How to Waste Money on Marketing

Introduction:

This week, Shawn Busse, Jaci Russo, and William Vanderbloemen talk about a whole slew of marketing challenges. From strategizing for trade shows, to whether your logo has to tell a story, to understanding what constitutes a brand, to whether that iPad ad that Apple pulled was terrible or brilliant, they discuss what makes marketing so difficult. It all starts, Jaci says, with the industry’s refusal to set standards: “I can’t find another industry that treats themselves so badly. Electrician, CPA, Realtor, hairdresser, nail salon tech, everybody else has some semblance of something to say, ‘I am a legit entity.’ Except our industry.” Which is part of the reason, Jaci says, that this is the constant refrain she hears from frustrated business owners who hire agencies: “We paid them all this money. And we got nothing for it.” Plus: how do owners get past that feeling that they need to be the hardest worker in the office, the first one in and the last one out?

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Shawn Busse is CEO of Kinesis.

Jaci Russo is CEO of BrandRusso.

William Vanderbloemen is CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Shawn, Jaci, and William. It’s great to have you here. It’s almost June, and we somehow are nearing the halfway point of this year. I’d like to start just by checking in on how each of your businesses is doing: what’s working, what’s not. How about you, William? We haven’t spoken to you in a while. How have things been going?

William Vanderbloemen:
Man, we’ve just been really busy, and that’s good. And that’s part of why I’ve not been able to be on the show. I’ve missed being with you guys. Our COO asked me if she could set an aggressive goal this year of 30-percent growth. And she’s been with me two and a half years, and is yet to be wrong on projecting things. So I said, “Okay, fine.” And first quarter, we closed 31 percent over first quarter last year. So that’s awesome. Second quarter, we’re not even halfway through it yet, but it’s been a little slower. Now, last year, it was our record quarter ever. So maybe that’s the one we don’t hit.

I will say that the thing that’s different that we’re noticing is the way business is coming to us. The algorithm that Google uses is just changing all the time. And everybody I’ve talked to who has super successful blogs is seeing a drop in traffic. And everybody’s trying to figure out how to deal with it. And I don’t know that anybody knows the dark arts well enough to fix it yet. But we’re making some tweaks and changes and hoping that fixes things for what appears to be a problem for a whole lot of people who have an internet-driven business.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds like it hasn’t been a big problem for you.

William Vanderbloemen:
No, I think we would be well over our projections if we had better traffic. But I noticed a funny thing yesterday. It was a virtual day. I wasn’t at the office, and I got a text from a guy who I had interviewed for a search I was running 12 years ago. And he pulled himself out of the search, and that’s fine.

He texted me and said, “William, you probably don’t remember me. My name is ____, and we met here.” And of course, I remembered him. And he said, “Now, I need a good number two. I’m in a really growing thriving organization. Can you help me find them?” So it’s that kind of thing that has covered the loss in web traffic. You know, just the compound interest of having done this for a long time has provided some nice growth for us that has subsidized the traffic loss that we’ve had, which is not that bad. It’s like, we’re 8 or 9 percent down. But friends of mine are 20, 30, 40 percent down. So something’s going on. We’re trying to figure it out.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, how about you? You were very open with us last year. You went through a difficult period where you had a long stretch where you didn’t attract new clients. I think you told us earlier this year that you were expecting a couple of big clients to come aboard. How have things worked out?

Jaci Russo:
Those were dark days, Loren. I don’t like talking about the dark days. It’s a little triggering. I’m gonna have some PTSD.

Loren Feldman:
It got better, though, right?

Jaci Russo:
It did, it did, it did, as it always does. It just was a longer stretch than I’m comfortable with. And we’ve gotten off to kind of a stop-start year. The two big ones are still hanging. They’re still waiting on some other piece of something to make it all happen. But in the meantime, we filled in with some really nice other new ones. And we’re heading in the right direction. We’ve also made some changes. Much like William, the things that got us here aren’t getting us there. And so we’ve had to change how we do some of our new business work. And I’m forever grateful for the clients that we have and the referrals that they give us, because that’s always our lifeblood. But you know—

Loren Feldman:
What kinds of things are you referring to, Jaci? What have you changed?

Jaci Russo:
I was just gonna tell you. We have a very robust thought-leadership program, whether it’s podcasts or speaking engagements. We’re still getting a lot of mileage from the book, and so that’s always been beneficial. We do have a pretty solid email database that we work really well, I think, and that’s been good.

And we’re starting to go back to some old-school things that we really enjoyed back in the day, and we just kind of got away from. We’re going back to our Hot 100—these are the companies that we really, really want to work for—and courting them, sending them things in the mail. Not letters. You know, some solid, fun promo items and some resources and some fun marketing-looking things. And we’ve done a pretty good job of connecting on LinkedIn, too, and that’s been helpful.

Loren Feldman:
Your Hot 100, that’s a list of 100 companies that you’ve identified that you would like to be clients?

Jaci Russo:
They would be so lucky. That’s how I think about it. [Laughter]

Shawn Busse:
I love your attitude, Jaci!

Loren Feldman:
And then you, you cold-call them? You reach out to them, or how does that work?

Jaci Russo:
We’re literally courting, what we used to do in the olden times, you know, the teens. Because I went back through the decades of: When did we grow the fastest? When did we grow the best? And it was really that kind of ‘08 to ‘14. That was a really good streak for us. And what were we doing then? And it was simple: We had this 100. And we added to it. Every month, we’d add a few to it. And it always had to be at least 100. We’re always adding to it. And we would mail them 3D-printer items, fun stuff.

For a while, we were kind of on a health care kick. And so—this is how dorky we are. We created this poster, and it was, I don’t know, like 11 by 17. It was very beautifully designed, black and white. And it said “legendary doctors.” It had the doctors from M*A*S*H, Dr. J, Dr. Dre, all the legendary doctors—and then whoever was the head of the health-care facility we were calling on, it had them. So we would get pictures where these guys would frame it and hang it on their wall. Like, they thought it was the greatest thing ever. And so, things like that, things that just kind of take the air out, to kind of make it fun. Marketing should be, at its core, something that gets people’s attention for the right reasons. And so we’re getting back to that.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, you spoke earlier in the year about the big push that you made to get your folks out in the community and make connections, kind of an everyone-sells idea. And you were pretty enthusiastic about how it went. How was that carried through since then?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I’m really proud of the team and feel really grateful that they’re willing to basically take on a job that was not in their job descriptions. And I think that process is going well. You know, it’s not going to be an overnight success. The aspect of it that’s been working really well so far is, I was in a sales meeting the other day. This was our second sales meeting with a potential client. And I played almost no role in that meeting. And the team did a really great job. I texted with the prospect afterward and asked him how he felt, and he was super enthusiastic and excited to make it happen.

So, I feel really good about that phase of selling, that the team can handle it without me in the room. And that’s a big deal. I think the early stage of developing relationships and nurturing those relationships and getting referrals, that’s going well. But that’s a long game. You know, that doesn’t happen overnight. In many cases, and the type of work we do, it may take a year, two years, three years, five years before they actually buy from us. And so, the seeds you plant today, they turn into trees much, much further down the road.

I was talking about the other day. I mean, it arose from a dog park visit that I had two and a half years ago. And I met a business owner and started talking to him, and one thing leads to another, and I’m kind of coaching him on what to do, because he’s a new business owner. And then somebody on his team reaches out to me. He’s like, “Oh, remember me? We met, literally, eight years ago.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen you in forever.”

And then fast forward to three months ago, the guy on his team calls me and says, “Hey, I mentioned you to this other person the other day, and I think you might be able to help them.” So all of those things play a part in that opportunity manifesting itself. I’ve been doing this for many, many years. So more opportunities fall on my lap than anybody. But now that the team is doing it, that’ll happen for them, too.

Loren Feldman:
Are you sending your team to dog parks all over Portland? [Laughter]

Shawn Busse:
I mean, that’s a funny thing. But I think the thing that’s important, that we’ve talked to the team about, is to find the thing that they care about, and invest time in it, and to build relationships in those spaces. So you’ve got folks investing time in sustainability and engineering and all kinds of different things where they’re interested in the thing. And I think that’s the most important thing, that you can’t push somebody into a space and say, “Hey, go get clients over here.” They actually have to kind of care about the space. And so that’s our strategy.

William Vanderbloemen:
Loren, this is why Shawn is a far more strategic business man than I am. When we started, I didn’t have enough to do. I mean, you cold-call everybody you can, and there’s just me, and a card table and the dog. And I got around to Friday, and I was trying to target churches, when we started, that needed a pastor. And church staffs are typically off on Friday, so Friday was a totally dead day.

So Adrienne sent me to Petco, not the dog park. And while I’m in Petco, I get a call from a pastor I hadn’t heard from: “Are you trying to start that thing still?” “Yes.” “I think we might need you for this.” —Okay. “How would it work?” I walk him through it. He’s like, “Well, I’m gonna have to check with people and run this through traps, and I’ll get back to you.” “Okay, fine.”

I’m at the checkout counter at Petco, and I get a call back from him. He’s like, “We’re good to go. Where do I sign?” “Oh, no, no, 30 more seconds, and I’ll be done.” I bought the wrong dog bowl with food. And Adrienne said, “You need to return that when you get a chance.” So the next Friday, I go back to Petco, I’m returning the thing, and I get another phone call from a different guy I hadn’t heard from in forever: “Are you trying to start this thing?” So like, when things got slow in that first year, I’d just go sit in the Petco parking lot and work. [Laughter]

Shawn Busse:
There you go. It’s the dogs. All about the dogs, man.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, you talked a little bit about what you guys have been doing. The other thing you’ve mentioned is that you just went to a trade show. And I’m curious what your experience was like there.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, so I have never been to a trade show of this scope and scale before. The convention hall—this is in Chicago. It’s a trade show for automation companies, and I think they said something like there were 800 vendors there. And you have these huge companies with massive booths, spending probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there. And I literally, at one point, got lost in the booths. I was like, “Where am I? I don’t know how to find where I’m going.” And so it was just a really eye-opening experience, having not really lived in that world before.

And yeah, I learned a lot of lessons. I think one of the really cool lessons was that all the time I’ve invested in LinkedIn, through the pandemic, before the pandemic, over the years, really paid off. I had people at the tradeshow come up to me and say, “Hey, I know you.” And I was like, “Oh, I know you too. But we’ve never met.” And so it really, for me, kind of solidified this idea of how you advance relationships, and that the digital space can be a place to start a relationship. And then the physical space, like a trade show, can be a place where you can develop it and nurture it and move it along.

And so, he hands me his card, and he’s like, “We should talk.” And then after that, I was like, “That would have never happened if I hadn’t gone to that trade show.” So that was a really good lesson. The other lesson was, I’ve never seen so many salespeople in my whole life. I mean, maybe you two have had more experience in this arena. But you literally cannot stop for a second when you’re walking around the booths because someone will come up to you. You feel like you’re a piece of meat, and there are sharks everywhere. Jaci, what’s your experience? You’re nodding your head here.

Jaci Russo:
So, Shawn, a couple of thoughts. First of all, welcome to being a girl. [Laughter] Because that’s how we feel a lot of times and a lot of places, not to get political about it. But you know, you kind of expressed the feminine experience in a lot of different venues. But no, I do think that in the past, pre-Covid trade shows and conferences felt more like a place where you would run into different decision makers. And the last few that I’ve been to, whether I was speaking at them or we had clients that were exhibiting, and I was kind of showing up to support, the overwhelming sensation was that the floor was filled with salespeople, but no buyers. And to be successful, you’ve got to have both.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I got a sense that if you went to that show, and you didn’t have a really good strategy to connect to people outside of the show—like, if you were just there to display or walk the aisles, I don’t know that it would be very valuable. I mean, I was a speaker. So that had some value to it, for sure. And the client I went with had a strategy for after the show. The magic was after the show. It wasn’t the show itself.

Jaci Russo:
Just to that point, we started implementing—and this is pre-Covid—a little bit of a before, during, and after kind of strategy. And I won’t go into the nitty-gritty details, but for us, the before is about setting up appointments, because you don’t want to just leave it to chance that somebody’s gonna find your booth. So there’s some cool tech and kind of wooing that can happen ahead of time to really make sure you’re on somebody’s calendar, and they’re not just going to find you.

During the show, you’ve got to have some strategies for getting people to the booth and getting their attention while they’re there, and making sure the right people are seeing the message. But then post? You’re right, that’s where the magic happens. Because it still takes eight touches. And at this point, you’ve had two. So what are you going to do to keep touching them in a legally and appropriate way after the show to make sure that you stay top of mind? And if, in fact, the person you met with at the show wasn’t the right decision maker, how do you leverage this newfound friend to get you in front of the right person?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I was really struck by, I would say, almost the wealth inequality of the show. So you would have these companies that were massive, and they would have these booths that were, I don’t know, probably 1,000 square feet. And then, you would have folks who had like an 8-by-10 booth shoved way in the back. And those 8-by-10-booth folks, I felt for them. Because it’s like, how are you ever going to be found by anybody unless you’ve got a strategy outside of that booth?

And it’s not like they’re getting off cheap. I think the square-foot price was like 40 bucks. So an 8-by-10 booth is $4,000, hotels in the neighborhood are $500 a night, you’re Ubering and food and taxi. That’s a big investment for a small business. And it really made me realize that if you don’t go with a really good game plan, it’s going to be really expensive and hard for me to see how you would get a return on that.

William Vanderbloemen:
Unless you do that—like, think through it long and hard for a strategy—it’s an absolute waste of time. We went to one conference without a strategy, and I think we paid $10,000 for the booth and nevermind all the other costs, and I’m like, “Next year, I’d rather you just give me 10,000 one dollar bills, and I’m gonna light them on fire consecutively. That would be more fun.” [Laughter]

Shawn Busse:
I’m curious, for the two of you, something that we’ve done two years now in a row [is] a small business conference. It’s a ton of work. It’s expensive. But boy, the effect of it has been really great for us. IYou know, I’m starting to see our clients do this, help our clients do this. I’m curious if you all have either thought of doing this yourself, or have clients who are sort of like, “Hey, we’re going to build our own community instead of renting a community from somebody else.”

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, we’re experimenting. And maybe we should have our own conference and host it at Petco. [Laughter] I don’t know. This last year, we decided to take our very best clients—and we judge that by net promoter score—and we invited them to an exclusive, limited, very small gathering, very high dollar, that we did in sort of a white-glove thing. So it was a mini-conference. It went great. And everybody asked, “Can we come back? How do we do that again?” But it was more about experience than anything. We did golf and skeet shooting, and you know, things.

We’re also still seeing that if we take our time and drop back into a strategy for a conference, it works. Like for instance, maybe the most difficult search we ever do is someone who needs to run the children’s ministries at a large church. And that’s a long story why it’s difficult, but it’s really, really, really difficult. In fact, if Jesus didn’t love children, we wouldn’t do it. [Laughter] I’m serious.

We couldn’t get candidates for a children’s pastor. So the largest children’s pastor conference in probably the world asked us to come do a booth, and it was going to be $10,000. I’m like, “I don’t even know how to…” And this was 10 years ago. And one of our Millennials, in their twenties, said, “I was at a party the other night, and they had a thing called the Smile Booth.” It was photo booths, before they were a big thing.

And so we looked into it. We bought one. We took it. We made the photo booth our booth. And it was a brand new thing that nobody’d heard of. And we put out costumes, glasses. Take all the pictures you want, and just give us your email address, and we’ll send you the pictures. And it was genius. And we actually got kicked out of the conference the next year, because the line to get to the photo booth was so long, it went all the way around the Gwinnett Center. And nobody was going in for the main sessions. So that kind of guerrilla warfare was, like, “Let’s change the whole game.” Because what we needed was not revenue from that. We needed candidates. I think we came home with a thousand children’s pastors addresses. So that’s a weird story. But it’s like, the only way it’s worked for us is to think about conferences that charge a lot for booths in guerrilla warfare terms.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, I’m curious, what prompted you to go to an automation conference? I know you have some clients in that area.

Shawn Busse:
Well, some of it was R&D. It’s like, “Okay, let’s go check this out.” I have several really great clients who work in automation, like really good clients. And one of them was going to go and have a pretty substantial presence and be a speaker. And he was kind enough to let us ride his coattails and even did a co-speaking event with me. So the two of us got on stage. We talked about a topic near and dear to our hearts, in terms of building professional services businesses and what that looks like through brand and marketing and culture. So there were just a lot of unique opportunities there, even just his own connections and being able to be introduced to people.

He went to dinner with somebody. He referred that person to me. We had a nice intro sales call. So there were just a lot of stars aligned. If I had gone there without that lined up, like, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have a client there, boy, it would have been a really different experience. So this was really kind of a special and unique thing. Will I go back next year? I don’t know. I mean, it just sort of lined up. It’s such a machine that you really don’t feel very unique in it. And even the speaking events churn you through, right? So we gotta get up on stage. You have 30 minutes. You’ve got to end right on time. They mispronounce your name. They mispronounce your company’s name. Literally, like, five minutes before I go on stage, she’s like, “Okay, so how do you say your name?” I’m like, “It’s Buss-ee.” And then I offer her, “And the company’s name is Kinesis.” Okay, great. So she introduces me as David Byoo-See from can-ISIS. Like, oh my God. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Did you correct her?

Shawn Busse:
I mean, it’s the most awkward situation. They introduced me as David Bew-cee, and they introduced David Nichols, who’s also on the stage, properly. And I’m like, “Hi, I’m Shawn Busse from Kinesis.” It’s just so freaking awkward. But you just kind of realize, they’ve got to file 30 speakers through in a day. And it’s just a financial thing.

And so I contrast that with a different event that I went to that was more of a learning event a few weeks ago, where everybody in the room was looking to learn. So there were education sessions. There were CE credits. And in that environment, it was great, because I had 100 people in the room. I was talking about an idea that was really near and dear to their hearts about the changes in marketing and a lot of, actually, what William was talking about—the changes in digital. And so it’s just a different thing. In one environment, you have a ton of salespeople looking to sell products and stuff. And in the other environment, you have a bunch of people looking to learn things. And I think knowing the differences between these conferences and how they’re structured is really important.

Loren Feldman:
Did you have a booth?

Shawn Busse:
I did not. No.

Loren Feldman:
So when you were done speaking, did you just kind of wander around?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I mean, I would go to after events, which I think is really important, is to kind of figure out what people are doing outside of the conference. And you get to have more intimate conversations. So I think that was really advantageous. But having a booth would have been an absolute waste of money for us. It just would not have been worthwhile, because you’ve got a bunch of people there. If they are buyers, they’re engineers, and they’re looking at robots.

They’re not looking for brand communications. You know, they’re already skeptical of us marketing folks. So I think the unique way we approached it was great. And I think having a client on stage with me talking about, “This is what we did together, and it changed our automation practice,” that was a great opportunity. I got great results from that. But a booth? No, it would have been an absolute waste of money.

William Vanderbloemen:
Completely agree. From our side, Shawn, we didn’t do a booth forever and ever and ever. Because what, are you going to hand me a resume in front of everybody? [Laughter] So one thing we fell into—which, again, these are not necessarily repeatable examples—but I had to get my mind in a different place and think outside: What is the normal use of sponsorship money? And we got invited very early in the company. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons we broke out and started a whole lot of new endeavors.

A friend of mine who designs spaces—he worked for Disney for a long time, designed our office—said, “Hey, man, the green rooms in the major conferences are horrible. And they’re nothing like a really well done green room. I think I’ve got a way for us to host the green rooms. If you’ll put up $10,000 a conference, I’m getting three other partners…” We built out the green rooms, made it a totally different experience for the speakers.

Now, I had a head start, because in my prior life, I was on the same speaking circuit with a lot of the speakers at these conferences. But I was hosting the green room and giving them great food and a great time. And I can draw a direct line back to our biggest growth from when we were doing that. Because then, what does Seth Godin say? ‘Sneezers’ are who you want. People who will sneeze your idea everywhere they go. And we focused on that. I didn’t come up with it. Can’t claim credit. But it’s a different sort of—I call it guerilla marketing—to just sort of, I don’t know, zig when everyone else is zagging. Those are the times it’s worked for me, when I’ve been able to listen to people with an idea for doing it differently.

Shawn Busse:
I think that’s such a good point. I mean, to talk about Seth Godin, like the whole Purple Cow book. These conferences are structured to make everything the same so they can monetize it.

William Vanderbloemen:
That’s right.

Shawn Busse:
And you’ve got to find a way to be that Purple Cow in that herd of brown cows. If you’re not attacking it with a creative idea, you’re done. I just think you’re done, because you’re gonna lose out to people with way more money and way more presence, in that case.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, in our emails this week, you talked about your concerns about standards in advertising in general. Can you tell us what’s going on with that? What triggered that as a topic in your mind?

Jaci Russo:
It’s a soapbox, Loren, that I get on anytime somebody acts like they want to listen or they’re waiting for a bus and they can’t leave, or they’re trapped in an elevator with me.

Loren Feldman:
Or trapped on a podcast with you.

Jaci Russo:
Welcome to being a captive audience. Pull up a chair. So I hear from companies all the time, this frustration that: Agency XYZ, we paid them all this money, and we got nothing for it. And now we don’t have money for you. And we think you’re gonna do, actually, a really good job. And now we’re sad that we wasted the money.

So sure, maybe part of it’s just a thing to get out of saying yes to us. But they could just say no. But as I dig into it, and I see what XYZ Agency did there, they’re right. They did get paid a ton of money. And very little was done. And then I looked a little deeper. And, you know, the client should have been smarter, there were some red flags. They should have maybe not hired XYZ. But here we are.

And so I think in so many situations—and Shawn, I’d love to know your thoughts on this—we do it to ourselves as an industry. Anybody can call themselves an ad agency, or creative agency, or communications firm, or PR company, or whatever you want to call it these days. Anybody can open their Mac laptop and have a Canva account, and now they’re a designer. We have not done any licensing, or certification, or educational requirements, or testing, or ongoing continuing education. And I look around, and literally, I can’t find another industry that treats themselves so badly. Electrician, CPA, Realtor, hairdresser, nail salon tech, everybody else has some semblance of something to say, “I am a legit entity.” Except our industry. And I don’t get it.

Shawn Busse:
Oh, man. That’s such a good point, Jaci. I was on a call the other day with a company that had 300 employees. Let’s just call them an engineering firm. And they had just fired their entire marketing department. And I was just sort of digging in, and I realized their marketing team had built this Byzantine spider web of digital marketing that no one could understand. And I was digging into it, and what I realized, Jaci, is that the level of complexity that has become the marketing and advertising industry is way higher than people’s perception of its complexity. You know, this owner of this company—which is in the tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars—he has no idea, really. And he’s a pretty smart guy, right? He has no idea of, say, the difference between an SEO strategy and maybe account-based marketing, or thought leadership and all the different ways that plays out and what is a relevant social media strategy?

And what I realized in that moment, is that in our career—I think we have a probably similar career trajectory, Jaci—back in the day, when you and I were operating early in our careers, it was like, you didn’t actually have to track that much. Maybe four or five channels, in terms of how the message might get to the customer, and then you could just focus on being creative. And today, marketing is everything from super, super highly technical tracking users and their digital behavior to actually being really creative and innovative, and brand, and all places in between.

And I really think that the business world just fails to comprehend how complex it is. And then as an industry, we’ve done ourselves a terrible disservice by actually not creating some standards and education. And so it’s a freakin’ Wild West. And no wonder. I mean, Loren, you’ve said this before: It is the one topic where there’s massive confusion and frustration. Of all the aspects of running a business, there’s so little clarity on what to do with marketing. Why is that?

Loren Feldman:
I have said that, Shawn, and I’ve focused on it from the perspective of business owners who just struggle with figuring out where to spend their marketing dollars, who to hire, what channels to use. It hadn’t really occurred to me that it could be frustrating from the other side of the table as well. Which is one of the reasons it intrigued me when you brought this up, Jaci. Have you spoken to other agencies? You mentioned you get on your soapbox when you can. Have you gotten anybody to salute?

Jaci Russo:
I mean, everybody, whether it’s local agencies, agencies that we partnered with on clients. You know, we may share a client, each filling a different role. I’m an AMA member. I’ve brought it up to them—AdFed. It’s sort of this third rail nobody wants to touch. And I never want it to sound like I’m saying, “I’m inside now, so I want to close the door behind me and not let anyone else in.” Please, don’t hear that. What I want to do is: Let’s just go with a naming protocol. The reason why the company in Shawn’s example had all these people doing all these things, is because there’s no protocols in place.

I think about architecture. What would it be like if every architect was self-taught? [Laughter] Maybe they have a degree, maybe they don’t. Maybe they went to a two-year, maybe they went to a four-year. Maybe they worked at other companies for years, or maybe they just learned some stuff in their mom’s basement and watched some YouTube videos. And now, they’re out there selling their architecture. We would never allow that. Why would we not allow it? It’s a hazard. They could build something that could fall down. It’s an incredible expense. It’s safety. How is this any different?

Loren Feldman:
William, is this confirming your worst impressions of the marketing industry?

William Vanderbloemen:
Oh my gosh. I listened to this podcast two weeks ago. We’re rewiring our whole marketing thing, trying to figure this SEO thing out, among other things. And it’s deep, dark magic, man. It’s not Don Draper coming up with a good idea. I’m just learning how much tactical strategy is in place, and then also intuitive: I think this is right. And I should have hired you guys to come help me figure it out.

Jaci Russo:
Yeah, well, call me. We’ll talk. [Laughter]

Shawn Busse:
I think there are two culprits here. One is the marketing industry itself. It really loves to simplify and make it easy to buy. And so we will do things like, “Ten ways you can get new customers in 2024.” Like, we make it seem easy. And we love our listicles and our infographics. So we’re kind of dumbing down the discipline in and of itself to begin with. And so, shame on us for not really helping businesses understand: This stuff is complex. I saw, the other day, 50 types of SEO. Like, different types of SEO: B2B SEO, B2C SEO, tactical. It was just ridiculous. And so, we’re to blame. I think that’s part of it.

And then I also think businesses are to blame. And what I mean by that is, I was talking to this prospect the other day. And he went back to the founder and was talking to him about our conversation. And the founder’s response was, “Well, why don’t you just go figure that out on the internet?” And so the resourcefulness that actually serves business owners well: Figure out how to do stuff themselves. We’ve talked about this, like QuickBooks. In the early days, you’re doing your own QuickBooks. And then you’ll eventually realize that’s stupid and highly risky. Eventually, business owners kind of figure out how bad of an idea that is. But that innovation and resourcefulness, and, “I’ll figure it out,” which we’re all guilty of, sometimes we hold on to that for so long, we fail to see just how complex an arena is.

I’ve had another prospect who literally said to me, “We want to hire somebody in marketing.” And the person they hired had no experience with marketing. And then they said, “Well, maybe we could pay you to mentor them.” And I’m like, “Okay, you want me to put 24 years of experience onto them? Okay, sure, no problem.” But then they backed out from that, and were like, “We’re gonna watch some courses and take notes and confer.” Like, are you kidding me? In what world would you do that in a business discipline? That’s just insane. And these are smart people. They’re running effective businesses. So there’s something about the treatment of marketing as it’s like this thing that, “Well, people do it, and it’s not really that hard. And so we can figure it out ourselves.” It’s so comical. I’m on a rant here.

Jaci Russo:
Thank you. Join the club.

Shawn Busse:
People get it wrong, and it has massive costs to their business.

Loren Feldman:
But Shawn, I think Jaci’s point is that you as an industry have encouraged these business owners to think that way by not setting standards.

Shawn Busse:
For sure. We have. And we’ve dumbed down branding.

Jaci Russo:
We have only ourselves to blame, all of it. We have complicated names for things that aren’t used consistently. Well, I’ll start with the word “brand.” Everybody uses it differently.

Shawn Busse:
Yep.

Jaci Russo:
If you talk to an architect, they all use the same terminology for things. Why? Because they took the same classes. They took the same tests. And there’s still creativity in that. There’s still style points. They’re allowed to do things in their own way, but on the same structure, because when you do the right things the right way, you get the right results. We are in a free-for-all.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, if you asked somebody, “What is a brand?” you would get 30 different answers to that question—if you asked business owners.

Jaci Russo:
From one person, yes.

Loren Feldman:
William, what’s a brand?

Shawn Busse:
Oh, gosh.

William Vanderbloemen:
I don’t know. [Laughter] A good brand? Okay, I mean, you guys have heard this before: philosophy and religion degree. I don’t know all the cool things you guys know. To me, when I see something and I say, “That’s a good brand,” I recognize it as something I can trust. And I recognize it as something I’m willing to pay for. How’s that?

Jaci Russo:
That’s a great answer.

Shawn Busse:
That’s better than a vast majority of people who will think that the brand is the logo, or the brand is the website, or, you know, “Oh, wow, that company looks really professional.” That’s not a brand. That’s just their visual identity. But again, a lot of this is our fault as an industry, for sure.

Loren Feldman:
Let me stop you there, Shawn. Let’s spell that out. The visual identity is part of a brand, right?

Shawn Busse:
For sure. Absolutely. But I think the more important thing is: What are people saying about the company and what it represents when they’re not around? I mean, that’s a better definition of brand. And the whole ecosystem from visual identity, how they treat their customers, how the customers talk about them to other potential customers, what is their reputation—all of these things are brand.

Recently, for example, there was this commercial that Apple put out, advertising their new iPad. And in this commercial, they crush—with a giant industrial crusher—all these beautiful instruments of creativity: trumpets, paint brushes, pianos, video games, cameras, the whole thing. They just crush it. And within a day, the creative community was just up in arms. And within a week, Apple pulled the ad.

Okay, why did that happen? Because the brand Apple represents is a brand of creativity and innovation. And this ad was really an affront to that community. So, was it a cool ad? Was it professionally produced? Yes, yes, yes. But it was incongruous with their brand, which is much more ephemeral. It’s much harder to understand.

Jaci Russo:
I have a little bit of a different take on it than you do, Shawn. I’ll start with, just to lead back into this, I like Marty Newmeier’s definition from his book, The Brand Gap. He says that a brand is the emotional connection or gut feeling that a person has about a company. I like it, because it puts the emphasis in the right place. It’s the person’s feeling. It’s their emotions. And that is upending to the corporate world that used to be able to broadcast messages and assume that everybody just believed what they said. Well, now the consumer owns it. So, I think that’s important.

Onto this ad: I am not a graphic designer, or a painter, or a singer, or a performer. I’m a strategist. I have thoughts. I think that I have a touch of creativity, because I think you have to be in our industry. But I don’t consider myself a creative, because I’m not an artist. When I saw the ad, which I saw before you mentioned it, I was blown away by it. I thought it was awesome. It reminded me of the meme that floated around for a while of a desk from the 1970s and ‘80s. And how, one by one, everything from that desk went into the iPhone: the calculator, the clock, the computer, the set of encyclopedias, the telephone, the camera, the videographer, until eventually, the desk was completely empty and there’s just like an iPhone sitting there. And I’m like, “Okay, I get it. It does all those things.”

This, to me, was a continuation of that. And really, the whole point was not: You’ve got all this stuff inside this magic box. But also, the magic box is thinner than ever before. As somebody who travels—and I’m looking at myself right now, and I’m embarrassed—I have in front of me the laptop that I’m using for this; I have the iPad that’s the full-size with the keyboard that I use, because I always have WiFi troubles, whatever; my phone; and the mini-iPad that I use when I’m doing a speaking engagement, because it’s got my timer and my notes and stuff and air pods and various other logical things on this desk. And so, obviously, I’m all in. And if it’s a thinner iPad, I can’t wait to swap out two or three of these things, whatever the new faster, thinner thing is.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I get it. You’re talking about the functional value of it. And I actually think that old ad was very effective, because it was talking about the potential that’s inside of something. Why this ad is a complete failure is that, yes, in the end, you’re like, “Oh, okay, I get it. All these things have been squeezed into it.” But through that process, it has destroyed these things that are of our childhood and of our creativity as children.

So, I call it the antithesis of Stranger Things. Why was Stranger Things such a massively successful [show]? It’s because it was tapping into childhood, the shared childhood experiences. And you want to talk about brand and emotional experience? It’s tapping into those emotional experiences and bringing them up to the surface and really celebrating them. And the miss on this ad was that it did such a good job of picking all of these amazing things that are of the emotional experience of creative people, and then it destroys them. And I get, like, “Oh, no, it’s squeezing them into the iPad.” No, it’s destroying them. It’s literally crushing them. They’re falling out the edge. The eyes on the emoji are bulging. Jaci, it’s a terrible ad. And I bet you Michael feels the same way I do on this one.

Jaci Russo:
Oh, I’m certain Michael feels the same way, because I love it. He hates it. [Laughter]

William Vanderbloemen:
Can a pedestrian ask the experts a question about brand logos?

Jaci Russo:
Bring it.

William Vanderbloemen:
We talked about, people think a brand is just a cool-looking logo. Okay, that’s fair. So do you need a cool-looking logo? And then the real question is: Does the logo need to tell any story at all? Like, I think at Starbucks, there’s no story there. What is that, the mermaid on the front of Ahab’s boat? Like, what is that? Apple? That’s a cool story. They’re saying we actually took a bite out of the apple in the Garden of Eden to have the Tree of Knowledge. Like, that’s a cool story. How much does that matter?

Jaci Russo:
Oh, I think it matters a lot.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I’m with Jaci. We’ll disagree on the ad. But I think we agree on this one. I think why it matters, William, is that if you don’t have a story, it doesn’t mean you will fail. But if you do have a story, it gives you 10X the potential, in terms of how you can advertise, how you can communicate, how you can talk about your company.

William Vanderbloemen:
So you leverage the logo. I’m asking selfishly, because our logo is pretty cool. Nobody knows why it looks like it does. It’s a searchlight. It also looks like a snowflake, because every one of our clients is individually unique. And it also looks like a bunch of V’s coming through an intersection point. And that’s exactly what we are. We’re a hub that connects a lot of different people. And we don’t want to use that at all. And I’m wondering, listening to you guys talk, if we ought to be telling more stories out of that logo or not.

Jaci Russo:
One hundred percent, yes. And here’s the thing: It’s not necessarily that you have to go around saying, “This is the story of what my logo means.” It’s that, number one, it needs to look good and professional and clean and cool and have brand standards and then be taken care of and protected, for sure. But when you have a story behind it, and the story allows me, as the potential buyer, to see myself in that story and to realize the benefit that I gain, the problem that you solve, the way you make my life better, the way that you are a guide getting me from the challenge I’m in to the promised land, that’s the story that’s going to get me to buy every time. Because that’s a story that cuts through the clutter and makes me want to pay attention. Because that’s a story talking to me about me, so I feel seen and heard, unlike a story where you’re talking about yourself, expecting somebody other than your mom to care.

William Vanderbloemen:
Okay yeah, that’s the StoryBrand, make the client the hero. All of that.

Jaci Russo:
Yes, there’s a reason why it’s sold millions of copies.

Loren Feldman:
We are just about out of time. I want to run one more question by you guys, real quickly. This is a question that comes from the small business subreddit. A business owner wrote, in kind of quiet desperation, “Why do I beat myself up for taking days off? I have employees. They know what they’re doing. I’ve taken the last two days slow, only doing some light home-office work. The majority of people I know take two days a week off. I almost never do. Yet, my inner voice tells me I’m a bum.”

You guys have all found peace with this topic. But I’m wondering, did you ever struggle with it? Did you ever feel like you had to be the last person to leave the office or the hardest worker at your company? And if so, how did you get past that kind of concern?

Jaci Russo:
I believe that, as the owner, everything’s on me, that it’s my job. I own it. I get the ultimate benefit from it. Michael and I have had conversations, where he wonders why other people in the company—and this is in different eras; it’s not like he said this yesterday—where he feels like they don’t have the same commitment or the same resolve or the same dedication. And I said, “Of course they don’t. They don’t own it.”

Like, that’s crazy to ever think an employee would be first in and last out and feel the need to work seven days a week and carry the burden of payroll and be focused on what’s next. That’s our job. That’s our privilege. That is a gift that we are afforded by being able to own and run and continue to operate this company. So I don’t have guilt, though, when I’m not the first in or last out. I don’t have guilt when I travel or take time off, because I come back refreshed and better. I also think I’ve done a lot of work, I mean, a lot of work, in the 24 years of being a business owner, to get to a place where I lead the way I do. It did not come naturally.

Loren Feldman:
So you did struggle with this for a while?

Jaci Russo:
Um, no. I struggled with raising four kids and being married to my business partner and finding clients and keeping us afloat. [Laughter] I wish these were the things I had time to think about. And this goes all the way back to my time in Los Angeles. I came out of a situation that felt like being on the floor of the stock exchange. It was loud, and it was high energy. And I will use the word “abusive,” because I think that’s the only way to describe it. It was a challenging work environment. We were told, “If you can’t come in on Saturday, don’t even bother coming in on Sunday, because you will not have a job on Monday,” because we were expected to be in at seven and out at 10 p.m. seven days a week. It was work. It was a lot of work. And you know, there were things thrown at us and yelled at us. And it was unpleasant work. And we were told we were grateful to have the job.

So then next job, I leave there after a couple of years, helped start a company, and I become a boss. And I have two assistants now. And I treat them the way I had been treated, because that’s the way the world works. And I was dealt a blow of reality when they sat me down—the two of them together, because they were scared of me one by one—and in tears explained that they hated their jobs, and they hated me, and they hated everything about their lives. And I thought, “Well, I don’t want people to feel that way. That sucks.” That’s how I felt. And so I started what has been a long and slow process to become someone you want to work with.

Shawn Busse:
William, you come from a kind of religious sphere. There’s guilt in that sphere. What’s your take? [Laughter]

William Vanderbloemen:
I don’t know that guilt is the thing. I think I feel like I’ve started—so it turns 16 this year—at least five companies in that 16 years, and it’s all the same company. Like, we’ve gone through when it was a bootstrap. If I didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. So I was at it at four in the morning and maybe worked out once a day and went to bed late and woke up hoarse. And that was just the way it was. If I didn’t do it, nobody else would. Then we had a team, and I needed to train them. But at the end of the day, I was still the one who had done more reps, and I was better.

Now, we’ve moved to a place where I have moved out of doing any direct client work with the very rare exception of a super complex problem. And the team is better than I am at what I’m doing. So I’m having to learn now to not be in the way by being at the office first in, last out. Because what I’m bringing to the table is—and this is what my team wants from me—vision. What’s around the next corner? What should/could we do next? And I will overcook that and go too fast and produce too many ideas and pour too much vision. And everybody just goes, “Oh my gosh. I’ve got enough work to do now, and you want to do all these new things?”

So I’m having to kind of marshal my time at the office, because the things I’m being asked to do are not the normal, day-to-day, execution of searches. It’s vision and motivation and challenging people to the next level. And you can overdo that, as a CEO. And I’m thankful for a COO who’s like Jen. Just tell me when I need to come to the meeting, or when I’m gonna be a disruption, that she’s really good to say, “Skip this one. You’ll be a disruption. We don’t need new ideas. This is about integration.” We found the Pat Lencioni Working Genius model to work really well for me to understand when I need to be there and when I don’t.

Loren Feldman:
How about you, Shawn?

Shawn Busse:
Well, I kind of jokingly asked the religion question because I realized at one point in my life, I had fully bought into the Protestant work ethic idea that, basically, my worth and value was related to how much work I did. And that was like almost a volume question, which is kind of crazy. And if you start to peel back the layers of that onion, you kind of get into even things like the Industrial Revolution, and the idea of inputs and outputs.

So a factory, if you can turn up the inputs, you’ll get more outputs, right? So it’s a very linear time investment kind of space. I think a lot of us subconsciously correlate amount of time to value, and that’s the wrong idea. Because to William’s idea, if he spends 30 minutes and comes up with a revolutionary idea, is that less valuable than if he spent three weeks and comes up with a mediocre idea? No. I mean, there’s often not a relationship between time and the value of an idea.

So I think, especially as owners, a really important transformation that we can make is looking at: How do we create the most value for our organization? And that may be decoupled from time. It may be: The greatest way I can create value for my organization is finding people who can do the job better than I can do it. And maybe they do it more efficiently. Maybe they do it with more grace. Maybe they do it with more joy.

And I think those ideas, they’re woven in deep within us. And I think that’s why when we get into issues of the four-day work week, and so forth, people get really emotional about it. On both directions, right? You’ll get people who will say, “What? Four days? I worked 60 hours a week when I was coming up.” So you get this idea of time spent is value and how much you’re contributing. And I’ve just found that when you start to free yourself from those ideas, you can do more powerful and more impactful things.

Loren Feldman:
So you’re saying this wouldn’t necessarily be a better podcast if I kept you here for two hours? [Laughter]

William Vanderbloemen:
Loren, that’s a whole other podcast about how to do a podcast. I’d love to learn from that. I started listening, this morning on my run, to a three-and-a-half hour episode of a podcast. And I thought, “This is crazy.” It’s almost like listening to the audiobook, but I am completely fascinated. And it’s amazing what I’ll listen to if it’s really good—and how long I’ll stick with it.

Loren Feldman:
Is it the podcast Acquired?

William Vanderbloemen:
Yes. The LVMH story.

Shawn Busse:
That’s such a good example. You know, if you were to listen to sort of the common marketing wisdom, it would be, “Well, people’s attention span is short, so you need to make a podcast short.” And it’s like, there is room for being different. What that podcast is showing is, just because something has been done a certain way for a long time or because the experts say a podcast episode should be 30 minutes, it doesn’t mean that that’s true. And often, the most impactful things are when somebody—back to our Purple Cow idea—goes in a totally different direction. I think that’s where the opportunity is.

Loren Feldman:
Well, I personally would spend three and a half hours with you guys anytime, but unfortunately, I think we’re gonna have to stop here. My thanks to Shawn Busse, Jaci Russo, and William Vanderbloemen—and to our sponsor the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses use an open-book management system to build healthier companies. You can learn more at greatgame.com. Thanks, everybody.