Dashboard: What If You Could Wave a Magic Wand?

[Music] welcome to another 21 hats dashboard I'm here with Shan busy who is CEO and founder of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy welcome back Sean hey good morning Lauren nice to talk to you great to have you here we haven't spoken in a little while what's going on what are you seeing out there yeah I mean there's a few things in the news these days I mean I I you know we don't need to get into into all the all the riger moral and detail but I think you know a lot of businesses are really being uh uh disrupted and upended small businesses especially it's it's a pretty challenging time is that based on what you're reading or are you actually seeing that uh in your in Oregon with your clients yeah definitely you know I'm hearing clients that you know had you know let's say they had business in the bag and then suddenly the contract evaporated uh or I'm hearing what are we going to do when our materials costs go up by x% you know so that that changes buying Behavior considerably so getting new customers can be really difficult in that environment um so so yeah so all kind of any and all the above you know uncertainty um is a difficult environment to do business in how bad would you say it is are are you seeing people panicking or uh is it just people are wary at this point I don't know if Panic is the right word I would say um I'm hearing a lot of anxi I would say anxious I think there's there's growing anxiety uh within the business Community you know because you just I know a lot of the news is federally focused and so forth say you know we're shutting down usaid or we're going to shut down the Department of Education a lot of folks forget that there are tendrils of the US government all throughout even our small communities you know whether that's in the form of Grants or small businesses that deliver on services to uh the various entities of the US government and so there's just such a ripple effect um with what's going on right now sure combining that with the tariffs and with the labor impact of the immigration issues um that's a lot going on are you having conversations with uh with clients what do you do you have any guidance for them yeah I mean I think you know I'm lucky that I've been in business for a little while and and I've been through a lot of different types of events you know you think about like the early days of the pandemic which isn't it crazy we're coming up on what five years five years is crazy to think about that but it feels like yesterday that year seemed like five years but it's it's hard to believe it was 5 years ago yeah yeah so I I think that event was very unique and that it was Global and it was sharp it was like falling off a cliff and and then I think about say like 2008 2009 which was kind of a rolling event and what I mean by that is you know yeah what was it Leman Brothers collapsed and you know housing values plummeted and Banks were failing etc etc but it it sort of happened in a you know at least economically in a kind of a rolling manner meaning in Portland where I was I got all the way to the end of 2009 and I was like telling myself huh that's interesting it doesn't seem to be affecting me like like I you know I was you know a lot younger then but I I really had sort of convinced myself that somehow the client mix and what we were doing had been you know spared and that was totally not true it it just was delayed and um you know kind of our you come to Jesus moment was in December and January of late 2009 and early 2010 um so uh it feels more like that that there's this kind of rolling situation that at the you know in the beginning might only affect say federal employees you know or probably really really having a tough time but then it'll affect the contractors who work with those federal agencies and then that's going to affect businesses who serve those companies and and so I think that's why there's anxiety because people are smart they can do the math on this stuff and see the connections you Sean I think you've told us in the past uh a little bit about uh your history with Kinesis and how difficult it was during the Great Recession and and I think what you described was that uh a lot of your clients you were working with a marketer within the client and the marketer got fired right um which obviously presents some problems for you H how did you find your way out of that yeah I mean I I've told the story so many times I apologize to listeners that have heard it before but you know that I was a I was literally like a we we serve the marketer within a company and we do largely brand and Design Services you know our customer was the marketer it wasn't the business owner and you know that's an okay business model um it's Peak and Valley it's hard to predict uh we got a lot of our business off of SEO a ton of business off SEO and it was an okay business model um but you know when the when the recession really started to take hold all those marketers they lost their jobs um and if they didn't lose their job they lost their budgets so you know here we were a company that relied on marketers to give us work and they were all out of a job or out of money or both um so it was it was tough so what did you do you know I was so lucky I was at the time I had been signed up for the an accelerator program for the entrepreneurs organization and you know I was around a lot of really smart people a lot of people who are suffering and struggling like me and uh I read a really important book called Blue strategy which is you know kind of long in the tooth now but it's still a really important idea and that that idea is like how do you turn non-customers into buyers and I read that book and I started thinking about my customer who was the marketer and then I started thinking about their customer which was the business owner and and how there was such a disconnect between what the marketer was doing and what the business owner probably wanted which I wasn't quite sure what they wanted so I started like talking to them I just started talking to business owners like hey do you have a marketer why did you hire them do they do are you happy what they do or you fired your marketer why did you fire them you know I just started asking people these questions about like marketing within a small business ecosystem and it was the unlocking of the like the big insight for me which was marketing was really broken for small businesses it just didn't work you know that the people were really frustrated by it and you yeah me it didn't work meaning the um the idea of having an internal marketing person who worked with an outside shop didn't work yeah I mean that that version was problematic in lots of ways but but more on a high level you could ask an internal marketer hey what's the vision that the owner has for his or her company and they generally wouldn't be able to answer that question or you would ask the owner hey what's the marketer doing to put Revenue into your business and they they couldn't answer that question either and and it was really interesting and that's why they got fired like like the owner really couldn't connect the dots between what they wanted to achieve and the marketer and the marketer couldn't demonstrate how they were helping you know keep the business uh moving in the right direction so that broken system you know I I started to ask my question like well why is that so broken and that was those were some of my big epip compes that by talking to owners and talking to marketers and sort of understanding the the this ecosystem and I started looking at it and go oh okay uh generally a marketer and a small business is hired at at a very Junior position they're very young they're usually right out of college many of them don't have any formal marketing experience at all they they were hired as an administrative assistant and liked to do marketing uh there was just all kinds of stories that I would hear about of like wow that's really interesting that that system doesn't really work very well and and then similarly because i' had been doing you know marketing for a very long time or or been working in that ecosystem I had just seen it get so complex you know I'd seen it go from like Print TV radio like that was it to like all these different digital channels and social and so forth so exponentially complicated industry uh inex experienced Junior employees owners who didn't really understand the Dynamics very well it's kind of like uh I don't blame anybody it just it's just a system that just wasn't built for Success so what did you do with all of these epiphanies so I built a new product you know so I essentially said hey let's let's leave behind this idea of we do whatever you need you need to be done Mr Mr Mrs marketer and let's serve the let's serve the uh owner of the business so in the Blue Ocean strategy idea I turned the owner into the customer not the marketer and and what we sold was um a really kind of a marketing department because part of the problem with the solo marketer is you're asking them to do too many things you're either asking them to be a senior level experienced person in which case they're going to want to hire a bunch of people to do the work they don't want to do or you're hiring a junior person who will they'll do a lot of activities gladly but probably not very well because they don't have mentorship they don't have experience they don't know what to do they might have gone to college but they were probably trained on consumer marketing instead of B2B so there's all these reasons why a solo person is a really tough solution to marketing you you really need a team of people and so I provided that team of people so I would have certain people who were very senior level and strategically oriented and then I have people who were execution minded and I have people who are creatively minded and I would offer that for about the price of hiring one person and it was a just a super powerful value proposition and because the market was ready for it I I just sold clients like crazy it was really it was a great time so is is there a lesson in how you figured out a new business model for businesses that today are are struggling yeah I I think the advice I would give today to owners especially if they're modeled is really struggling if they're having a hard time with the model like you're finding that buyers are reluctant to buy or they're you know they're worried about the price Etc is is to really like do like I did and start to ask questions about the buyers like and you can even interview them you know like interview them to understand well what are their real frustrations like I didn't understand under the earlier business of Kinesis I didn't understand that the business owner was frustrated with marketing kind of lack of accountability and lack of connection to their Vision I didn't know that right because I was I thought my customer was the marketer and the marketer never would have told me those things so I dove deeper in and I started asking owners what they were struggling with and so I think going to either your customer or who you want to become your customer which is what I did I went to the person that I wanted to become my customer and I started asking them open-ended questions uh questions about you know if they could wave the magic wand what would they make things like you know I so I started to learn from them what their pains were and what their struggles were do you see businesses doing that it's really hard to do like gravity is a thing in business and what I mean by gravity like the operating of the business you know you're to op inertia yeah it's inertia that's a better word you know so so we are told figure something out and op imize it and that mindset is great you know but it is a little bit of a Industrial Revolution mindset whereas I believe that we are changing so fast now because of technology and communication and globalization uh companies need to put a lot more energy into what I would say sort of like the Innovation and creativity realm so that they're kind of constantly thinking about building new things and running small experiments to see what's possible that's you know for me me that was really it was lifechanging you know when I did that in 2010 and and I think more businesses could benefit from that and I think we're in that moment I think we're in another moment like that where change is is it is dramatic and it is rolling through our economy and so I would say don't don't wait you know don't wait until you know like all your customers are gone like I did you know like I was I was really in a bad spot but you know do it do it when you you know still have existing customers and build something new it sounds like it it's it's not just about being creative and Innovative not that there's anything wrong with that of course but yeah it's deeper than that in a sense I think if I'm hearing you right because it's understanding what your customers are really thinking the way you had to figure out um if you're not keeping in touch with them if you don't really know what their pain points are and and they move in another Direction you're not going to go with them yeah that's that's exactly right you know I I think as your business grows you get further and further from your customer and I think really good businesses don't let that happen I think really good businesses stay very very tight with their customer so they know when the tides are shifting you know I think about my friend Ken he owns a company called grovemade I think we interviewed him many many moons ago maybe maybe during the pandemic Lauren I don't know if you remember that but you know Ken used to make uh bamboo cell phone cases you know like that was his thing he got known for it he was good at it they made money at it and then what do you know like China starts to make these things too and then pretty soon like he's just being copied right and left and he's a really good example of a guy who's sort of always thinking about what's the next thing before before the gas runs out of the tank of the old thing and so he start to go after like desk accessories you know like the way he put it was we rode the wave of the rise of the standing desk you know like the the innovation of the standing desk which he had nothing to do with created a new set of problems mainly like for example the monitor was too low on the table so you needed like a shelf to elevate it like he created a category called the monitor shelf like he did that like he built that and now today you know he's been a million times over there's there's B websites I'll go to that look just like grov so he's now envisioning grovemade 3.0 which I can't really tell you what that's about but it's pretty cool very exciting but basically he realized that the end was coming for the for the phone case but there was something new that his customers were thinking about which is like these standing desks and and the problems associated with them there's actually problems with standing desk they don't have good storage they don't Elevate the monitor they they look commoditized there's just all these problems and so he solved those problems through through product Innovation he a really really cool guy really cool story interesting I do remember Ken he also rode the wave of the of remote work which obviously is oh yeah it's not what it once was although I don't think it's ever going away completely obviously right so any advice for someone who wants to reach out to their customers do you do it regularly questions to ask anything yeah I mean I have a couple couple couple guidelines I mean the the team has a whole methodology they use and you know I'm a little distant from it at this point but um I would say a couple couple key ideas one is the biggest problem with with interviews is bias um you know you have the bias of the interviewer and then the bias of the interviewee so I like to have somebody conducting the interview that kind of doesn't have skin in the game you know that's that's outside of the day-to-day interaction with the client uh that maybe isn't even attached to the revenue from the client so you know you could hire somebody from the outside to do this kind of work uh I think you get really great results when you do that sort of thing um and it doesn't have to be us you know I don't want to seem self-serving I mean you can hire all kinds of different people to do that kind of stuff um I would say that the you want to kind of think like a journalist in terms of not coming to the table with a a a predetermined idea of what answers you're going to get so you want to ask really open-ended questions um one of my favorite ones is to ask like the magic wand question you know hey imagine you waved a magic wand and you could change everything what would that look like you know paint me a picture um I like to ask expansive questions like that those are those are a couple of good guidelines I would also say you know and I I will get some push back from some groups on this um I don't like surveys I I full stop I I I think that they have all this inherent bias built into how you shape them and also who is willing to answer a survey this is why I think you should have conversations um I think fewer conversations is worth way more than giant surveys with lots of supposed data and so I like to pick I like to pick an audience that you want to replicate so rather than talking to all of your customers I encourage people to talk to you you know really the right fit customers those that align with your values those that uh you know financially are um profitable for you and are a delight to work with because you are wanting to recreate those uh experiences those those client experiences and those customers I'm I think you can you can talk to unhappy customer I always get this question like well do you want to talk to the people who aren't happy it's like well yeah we can do that but I would I would bias you know 8020 maybe towards the towards that towards the satisfied customers because your goal here is to do and to create things that attract and connect to a right fi customer the goal isn't to um fix your operations that talking to unhappy customers actually can be a good thing for a different reason you know I think for fixing operations or finding problems that's valid too I don't want to say that's not valid but when we're talking Innovation creation and new I think talking to either your dream customer or even like I did back in 2010 who you think could be your next customer uh I have a client where they were really beholden to a distributor model which meant that the End customer they never got to talk to them so they were talking to the distributor and there's a real problem in those distributor models in that Distributors don't do a good job of communicating to the manufacturer What It Is the End customer values so one of the one of the uh visions that we cast for them was how do we get to that end customer how do we actually start to sell direct to that customer so talking to your dream customer as opposed to the default customer is another another important idea that I like to I like to talk about interesting I I think I hear you saying that there's value in both the business owner keeping in contact with his or her own customers and there's also value in bringing in an outsider to have those conversations in an unbiased way maybe the answer is to do a little at both I think it's totally undervalued but all of that is under undervalued in terms of its importance because it doesn't show up on a p&l right it's not like a a you know some people will use things like um I got one of these the other day what's that called the they ask you like How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend 1 through 10 um oh gosh you know what I'm talking about I do know what you're talking about anything below a seven is like red alarms go off kind of things and and I those are okay um but but I just when I when I see an owner who's uh really committed to staying in touch with their customer like um net promoter survey is I think what you're looking for yes net promoter score um thank you yeah I I just think somebody who talks to clients on a regular basis wins out you know because that's going to often be a source of inspiration creativity and new creation and I think we are in a moment where the disruption is so extreme that the path forward might be to do something new you know it might be to create something that you know maybe isn't out there already or that the that has been opened up in the market like I I couldn't have gone to the market with my offering in 2007 because the market was pretty H maybe 2006 the market was happy it was kind of fat and happy and lazy that's why all these marketers had jobs and so it took the disruption it took the like the kind of like violent shaking of the economy for owners to be like maybe I shouldn't hire this in-house person and and and that created opportunity for me which interestingly enough over time became more and more diff difficult because as the economy stayed good for like almost a decade you know I mean it stayed good forever people reverted to those behaviors and so my value proposition started to diminish which is why I started shifting more towards strategy business coaching business Consulting as opposed to just pure marketing because what I I saw the writing on the wall I was like you know what people are getting lazy again they're hiring their you know single in-house marketer they're not really accountable that that person doesn't know what their vision is you know there are good marketers out there look I'm not I don't want to throw them all under the bus but but basically the market was regressing to the mean and I was like oh we go to we got to create something new and and I think we're in this moment again I think for all businesses we're in this moment and that's why I think creation and creativity is really important I love the idea of finding that opportunity in a in a very difficult moment and hopefully a lot of people will be able to do that in this particular moment um good stopping point Sean busy is CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy thank you Sean thanks Lauren have a great week everybody [Music]