The Secret to Growth Marketing & Having Fun at Work | Wes Yee
In The Secret to Growth Marketing & Having Fun at Work, Wes Yee (Twitter: @WesYee), an experienced high-tech marketer, joins host William Glass to discuss how tech companies should approach growth marketing. Wes shares how he learned the hard way that there is no one size fits all growth marketing strategy that you can copy and paste. Instead, you’ll learn how to identify what growth marketing strategy will work best for you business. You’ll learn:
- How to craft a growth marketing strategy
- Identifying and implementing growth marketing tactics
- Defining growth marketing, acquisition marketing, and performance marketing
- How as a leader to make work more fun
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About Wes Yee
About Wes Yee:
Wes Yee is a marketer and investor with 10+ years of experience driving growth for technology startups. He’s head of integrated marketing at Ramp and a Channel Co-Chair at Pavilion where he helps marketers solve problems. From 2018-2020 he led the growth marketing team at Guru, helping grow revenue over 400%. Prior to Guru he was the VP of Marketing at Sequoia Consulting group and has held key marketing roles at Piqora, Kony, ShareVault and Semphonic. He holds a BA in Mass Communications from CSU East Bay.
Learn more about Wes Yee: LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/wesyee & website – www.WesYee.co
Transcription
Transcription is autogenerated and likely contains errors.
[00:00:00] William: Are you interested in growth marketing and how to scale a startup? Well, if so, then you’re going to love today’s episode. It’s with Wes Yee and I’m super excited to have him on because he talks about how to make work fun, which you don’t hear enough of. And he also talks about some of the challenges that he’s faced as a marketer, where he was having success, move to a new company and struggled to use some of those same tactics and how we had to adapt it, which just tells you that there’s no one silver bullet for marketing.
You’ve got to be agile, flexible and understand what drives the business forward. So west is going to dive into all of that cover some really great topics. And I’m also excited because Wes is officially on as an ostrich advisor. So he’s helping us figure out our marketing strategy tactics and just implement a absolutely killer growth marketing when it comes to ostrich.
So super excited to announce that. And without further ado, I hope you enjoy today’s marketing focused episode of the Silicon alley podcast featuring the west Hills. Are you interested in growing and scaling your business? Welcome to the Silicon alley podcast, where you’ll hear from entrepreneurs, venture, capitalists, and top performers on what it truly takes to grow and scale a business.
You’ll walk away with actionable insights. You can apply in your own business and life. Now, Dwayne glass, the CEO and co-founder of ostrich and your host of the Silicon alley podcast. Less welcome to Silicon valley podcast.
[00:01:22] Wes: Super excited to have you on today. How’s it going? Good to, good to be on. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:26] William: Yeah, definitely. We’ve had a bunch of conversations offline, but I’m excited to dive into it and cover a little bit about your experience background in marketing. And what I’m kind of want to start with though, is when you look at your LinkedIn, I don’t see anyone else that has as many recommendations as you do.
You’ve done a really good job in terms of working with coworkers, clients, and kind of getting recommendations and giving recommendations. But the reason that I want to bring that up is that, , there’s one comment and there’s some really good comments in there. , but you’re described as a finance guru, a sushi, a sushi, officiant auto, and a killer pushup competitor.
And I think that’s a great way to kind of stage today’s conversation.
[00:02:06] Wes: Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely, uh, something that I think, I don’t know how many recommendations that’s a part of. Anyone who’s worked with me knows a few things and sort of separate from my, you know, my main role as a, as a marketer.
I, uh, certainly the last few roles that I’ve had have taken kind of a personal interest in the finances of my teams, not in managing them, but, but in helping them. And so, you know, one of my, sort of like away from work, interests is personal finance. And so I actually had a coworker. I heard a woman a number of years ago.
Yeah. She was very early on in her career. And at some point, you know, just in the, in the, you know, I think it was probably an event or, you know, sometimes sort of away from work, but, but still on work time, she mentioned to me that she had actually like a bunch of credit card debt and then just, you know, no, nothing, nothing surprising, you know, young person living in San Francisco, very common story, right.
You kind of finance that yourself until you can get your career running. And so I just asked, Hey, you know, if you’re interested, I’d love to spend some time with you on a regular basis, you know, as, as your manager. And, you know, I, I feel accountable, not just for. Success as a marketer, but your success as a person.
And so that was something that I thought, you know, I I’m, I have some practices of my own that have worked for me. And if I could help someone out, certainly someone on my team like that I would want to. And so we kind of sat down and sort of, you know, not nothing formal, but about once a month and kind of walk through like budgeting.
And mostly initially it was just about like spending and saving, but then it sort of progressed to investing and how to think of. The 401k at work and then how to think about, you know, potentially opening a brokerage account and doing things on outside of, outside of the 401k. And so we’ve, we looped in a couple of other co-workers as we were going.
There were other people who I had already, you know, had kind of just like, uh, offhand conversations about investing on stocks with, and, , and so we kind of made little small groups, very informal, but that’s one thing I’ve sort of carried forward that, you know, oh, sorry to, to bring that to a close, , ended up a couple of years ago, you know, had we’d followed up, you know, even after I stopped working with her, but, she was out of debt.
She had a bunch of savings. She was looking at buying a house. She had done well in some of her investments. And so, you know, looking back on the few years that we had worked together, you know, we had done a whole bunch of things for work that had, you know, I’m proud of. And, and I was proud of her for doing, but really this was something that I felt, you know, when I think about like what I was able to do as a manager, That was one of the things that really stuck out to me is like, man, I’m really glad that I, that we did that together.
I mean, she did all the work, but, but that I was able to kind of at least help point her in that direction because, you know, we, we spend so much of our time at work, giving our all to our company, right. It’s, you know, whatever we’re doing, at least the people that I’ve tried to work with and surround myself with, you know, they’re very committed to their jobs.
And in, in a lot of cases, they put their own wellbeing and potentially their own financial wellbeing, second or third or further down, you know, a lot of people. Uh, as, as you know, don’t, don’t necessarily like to think about money, but it is so important to our own well-being and our careers and our lives are going forward.
And so just being able to be a part of that journey for her to get her from someone who was in debt stressed about it, to someone who was in a really good place with a solid financial foundation going forward and all kudos to her. But that, that felt really good to me as a marketer, as a marketer, as a manager.
And it’s something that I took forward into future roles and, you know, I, uh, I always, I started like sort of formalizing it a little more. Had slack channels with coworkers where I just sort of invite people, Hey, if you’re interested in investing or personal finance, you know, this is another interest of mine.
I’ve got some resources, I’ve written some things, and I share those. And, uh, they’ve been helpful for people. I’ve had people who had never invested any, a dollar in their life who opened up investing accounts, who bought stocks, you know, certainly over the last couple of years, that’s been a really exciting, and I look forward to hopefully in the years to come hearing more stories from people that, you know, I came across at work or, or in life who through.
You know, some conversation with me or something I may have shared or on a better path financially and with investing. So, um, have had a few people like that. Uh, but, uh, it’s, it’s definitely was, was a fun one. So I know I just took the finance piece of it, the sushi one, you know, that one’s sort of self-explanatory anytime I, uh, have hired someone or worked with someone they’ve inevitably found themselves eating sushi with me and eating sushi with me, it’s probably a bit different than with most people, you know, you and I actually haven’t, haven’t sat down for sushi yet, but if we do, you probably won’t even get to hold the menu.
I’ll take care of all the ordering. I’ll, I’ll guide you in how to eat the fish. You know, there’s all kinds of stuff that, you know, sushi has been my favorite food for a long time. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Japan a couple of times. And so I’ve learned a thing or two about ordering and eating and enjoying it.
So that’s the one that I like to push people’s comfort zones on. Especially, you know, here in the U S sushi is much more popular. It used to be, but still, a lot of people, when they pick up their McGeary, they put it, you know, they, they dip the rice in the soy sauce and then put that in their mouth.
That is a total no-no paying for the fish. And, uh, the rice is going to absorb tons of slice sauce and basically overpower the flavor of the fish. So you want to dip the fish. You want to go fish side down on your tongue. So you’re really getting the maximum over the fair. So that’s, you know, tip, take away.
Number one from, uh, from the episode today is, uh, is how to truly enjoy a piece of new Geary. I love that.
[00:07:28] William: Yeah. Why? I’m funny. So funny enough, I worked at a sushi restaurant and high school. Uh, it was like a fast casual sushi restaurant. If that makes any sense,
[00:07:37] Wes: uh, what was it called? What was it called? I feel like sushi restaurants tend to have very punny names, especially a fast casual sounds like mocking fresh.
No. So,
[00:07:46] William: yeah, but, uh, but it was funny because before I, before I started working there, I only ate California rolls. And then once I was actually working, I actually, you know, I had to talk to customers and explain what was good and I, I liked fish, but I never really experimented when it came to sushi. And then at the end of that, you know, as eating everything so eel and all the, all the, well, whatever we had, cause it wasn’t a huge dominion.
Right. I’m was in Birmingham, Alabama. So we also had like a cook chicken roll to put it
[00:08:12] Wes: in perspective. Very traditional. Yeah.
[00:08:16] William: But, um, yeah, definitely, definitely interested. And you really are an officiant auto, not just a sushi lover. Right. And I think that, that came out clear. So definitely excited to dive in when it
[00:08:26] Wes: comes to this issue, we’ll have to do it.
We’ll have to do it for sure. And I know you didn’t probably didn’t want to go this long on, on one LinkedIn comment, but the pushup thing, you know, I. I was a college baseball player and our coach, or the currency, to tie it to finance a little, the currency of punishment was pushups. And so, got really good at doing pushups.
And so my team, and this is a coworker from recent, uh, recently, we got into a spirit where when, you know, we’d be sort of low on energy, we would, just kind of drop our, put down our laptop. Uh, find an open spot in the office and start some kind of fitness competition, uh, you know, whether it was, you know, pushups or, the woman who’s who, who was a recommendation reading, Julia, shout out to Julia.
If you happen to be listening, she’s a yoga instructor and is just an incredible shape. Challenged me to a planking contest, destroyed me out. So yeah, another fun thing, you know, I think like, like we were talking about earlier, you know, you spend so much of your time at work that, you know, as, especially if you have any sort of leadership role, I think a lot of your responsibility is not just delivering outcomes to the business, but it’s also keeping spirit time making sure that people are enjoying their time at work and you know, all those things, all those are, you know, all those ingredients to being successful at work that are outside of, you know, how clever strategy can I come up with?
You know, what’s the smartest messaging we can do all that’s important, but really, you know, you can’t. It’s difficult to maintain motivation 365 days a year based, purely on your love and passion for your particular niche at the office. At least that’s my take. And so being able to mix in, you know, elements that, you know, as a, someone who played team sports, you know, were sort of built into the culture.
Building of those types of organizations have always been, um, a part of what I’ve tried to bring to the table at work. And if something that, you know, really.
[00:10:18] William: Yeah, no, absolutely west. And I think that comes across very, very clearly that you really are focused on bringing a lot of, uh, bringing excitement, bringing that team, that team spirit, doing things that are fun outside of the box, right?
Your job description, wasn’t help. You’re a direct report to work on their finances, but it was something that you cared and wanted to bring that and something that you enjoyed and were able to kind of give back and same with the sushi, right. It’s something that you enjoy and it’s like bringing that type, that part of your personality into the office, um, and the work environment, which I think is absolutely crucial.
And when building teams, I’m curious, have you always thought like that was that a learning process? Cause I don’t think that everyone thinks about managing teams team building
[00:11:01] Wes: that way. Well, the sushi I’ll admit is it’s a bit of a selfish, selfish piece of it. Um, but uh, yeah, the team building thing, you know, I think probably like most people it’s an evolution, right?
So, uh, You know, the first sort of leadership roles I can remember were in sports growing up. And so whether that was as a player or, you know, later on as a coach and a mentor to younger players, that was something that I sort of sort of just, you know, you kind of just mentally keep that ledger of like, Hey, what works when you’re trying to motivate people, when you’re trying to get people to go along with you.
One of the, you know, I’ve mentioned I was a baseball player, one of the things I think that’s really interesting about baseball is that the players tend to have a very diverse background. Like you don’t get the only thing in a lot of cases that I had in common with some of the people that I played with was that we played baseball people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds, people from all sorts of geographic backgrounds, all sorts of, you know, people who spoke different languages and you just kind of get.
Really broad set of people who, it can be hard to get along with people, especially in a sport like that, where you are spending, you know, 40 hours a week as a, you know, a young person, a young person playing. To have a leadership role, there you could never just be, Hey, I’m an authority figure.
Listen to me. Because I’m a senior and you’re a freshmen, whatever that stuff is, it only goes so far. And so a lot of manager leadership principles that I took started there. And then certainly, you know, as I got my career started as a marketer and started, building out teams and hiring.
There is sort of, a combination of what works at the office. Things that I learned from, uh, from managers that I had other leaders that I worked with, you know, I’ve certainly done my own sort of deep dive on articles and books and things like that, and tried to collect as much as I could from others.
And so, you know, it’s nothing that I was, you know, born with or anything, but it’s, it’s mostly just a collection of my experiences and things that have worked and things that I’ve enjoyed as, as in. Yeah, no,
[00:12:50] William: absolutely. That, that makes sense. Yeah. That’s interesting being in such a diverse group of people, right?
When you were playing baseball and from all different backgrounds, different languages, and having to figure out how to bring people together and then keeping note of that, as you, as you kind of transition into the working.
[00:13:05] Wes: One other thing I’ll mention that, uh, separate from the team sport thing is I spent, so I’m, I’m 34, about to be 35 tomorrow actually.
And sprint day. Thank you. I sort of grew up came of age, you know, during the poker boom, the online poker boom in like the early to mid two thousands. And so I was very much a poker player, um, at the time. And, uh, one thing about poker is that there’s, there are certainly the elements of statistical, you know, need, you need to know the numbers, you need to know the odds.
You need to know that size, I’ll call that kind of, so you know, the game, right? You need to be good at the game, but there’s also the, but half of the game is really. Understanding humans and is, uh, being able to make sort of, to do pattern recognition and to just sort of understand someone with limited information.
And so when you’re sitting at a table and you’re looking at someone and then they’re making a decision, or you’re making a decision for your money, you kind of get a pretty clear cut view into the, into the factors that are important to someone. And that can be, you know, how, how willing they are to make a bet how, you know, you sort of understand someone’s risk tolerance very quickly, right.
And that tells you something about them. And I’ve always felt like. You know, the, the time that I put in there and the money that I put in there really has paid off in my career in that I am able to, or I, part of my interaction with other people is just naturally like trying to really understand what drives them, trying to really understand what motivates them, what scares them, not in any, you know, fear way, but, but in like, what is this person, what is this person worried about?
What are the, you know, where, where are they in life? What are they concerned with? And I think that. Really served me well as a manager, as a coworker, as a friend, because so much of, you know, what we bring to the table at work. Like we’ve been talking about it, some of it, you know, I’m a marketer. So, you know, some of it is I enjoy writing.
I enjoy communicating. I enjoy putting together events and experiences for people and finding a way to present products and services and, and things like that. But, but a big piece of it is, Hey, I’ve got to connect this to someone emotionally, it’s I call it psychologically. And I can’t just do that by saying, Hey, this, this, this product does three things that you need three to five things that, and it doesn’t, and it does three to five things better than our competitor, right?
It’s like, you can, you know, people can see through that, right? We’re all inundated with advertisements and marketing in all these areas of our life. And so as a marketer, if you’re not able to connect with someone emotionally or psychologically, or, or, or motivational, or to connect to that motivational piece, you know, why are they spending their time, the way that they are, then you’re just not going to be as good at your job.
And so that, that to me has always been a large piece of.
[00:15:44] William: Yeah, no, that, that makes a lot of sense, Wes. And didn’t, didn’t realize you were poker player. I got into that as well for, for a while. I was playing
[00:15:51] Wes: poker. Let’s go to Texas Hold’em games
[00:15:54] William: when I was 13 with, uh, with my dad and his buddies. And, um, won a couple, won a couple of games and then was not invited back afterwards when the 13 year old beats, the grown men.
Definitely, definitely a lot of luck there, but you do learn a lot about people. And as you said, it’s really interesting, especially when you think about marketing and connecting with someone emotionally. What would you say are some of the, some of the things that people should think about, entrepreneurs, business leaders should think about when they’re marketing their product or service?
I know you’ve helped us kind of think through things on ostrich from a very strategic level, um, and kind of kept us from getting stuck into the rabbit hole or stuck into the weeds when really we need to zoom back and look at the bigger picture, but I’m curious, what are some of those, those things that, uh, that entrepreneurs and, and startups should be thinking about when it comes
[00:16:39] Wes: to marketing?
I think you used the right word and it’s, it’s the most overused word in marketing, but that strategy and being strategic, one of the, the biggest challenges with marketing is that, uh, because we are such consumers of marketing, all of us, right. It’s everywhere. Especially if you have a job that puts you in front of a screen all day, uh it’s you know, advertisements are on every site.
And as a result, we all. We’re sort of subject to this dynamic where it’s like, because we all consume it. Everyone has an opinion about what good marketing is, right. And where, where, uh, you know, what tactics have worked well on them. And so, uh, it can be very easy, especially if you’re an entrepreneur who maybe isn’t focused on marketing to spend a lot of your energy sort of feeling like, oh wow, we need to do everything.
There’s so many opportunities out there, uh, which is a blessing and a curse because yeah, there’s, you know, let’s just take social media, for instance, like, Hey, social media, we know it gets a lot of timeshare people’s mind share. They spend time on it. They’re addicted to whatever their app is. Tik TOK, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, one of the ways I’ve, I’ve realized that I’m getting pretty old is that I’ve doom scroll LinkedIn, which I think just like the, the lowest of the low, but, uh, you know, the reality is we spend a lot of our time.
And like I said, if you’re on your phone or you’re on your computer, it’s just natural. Like, there’s, there’s probably a tab. If you’re listening while you’re working. Uh, tab open on your computer to X social media site. Right? But there are so many, there’s so many tactics you can do. There’s really an unlimited amount of things that you can do on these sites that you’ve, you know, companies have, in some cases, dozens of marketers who are, who are running different channels, uh, putting together different types of content for each channel, it can be very tempting to fall into the pit of like, let’s do everything.
I see a company that does well here. I say, company does well here. Let’s copy or find our version of what’s happening there. And just sort of take this tactical approach to marketing that let’s do everything let’s let’s, uh, we need, we just need to spread the word everywhere. And I think what’s for me, the approach going back to like the word strategy, it’s like, it needs to be very outcome focused.
And so if you’re really thinking about marketing, it’s like, you, you do have an unlimited amount of opportunities, but, but not all of them are your best opportunity. Not all of them are your second best opportunity. Right? And so if you can really start with the plan, what do we want to achieve? Do we want to optimize for the most.
The most visits do we want to optimize for the most signups? Do we want to optimize for the most engaged users? Like those all are part of your funnel as a, you know, as an entrepreneur, but the way that you would acquire those users or entice those users to come in, interact with you and learn about your product or your service, um, can be very different.
And so really making sure that you’re orienting your strategy around the specific outcome that you want and not sort of this catch all, Hey, let’s just do everything. Um, and the other reason that I think maybe, maybe the more compelling reason to, to take this approach of starting with the outcome, the very specific outcome that you want is that it’s very unlikely that your team, which may be one person, maybe a hundred.
It’s going to have the skillset to do every single thing at the, at, at, at their best. Right. And so if you have great writers on your team, but you ask them all to produce Tik TOK videos, probably not going to be your, your best option. Right. And so, you know, I’m going to drop, I’m going to drop sports analogies, this whole conversation.
But if you have a bunch of people who are good at shooting threes, but you ask them all to drive the lane and dunk, you’re not going to have a very good team because that’s just not their strength. And so that’s the other piece of it is like playing to your team’s strengths. And, you know, obviously you can hire if you really see opportunities in different areas, but, you know, stack rank what you think you’re going to be good at the level of effort required to do it, to accomplish it because that’s the other thing, right?
It’s like we all have limited time. And so if you actually don’t have the time to explore six different tactics, it’s not worth thinking about number four, five, and six on what, what is my best opportunity. Right? So, um, it has a lot to do with focus. It has a lot to do with that sort of. Like you were saying earlier, like pull back, think about what outcome you really want to achieve.
Think about what is achievable, how hard it would be to achieve that, given your team, given your resources, um, and, and, and invest accordingly.
[00:20:44] William: Yeah, no, I think that’s great advice. Westbank. I’m definitely guilty of trying to do everything or doing too many things and not really executing any of them.
[00:20:53] Wes: Well, we all are totally, I mean, it’s because as a marketer, you want to please, right?
You, you want to show that you can do these things. You want to show that you’re a creative person, that you understand how to communicate in all these different mediums. And, and certainly as, as a, as an entrepreneur, you, you want your product and service communicated to everyone, right? You’re investing your life in developing this.
Um, and so you want everyone to see it, no matter where they are, where they have. Yeah. So
[00:21:19] William: that’s, that’s really, really helpful lesson. So, so really the advice is to think about that outcome first, right? That’s what, that’s what you should be doing when you’re implementing a good marketing strategy, whatever tactics you pick, but from the strategy perspective, need to think about that outcome first and foremost.
And then from there develop what is tactical you’re going to do to drive that outcome.
[00:21:40] Wes: You’ve got to know where you want to go before you, uh, before you can figure out how to get there. Absolutely.
[00:21:47] William: I’ll be very transparent, I’ve been pretty transparent on this podcast is I’m very hesitant when it comes to marketers because there’s so many social media experts or Tik TOK, whatever the tactics are.
I’m curious from a marketing from marketers lens. How do you really figure out and think about vetting. Whether it’s someone that you’re bringing to your team or someone that, you know, an agency that you need to, that you need to bring on to, to help support your growth tech is what are some of those things that you can be thinking about, um, and should look for to identify someone that really does kind of know what they’re, what they’re talking about.
Cause it’s easy to throw dollars and time and energy at metrics that don’t matter. And or people that, you know, drive fake, fake metrics, bots and followers and all that
[00:22:33] Wes: kind of stuff. Yeah. And, and one of the hardest parts about this, uh, especially for a non marketer is that marketers are excellent at job interviews.
You know, we, we, we communicate for a living. And so knowing your own story and being able to present that to someone is, is part of, part of your job almost. And so you have probably, it’s even harder to sort of sift through the noise and find someone who is a great fit, um, to, to partner up with you. So for me, you know, a person who’s, uh, been a great influence on me.
Has taught me a lot about how to, how to do this at a higher and really suss out the difference between great marketers and, and others who may be like you’re saying are, are more focused on tactics or more vanity metric focused, or, you know, may not be a fit for this type of organization. And I think we’re talking about whether it’s very sort of strategically and outcome outcome focused, um, is Ryan Benichi, who’s the CMO of Werribee whereby I’m not sure there’s another video via chat service.
It used to be the CMO of G2 and what he’s, what he said was like, you always really need to make sure that you’re focusing on finding people who have owned an outcome, finding people who’ve owned a number, and once you sort of can drill into what that is, and you know, there’s nothing, there’s no secret sauce to it, right?
You say, Hey, have you owned a number of what, what were your, what were your outcomes that you were responsible for? Then you can really start to peel back the layers of the onion. And so you want to understand, well, how did you drive those outcomes? What were the things that you did? What was the, how, how did you come up with a plan to get there?
What were the things that you did to, to, to build out that plan? Very specifically, what did you do? And then you can kind of understand what is their personal funnel? Like, how did you know if they owned a channel, if they owned a type of content development, what was their process? Walk me through your process.
As you built this out. And within that conversation, you can sort of try to understand, oh, did you ever have trouble hitting, hitting this particular part of this particular number as a part of that pipeline? Were you struggling to bring in opportunities? Where are you struggling to book meetings for your sales team and what did you do when that happened?
Right. And as you sort of start to just ask and dig and dig and dig, you can understand really quickly whether someone actually owned it or whether someone actually was the person who was responsible for making a change for making an improvement in that area, or if they were just along for the ride, you know, I’ve been pretty surprised at how easy it is really actually to get through that.
You know, if you can get even to the second or the third layer, quite often, you’ll be able to suss out whether or not someone has actually solved these problems themselves. And to me, that’s really, you know, if you’re, if you’re a hiring manager, that’s what you’re looking for. You’re not looking for someone.
You know, solved every problem or never made a mistake. You know, those people don’t exist. And if they do, you know, call me, I’d love to work with someone like that. Maybe because if it were true, but I can’t imagine that it would be. Um, but you’re looking for someone who has the ability to think and iterate and learn.
And when they run into a problem can come up with solution and that’s, you know, that’s ultimately the type of person that I like working with. Um, and I think this is kind of, it’s been a useful way for me to help, to help me find those people is really to just peel back the layers of the onion, make sure that they were someone who, who owned and was responsible for something.
And then carry that through into the way that you manage them. When you bring them onto the team. You know, if you hire a, you know, someone to run content for you, don’t, don’t micromanage them. You don’t wanna, you know, tell them how to run their content, calendar, how to edit articles or how to, you know, how to message things.
On the blog or whatever it might be. You hired them to do that job, give them the metric. You give them ownership of it, give them skin in the game so that they feel like they, and make sure that something that they do in fact, have agency and control over, the success of, and then let them run with it, let them do the job.
And I think that’s where you really see marketers and, and team members in general flourishes when you give them that, that agency and that, that north star to drive towards. And it is actually something that they have to have, have control over. And I think that’s, that’s probably the secret piece is like, so often people want to throw metrics at marketers that actually, we just don’t have control over making sure that people do feel like they have the agency for their own successes.
Yeah, that makes a lot of
[00:26:34] William: sense. Well, I see that being able to actually own the number that, uh, that you give someone and then also the license to do the things they need to do tactically without being micromanaged. Right? Cause you’re bringing someone on for their expertise and the fact that they can drive outcomes.
So allow them the flexibility to, to use whatever tools they need to, to, to, to meet that metric. What are some of those metrics you just mentioned that get thrown out there, that a marketer doesn’t have control over. Like if I’m trying to think about what are, what are actually good metrics that I can think about, whether I’m about to bring on a marketer, I’ve already got a marketing team and I need to kind of reassess, like what, what are those metrics that are, that are good, uh, good metrics to actually that someone can actually.
[00:27:16] Wes: Yeah, I think, you know, um, it’s, it’s not going to be anything too inspiring, but if you just think about what your final is, and as you know, running a business, you kind of need to understand, at what point do people first come into contact with your business and then what are the actions that sort of move them closer to being, becoming a user or a customer.
Right. And so marketing typically is going to be responsible for the, for the pieces higher up in the funnel that can start with website visitors, you know, web traffic. I think that is something that, uh, in every org that I’ve been at and I’ve been at, it’s obvious that marketing should own that. Right?
How do we draw people in? If, if the website is our store, that’s a, you know, we’re, we’re obviously talking very digitally focused. My background is in SAS, so that’s kind of done again. I was going to be, but you know, if you own a store, how do you get people? How many, how are you getting people into the store?
How many people are you getting into the store? Uh, that’s just the top, right? You know, that is, that is your, your top constraint, how many people, and then of those people, you obviously want to convert as many as you can, but you need an open. And get as many of those people in as you can. So just overall traffic is a great place to start underneath.
That is, I’d say, you know, there’s a number of different ways. People, so many different acronyms get thrown around qualified leads, qualified traffic, um, you know, whatever, however you want to call it, sort of like underneath that broad number of how many people we’ve been able to get in to just take a look, to just get to know us, how many of those people are actually.
Engaged, how many of them would recognize our brand, our logo, our value prop. And there’s a number, different ways to quantify that, but it could just be that they take an action on your site. They download something, they fill out a form, they view a video, whatever that is that shows some level of engagement beyond I visited once.
Right. And so that’s, that’s kind of the second metric. And those I think are just, they’re just mostly important to know as a marketer, right? So many tactics are focused on outcomes that are just get you to the site, get you to take an action. And so those are the two that are going to tell you whether or not you’re doing a good job in those areas or whether or not you’ve chosen the right tactics to move those numbers.
Personally, as a person, who’s had sort of like demand gen and growth marketer titles, my impact, and my focus has gone deeper into the funnel and. It’s taking those people who are in that second category of engaged, uh, qualified, whatever you want to call it and sort of vetting out and getting them started on the business case.
Right? So typically that can be, you know, in the past, for me, that’s been meetings booked. So did we get you through essentially our marketing funnel on the site? We shared enough content. We didn’t have education. We showed an, a value to you upfront that you were willing to speak to someone on the sales team.
You were willing to come to an event you were willing to fill out, share some information that shows that you’re actually an active buyer, that this is the need is validated. And so meetings, certainly one more recently, uh, like qualified opportunities. So someone who’s talked to that person and talk to a sales person and basically, yeah, they, they are interested in buying this type of software, this type of service, this type of product that, that I think is a great way to tell you that, Hey, you’ve gotten people.
You’ve gotten the right people in and see, you’ve been able to do a good enough job, getting them to the point where they are actually they’re considering purchasing. Um, and as a marketer, that is probably 90% of what you can be accountable for and where I would certainly want to hold my marketers account.
Those are the numbers that I would want to hold my marketers to. And then there, you know, I have been sort of lucky enough to work at startups where you kind of have some gray area where you can really experiment and see, Hey, can we have more of an impact deeper into the funnel? Can we help close a deal?
And so there are certain account-based marketing tactics is kind of the bucket that those, those sort of, um, efforts tend to fall into. But once someone does have a conversation with a sales person, once they are in that sales funnel, you know, we don’t have to just drop in, you know, cut ties and marketing is done.
We move on to the next, you know, we can send them some direct, a direct mail piece. We can make sure that they’re included on new content or. One thing that’s worked well for me, maybe you’ve done it on this podcast is trying to build a relationship with this person outside of them buying the product, whatever product it is from you.
Right. And so, often we would invite that people on to do, to do a podcast, to do a webinar or something that actually promotes them and their brand and makes them look good. Um, as a show of value, as they’re in a process in a buying process with us, you know, that’s a good way if you’re, by the way, little, little, little hack, if you’re a marketer and you, and you start to see, uh, your prospects showing up on your competitors, podcasts, or webinars, that’s probably what they’re doing.
They’re trying to find a way to make that person like them by presenting them in their, as part of their content strategy as an expert or as a leader in the space, which, which is a great, I mean, it’s, it is a very much a win-win thing, right? It’s like, oh, you’re sort of validating our content and our product by showing up on our show or, or our piece of content.
And we’re making you look like an expert because we’re giving you a chance to show off right. Show how knowledgeable. Your role, your industry, you are so, as sort of, you can tell, like, I I’ve been a marketer that sort of comes, comes in and sort of thinks of things is like, Hey, this is all open greenfields.
You know, like I said, at a startup, uh, there there’s, you kind of have some more freedom to be able to do that and say, Hey, I can actually have an impact. From the first time someone comes into contact with my brand all the way through until they buy something and perhaps further out, right? It’s like, how do you activate your existing customers?
You come get them to speak at events, you figure out referral programs, you connect them to potential customers. So there’s all kinds of ways that marketing can play a role because marketers, you know, I’m a little biased, but I think do have a, quite a broad skill set, um, and an ability to contribute to, um, a great customer experience from, from the first time they come and, uh, interact.
[00:32:50] William: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to us. And I appreciate you kind of walking through those metrics and then give me some examples. Cause it’s, yeah, it’s really helpful to think about how, how, when you give marketing, uh, the right metrics, as well as the agency, as you mentioned earlier, you can come up with all these different tactics and strategies and things that you wouldn’t be able to predict from the outside, right?
Like, you know, using a, as you said, using a podcast as a, as an account based marketing tactic to build a relationship outside of just the sales process that brings value early on and shows the type of partnership that you want to have. Um, I think that’s, that’s really. Really helpful. I do want to just quickly make sure that we didn’t lose anyone.
If you mentioned a few different terms, demand gen growth marketing and account-based marketing. Do you mind just quickly doing a quick definition of those just so that we don’t lose people? Um, that that
[00:33:43] Wes: might be like, oh God. And then that might be honestly a way to lose people because those terms are, have been defined so differently.
I mean, you know, marketing, I think, especially MarTech, but you know, the marketing landscape has exploded in the last 10 plus years, so many different, well, we’ve seen sort of the strategy of category creation become very prevalent in marketing, especially. Um, and so, you know, terms like account-based marketing, oh, then, you know, that started showing up 10, 15 years ago.
It was like, Hey, this is a way a smarter way to market. Especially for enterprise, um, enterprise prospects. It’s a, you know, a deeper strategy. It’s kind of just a renamed version of. Good marketing. What are the things that comprise in account-based marketing strategy, targeted ads, small catered events, you know, very focused things.
So, yeah, so I’ll, I mean, my definitions, just, just my take account based marketing is basically taking that sort of strategic approach to marketing and customizing it for an account. And so if you kind of, the, it’s almost like a smell test. Uh, if you, if you want to know whether or not you’re doing account-based marketing, ask your, ask your head of marketing, what your, whatever role they might have, the title they may have, uh, you know, what are we doing differently for our number one account than we do just for our, for, you know, our number of 1000 account, if they can’t answer that you probably not doing account based marketing.
So that’s, that’s kinda the key is it’s those customizations, that, that element, um, is, is the distinction for me. Um, demand gen, you know, it’s funny that term has, I think had a bunch of different definitions over the years. Initially, at least the way that I was kind of introduced to that. The function was kind of like be the person in marketing who has a metric.
So we got a lot of, I think a lot of organizations hired marketers based on like a tactic. It was like, I’m going to hire an event marketer, I’m going to hire a writer. I’m going to hire, you know, someone who does video and it’s like, you’re, you’re in. And you need those people by the way. But none of those people are people who are going to hold revenue numbers or pipeline numbers.
And so demand gen was kind of that person who, Hey, this is the person on my team. Who’s going to actually count leads the person that my team who’s actually going to make sure that those leads get followed up on. And so there’s sort of like the mechanical. Of turning the, you know, harvesting the spoils of the efforts that the marketing team is doing and turning that into some pipeline.
And so demand gen is actually more of a collection job, right? It’s like, okay, person who, when you’re putting together a campaign, Hey, we’re going to do a press release. We’re going to put out a video. We’re going to do a little one day mini conference, whatever it is, there was a person who says, okay, we’re going to do all those things.
And then how are we going to make sure that the people who come the people who participate, uh, get into our pipeline, that they talk to a salesperson that that’s kind of that bridge, and sort of the, the catch all at the bottom of the funnel there.
I think it was marketing, I think is kind of where demand gen like evolve. It’s like this idea that like marketing has a role to play in. In some cases in product. And so it was basically like tying together the experience on the website or the experience, getting to know the brand into how someone interacts with the product.
And so that can be things like, you know, how are we building vitality into our product in some way, you know, there are certainly tons of product people who have a background doing that type of work. Uh, but, but others can benefit from a partnership with marketing who can, who can tell them, Hey, you know, we’ve invested in getting these people to come and try out our product in this way, or through this channel, let’s build an element of that into our product.
And so if we’re getting a ton of people who come in to look at our marketing product through LinkedIn, let’s create some kind of integration in our products so that as they have success with our product, we can make sure that. Flywheel that’s, you know, that we’re completing that circle back to LinkedIn and that we can continue to get other people who spend a lot of time in LinkedIn to come and try the product and kind of complete that complete that cycle so that it becomes sort of a self fulfilling thing.
So that’s kind of the element of growth marketing that is, you know, again, these are sort of like the, the roles that are not so much on like attack, like tactically focused, like, Hey, I’m, this is my output. I’m here for my specific talent or expertise in this one area. But it’s that I’m, I’m really orienting myself around this outcome.
And there may be a number of different ways to achieve that most likely you’ll need to iterate and innovate, specific to what your product is to, to be effective in that area. But that’s, that’s kinda my thought of about growth marketing. And quite often, those people are similar to demand gen and that they own revenue numbers.
They own pipeline numbers. Yeah,
[00:38:15] William: thanks. Westford. Define us. I think that was really, really helpful. As you said, category creation is a huge thing, especially in the marketing MarTech space. So I think that, uh, that, yeah, the definitions are slightly different, but there it does, it is helpful. Um, cause I think a lot of times, if you’re not deep into the marketing space, you hear all these terms thrown around and it can get a little bit confusing about like, are we doing account based marketing?
Are we doing demand gen
[00:38:40] Wes: or like, it’s not an accident. I mean, marketers are smart. They come up with like, like probably, you know, any, any professionals, they come up with all kinds of acronyms. Hey, because it is easier to say, but it would be because it makes you sound smart and it makes it sound like, you know, something that someone else doesn’t, when you can just rattle off a bunch of little.
Maybe they’re a little amorphous in their definition. And so if you’re speaking to a non-market or they go, oh, okay. My marketers know what ABM is. And so when I read that article about ABM, I don’t have to worry. They know what they’re doing. So it’s not accident.
[00:39:13] William: Gotcha. No, that’s helpful. Yes. She mentioned that, any marketer that says that they’ve done everything perfect and, you know, had all these experiences probably is, is not, uh, is, is lying.
Right. Um, cause as you said, there’s so many things, you try different things that don’t work. I’m curious if you can share kind of an example from your own career or something where you, you know, you tried something that didn’t work and had to pivot and how you approach that
[00:39:37] Wes: I’ve never made a mistake.
What are you talking about? Well, I think, you know, one example I could give is, I previously worked at a company that was, uh, focused on, on the benefit space, in the HR space and my background had been in SAS. And so a lot of the reason I was brought in was like, Hey, let’s kind of modernize this business.
The business had been around for a long time, but was really looking to enter. A growth stage. And so my thought coming in was like, I’m going to be this marketer. I’m going to build these digital account based marketing programs. We’re going to run, you know, we’re gonna run webinars, at the time that was, you know, I guess still is, you know, especially in COVID times, but it was a really key part to a lot of digital marketers.
Playbooks was like, Hey, let’s use this as a, as a core piece of our content strategy. We’ll do paid ads. We’ll do all the, you know, we’ll do social, we’ll do all this kind of like digital stuff. And part of this will go back kind of to the strategic plan of like where you actually, where, where I would actually recommend.
People get started. If they’re coming in new to an organization is, is don’t come in with your playbook, right? It’s like what you’ve done, what you’re good at that is going to inform and help you be successful where you, where you are. But for me, a lot of what’s going, like what a lot of is what’s going to make you successful.
Coming into a new role is figuring out what’s worked so far. And so that’s a question that I, you know, when I’ve been interviewed for a, for a role, I always try to understand that right away. How are you getting customers? How have you gotten customers historically? What tactics have worked for you? What parts of your pipeline of your funnel are working well?
Uh, what parts of your sales funnel are working well? Where are your strengths? Who are your best people? You know, you have really strong reps, you have a really strong website experience. What is it? Because those are the areas where you want to double down initially, because that’s just the low hanging fruit.
And so when I joined this organization, like I said, I kind of had that it was, you know, earlier on in my career, this was my first VP level role. And so I sort of came in, Hey, I need to have a plan. I need to have my playbook ready to go. I want to come in and really show and prove myself that I’m deserving of this role because at the time I was, you know, pretty early on in my career.
And it certainly was a younger than, younger than most VPs I would say, I would think I was in my late twenties. And, but I did do that sort of like that fact-finding initially I was like, well, how actually have we got. All these, you know, the clients that we do have, the couple of hundred that we had at the time is have we gotten any through paid ads?
Have we gotten any through online programs and we’ve got any through social media? No. Was that kind of the answer? Actually, people were not discovering us that way. And so for me, it was that the exercise was really like, I need to dig in and understand, well, actually, how did we get these people to come?
And what we, what we quickly found was that, and by the way, a lot of me, I’m a quick start. So I came in, I started doing all of these things, right. We started spinning up programs. We did all sorts of digital stuff. We came up with a new things on the website to try to activate these things, things that were in my playbook.
And they were not, they were not going well. Right. We were not building getting, getting a lot of results that way. And what I figured out is we were sort of simultaneously doing this deep dive on what was working was that actually live events was the biggest thing for us was that people who are making benefits decisions for their companies, these are, you know, HR leaders.
You don’t get to be. In SVP of HR buying benefits for your company without ever talking to someone, because it is a really complex trust built. And so in most cases, what we found was that these people had some personal relationships with people who worked at the company. They had either met at some point.
And then this, you know, someone on our team had maintained a relationship for potentially years before they ever even started a business conversation. Or they’d come in, they’d met. One of the events. I think the company at the time was running two events a year, one for customers, one for like prospects and acquisition.
It was really about getting people in front of each other because we had really experienced people. We had very knowledgeable people, very friendly, personable sales team. And so pretty quickly I realized like that’s, that’s where we need to really lean on is get, get people. If we can get people in the same room, we can get prospects in the same room with our team and with our existing customers who are happy, then we’ve got a really good chance of success.
And so in, you know, we basically just pushed all our w we push more and more chips into that event strategy. And so build, you know, we started, we had to build out our list, figure out who all these people that we wanted to get in touch with were. And so that sort of standard marketing, you know, you come in and you need to build that list.
You’ve got to have somewhere in the market to email is obviously we haven’t talked much about email cause it’s kind of the most mundane of the marketing tags, but it is kind of the core, right. That. You’re a direct connection to someone you’re not going through an ad platform. You’re not going through, someone else’s content.
It is your direct way to speak to someone your direct way to engage with them. And so building out that list was a big sort of foundational step. But the way that we activated it was by building out a really strong events program. So they had, like I said, been doing one or two a year. And so where my team decided to invest was let’s let’s scale that let’s take it.
Let’s do smaller events on a more frequent basis. Let’s start with that. Let’s do more large events. So we’ve kind of moved to like a quarterly larger. Cadence, we started doing towards my laboratory in my last year at the company, we did a weekly, small events, you know, sort of like round tables, uh, you know, six to 10 people, similarly sized companies.
We started using, uh, customers who were at slightly larger companies to sort of like the aspirational key person at those. We did small dinners, we did wine tasting events. So those are some of the things that we would kind of pull off the shelf as sort of our account based marketing strategy. Hey, we have a, you know, we want to target enterprise and get larger, uh, some larger prospects in invested.
We’ll take them to, you know, we’ll invest more in a smaller event for them. And so we went from, like I said, when I joined the company, doing a couple events a year to my last 12 months there, I think we ran 56 events in 52 weeks or something like that. Um, and we did them in a number of different geographies.
We, we grew out, we built out our New York office off of our events strategy. Um, and we actually got it down to a point where our conversion rate was, uh, for every 10 people that we could get to show up to one of those events, we would end up closing three of them. And so, yeah, I mean, initially I think if you had told me that that was going to be our strategy, I would have been like, there’s no way we can convert enough to make it worth the amount of money in the amount of work, because events, it takes a lot more work to put together a schedule and event and get people to show up by the way, which is the hardest part for event marketers than it is to spin up a webpage than it is to put together a webinar.
You don’t have to book a venue, you don’t have to have signed contracts. You don’t have to get vendors, food, all that stuff. It’s much easier to do digital stuff, but because we were able to tap into that early learning that, Hey, when we get our people in a room face-to-face with our prospects and have some customers there who can sort of validate the value that they’re getting from us.
We wouldn’t have been able to scale it in the way that we did. And so it really, uh, it, it certainly surprised me and it certainly. Coming back to like the failure was like really opened my eyes to the fact that, Hey, just because something worked for you in the past and you had it in your playbook and it was something that you were good and comfortable with doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the best way for you at your next role or in your next, your next situation.
And, uh, that’s something that I tried to carry forward, right? It’s like, make sure that you come in and have a bit of an open mind, be willing to learn, be willing to be wrong, you know, test some things. But then when you do find something that works as we did in this case with events, be willing to double down, triple down, quadruple down 50 X down, um, and push all your chips in because you know, we, you know, we grew that business, from, I think when I joined, we were 60 something employees.
When I left, we were like 352 and a half, three years later. Um, and number of customers, and then we went from, you know, a couple hundred to, you know, creeping up on a thousand. So, uh, it really, you know, that was a real corporate.
[00:47:09] William: Yeah, no thanks. Thanks for sharing that, Wes. And I hope that one of those 56 events was a sushi event.
I’m just throwing
[00:47:15] Wes: that out there a hundred percent definitely. I
[00:47:19] William: think, I think that’s really, really helpful. Just because you might’ve had success with one tactic or one strategy, just one company, when you think about a different customer base, a different product, a different sales process, you’ve got to reassess.
And if you’re owning that number right versus just one kind of facet of being a one facet or tactic, then you can really actually adapt and change your strategy. So I think that’s
[00:47:42] Wes: really helpful. I would add. And just to kind of close the loop on that is like the reason it worked wasn’t because we came up with cool events.
You know, anyone can have a dinner, anyone can rent out an escape room or take people to a concert or a baseball game. It was because very specifically we understood kind of coming full circle where we talk about it. We understood the motivation of our, of our, of our customers, of our, of our clients and our prospective clients was not, I need to find the best benefits partner.
It was that with benefits, it’s very complex, it’s very personal. And so when people have problems with their benefits, that’s different than having a problem with your email tool, if you, or your partner or your kid, and can’t get the care that they need, or the coverage that they need when they are at a, you know, at a stressful time, because if you’re having health, health problems, that is a very stressful time.
Then the, the sort of the anger, the problem is much bigger for you as an HR leader than it might be. If, Hey, we’ve got a product, uh, we have a product problem. This page won’t load, or, you know, this crashing, whatever. That’s very, that’s a very different kind of problem. It’s. So, because it’s so sensitive, we found that our are those HR leaders.
And in some cases it’s smaller companies often that was actually the CEO. They were very hypersensitive to. Hey is the person who’s selling me this partnership, this benefits partnership. Is it someone that I can trust? It’s someone that I feel like if at two, am I get a call from someone who’s on my team, who’s just been diagnosed with cancer and wants to know if they’re covered.
Can I call that person who sold me? My benefits sold my company benefits to me and, and, and feel confident that they’re gonna make sure that we’re, we’re okay as a business, as a small business, in some cases, and that our employee is going to be taken care of. Can I do that? Or is this a company where I don’t even know who I would call?
Right. And so that piece for us was kind of the key sort of completed. It closed the loop for us in, you know, why this strategy was working because we did, you know, it was like, we, we legitimately tried to build into our process, become someone’s friend. Like, I, I mean, that’s, that’s kind of a weird thing to say.
Like, I never see that on like an account executive or a sales consultants, job description. Systematically. That was one of the things we were really good at. I mean, if you looked at our Salesforce implementation, like there were lines for like, what is this? Person’s spouse, his wife’s name? When is their birthday?
What are their kids like to do? You know, what are their favorite hobbies? Like the things like that, that those don’t come out of the box in the CRM, but that was built into the formula. And essentially the way that businesses run, I was like, I hope I’m not giving away too many secrets, but it’s like, if you don’t know these things about your prospect or your, or your client, then you’re actually not doing a good job of building a relationship with them that will sustain the business relationship.
Inevitably, there will be a problem. You know, it’s just the kind of business where things go wrong integrations. There are so many parties involved from the insurance company to the benefits providers, to the, you know, to the broker, to the actual, you know, practitioner. There’s so many things that can go wrong, so many places and they just will.
And so. If that person doesn’t have that type of connection to you, you’re not going to be able to hold on to the business and that’s really how, you know, that’s how you get revenues hanging on to the business. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s a, it’s a continuous relationship.
And then we also saw the success stories we saw where people would literally, like we would have customers who would invite members of our team to their weddings and like it, there was that closeness. And I even felt that on the marketing side, you know, I remember how. Yeah, we went to New York, I mentioned and opened a, an office there.
And so I was kind of a big part of that going out and spinning up new business with, through the event strategy. Um, and I got to meet a lot of the local HR community there, especially in the HR tech group and, became friends with some of those people. And I remember they had problems with us early on.
We were getting started there. We didn’t have a big presence on the ground. We had, you know, a small WIWORK compared to like a large office out here in California. And, uh, I remember sitting down for sushi with, with one woman, who I’ve become friends with and she’d spoken at an event and, and I, and I sat down and she was like, Hey, you know, I don’t want this to be a weird conference.
I don’t want this to be a weird dinner, but right, right off the bat, like, I’m very unhappy with how things are going. Here’s what I problem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’re not going to fire you guys because I trust you. And, and there was another person who, she had built a relationship with as well.
And he was like, and I trust him to help me get this. But this is a problem and we’re not gonna, you know, we can’t continue to have this problem. And so that’s, for me, like it crystallized, this strategy is like every piece is very important and this relationship piece is actually the core of it.
Understanding the motivations, understanding in this case, she was concerned about her job and about her, not, not even so much her job, but about the responsibility that she had to her employees, right. To the people who worked at her company. And that it’s really not based on what features we had in our app or, you know, what, how our website delivered information to them.
It was about that trust that she knew that someone on our side, we would get it taken care of and make sure that she was, looked out for which, is something certainly I’ve tried to, you know, take forward with me. Yeah, no, I
[00:52:51] William: think thanks to Westford. Yeah. Bringing that full circle. And I think that really kind of highlights why.
Strategy was, was so successful. And it also kind of reminds me, why you might’ve been one of the perfect people for this specific marketing role, just based on the fact that you, you know, shared the interest that you took earlier on with your employee around their finances is something that’s very personal that, that you didn’t have to do.
That’s not in your job title, but it was a responsibility. And that kind of goes back to that, that empathy that you’ve, you’ve highlighted. I don’t know if we’ve explicitly laid it out, but that empathy and understanding kind of the pain points of, of the people that you’re working with, whether it’s an employee or a customer, I guess west one, we, we started, we started there and I think we’ve, I think we’ve kind of come full circle in terms of the marketing perspective, but you let off.
The, the personal finance, and getting interested in, and, what you did is something that based on our experience with ostrich and kind of some of the conversations that there tends to be one or two people in an organization that are really good at personal finance and that’s who people lean on and kind of take on this other role, but I’m curious how.
Have you always been interested in personal finance? Like what, what, like sparked your interest there and then ultimately, you know, obviously you felt comfortable enough to start to start coaching, start coaching your, a direct report, but just curious, like what, what sparked that interest
[00:54:12] Wes: in you? I think I’ve always kind of had the hustler mentality, not to steal the term too much, but.
You know, when I was a little kid, I was the, probably the kid who I feel like every elementary school probably had this kid who was like selling baseball cards. And like, for me, it was like, and this is going to age me for stuff. Sorry, any, uh zoomers um, porgs, I don’t know if you remember, pugs were a big thing.
And so, you know, buying, selling, and trading, pawns, baseball cards, things like that, you know, later on in high school, you know, we had those big books of CDs, right? It was like this, you know, binder full of CDs. And that was your thing. If you, you know, once we had a car, once we had cars, it was, oh my God, like, I’m going to drive around.
I’ve got all these CDs, Hey, let’s put it in. We’re going to the beach, let’s listen to this. We’re going for a drive. Let’s listen to this. That was the cool thing, everyone, that music, but, you know, CDs costs 10, 15 bucks. And as a high school student, you couldn’t afford a lot of those. So when the CD burners came out, I was, I was on.
This is my chance, you know, went to staples. I would buy those big things of like a hundred, you know, it’s a dollar per seat for blank CD, right? If I get sued well, that’s your limitations. That’s that’s long, long, long gone. But, basically what I did was this was one of my first businesses look at CDs. I put it all into an Excel spreadsheet, you know, I’m a 14, 15 year old and I would put together like four or five pages here, all the CDs I have, and then we’d go to class.
I would pass it around. People would put their name next to the one they wanted. And I would go home and spend my spend my whole night burning CDs and selling them to my friends at school. So I don’t know how I ended up on that road, revealing my, music, piracy history. But, essentially like that was kind of my, like, you know, I’ve always been kind of this person who like wanted to find a way to make money and do something creative like that.
So to, to pass that forward into personal finance and investing, interesting actually in college. So I mentioned my sort of like background in baseball. I remember there was a, so we’re going to go a little baseball nerd for 20 seconds, but, uh, there was a pitcher named Francisco Liriano who came up with the Minnesota twins and he right away was just like an amazing pitcher.
He was one of the best pitchers in getting strikeouts and just like, you know, dominant guy. And I was like, Hmm, I recognize this guy. Like, I think I have a baseball card of his from when I was a little kid. Maybe we, when we use the minor leagues. And so when I was home from college and on the weekend doing laundry, kind of dug through the garage, trying to find it.
And I found it and it was like, oh great. I have this car. And I go on eBay and I’m like, oh my God, this card is worth $200. Like this was just sitting trash, basically in my parents’ house. And it was like an novice treasure. Right. And so I kind of deep dove as like, okay, do I just sell this on eBay? Should I find some websites where people are buying and selling and trading cards?
And so I ended up finding this site where. There was actually these people who were kind of the, the investors of the baseball card world, who were basically, they were sort of like amateur Scouts or they would sort of just like, they were just like consumers of baseball, scouting information. And so they would go and they would look at, Hey, who are the top high school international assignees, I’m going to go and buy up their rookie cards, their autograph rookie cards in bulk.
And so there was, you would find these threads where, you know, people three or a three-year-old thread where someone had bought up 50 David Wright, rookie cards, he was a Mets superstar for a number of years and they bought them up for five bucks each, well, three, four or five years later, this guy is the face of the all star game, right?
He’s, you know, superstar in New York, the biggest market, and those cards are selling for $400 a pop. And so now I’m looking, I mean, these people spent a few hundred dollars on these rookie cards and they made thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. I know a lot about baseball.
I’ve, you know, I’ve gotten to know players that I have gone into the pros Scouts, you know, all these connections. I also can watch baseball. Right. And so I was like, I can do this. And so I started, you know, while I’m in college and that was, I never actually had a job in college other than three months at Abercrombie and Fitch con that’s probably not worth getting into.
But, that kind of became my revenue stream was like, I would buy up these bulk cards of guys who like Buster Posey or Tim Lincecum. They were like known as amateurs. But people weren’t flooding in and picking up those cards at a high cost. You could buy them for 5, 10, 15, $20. Probably the craziest one is Mike trout.
People know, his autograph cards were available for 15, $20 when they came out. Now they sell for three to 5,000, each. Wow. There were guys like that, that I had 50, 30, 50 to a hundred cards of, because I just basically, when those cards would come out, I would just go on eBay. I buy every single one for three months and then I’d pay that forward.
And so it was kind of like my first foray into like, investing, like kind of like buying stocks, but of baseball players. And so I did that for a number of years, kind of got into that world. I won’t go too, too far into that ended up paying off my final student loans. The day I graduated with baseball card money combined with, you know, some of the savings and things like that, but that was kind of like, I think a training ground for me mentally to sort of think about, you know, how do you buy something with the idea that you’re going to someday sell it, or the idea that it’s hopefully gonna appreciate and value.
And so that was kinda my training ground. I ended up continuing to do that, fairly successfully for a few years as I, you know, got into my working career. And then at some point I started getting. Hooked into, some sort of like financial content, I guess. So for me, the entrance was really like, the Motley fool.
And so I started listening to a bunch of their podcasts and podcasts for me have just been such a great way to learn and kind of, Hey, I’m, you know, vacuuming or doing laundry. Like this is a good chance for me to do something simultaneously. So I kinda got into interested in, in, in stocks and investing specifically through the Motley fool, and I know.
You know, started setting aside a and building kind of, I think to the connection to ostrich is like the building, my regular packets in my regular practices around how am I going to save and build up, my own personal finance habits and, and hopefully be successful in this area. It was like, what were these habits started setting aside money every month, putting it into my retirement accounts, reading more and learning more about how people were doing this when they were doing it.
How much, what percentage is, how much, and then it’s sort of like, I’ve always been kind of like a, like a self-help nut, like reading books, like the Tim Ferriss stuff. And, like how can I come up with financial discipline to really be, you know, in the top X percent of how, how much I’m saving and investing.
And then over the years, it, it just kind of snowballed. And all of a sudden, you know, literally I have a spreadsheet that goes back to the first couple of years that I was working at. Just basics. How much did I spend that month? How much did I make that much? How much in that month, how much did I save?
And just knowing every month and seeing those numbers go up a little bit every month, just kind of trained me to keep doing it and keep doing it, keep doing it. And as I was able to get better jobs and save more money, you know, those numbers started looking better and better. And then as some of my long-term investments started to perform better, it really got, got exciting.
When I started to see, you know, when I had my first, stock double and I saw, oh my God, like I put in, you know, a few thousand dollars and now it’s worth double that amazing. Like I’m, I can only imagine if I had put more in right now, I’ve read the snowball, you know, the Warren buffet book and, he had a couple of those, I think the coffee one, the coffee anecdote is one that has always stuck with me is like, all of you buy, you know, $2, a cup of coffee today.
That’s worth 30 bucks in, 40 years or whatever it is. What is it? It’s eight X, every 40 years. Your money or 16 X, every 32 years. I can’t remember exactly what it is. You know, at, at, at whatever eight to 10% a year, you do that math very quickly and you can sort of discipline your spending. And I’m one of these obsessive people that I would walk around and be like, oh, that’s cause you know, that that shirt costs 50 bucks.
Oh my God would be hundreds of dollars if I just saved it and invested it and had, you know, even average performance in the stock market with that, with that money. Right. So I was able to keep my spending down while increasing my earning potential and savings. And that habit was just, it just was such a reinforcing thing for me as I saw more and more success.
And then. You know, a few years ago, I think, I had, a couple of a couple of investments that I, very early on through a little bit of money at that, had done extremely well. So Shopify Tesla, those are very popular names now, obviously, you know, if you pull up the charts on those, so you can see kind of the amazing run that they’ve been on over the last seven or seven or eight years, or, or even just last two or three years.
But those were some where I had gotten in very early, gotten a little bit of money and, and, started to see kind of like really accelerated returns where it was like, you know, what was it, what was once a double was now a 10 X, 10 backer now, 15 bagger, 20 bagger, which, you know, as you sort of have this other like consumption of financial media, like you sort of learn that like, Hey yeah, if you have one 10 bagger, that means you can have nine go completely to zero.
And be at square one. And, you know, it’s, it’s obviously been a great time to be invested in the stock market over the last decade or so, but that was kind of, you know, that was sort of like on the personal finance side, a goal that I set for myself, or it was like hoping for myself, I guess you don’t have as much control when you’re just investing in public companies, but it was like, you know, someday I’d love to be able to, to actually make more from investing than I do at my day job.
And w you know, with some good luck and good fortune and good and good practices, have had that happen for me. And so that, it’s just, it’s, it’s been that sort of like feedback loop for myself where, Hey, if I keep honing my discipline and practice around how I manage my money, it can really pay off in these ways.
And that sort of keeps my motivation high for doing this and has, you know, Inspired me to try to help others achieve the same thing or, you know, to, to, to their own discretion, invest the time and the money to hopefully build that foundation for themselves and achieve those types of outcomes because ultimately money is not, you know, people a whole money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does give you, it does give you options.
And you know, when you have money versus when you don’t have money, you just have different stresses, you have different problems. And you know, if you’re someone who’s interested in their career and wants to be able to take maybe a career risk and work at a startup or do do something that maybe isn’t guaranteed to take care of you, if you’ve had good financial practices, if you’ve had good luck, I mean, luck is a big part of.
Yeah, and it goes unsaid, but then you have the op you, you have more opportunity to take those types of risks, that can pay off for you in your career and your happiness and financially, you know, whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. I think, going back to the, the poker conversation is like when you have the opportunity to have a large outcome, oftentimes that comes from being able to being, you know, having a big stack and the tournament means you can take more, more risks and thus have higher upside.
And so those are all sorts of things, you know, sort of like mental models that have helped me, in my journey and have also kept me interested in it. Right. And that I, you know, I’ve tried to share, when I can.
[01:05:10] William: Yeah, no, thanks. Yeah. Thanks west for, for sharing. I think that’s, that’s gotta be a great feeling when, when you’re bringing in more from your investments and your money’s making more money than when you’re actually putting in a, I have to work at it at a nine to five.
[01:05:23] Wes: It changes your relationship with work. I will tell you that, you know, I mean, it’s for sure there it’s a great problem to have, but if you’re someone who, I mean, let’s not beat around the Bush, there are people who a lot of us, right. We work. One of their main reasons is to make money, right? It’s like we’re trying to earn a living, take care of ourselves, take care of our family, whatever, whatever our financial goals are for.
If, if you no longer have that as your primary driver at work, it does change your relationship. It makes you question like, am I doing this just for the money or is it because I love the type of work that I’m doing? I love the people I’m working with. You know, I found, you know, my, my experience personally was that, like I found that there were compromises that I made, at times in my career because I was prioritizing my earning potential as opposed to my day-to-day happiness or, the environment that I was working in.
And so, you know, going back to that idea of like opportunity, you know, financial freedom means you can be more selective in where you invest your time and, and, and your day-to-day. And, we do spend so much time at work. I think that that is for sure a benefit.
[01:06:23] William: Yeah, no, absolutely less. And I think that, yeah, when you, when you get to that, that level of, of, financial freedom and you can make decisions, as you said, not based on, I, you know, if I lose this job, what are the implications?
I’m not going to be able to pay rent, feed my family or whatever, whatever those things are. It does change how you, you know, how you think about work and what you can do, what you can prioritize. And I think that’s something that if you’re just kind of starting out and personal finance, it’s not about, you know, that is the feeling I think that people should aim for versus the, having a bunch of nice things or being able to buy a first class ticket to go overseas or whatever that, that kind of like vanity metric is.
It’s that kind of emotional metric that I think is even more
[01:07:08] Wes: powerful. How come we’re in it. So there you go. Yeah.
[01:07:13] William: Wes, you, you kind of hit on, two things that I think were I typically ask, which is relationship with money, which you’ve kind of already hit. And you also kind of described a couple of your good investments, Tesla and Shopify.
I’m curious, what you would say is the dumbest money mistake that you’ve made.
[01:07:27] Wes: Interestingly, it is, Shopify and Tesla as well. So, and, and probably like a lot of people I’m subject to the people around me, the influences around me. When I had some early success with those investments, actually, I had people telling me, Hey, you know, sell off some because you’ve, you’ve made your money, take some off the table.
Right. You’ve, you know, everything else can be gravy. And so I, I had forgotten this, but actually, I’ve been moving some money around and changing banks and whatever. And so, you know, you see your, you can see your history, your trade history. And so I realized recently that I sold about half my half my Shopify position very early on when it had doubled.
And so now looking back when, for me, it’s, you know, a 30 bagger it, uh, definitely. Yeah. Wow. That’s a really, that’s a, that was a big miss. That was a big mistake that I made for a relatively small amount of money. And so, yeah. And same thing with Tesla there, selling too soon in a lot of cases.
And so that’s something that I’ve actually tried to like really deep beat myself on the head with is that, Hey. As, if I truly believe that I am a long-term investor, someone who’s, who’s buying, you know, buying stock in a company, because I believe in the strength of the company and the strength of the business and the opportunity that the business has ahead of it taking, taking wins, taking gains.
It doesn’t actually make sense, because if you, if you have a stock or an investment that doubles in value in a period of time, and you take the money out of that, you’re basically you, you have to do something with that money, right? So unless you have something to spend it on here, you’re buying a house, whatever fine, you know, that was your goal.
You achieve your goal. That’s a smart thing to do. But if your goal is actually to maximize your return on that money, you’re probably going to reinvest it. And so, or hopefully, and so taking money out of a company that doubles or triples, or does really well and saying, I can find an investment better than that company that has already proven to me that they have figured out how to double and triple their, their value.
Well, that’s pretty, there’s some hubris there, right? It’s like, are you really just a wizard that can identify companies that do better than doubling and tripling Willy nilly? You can identify those on your own any time that’s pretty bold. And, it’s humbling for me to think of it in that way.
Right. It’s like, Hey, every time I sell something that’s doing well, I’ve got to find something that’s going to do better than that. And so that stopped me from, I think, making too many of those mistakes, in more recent years. But yeah, certainly when I look back, I think of those as, some of my bigger missteps.
And I’d say one that actually, yeah. Now that I think about it, ahead of that, that, I actually thought at the time it was, it was one of the more responsible, maybe the most responsible financial decision that I could make now sounds so stupid. Early early on in my sort of like finance, saving career.
Like my savings goal was buy a new car and, and, you know, you live in California, you got to have a car. And so I was like, let me save up enough to buy a new car for my first job. And so, you know, it was like a year of savings and I went and bought this, you know, to me really nice BMW. And I was so stoked and I was like, I’m going to pay all cash because I just, I don’t want to have any debt.
How smart am I paying all cash flow, blah, blah, blah. And so I did, and I was really proud of myself for awhile. And then at some point I realized, well, wait a second. I could have taken a loan out at a very low interest rate and taken the money that I put that I just wrote in a check to this dealership. I could have put that into Amazon stock and I could have put that into Tesla stock.
And it wasn’t like those were, you know, companies, no one had ever heard of those were companies that a lot of people were investing in that I, I was investing in, but just not, you know, this large amount of my savings. And at some point I realized that I was driving around. A half million dollar BMW, because he has the money that I would have that I put into that car would have grown 20 X, in the first few years that I owned it.
And so that one actually is a, is a story I’ve shared with others that I’ve kind of helped on the finance journey, like really think about where you’re applying your capital, but also what are the mechanisms out there that can help you get the most out of it? Responsible use of debt or credit. You know, the idea that you can take out today, you can, you know, you can use lines of credit or you can use, you can get home loans at, you know, two, 3% and you can invest that money.
Hopefully, you know, historically at eight to 10%, a year in an index fund, potentially better. If you, you know, you have a different, a strategy and you have more of an interest. And so there is some elements of arbitrage available to you. If you take the time to learn it and you have the interest and passion in it, there are just little things like that.
That for me, it’s like, I, I still have that car. I look at it every time. Part of me thinks about, I wish I had just taken that money and done something smarter with it, but that I, you know, I think that to the sort of like, just have a lot of this conversation is part of that growth mindset is like taking those learnings, those experiences, those failures, and turning them into something that helps you down the road, because otherwise they are a waste, right?
They are actually just, it is actually just a waste or a failure. But if you can take it and you can learn and you can build better habits and better disciplines around it, then you can, I think the more. Yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:12:28] William: Yeah. Thanks west for, for sharing that, it’s helpful to, to get some of those examples and yeah, the, the new car, I think is one that a lot of, a lot of people have, have made in their, in their time.
I don’t think you’re alone in that, but when you, yeah, when you frame it as to what could this money be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years, then it really helps you make larger purchasing decisions, even smaller purchasing, purchasing decisions, a little more seriously versus, ah, it’s only, you know, X amount of dollars or I’ve got the money or all that kind of stuff.
So yeah, less, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you sitting down. I want to leave you with the last word. So if there’s anything that you want to share with the audience, please feel free. And then also, how can folks connect with you outside of this?
[01:13:13] Wes: Yeah, I think, you know, as far as like a final message, I won’t make it about marketing or about finance.
I think actually just, you know, we’re in 2021, it’s been a crazy couple of years. I mean, times are always crazy. People always have things going on in their life, but I think especially now we’re all, we’ve, we’ve all sort of gone through and are going through a really difficult time in some ways, whether you’re personally affected or someone around you is.
And so I would just say like, try to be kind to yourself, try to be kind to others. It’s, uh, you know, whatever your views are on things. It’s, it’s, it’s very easy to, to see the, and get frustrated with people who don’t share those things. And certainly I’m guilty of that as well. It’s, it’s been really hard to see that, you know, people are suffering, uh, as a result of COVID and all this sort of things around it, but be kind yourself.
And, and I think part of it is like taking a perspective of understanding that, you know, most people are not out to get you. They’re not out to get, uh, other people it’s, it’s really, you know, we all are a product of our own experiences and there’s a reason that people make things, make decisions or have views that are different than, you know, And if you just take a little bit of time and have a little bit of patience for that, I think, uh, we can all be better to each other.
So a little bit of aspirational words there, hopefully, you know, I know for me, that’s been, that’s been helpful because it is, it’s difficult when you see so many frustrating things happening out there. And in a lot of cases, it feels like the answer is so simple or so obvious, but you know, there, there are all kinds of reasons.
Psychologically as humans, we are a flawed creatures. We, we, our brains, the idea of understanding some of the problems that we face, uh, in the world today. It’s very difficult to think that people who, you know, we all have jobs, responsibilities, things that that are we’re dealing with day to day, the idea that we would all also be able to manage global issues.
Uh, it’s, it’s, it’s a bit naive, I think, on our part individually. Try to remind yourself to be a positive force in the world, you know, help people around you care for the people around you and then, and then to be in contact contacted me. You can find me on social platforms.
I’m Wes ye Twitter, LinkedIn, probably the two best places. I do have an Instagram. It’s mostly just for my dogs. I have four dogs. They’re actually seven dogs in my house. Like we were talking about earlier. A couple of them have joined me for this conversation. So if you, if you like dogs that you can find me on there as well, but thanks again for the time.
Been really fun, having this from. Yeah, absolutely. It’s been a
[01:15:33] William: lot of fun. Thanks, Wes. On your way out, please share the podcast with others is the only way that the community grows and others hear these incredible stories from entrepreneurs and top performers. And of course, pound that subscribe button.
So you’re notified when new episodes drop every Friday, I’m William Glass, CEO and co-founder of ostrich. And of course you are a host of the Silicon alley podcast have a very profitable day.
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