Janel Laravie is Founder of Chacka Marketing, a performance marketing agency based in Tampa, Florida. Janel tells us about some of her unusual, but effective hiring questions, why she thinks Zoom calls are beautiful, how the ugly side of business prompted her to start her agency, how her agency work directly led to 50 new jobs in a small Ohio town, and what exactly Chacka means. Sadly, it’s not a reference to the ‘70s TV show Land Of The Lost.
Janel Laravie is Founder of Chacka Marketing, a performance marketing agency based in Tampa, Florida. Janel tells us about some of her unusual, but effective hiring questions, why she thinks Zoom calls are beautiful, how the ugly side of business prompted her to start her agency, how her agency work directly led to 50 new jobs in a small Ohio town, and what exactly Chacka means. Sadly, it’s not a reference to the ‘70s TV show Land Of The Lost.
Links
Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business, a book by Gino Wickman
Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business, a book by Gino Wickman and Mack C. Winters
David Rodnitzky(David) (00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Janel Laravie, Founder of Chacka Marketing, a performance marketing agency based in Tampa, Florida. Janel tells us about some of her unusual, but effective hiring questions, why she thinks Zoom calls are beautiful, how the ugly side of business prompted her to start her agency, how her agency work directly led to 50 new jobs in a small Ohio town, and what exactly Chacka means. Sadly, it’s not a reference to the ‘70s TV show Land Of The Lost. Enjoy the show.
Janel, thank you for joining us on Agentic Shift.
Janel Laravie(Janel) (00:34): Hi, David. Thanks for having me.
David (00:35): Yeah, it’s great to talk to you. So we could talk about what we were talking about earlier about how Iowa Football is primarily responsible for the Buccaneer success, but we’ll save that for another day. Let me instead ask you to tell us your founder story of how you started Chacka marketing.
Janel (00:51): How I started Chacka. Well, I feel like there were so many things that played into my becoming an entrepreneur and taking this gigantic leap of faith. But I think the ultimate drivers were that I was working at an agency that went through a bankruptcy, and it was an ugly, ugly process, and one where I was able to actually see some of the ugly sides of business. I very much value what I learned through that time, because it made me realize a lot about my own ethical compass, my own moral compass, and what was important to me. And there were things that I didn’t like. And I didn’t like how they happened and I thought they could have been prevented. And ultimately that was my catalyst for wanting to do it on my own.
David (01:38): Can you elaborate, without incriminating yourself or others, in terms of what were some of the ugly things?
Janel (01:44): Ultimately what happens in a bankruptcy is that you go 90 days late on payment to your creditors. And I had to walk into Google and tell the Head of Finance that we weren’t paying them, but to please not penalize the clients. And having to carry that message was something that I shouldn’t have had to do, but somebody has to be that bear. And I decided that that wasn’t something I was okay with and it wasn’t how I would operate a business and ultimately decided to do it on my own and do it better.
David (02:19): I will say just, it reminded me of a story, which was many years ago, one of our accounts got hacked, our Google accounts. And we immediately contacted Google and said, Hey, there’s been a hack. Someone’s been fraudulently advertising. And they went ahead and paused all of our accounts, all of our clients’ accounts. And I was like, whatever you do, you cannot pause the clients’ accounts. No good details unpunished. So I can feel the pain. I’m trying to convince Google to please, whatever you do, just don’t turn these accounts off.
Janel (02:47): Yeah. You just don’t want to penalize the wrong person, and everything worked out. Actually Google was absolutely amazing through that. I remember my own rep at that point in time was like, I am so sorry you had to do that. And so the level of empathy I received was amazing. So yeah, I mean, it was one of the most unwanted but valuable lessons I’ve ever had in business because it taught me so much about myself and what was important.
David (03:15): So what were the two or three things then that you said, now I’m building this agency, this is what I’m going to do differently?
Janel (03:22): I think doing what’s right is extremely important. So a really amazing, and sometimes painful example of that is that when my team makes a mistake, there’s no covering it up. And if we overspend or we do something that wasn’t in the client’s best interest, we bring a make good. And that’s something that I know a lot of agencies hide or try to brush under a rug or polish it up to look prettier than it is, but they still have this giant [inaudible 03:55] on a platter. And for me, that wasn’t how we were going to operate.
So yeah, I mean, not only is that something that we do for our clients because we feel it’s right, but we’ve also evangelized that internally that mistakes should be shared. And the best way to really display accountability is to take action. And so when there’s something catastrophic, we’re going to say, this is what happened. This is how it happened. And this is what we’re going to do to make sure it never happens again. And so you build this culture of accountability and process and it makes people feel good about what they do.
David (04:34): I agree with you. I’ve taken the same approach historically that if you make a mistake, you got to own it. And often times that means some form of financial compensation. The only thing I’ll say that’s contrary to that is sometimes it feels like a heads-you-win-tails-I-lose situation. So what I would say by that is when you make a mistake, someone says, all right, pay me the $500 a mistake. But when you do something really awesome and you increase the client’s profit by $200,000 in a month, the client doesn’t come to you and say, I’m giving you a $20,000 bonus because you did such a great job. There needs to be some balance there, I guess.
Janel (05:08): Yeah, no, definitely.
David (05:10): So you set up a shop after you left this company that was in bankruptcy. What were your early challenges with getting the agency going?
Janel (05:17): Huh, let’s see. I think in the early stages it was really knowing how to balance my own time. So this amazing piece of advice to surround myself with other entrepreneurs started off very, very small. I reached out to a former colleague that had gone off on her own and had a content marketing agency and a couple of freelancers, other former employees, former colleagues that were doing side work for her. So I talked to her and she said, Hey, you know, this was my best piece of advice that I received when I got started.
And so I started seeing the value in that very, very quickly and always tried to insert myself in those opportunities, whether it was a meet up for startups or then finding out about an organization about entrepreneurs organization, and then setting this bar for myself. You have to have a million dollars in revenue to be an EO, and setting that really, really high bar, and then being qualified and being able to join that organization and then saying, what’s my next level? My next level up was YPO, learning about YPO, and then saying, okay, it’s like a $10 million threshold to get in here. Set that next bar and always work to level yourself up. But you’re surrounding yourself with people you can learn from. So it’s really this mentality of always be learning, but you’re reciprocating in these types of scenarios.
David (06:39): Makes sense. I always believe that pay it forward and co-opetition are two things that work in the agency world. There’s plenty of business to go around. We don’t have to hide our secrets. How many people are at Chacka today?
Janel (06:53): Probably 23.
David (06:55): And are they all in Tampa? Are there some remote, I’m guessing, as with most agencies?
Janel (07:00): Yes. We used to be predominantly in Tampa, and I would say the majority still are probably in Florida as a whole, but we have expanded. So our office is fully virtual now. We do still have a lease, but the whole team is remote. It’s actually been fabulous in a lot of ways. I think that what happened culturally with going remote was that once we were able as an executive team to commit to keeping it, the remote culture was able to flourish. But I think until executives are making that commitment to the team, they are living in limbo. So our people are more spread out. Actually we had an offer go out yesterday to someone in Illinois.
David (07:45): It feels like this is the new normal. I haven’t talked to a single agency that doesn’t have partial or complete remote at this point. Would you say that’s positively or negatively impacted you? And I ask that because by way of example, we’ve had some offices in areas that aren’t as competitive in terms of trying to hire marketing talent that can be a benefit. And then I think during COVID, there were certain situations where someone who suddenly got an opportunity to work for a company a thousand miles away and got paid the salary of that zip code instead of the zip code they’re in. You can’t blame them for taking that opportunity.
Janel (08:18): Yeah. So I would say that’s been the biggest pivot for us as a business is that we were insulated when we were just here in Tampa because, no offense, but we’re the best gig in town until it was agencies in New York and LA that can hire people in Tampa. And that was definitely a game changer for us.
So we’ve had to really look at our business differently and we’ve been pivoting and shifting more dollars in our overall budget go to people now than ever before. But there are other buckets that we saw pretty much dry up like travel. And so you’re looking at how you’re reinvesting your own budget to accommodate for an evolution in the ecosystem.
David (09:05): You raised an interesting point about travel because I do think that during COVID, travel, real estate to some degree, in-office perks, all those things went down, compensation went up. I often think about will travel come back from an agency perspective because we’ve all sort of learned, clients included, that you can get a lot done with a Zoom call.
My theory is that I don’t think travel will ever fully come back, but I do think it’s going to come back to some degree because the moment that an agency loses a client because someone knocked on that client’s door and said, I’ll come every week and meet with you, that’s the moment the agency says, all right, fine. No more Zoom meetings. We got to get out there and see the client in person.
Janel (09:43): Yeah. The reality is that it’s going to be almost regional as to whether or not clients are expecting you to come and visit them in person. So I would say what’s interesting about Chacka being based in Tampa, Florida, is that the majority of our client base has always been in California.
David (10:03): So it’s just they’re used to it.
Janel (10:04): So the beautiful thing about Zoom calls and those reoccurring meetings is that they are face-to-face now. You used to be on a speaker phone. Think about that. Two years ago, we were sitting at a table with a spider phone in the middle.
David (10:20): It’s better than the Polycom or whatever that thing was called.
Janel (10:21): Yeah.
Janel (10:21): I’ve been on enough Zoom calls to know it’s like the telltale sign that you’re talking to a group of people and then suddenly you see someone’s eyes become very brightly lit, which means that they’ve switched to their inbox with the white screen behind them. I’m reading emails. It’s just not the same, but I get your point. I mean it’s better than 10 years ago.
Janel (10:43): Yeah. No. I think it’s better than two years ago.
David (10:47): Yeah. Agreed. And look, it’s better for the environment and it’s more efficient. The bottom line is if a client wants you to fly across the country and you’ve got a six-hour flight and then you’ve got to check into a hotel and everything’s disrupted, someone’s paying for that and nothing’s really being accomplished other than looking someone eye to eye.
I have to ask it because I actually forgot to ask this question. What is the origin of the word Chacka? Because whenever I hear Chacka, I’m probably the only person who says this, I think of the TV series Land Of The Lost.
Janel (11:14): You’re not the only person, but I will give you the origin.
David (11:17): I’m hoping that that’s the reason that you named it then.
Janel (11:19): No, it’s not. Actually the first name that I named the company, the company that I went through to do the incorporation only looked within Florida and there was a similarly named company in Colorado. And so when I very first launched my company, it was named something else. And so I quickly had to pivot when I received a cease and desist.
So I went through and I was looking for a word to name my agency that had punch and possess. Coincidentally, at this time I actually read a media post article that you wrote. And it was when you changed your name. Was that 2009, 2010?
David (12:07): It was a little later than that, I think.
Janel (12:09): Anyway, it was around that time. I was trying to figure out what I was going to name the company. I’m looking up words and different lingual and trying to find that right thing that has punch and possess. And I came across a website that had a Hawaiian surfer lingual. It had what the surfer word was and what it meant. And I came across a word Chacka, and it was spelled C-H-A-K-A, and it means better than gnarly. And that was it.
David (12:37): Do you have surfers who come up to you all the time and say, I know what this means.
Janel (12:41): Yep. And actually several years ago, we gifted a [inaudible 12:44]. We had a summit, K8, that had a theme of making waves. Making waves was the theme. And we had these Chacka-branded surfboard made and gifted at the time. I think it’s still in the San Francisco office if that office exists.
David (13:03): That is a good story. And I did probably write an article about this because I do tell people that when you name your company, you should name it something that means nothing or means something in Hawaiian, I guess, but mostly means nothing, because you may pivot. And that’s the problem that I ran into. I started out as PPC Associates and that was great when all we did was PPC.
Janel (13:19): And that’s what the article was about, was like not pigeonholing yourself.
David (13:23): Yeah. Because you will. My co-founder wanted us to be called Rodinsky and Associates. And I was like, there’s no way we were calling ourselves. We’re going to have to buy 6,000 misspellings of Rodinsky.
Janel (13:33): And your display were always going to get truncated.
David (13:35): Yes. There’s so many reasons not to. I mean, interestingly, I never bought the word rodinsky.com because I thought who would ever want that domain, but it turns out there is a Brazilian law firm called Rodinsky Law Firm that has that domain. So there you go. You buy it because you never know. What would you say is the elevator pitch for Chacka Marketing today? How do you guys differentiate yourself? Who are good clients for you? How would you describe that?
Janel (13:57): So for us, we’re looking for people that are truly like-minded, and we’re looking for people that want to grow, and we need that fit to be there. And so it’s almost routine for us to say this isn’t a fit for us. Growing a company, you can go through these evolutions of skyrocketed growth and then you can have growing pains and you can do all these things, but at the end of the day, where everyone feels good and feels valued is when they have this shared mission. And when you look at the problems you experience in owning an agency ultimately come down to retaining clients and retaining talent. Those are the two biggest things as an agency owner. If you can retain clients and retain talent, you are unstoppable. The rate of growth year over year in our clients is going to easily offset any attrition rate.
So growth for agencies can happen very easily, but it has to happen when you have this shared mindset. And so we’re really looking for that growth-oriented mindset. And it’s commonplace for me to ask someone a preposterous question during a discovery call, like, okay, you want to get to a point where you can sell 500 of your product every day. If I deliver that tomorrow, can you fulfill it? Because if then they’re scared by you asking that question, oh no, no, no, no, I would need six months to build to that. Then you have to say, Okay. It’s going to take you six months to get there. And so you’re only asking for 20% growth over half a year. That doesn’t sound like a growth mindset to me. And so that’s something that we might refer out to someone else or say you might be a better fit for this type of agency.
David (15:46): That’s great. On the retention front, I have a little reminder statement where I say that in e-commerce, there’s three things that matter: client retention, employee retention, or I should say customer retention, employee retention, and then vendor retention, which is not a big deal for us. But you have to make sure that you’re treating UPS right if you’re an e-commerce company, whatever. But you’re absolutely right. Retention and lifetime value is what drives any business. If we, as agency owners, were able to keep a 100% of our clients and a hundred percent of our staff, we’d all be at 5,000 people right now.
Janel (16:19): I can almost assure you something. If you track what accounts the people that leave your agency work on, you will begin to find common denominators.
David (16:30): What do you mean by that?
Janel (16:31): When you have problem accounts that play into employee-
David (16:37): Oh, I see. When the client is a jerk, for example.
Janel (16:40): It matters. And so just as it matters when you have like these awesome clients, you have an awesome client that’s been with you for eight years, they’re not awesome because they’ve been with you for eight years. They’re awesome because you’ve had this relationship with them for eight years, and chances are pretty good that there’s a lot of continuity on both ends in that relationship.
David (17:00): Totally agree. Some of my biggest regrets are basically not firing clients soon enough and then losing great staff as a result.
Janel (17:05): Yep.
David (17:05): Well, let me ask you that regarding clients, and it’s a two-sided question, but we can answer one at a time. How do you deal with challenging clients and how do you detect them? And then the second question which we’ll get to is what are your favorite client success stories that you would share? But let’s start with a tough one first. How do you deal with challenging clients? How do you detect them?
Janel (17:23): There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to this, and sometimes you can correct it and sometimes you can’t. The first thing is I think making sure that your team knows that you appreciate them, even if they’re not being appreciated elsewhere. And so the first thing is making sure that your people managers, whoever is touching everyone on a daily basis, is aware of feelings and exercising empathy and encouragement, and that’s going to help to your one-offs because everybody has a moment, but it’s the ones that continue on.
In that scenario, I will typically try to observe it, observe a call or a meeting to get a feel for it. And then the way that I handle this, whether it’s right or wrong, maybe this is like me being a mother, but my approach is to typically reach out to either that person directly or to a supervisor depending on the scenario and have a conversation and just say, there’s obviously- and I do kind of like a mutual approach.
Actually, we had a client, still a client, they had some turnover in a position on their end, and there was a lot of communication that said, Hey, you haven’t paid invoices. There’s all these invoices piling up. And the new person, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened on their end, but eventually, we got to a point where we said we have to stop. So everything ceases. And then they really, really freaked out. The CEO of the company calls me on my cell phone and says, “What’s going on?” And I’m like, “Hey, we have all this information. We had an email back that said a wire was sent on this particular day. And then there was never any money.” And he’s like, “There was all this correspondence.” And I said, “We should have known that when a new person came in on your end, we should have said, what’s your preferred method of contact.” And he goes, “What’s your preferred method of contact?” And I said, “Text.” And he goes, “You sent emails about this?” And I said, “Yes.” He was like, “Okay. I think maybe you’re taking accountability too far.”
But you don’t throw the person directly under the bus. You say, here’s what I know we could have done differently. We could have said, What’s your preferred method of contact from that first conversation, and then we would have known that we should have texted her about the invoice. But he realized how preposterous that sounded. And we got past it fairly quickly and paid.
David (19:54): So I’m reading this book, Don’t Split the Difference. It’s about negotiations. And one of the things that he talks about, I’m not going to get it quite right, but he talks about a disarming part of the call where you start out by just admitting all of your faults, so to speak. Like you could say like, Hey, I know I probably should have sent this to text and I know how panicked you must be right now, and that we didn’t respond soon enough. All the concerns that they have, you just lay them out at the table like a defense attorney saying like, Yes, my client was in this location, and yes, my client had a gun, but no, he didn’t shoot. Unintentionally, you’re following this FBI hostage negotiators approach to negotiations.
Janel (20:35): But ultimately getting back to that difficult scenario is that I will attempt to have that conversation to get things back on the right track. I make every effort to exercise our own level of accountability and a high level of empathy as to what may be going on to drive things and being open. I’m open to your feedback here. What are you hearing? What are you feeling? Let’s make this better? And then we develop a course of action that everybody feels good about.
And that course of action could be assigning new people to work on the account or it could be walking away from the account as a whole. And those are difficult. We did that. It’s been almost two years since we walked away from an account that we were initially extremely proud to work with, super excited about the work that we had done. And this one new person came in, and it was just shocking behavior. And so ultimately we said, there either has to be something happen with one individual, or we’re going to have to exercise our end of the out because we have a mutual out clause in our contracts. And so that’s what we did. And we serviced them until they found a new agency.
David (21:43): Yeah, it’s unfortunate. But I think human nature is such that when a CMO hires a new Director of Marketing, whatever, and that person is problematic, oftentimes a CMO has confirmation bias, basically. They’re like, well, I hired this person. If you’re saying this person’s bad, you’re accusing me of being a bad chooser of people. They may not say that directly, but this is what’s going through their psyche. And I think what you said earlier is right, continuity on both sides is what makes a great relationship.
Janel (22:10): It is. And it’s difficult. It’s difficult for everyone to achieve, but I can tell you, we have a client that we have worked with for probably going on 12 years. And that particular client, we have worked with the same person, I think, the entire time. And that is an amazing relationship.
David (22:29): That’s impressive.
Janel (22:30): And it’s an account that’s seen amazing growth and consistent growth and that speaks to it.
David (22:35): So would that be an example of a favorite client success story?
Janel (22:38): My favorite client success story, it’s a former client and they worked in manufacturing. When we took over their business, it was so run amok. They wanted to grow and they just didn’t even know how to get there. And so we first drove the efficiency in their program and then we started scaling it. And once we started scaling it, they ended up adding in their manufacturing plant a third shift. And they were like, Chacka, what you’ve done, you just added a third shift of jobs, and it was 50 jobs. And so when they added a third shift, it added 50 jobs in a town in Ohio. And when I think about what our impact is, that’s what our impact is. And when I think about what fuels me, I love the profound impact that we can have on the economy as a whole. And that wasn’t my community; that was in Ohio. That’s my best one.
David (23:38): That’s a great story. And sometimes we’re a couple levels removed from the impact on people.
Janel (23:43): Now, let me also take you back, too. I didn’t do that work, but the person on my team that is predominantly responsible for that outcome, it’s her favorite story, too. And it should be. And she’s still at Chacka.
David (24:00): That’s fantastic. Let me ask you one more client-related question. A lot of people talk about in-housing these days. What’s your opinion on in-housings? Good, bad? Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.
Janel (24:10): Okay. So the problem with in-housing today versus in-housing five years ago or even three years ago, is that now you are competing with everyone in the world, just like I’m competing for my talent and I’m competing with other agencies, you’re competing with us. There are going to be a small portion of people that are actually going to say, I prefer in-house over agency, and you are always going to be able to get those people. But that is a smaller part of the ecosystem that actually thrives on that type of scenario.
So as we are all looking for more and more people when everyone is hiring, it is going to become more and more difficult, I think, for in-house to compete for the talent. I also think that there are things that agencies are doing that are bringing scale and capabilities at a faster evolution than in-house can do on their own for the same reason as we have always said. What’s the value of an agency? Well, we touch all these different things. It’s actually true.
David (25:17): Right. You learn faster.
Janel (25:18): And you look at things like the reporting automation and the AI being used in an agency, it’s light years ahead. And so unless you’re the biggest brands where you’re actually essentially managing an internal agency in itself, then in-housing, I don’t think, is going to make sense. And I think that we’re going to see a lot more of these advertisers that are in that 150,000 to 400,000 a month spend range that have had in-house. I think we’re going to see those beginning to go back out to agencies. So that’s my prediction. And I think that it’s a phenomenon that will be driven by the talent pool.
David (26:01): I agree with most of what you said. I’m not sure I agree that people prefer agency work over in-house. I think it depends on the person. There are people who like in-house, in some cases, because it’s frankly less stress. You have sort of a 9:00 to 5:00 job. You don’t have six clients who all think that they’re your most important clients, and at a big company, sometimes frankly, you can kind of get lost, and no one even knows what’s going on.
I often think that the biggest companies, if you’re on the marketing team for IBM, no offense to the IBM marketing team, if a company sales drop by one-tenth percent, which is a billion dollars because of your marketing, no one has any clue. No one knows. So there’s some safety in that. And I guess the other advantage of in-house would be you get to be laser focused and you get to focus entirely on your business. You get to know the industry, you get to know all the cycles, and all that stuff. But I also agree with you about the learning. The learning is much faster on the agency side. If you want to learn, you should work at an agency, but to some degree, for lifestyle, you might want to work in-house.
Janel (26:59): Yeah. I think that there are people that need or want that level of a less stressed balance in their life. And then there are people that want it, crave it, and miss it when they don’t have it. And so that’s the type of person we look for.
David (27:13): Someone who craves stress.
Janel (27:16): It doesn’t have to be stress, right. It’s craving movement.
David (27:20): Yeah. I agree with that. Movement is a good term for that. Let me ask you about, you mentioned empathy a couple of times. What are your core values or core promises to your team in terms of how you’re going to run the business?
Janel (27:31): So we have four core values that we kind of evangelize on a routine basis. And the first one is to be accountable. That’s something that we talked about, but we say it’s not just owning it, but it’s being a part of the outcome. It’s saying, what are we going to do about it and taking action. And so that’s how we really speak about being accountable. We also say to be hungry, and it’s very similar to curiosity. It’s that eagerness to always be learning, but we say be hungry.
We also have be growth oriented. And when we talk about being growth oriented, we’re not looking for those 20 percents; we’re looking for exponential growth. We’re looking for hockey sticks on the chart, and how do we get there and being creative about getting there?
Oftentimes when I pitch, I’ve heard this so many times where the person says it can be on the other end of the phone. They say, I can hear your passion. I tell people that the moment they stop enjoying what they’re doing to stop doing it. And we carry that passion over into believing in what we’re doing for our clients. You have to feel happy and rewarded and excited and you have to have a passion for what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean that you have to be passionate about every product one of your e-commerce client sells, but you have to be passionate about the work you’re doing as a whole. You have to be able to find the passion. And if you can’t, then something very, very important is missing because without the passion, I don’t think the other things happen.
David (29:08): I think this is universal to agency founders and to agencies probably up to a certain size. I mean, I don’t know that at a holding company that they’re hiring for passion, but I think at independent agencies and smaller agencies, it’s a mission-driven culture. Your story, my story is somewhat similar in the sense that we wanted to do things differently from the way we had seen things done in the past. I actually used to say, we’re in a mission to save clients from inapt agencies. But the passion, I think, indicates a mission. It’s like this isn’t just about a paycheck. This is about doing good for clients and by association doing good for the world.
Janel (29:39): Yeah. I think when we look at what drives us, that passion is what the common ground is, but my passion doesn’t have to be the same item as the person next to me, but it can be shared. It’s such a unique quality.
David (29:52): Totally. How do you hire for that? How do you identify team members that are going to be passionate and growth-oriented, all that stuff.
Janel (30:00): Yeah. We ask a lot of scenario questions. A lot of tell me about a time when. I like to ask people what they’re passionate about and see if they have enthusiasm in their voice in what they talk about.
David (30:13): Have you gotten any interesting responses? What’s the craziest thing someone has said they’re passionate about?
Janel (30:18): I think that the first thing is that sometimes people are a little thrown off where they’re like digital marketing. And I’m like, no, no, no. It can be anything. It can be fluffy bunnies. And then they’re like, oh. I oftentimes ask people to tell me about something that happened to them in their lives that just wasn’t fair. Like you were just dealt a bad hand and it wasn’t fair. That’s actually my favorite to ask.
David (30:41): That’s a great question. So what was the answer that you got that was so interesting?
Janel (30:45): I had someone tell me about how they didn’t graduate from college on time because they had ended up having to drop this class. They weren’t going to do well in it, went and dropped the class, was walking down away from student services like defeated and then got hit by a bicycle.
David (31:04): God.
Janel (31:07): And that when he was getting up off the ground, he realized his flip flop was broken and his toe was cut.
David (31:13): Isn’t there a book called The Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. That’s what this sounds like basically.
Janel (31:17): Yeah. And there are other parts of the story that I’m not going to get into because I am afraid that I would say something insensitive along the way of completing the story, but it was a really, really, really bad day for him. And it could have been a movie. It could have been a movie. And that one, I will never forget that story. I’ve had a lot of amazing answers to that, and you really get a lot of insight into people based on the story they tell.
David (31:46): That’s a great question. The two questions that I was thinking about because I was now asking myself what I ask, the one question I always ask, which is a very unfair question is describe the color blue. I always ask that question because you can’t really. It’s like, oh, the sky is blue. What if it’s raining out and it’s gray? Water is blue. Well, sometimes it looks green. The reason I ask that is just to see some level of critical thinking.
And then the other set of questions I would always ask is ask them to set up a marketing campaign for a bottled water company because bottled water is basically the stupidest product on earth. I mean, it’s literally just water in a bottle that destroys the earth while you’re drinking it. And it’s not differentiatable. If you do a taste test of 10 different things of water, you’re not going to know the difference between Dasani and whatever the other competitors are. So seeing how someone thinks through that, like how do you create ad text for a water company to differentiate your product? I always thought that was a fun way to ask interview questions.
Janel (32:38): What’s the best answer you’ve gotten?
David (32:39): On the water? I don’t know. It’s always something like, they try to emphasize some benefit, like the freshest or the cleanest or something. They just try to come up with some adjectives that tries to differentiate it. But ultimately, like I always said, if you can brand water, if you can get people to make a conscious choice to pay a dollar extra for water, then you are a genius marketer.
So let me ask you some questions about the future. What do you think the future of agency is going to be and insofar as prediction, what worries you about the future and what gets you excited?
Janel (33:15): I think that the agency of the future has the best elements of a full service shop, but has the ability to be nimble like a small shop. I think that it’s offering a wide breadth of services but being able to act like a startup.
David (33:36): That would be a good agency.
Janel (33:38): It would be a great agency. It’s what I’m trying to build.
David (33:40): Is that your aspiration, would you say? Is that what you’re trying to build?
Janel (33:44): Yes. Yeah. I think for us and where we’re trying to go is that we are trying to find like-minded agencies that expand our services, that we can fold into our mix. And I think it’s important for our growth because we’re constantly analyzing everything. And I already said that retaining people and retaining clients are the two biggest problems you face, and whether or not they’re actually problems or they’re just a variable to optimize. I don’t know that they’re problems, but there’s certainly something we work to optimize. And so as we work to optimize those and we understand when we lose the clients that we lose, it’s typically because they feel they outgrow us.
David (34:24): Yeah. So being future-proof means being able to scale with clients, I guess.
Janel (34:28): Yeah. And then just in terms of like agency and like the digital landscape and where everything’s going, like any bold predictions there, I’m most fascinated by programmatic and the future of programmatic. We’ve really been able, I think, to optimize programmatic media so well, but I think as we have tracking and data changes in the future, that makes me wonder if that’s going to be able to sustain the growth that it’s seen. It’s the thing that I am the most perplexed, like that I have my eye on probably the closest.
David (35:06): Because when you look at the data, you feel like it doesn’t work?
Janel (35:09): No, it does.
David (35:10): It does work, but you’re perplexed as to how it works?
Janel (35:13): No, no, no. I’m perplexed as to the direction that programmatic media is going to go, as there are changes in tracking capabilities and third-party data because I think it’s going to be hard to sustain not only growth, but even where it is now should some of those changes that are coming actually ever land. And I think they are going to. And I’m acutely tuned into because I feel like that’s the thing I have to keep the closest pulse on.
David (35:44): Yeah. Certainly the platforms are taking away a lot of data in the name of privacy, which could hurt programmatic. But I guess the flip side of that is, as people are cutting cords more and more to cable and you’re seeing more connected TV, we could see a future where every single commercial that’s shown on TV is personalized, based on demographic and psychographic data, which I always think about like the Super Bowl. The halftime shows sponsored by the Ford F-150. And it’s like, there can only be 1% of America that wants a Ford F-150, and only 1% of that 1% is actually searching for a Ford F-150 right now. And that’s always been the beauty of internet. And so I think that’s the part of programmatic that I find interesting. Like you could get to the point where maybe you don’t have a separate halftime show for every user, but certainly the commercials are like, don’t show me a Ford commercial because I’m never going to buy one.
Janel (36:30): Yeah. It’s one of those things that I’ve always thought that we should have a big public service announcement behind to say like, Hey everybody, if you would just share all the information about you, think about how relevant your address.
David (36:43): Trust us. We’ll not do anything bad about it.
Janel (36:46): Trust us. We won’t abuse it at all. You’re in a bucket. It’s not you, you’re in a bucket of other people like you.
David (36:54): Yeah. Although the truth of the matter is I give Google a lot of credit for the fact that the AdWord system, or I guess Ad system now, was not just calculating rank based on CPC, but also on click-through rate. It was the first time in history really that an advertising platform said, it’s not just a matter of how much you pay us. It’s a matter of how relevant your ad is to users. And it’s part of the experience.
Janel (37:13): Do you know what’s so interesting about you bringing this up? Do you know that I use the original Hal Varian video.
David (37:21): Oh, on quality score
Janel (37:22): On quality score and CPC?
David (37:25): No. You used it?
Janel (37:26): I use it in training new people. We use it in training. And even when it’s someone that has six years of experience, it’s something they see in our search training in their first week because most people haven’t actually watched that. Now, I will tell you, if you go back to the original one, that’s like from, I don’t know, 2010, might even be older than that, but if you go back to the original one on YouTube, it actually cuts off and stops playing at like the 10-, 11-minute mark, and you can’t finish that one. It’s kind of funny.
But I told people that it’s proof that YouTube videos don’t last forever, that they stopped in their entirety after 15 years or something. But it’s an amazing concept. It was so ahead of its time because it really allows the power to be and the end users, the consumer is empowered. And it’s almost like a crowdsourced vote towards relevancy.
David (38:19): Yeah. It becomes part of the experience instead of a distraction from the experience. I will say, though, that if you want to go even further back than the Hal Varian video, if you read Larry and Sergey’s original paper on the BackRub Algorithm, which later became PageRank, they talk about how a good search engine would never run ads for a company’s branded words, phrases because that would be bad user experience. So imagine a world where Google’s totally optimized for relevancy. We wouldn’t have branded paid search. That would cost them a lot of money, though.
What are your favorite marketing and leadership books that you love?
Janel (38:57): Let’s see. So we were talking earlier about YPO and Global One. So I just joined Global One in addition to YPO Florida, and it was for the Columbia Business School, the series that they do. And there’s a professor at Columbia Business School named Rita McGrath, and she has seen past corners or seen around corners. And it’s absolutely fascinating to think about planning for the future and imagining these outcomes that could be very, very grandiose in nature.
And basically the concept is saying if this is a possible scenario five years from now, what would be the indicators leading up to that. And so you start thinking about what indicators could lead to that outcome, and then you have a plan of what to watch for. And this can be both opportunistic as well as defensive. And that was one of the most amazing concepts I’ve probably ever learned, and I think it’s something that I almost subconsciously do.
However, having a formalized approach to it just really made me feel empowered to not have curve balls in the future. Of course, you’re always going to have curve balls, but if you’re thinking of these grandiose events, and I think the example she used in class was maybe like Kimberly-Clark or someone like Diapers were in a lockdown. We could either have a baby boom because people are home and making babies or we could have a baby bust where people not being able to work is going to affect their ability to support children.
And so it was like how do you monitor for a baby boom or a baby bust. And so we ended up tracking back all of these variables and thinking about what are the things you could watch. You could watch the sales of prenatal vitamins. So there’s all these different waves and how far ahead of it could you get.
David (40:53): That’s fascinating.
Janel (40:55): Yeah, so that is the one that I’m hot on as of the moment. I’m a big believer in Traction and the EOS Operating System. I would say I don’t know that it’s meant for an entire organization, but I think the concept of a Level 10 meeting and in your leadership levels, that it’s absolutely phenomenal, and I think it’s been game-changing for my business.
David (41:17): It is amazing how many agencies use EOS. We’ve been using it for six or seven years now, and we’ve been through I think three different consultants, and we keep refreshing it. I think it’s Traction: Get a Grip is the classic. And there’s one called Rocket Fuel that people recommend as well, which I haven’t read, by the same Gino Wickman who did Traction.
Last question, what advice would you give to someone starting an agency today?
Janel (41:40): You want to see people be successful, right? I do anyway. You said something about sharing before. I think it is to not be afraid to share with the competition. There could be a time where someone uses something you shared against you, but that is going to be a small sliver of what the opportunity to learn and gain from sharing is going to give you. And so you don’t want to hold back everything that could be to guard those little tiny examples of where someone might misuse the information that you share.
And so it’s incredibly valuable. I learned that sharing was better than being guarded from a Aaron Goldman poolside at a Search Insider Summit. It was before I started Chacka. So it was a really long time ago—a really, really long time ago. And he point blank said, “Hey, are you in the Lowe’s RFP?” And I was like, “Yes…” but I was glad he shared.
David (42:41): The biggest thing I’ve learned from Aaron is that you can still dunk at age 40-something.
Janel (42:47): Yeah, important lessons from Aaron.
David (42:49): Impressive. I think you’re right about that, and one of the things that I always talk to people about in the agency space is that in the digital marketing world, the pie is getting bigger. And so everyone is going to grow. So that’s not really a problem. We can share information because the market’s growing at 10% to 15% a year. So it’s not like we’re all fighting for scarce resources, and not to mention the fact that paying it forward feels good, and secondly, agencies help each other out. Sometimes, I have a client that I can’t work with, and I send it to someone who helps me with another client.
Janel (43:21): It’s what we do. Sharing goes a long way. It’s such a big pie. You rarely cross paths with the people you know, which is remarkable, because I think every time I talk to you, I do feel like we’re very likeminded. I always feel like we’re likeminded. I think that me growing up in West Virginia and you growing up in Iowa, I see all these commonalities, but at the end of the day, we’re not the final three in an RFP ever.
David (43:46): Probably not. It’s actually interesting. If you asked me like who are the top three companies that I go up against in RFPs, there’s not some concentrated, like it’s always these three companies.
Janel (43:55): It’s not.
David (43:56): I used to try to keep track of all the performance agencies in the United States, and I actually had a Google Doc of I think 125, and it’s probably now 250. So there’s plenty of competition, but there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone.
Janel (44:08): Yeah. I think ultimately, though, the agencies that are able to retain key talent are the ones that are going to be the most successful. And that is ultimately contingent on a myriad of factors. But you have to understand why your people are where they are and make sure that those are things that you don’t ever change.
David (44:29): Absolutely. It’s a human capital business, and it’s not like selling corn oil. The capital can walk out the door if they don’t feel like they’re on a mission to do something great. So that’s what matters.
Janel (44:41): On a mission and that their role in that mission is valuable.
David (44:44): Yeah. Well, Janel, this is great. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me on this and continued success.
Janel (44:50): Thank you so much. I am so honored that you reached out to include me in your podcast series. You’ve got some great founders, and I will do this anytime.
David (44:59): Awesome. Well, we’ll get through our first round of conversations. We’ll have you back for a second conversation.
Janel (45:04): Awesome. Thanks.
David (45:07): A new episode of Agentic Shift drops every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or visit agenticshift.com to see the latest episode.
Links
Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business, a book by Gino Wickman
Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business, a book by Gino Wickman and Mack C. Winters