of the growth accelerators. A lot of small business owners, when they hear brand development, all the brand kind of words, they either feel like it’s a bunch of fluff or it’s not for them, or they minimalize it. Say, Oh yeah, I’ve got a logo, that’s my brand. How do you help somebody understand the importance of brand development?

Clare Price (12:58): We have a tool as part of the Octa Grow system, as part of the brand accelerator called the value grid. That is my core tool that every client has to go through. And what it does is, again, it replaces the traditional, I will call it agency approach. Cause if you think about the traditional agency approach, what happens when you’re gonna do brand values, right? Again, everybody’s in that room, they throw a bunch of words up on the whiteboard, they circle the words, everybody agrees on the top three, five or seven, and they leave the room and the agency puts a sentence against them. That’s what I’ve experienced in my career. Yes. What we do is we have our value grid starts with those values. So same start, but we also define the value based on a dictionary definition. So everybody has the same definition of the value and they’re not self self-defining the value.

(13:49): Sure. That’s number one. Number two, we ask them why that brand is important to the company and we ask them to really give us a reason behind the value. How does that change the company culture? How does that change the customer experience? How does that really relate to the day to day employee experience? And then the fourth step is we asked them to give us the what, the why and the what. So how are you living that value every day in your business? And that’s actually put in a grid style with a lot of detailed information. And the values do come out of that. And then they’re tied to the company culture, they’re tied to the employee experience and they’re tied to the customer experience.

John Jantsch (14:39): I think people really underestimate, a lot of times when they think of brand, it’s like, what’s the public face? I think they really underestimate the internal culture of the employee experience because that’s really when it really, really comes down to it. That’s in, especially in small businesses, that’s how your brand is experienced is through your people. Absolutely. Probably less from your television ads. So really an important part that I think is missed often chapter five talks about, and it’s one of the accelerators, you talk about a message clarity. I find for a lot of small businesses, we have to actually start with message period. Because a lot of times it’s just like, here’s what we do. And it’s like a race to be the same. How do you help folks not just clarify a message, but clarify a message that matters that differentiates them?

Clare Price (15:24): So again, we use the message canvas, which is in the book, which has the six areas that we look at. So we look at, well, first of all, what’s the big idea? What do you really want to communicate? And the other thing I think that’s important, John, and I think this is the core big mistake that business owners make when they’re looking at their message, it’s a translation error. They know what they do, they know how they speak it, they know how they live it, but the customer doesn’t necessarily live and speak the same way the business owner does. For example, I had one client who sells software to 12 schools, and they had a real problem with their messaging because they’re an engineering company. They were selling to superintendents of schools, public information off, and a whole different culture of people with a whole different set of ways of looking at the world.

(16:19): And so they would come in with speeds and the school people were like, Well, we don’t understand this. What is this? So we ended up doing a lot of work on the messaging there to translate the true benefit, the benefit to the customer, the benefits that the customer was living day to day. And I think that’s the other mistake that a lot of happens with messaging is people go with a very surface message like, Okay, what’s our benefit? Okay, well our benefit is faster, cheaper, better, but what’s the actual lived experience, that person, that customer’s having? What’s gonna change the way that they do their business, live their life or live relationships? And then once you find that you find that real deep desire, motivation, then you can really provide the right message.

John Jantsch (17:14): After doing thousands and thousands of interviews with customers of our customers, one of the things that’s become very clear to me is most businesses don’t understand the real problem they’re solving for their customers. And that’s kinda what you’re getting at. Or at least have no ability to put it in the words or the voice of the customer. And when you can do that, it really sends sort of a magical message to the person you get me. Exactly. I think that’s why it’s such a great starting point. Let’s talk about expansion, which is again, another one of the accelerators. A lot of people just traditionally, it’s like, Hey, we’ve gotten to a certain point. Do we go after a new market? Do we just make more products? Do we go into a different geography? How do you help people hone in on smart ways to grow, I guess?

Clare Price (18:01): Well, I look at market expansion and I’ll use an overused term and hopefully you’ll forgive me. The land and expand approach to expansion, which is finding your core niche, finding that core area where you’re the strongest, and then moving out from there. I tell my clients it’s a pie, not a circle, because what I typically find is that people wanna get customers everywhere, especially when they’re startups. And so they’re sort of creating dots in a circle that never ever get connected. But if you look at it as a pie where there’s a starting point and from the starting point you sort of expand out from there, you look for related niches. And I do have a chart in my book that talks about when my first consulting after leaving the corporate world was in real estate marketing and branding. And it was great until 2009 came along .

(18:57): And then, oh, I will never forget, I was driving to one of my clients, Ke Williams in living in Sacramento at the time, and I’m driving up to the office and look across the parking lot and financial title company, which was one of the largest title companies in the Sacramento region. Their doors were bolted, were literally chain locked, and all of their file boxes were outside the door permanently closed. The real estate marketing and branding that I was doing disappeared very quickly, as you can well imagine. Yeah, I had to find a new niche. So what I did was I looked at what are the characteristics of what a real estate person is dealing with in terms of branding and then what are similar, what would be similar professions? So for example, real estate they’re all selling the same product, so they have to brand on their person, their own character, their own style of working. So who else has to do that? Well, insurance representatives for example, and financial representatives. So looking for related segments that have the same characteristics that you’re already serving. So the product is likely to be a good fit or a good fit with small modifications, I think is a really good way to go. And it’s particularly valuable for those companies that don’t have a huge marketing budget who need to take it slow so they can take advantage of the next door neighbor, if you will, in terms of the customer segment.

John Jantsch (20:29): Awesome. Well, Claire, we’re, we have run out of time, but I’d sure love it if you’d invite people to where they could find the book, where they can find out more about your work.

Clare Price (20:39): Okay, well I wanna let your audience know, John, that I do have a special offer for them. If they go to octane growth.com/my offer and click the link, they’ll be given free download of the first chapter of the book and they’ll also be able to set up a 30 minute discussion consulting call with me if they wanna purchase the book. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all of your regular channels. There’s also links to those on my website and I just wanna, again, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you and with your audience.

John Jantsch (21:14): Well, thanks so much for stopping by and taking time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Clare Price (21:22): I hope so.

John Jantsch (21:22): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.