An Agency Story
First hand interviews of creative, digital, advertising, and marketing agency owners that have walked the talk of running an agency business. These are riveting stories of the thrill of starting up, hardships faced, and the keys to a successful business from agency owners around the world.
An Agency Story
Would Your Agency Survive the School Bus Test? - Scratch Media + Marketing
Company: Scratch Media + Marketing
Guests: Ryan Ellis
Year Started: 2009
Employees: 26-50
What happens when an agency depends too much on its founder? In this episode, Lora Kratchounova, Founder of Scratch Marketing and Media, shares how she built a 40-person B2B tech agency by shifting from founder-dependence to team empowerment. From mastering positioning to embracing deep tech and climate tech, Lora’s story highlights an ever present learning mindset and team focused leadership.
Key Takeaways
- The “school bus test” what is it and why it matters
- The role of positioning as the most critical agency “hack”
- How empowering your team leads to better leadership and client results
- Why primary data and customer insight outperform assumptions
- A lesson in climate tech and passion
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where owners and experts share the real journey, the early struggles, the breakthrough moments, and everything in between. I'm your host Russel Dubree, former eight figure agency owner turned business coach, sold my agency and now helps agency leaders create their ideal business. Every agency has a story, and this is your front row seat. This is an agency story. Today's guest built her agency out of pure curiosity and a drive to solve problems differently. Lora Kratchounova went from leading marketing at a tech startup to transforming how companies position themselves in the market. Nearly 17 years later, as the leader of Scratch Marketing and media, she's still just as passionate about her work and the clients she serves. Welcome to the show today, Lora.
Lora:Great to be here.
Russel:We were talking about travel before we hit the record button. Any cool places you're going this year?
Lora:Yes. I'm going to Paris. It was kind of a triple reason, I wanted to take my mom there, my birthday's in April and then my son, son turned 21. Made it for good reason to go to, to go to Paris. And then, uh, we're spending a month in Valencia as well.
Russel:Oh my. Okay. You got some good plans coming up. I'm assuming you've been to Paris before?
Lora:Yes. I love that city.
Russel:What's your favorite thing to do in Paris?
Lora:Just sit in a cafe and just watch people. It's okay to stare so that's the best part.
Russel:Yes. I will say, usually when we travel overseas, I mean, it's just sun up to sundown. We're just trying to fit everything in. But Paris was the one time we went, we kind of got to the end of the week and we had seen it all, and so then we just got to do that. And, uh, I have to agree. I think it's a, it's a fun part of Paris.
Lora:It's a great city to walk around, to have a bite, to have a drink, to go into museums, so it's great. Yeah, I can't wait.
Russel:Awesome, well, excited for you. And I'm an April birthday as well, so, uh, it sounds like we're both Aries here.
Lora:Oh, twinsies.
Russel:Yes. Twinsies. Look forward to that for you. If you don't mind, tell us what Scratch Media does and who you do it for.
Lora:We are an integrated B2B technology agency that offers all of the services that an outsourced marketing department would offer to companies. The idea started with 17 years ago, and to this day, I joke with my former CEO that he drove me to open up Scratch. I was the head of marketing for a local startup. It was fun until it wasn't fun anymore. That kind of pushed me to look into the market and see what I can do next. I didn't have a, um, a master plan in mind. Um, and What I figured is that a lot of agencies at the time were really good at one particular thing. If you go to an SEO agency, they're really good at SEO. Therefore, every problem they see is through the lens of SEO. PR, you know, sales enablement, you name it. the idea was, hmm, what if we just look at a company and say, what, what are the opportunities ahead of this company? What are some of the challenges that we can overcome? What if we flexed all of the marketing tools in the tool set to do that?
Russel:And here you are, 17 years later. Awesome. I'm curious, you mentioned that you had your origins or someone inspired you, it sounds like, maybe, uh, in an interesting way, uh, to start the agency. But now just maybe questions like, who have I, who have I inadvertently inspired to start a business because of something? I don't know. Now I got a question. I gotta know the answer to this.
Lora:I have so many inspirations. I actually joke about having professional crushes on people all the time. I'm so thankful for multiple people in my career. I'm a Bulgarian turned Canadian, um, turned American. I wanna stay with a Canadian streak right now.
Russel:That's fair.
Lora:I started my career at Shale Oil, so my first general manager was an UK general manager, and he taught me a lot. Actually, he was the first one who, you know, put a stack of paper, uh, on my desk and said, okay, this, we need to do the business plan for next year. You have five days to figure this out. I said, the stack of paper I'm supposed to read in five days and come up with a plan for next year? I can't even read that fast. I tried. I kind of, you know, struggled with, with it. We got together and he had half a page filled out and it had everything that we needed to think about for next year. I said, I don't know what that is, but that's what I wanna do one day. That was the first kind of big inspo and then multiple people throughout.
Russel:I love what you said, professional crush. Who's your number one professional crush right now?
Lora:I have so many. I don't even know where to start to be honest. My latest one is, uh, Liz Wiseman. I love Simon Sinek. Uh, but Liz Wiseman, um, I don't know if you've come across the book Multipliers?
Russel:Mm-hmm. Oh yes. I love that book.
Lora:Right? Love that book. I figured that a lot of times I'm an accidental diminisher, so just even having the awareness and working through that has been an interesting challenge for me.
Russel:Yeah. And for the folks at home that are, you explain for the folks at home the quick premise of Multipliers. How about that?
Lora:The quick premise of Multipliers is that as leaders, uh, there are two types of leaders. Leaders that empower other people to do their best, and leaders that take away from the superpowers of people, whether they mean it or not, some people mean it, some, some people are accidental diminishers. I highly recommend that because you, all of us have tendencies, uh, around accidental, diminishing, um, and it's a great thing for you to look at if you wanna build a great team and a great following. This book is an absolute must.
Russel:That's a great recommendation Great book, and not to say it's not popular, but you don't hear it talked about a lot in business circles. I think that's a great recommendation and just really it speaks to, especially of a team of any decent size, you, you have to empower, um, and, and to be, and to be aware of when you're empowering and when you're deep powering or diminishing, I think is how, how you worded it. Awesome. Tell us what really got you the point to just say, you know what, I'm going to, I'm gonna start an agency.
Lora:I think it happened naturally after maybe having two or three people join me and then I realized that I'm actually running a small agency. But it wasn't, I didn't have a business plan in mind. You know, It was interesting because, having been in the role of head of marketing, what you do usually, and I completely sympathize with all the other VPs and CMOs of marketing out there, your head's down kind of on the business, working on it, making sure that, you know, you do your job and, um, you don't have a lot of time to, uh, to socialize, to network, to go out there to really, um, make a meaningful contribution in the community. I think that the first revelation was I just wanted to be more engaged, and this is when I even started mentoring with Techstars and, um, Intel Ignite, Layron and, um, Cambridge Innovation Center in the Bulgarian Innovation Hub, which is, uh, on the West Coast. That's kind of how I started. Then I realized that there was still a need for this kind of integrated function. Someone who can come in and, really a team who can come in and quickly figure out what the opportunities are, how to reposition, position a company, how to maximize the resources, um, and the market opportunity. That's kind of how we kept going, um, and we kept adding functions. For example, I was new to PR when I started Scratch. I mean, I'd only had managed PR agencies, and lo and behold, you know, I think that I can consider myself a PR pro these days, so there you go.
Russel:I'd hope so, yeah. It's funny how you started the conversation and said you didn't have a business plan. I'm still looking for the first agency owner that started their agency with a business plan. So if you find them, um, let me know and then I can have them on the show.
Lora:And vice versa, please. I wanna meet those people who had this amazing vision.
Russel:I don't think it happens very often, to be honest. Certainly some people go about it more, more intentionally, but, uh, I don't know still how many ends up with a business plan. I feel like my listeners would be really mad that, I can't believe we didn't go to this well, but, but you said Bulgarian to Canadian to the United States. Share a little bit about that journey because that is unique unto itself.
Lora:Ooh. I love to tell the story. My first job was at Shale Oil in Bulgaria, so I went to the first American University that opened up in Eastern Europe. George Sos funded that university. As you can imagine, after the communist regime fell down, there weren't a lot of marketers. Not like today. There's a ton of marketers where I am. Back in Bulgaria that wasn't the case. I did get the job of marketing director of Shale Oil at the fragile age of 21, and I literally had no idea what I was doing, to the point where, at one point, I was pulling out the brand standard guides that I had because we were still in a physical world and the GM saw me walking with them home and he said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm bringing them home to read them. He said, Lora, these are brand guides. These are reference materials. You don't read them, they're not books. You use them with specific use cases. That was interesting. And then, uh, Another interesting experience was when we had to open up the, the first two Shell stations in the capital of Bulgaria. At that point, I wanted to close the main street, and I went to the GM and I said, this is who we need to bribe. This is who we need to pay off. As he was writing down, he looked at me without any judgment and said, Lora, we don't bribe at Shell and he continued writing. I said, oh my God, that's what you mean by value system. I get it now. It clicked. That was the, uh, a funny experience. At that point you sort of think about what's next. A really good friend of mine who we continue to work together, he's one of my creator directors based in the Middle East. He gave me this booklet and said, hey, Emerson College. Maybe you're interested in kind of applying for a Master's? That's all I did. I didn't apply to any other schools. I got a scholarship, came over here. The rest is history.
Russel:Where is Emerson College, by the way? Where is that?
Lora:It's in Boston.
Russel:Oh, that is in Boston. Okay.
Lora:That was good 25 years ago or so. Then decided to, uh, stay permanently here. It was hard to stay in the US. Applied for immigration, got accepted, um, into Canada. Moved to Toronto, which was an amazing experience there. Spent, uh, about 10 years. Worked for American Express there, which was amazing experience. Again, traveled back and forth'cause uh, this is how I joined one of the startups in Boston, then another one, and that's what brought me back here.
Russel:Okay. You've been around the world a time or two, it sounds like. A few stamps on your passport.
Lora:A little bit.
Russel:Very cool. All right, so, so we, we went a little bit, uh, around the world to get to, uh, chronologically anyway, to get, to get to where we're at. So you started the business. What were the early days like? What was going through your head? Was it just all energy or any fears you were going through, or was there even time for that?
Lora:I think that, of course, as you start a business, first of all there's always like, uh, a level of anxiety. Would I make it, would there be enough? as you're servicing clients, you don't necessarily have enough time to think about your new business activity. So it's a, It's a difficult endeavor. Simon Sinek in his book, um, Why Start With Why? He's talking about the, a school bus, bus test. If you get run by a school bus, would your business continue? So For a long time that wasn't the case. Everything depended on me. Thankfully today we're in a completely different boat, but it took a while for even me, um, to figure out that that's, um, the right thing to do. I guess, to a certain point I was lucky because I was at the right time, at the right place. VMware and EMC actually was, um, Boston based as well. Had a few friends there, got introduced and started working on the social media side of things with EMC and VMware and we became a global agency of record for their partnerships then for their telco division. I was just lucky to be in the right place in the right time, I guess, and having the right tool.
Russel:Not any different than one of the questions I ask towards the end of, of entrepreneurs born or made, which you'll, you'll get your chance at. But, um, it's, uh, this podcast, how I Built This with Guy Roz, he says, is it luck or is it skill? It seems like everyone I still talk to, regardless of the size of the business you built.
Lora:It's a combination.
Russel:Yeah, it's a, and certainly the case in my own story. You talked about something that is really important and I think maybe, maybe one of the more significant challenges I think in running and growing an agency is, is that school bus factor of how do you not be the be and all, be all and end all of the business. Is there a particular wake up call that you came to realize that, or, and then I'd love to kind of even just explore the process that you went through to, to get on the other side of that.
Lora:Great question. I wish I had the book Multipliers when I started out because I think then it, a lot of things would've come naturally to me. I think that initially the mistake or, uh, the over indexing that I made was I was maniacally focused of making sure that the clients were happy, that we were doing the right thing. So much so that I almost ignored what was happening on the team site. Luckily, I don't know that I necessarily had the wherewithal to attract the right people, but they, they found me interesting and persevered with my, you know, sort of, uh, to this day we joke that, you know, it's not your kind of quality of stuff, Lora, but it's okay, you know, um, because I, again, I, I just over index on making sure we do the right thing. And if it's not the right thing, we, we would revisit it until we get the right thing. I don't care how much money people paid for something. At some point you realize that there's plenty of other smart people out there and, um, you give them a chance and then you see that, um, they actually flourish and they become great leaders and you learn from them. I guess The moment you realize that that's the case, that's when you go, I can breathe easier and it's actually a lot more fun when you find yourself in that kind of a situation with peers who you respect and you learn from.
Russel:Yeah. And that can be, you know, I, I think the reason why it is hard is because, you know, so many agencies are where they are, and the success are driven by someone that's very ambitious and capable and talented. When you think about how you had to adapt yourself, I mean, is there any like specific hack that you know, that you did to just better empower your team and better let them take hold?
Lora:Yes. Highly recommend, uh, that folks spend time looking at positioning, um, and especially April Dunford. In her books, there are two. One is Getting, um, uh, Awesome. And the other one is the sales book. I don't remember the names of both, but I, those, those are must reads. You need to understand the business aspects of what we do. You need to understand, um, or companies, whether they're part of a super noisy marketplace, whether they're starting something new, um, who the competitors are, who are the, the major ones, um, out there that are setting the pace. If you don't have that framework, you can easily get lost in, in the shuffle. I think having that framework has helped me build on, um, my industry knowledge, um, technical knowledge, what have you. But I think that that is the hack, at least if you wanna run an integrated agency, you need to know positioning inside out.
Russel:It's certainly the talk of the town. I think agencies are moving in the direction to start to understand that. As kind of the industry and digital, digital marketing, et cetera has evolved.
Lora:Is that what you're hearing?
Russel:Oh, yes. Oh yeah, definitely. You're seeing that focus in a lot of ways. I always kind of equate it that anybody that gets on the other side of better positioning for themselves, nobody goes back to more generic or broad or general. They live in their position. But it's always interesting I don't hear too many agencies that start out really well positioned. Even if they might, and I don't know. I'm almost curious to start doing a study on this of, is that a natural order of things that we just have to figure this out and that's part of the process, or could we start better positions and, and be all the better off at? I don't know what your take is on that.
Lora:I mean, I think it's a natural consequence, especially if you're starting out, uh, you usually don't know who you are. It's like with our kids, right? When they're born, they don't know who they are and they form themselves as they go. I think naturally, that's part of it, finding your own calling. The reason why, you know, it's, it's difficult to be integrated because this is one of the, again, again, I was lucky. When I moved to Canada and I worked for American Express, our team was much flatter than what was happening in the US. If you go to New York, people, uh, there were like 10 people doing my job in New York. You could only see a sliver of the action, and that's how people grew up through the ranks. So for you to have this bird's eye view on a business, which I had at Shell, mind you, I didn't know what I was doing, but I kind of peaked at all of it and I was like, oh, okay, okay. Let me go learn all of that, uh, is really hard. And then the challenge of build, building integrated is, you know, from the ground up is you do need experts in some of the core areas of marketing. You need people who understand the role of public relations and credibility and corporate communications, right? That sort of function, brand building, which is not necessarily corporate comms, it's a little bit different depending on the role. Demand gen is different. Field marketing is different. Sales enablement is different. You need to find the right people who are willing to, to look at the other areas. It's not an easy thing to do. It's not.
Russel:That's a good reminder. It's not an easy thing to do. That's why I think I do have conversations about the idea of positioning, just to say, it's a journey, not a destination. And every day you can just get a little bit better, a little bit closer to refining what that is. I know, um, from a previous conversation that you have, do that all day, every day for, for your clients and whatnot, it sounds like, but maybe not always the best at doing it for yourself, but you're, you're working on that, I, as I understand it, and, and trying to eat your own medicine maybe more and more these days.
Lora:Yes. It's true. Well, first of all, when I was trying to define my brand, um, when I got a little bit more serious about it, I didn't do it myself. I found people who I trusted to do it. When you're internal, you're too close to it. You just can't see it well enough. I highly recommend that if you're doing it, just find a peer who you trust who can help you through the process and be open to the feedback. When you have a bigger team, not that we're that big, we're just over 40 people, but you do get a lot of perspectives. That's another thing to sort of, when you start forming things, and then we went out and we talked to people as well and said, given the, the nature of what's happening, which is complete whack-a-mole these days, what would you rec and how do you see us? We got that perspective and we were able to kind of open up and not be precious about any of the stuff that we do.'Cause to this day, it's hard for me to say, oh, we don't do that. Or we don't do that well. Not because I'm trying to get every piece of business. It's because I see how this can fit into an overall program. That's my bias.
Russel:I totally get that. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's hard to say no to opportunity sometimes, but we build that discipline over time. That's a really compelling thing that you shared of just this idea of out, something that you do all the time, but still outsourcing it. Imagine, right. I'm sitting here thinking, well, we built websites and we would've never really considered, I mean, we talked about it, but we, I knew we never would've gonna do something like that, like outsource our website. In hindsight, I, I kind of agree with you. You're just too in it.
Lora:Well, not the technical aspect of it, right? Because the technical aspect, if you're really good at it, why outsource? But the whole kind of positioning and how you need to show up for people and where you focus, I think an outside perspective is.
Russel:All right. I like breaking that down further. Get someone to help you out of your own kind of blind, take the blinders off on the strategy piece, but you can still do the execution at the end of the day. And if you can't find time to do the execution, then maybe you, you got some bigger problems you need to address in your business. All right. That's some good advice. I love that. Where do you think you've evolved the most, uh, as a business, um, over, over the years? Or is there any kind of like, I mean, obviously we talked about just kind of this transformation with the team, but any other big pivotal moments that you feel like really defined where you're at today?
Lora:As an agency, we were in a B2B Tech agency when we started, so learning the technical aspects in deep tech, right? Understanding infrastructure cloud, networking, telecoms. It's not something that comes easy or natural to people, so we had to learn it. I think the moment we realized that we need to invest in it and having the patience to do so and kind of embrace a product marketing function was the other thing. How would a product marketer think about that? Is always kind of after the positioning is the next thing. Those were super important. Staying nimble and kind of adapting to what's happening. Um, you know, It's interesting, even to this day, if you look at the AI tech that's out there, you would question whether there's a future for design, there's a future for content. I do believe that there is. AI is going to continue to augment, but there's absolutely no substitute for this key human insight that we have and empathy that we have, and if you really know something well, um, and you can connect it and connect all the dots. I'm yet to see AI do this, um, in these kinds of situations. That was the other point of seeing ChatGPT and, and kind of embracing and saying to everyone, just use it. Let's just incorporate it. Let's not just be afraid of it. And sometimes, you know, um, criticize your own work, upload it to ChatGPT and say, if I were X, Y, Z and needed to critique it, where, where the, um, the, the soft spots? That was the, the next pivot of the moment, but I think the tech aspect and the product marketing aspect was a huge pivotal moment, maybe 12 years ago, that helped us kind of double down into deep tech. That's what we do.
Russel:Okay. I love that aspect of, you know, really just getting, getting your fingers and hands dirty in your industry and I guess really become, not just the subject matter expert of your service, but subject matter expert of that industry, it sounds like.
Lora:You absolutely have to meet. You can't do it otherwise. Sometimes people would say in security, you can learn it. Well, good luck. Maybe you can. But, uh, it's a, it's such an evolving and such a complicated field, and it's a, it has a completely different beat than DevOps, than IT, than data science. You just can't just, you know, make the jump and say, I'm good at it. You have to be seeped in it.
Russel:Can't fake it. What did that process look like for you? Did you go shadow people in the field for a day? How did you take on that learning curve?
Lora:All of the above. But I think the most important thing is first you need to do your homework and then you need to talk to the experts and get their take on it.'Cause they will take you from point A to point C a lot faster, but you have to do the hustle and not expect that someone's gonna pour the knowledge. The same thing with AI, but I think talking to the people who know what's going on in those places, super key.
Russel:Yeah. I'm a big fan and, and pushing a lot of the folks that I work with today to go get that primary data. Let's not make any assumptions about any past that we're thinking about going down. Go to the sources, get the primary data, ask'em what they want, ask'em what they feel, ask'em a whole lot of other things along the way. As you kind of said that, I can, you need the expertise first, the kind of the initial research so you can ask the good questions, but then they can, that can carry you from point A to point C so much faster. I love the way you put that.
Lora:And then talk to the customers, right? Whoever your customer is, like, you have to understand their, their worldview. Don't ever assume that you know it all. As soon as you think that you got it, that's where you become obsolete. Always have like, at the back of my mind, I always can learn here and have an open mind.
Russel:I thought you did know it all, Lora?
Lora:Still learning. Listen, lifelong learner, the first one to, to admit it.
Russel:Yeah. I think in this space, if you're not, you're, you're, you're going, you're just not gonna make it, I think at this point. The way I feel it, especially AI is only accelerating this, that every day that goes by, this gets noisier, more complicated, more complex, um, all and, and add people to that mix, uh, that are equally kind of be befuddled and trying to keep up with it all in. We've just got a really complicated concoction here. Um, well, tell us like, What's the future look like? What are you thinking for the long term for Scratch?
Lora:I think that the long term is doubling down on what the, our space, which is again, I'm, I'm glad that we're in deep tech'cause it's less affected than other, than other sectors. I'm more interested in, uh, climate tech and we're investing in this, even though it's difficult times because it's not getting as much funding. We have doubled down on it and continue to do that on the good side of tech and, you know, um, we'll just be there to support people as much as we can. and then the Industrial space is super interesting for us, and then I don't think we're gonna ever be a big, big agency, but um, we're just stocked as a team and we said, uh, we want a hundred percent team retention because if we don't want them, and then why have people work with you? We just wanna make it meaningful. The same thing, where we can control it, a hundred percent client retention. I guess going back to basics and just running a good, solid business.
Russel:Anywhere you go in life, I feel like it, you can just always, if you just go back to basics, you're probably not on the wrong path. If you just focus on the fundamentals. Life lesson.
Lora:It's really great to hear that you say that. It's soothing.
Russel:It continues to just ring too true. You can apply that to sports. You can apply that seems like to anything. you know, It's interesting, I, I, I've kind of, it's come upon this thought of, you know, a business is like, every single day it exists, naturally gets more complicated. No different than as a tree grows, branches go different directions and, um, things happen on that tree. We have to trim it down constantly and, and focus on the basics and the fundamentals. Otherwise we'll get a big, gnarly, um, bush that I probably got one out here in front of my house.
Lora:You need to leave some of the branches to grow as well, right? It's a little bit of a balance.
Russel:Yes, yes, yes. You can't trim it to nothing. You can't lop off the top, uh, and expect it to grow, but, um, it, it grows, it grows better and prettier if we, if we trim it in the right way.
Lora:If we take the right care of it, right?
Russel:Yes. We need to bring a, we need to bring a gardener in here for some subject matter expertise to help us align this from a, a business analogy, uh, perspective.
Lora:Exactly.
Russel:Something, you know, you kind of mentioned there, just kind of looking at the future that was curious about, as you said, focus on climate tech, is that just something you're passionate about? Is that what you see as a long term opportunity?
Lora:The entire team is super passionate about. If you think about like, um, eventually tech gets to a point where doing the right thing is the easiest thing to do. Hopefully we can get to the same point with climate tech, where you don't have to think about the fact that it's climate tech, that it's doing great for the environment. I think we're gonna get there. We'll have to get there. That's something that the entire team is passionate about. We've done, uh, a lot of non, uh, profit work as well, uh, supporting different causes on that side. I think we'll continue to do that.
Russel:Just for the, the folks including myself, uh, at home, that maybe don't even understand what climate tech is, what consists of climate tech?
Lora:It's a growing, uh, uh, set of technologies, but I'll give you one example. ChatGPT, some of these large language models need a lot of compute power in order to train the models and then to use the models. You can even see like OpenAI changing their subscription levels because they figure out that even the 200 a month is not enough and they're gonna charge 2000, 12,000 for their GenAI options. That's because there's a lot of compute. That means that there's a lot of big servers that, these graphic processing units from Nvidia mostly, but more and more from AMD and Intel and other companies. These chips need to be cooled and the way we've cooled the chips, so far, is with air and water. Guess what? That's a precious resource that is impacting the environment, right? And now there's newer technologies like liquid cooling technologies that actually can cool these, um, these servers in, in a perpetual motion without ever involving air and water. So Imagine, it's a self-containing mechanism without impacting the environment. You can even take it to the level where it starts producing electricity that it needs so that there's less electrical footprint. That's a good example of climate tech and, um, an area where we're working.
Russel:Very cool. I mean that, I felt like I just participated in a mini moment of Mr. Rogers show where, I dunno if you ever watched Mr. Rogers by chance in the day where, where he would go to, uh, a, a crayon making factory or something like that and just tell you how it worked. Now I feel like you just did that for everyone about, uh, a little piece of climate tech. We learned more than just agency stuff today. I guess I'll just leave you with one other last big question, Lora. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Lora:I think both. You have to be born with a bug, um, but the bug is not enough to become an entrepreneur. You have to work at it, but if you didn't have it in you, you probably shouldn't try it.
Russel:Okay. All right. Most likely born, but you gotta be made.
Lora:Yes, both. I stand by both. It's a compound answer, but it's, I, I believe it.
Russel:You know, it's so funny that everybody feels like it's cop out, but I actually, you know, one, there's no right or wrong answer by any means, but, um, it, it's probably like all things that, that answer, focus on the basics and the answer is usually somewhere in the middle. If people want to know more about Scratch, where can they go?
Lora:They can find me online. I have this, uh, unique last name, um, Kratchounova, but the, the first name is Lora. That's the easiest way to find me on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me or on our website, which is www.scratch mm.com.
Russel:Beautiful. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time outta your day, Lora, for sharing so many wonderful details about the power of positioning, uh, the power of primary data and doing market research, and even sharing us a little bit about what's going on in the world of climate tech. Really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today.
Lora:It was great to be here. Thank you, Russel.
Russel:Thank you for listening to An Agency Story podcast where every story helps you write your own, subscribe, share, and join us again for more real stories, lessons learned, and breakthroughs ahead. What's next? You'll want to visit an agencystory.com/podcast and follow us on Instagram at@anagencystory for the latest updates.
Lora:Each year we, we, especially since COVID,'cause first we were obviously in office and then we went all virtual and then we tried to get together multiple times a year to make sure that we're spending time together. One of our summer, um, outings was on a private island in Connecticut. We rented it for two days and we had it to ourself.
Russel:Okay. What occurred? What did you do on this private island for two days?
Lora:That shall remain, uh, confidential. No, but we had fun'cause it was on the lake so we could, you know, obviously jump in the lake, swim and then you can do all sorts of things on, on the island as well. It wasn't a huge island, but, um, it was fun.
Russel:This is my first top secret story. So intriguing. Gosh, leave it on a cliffhanger here.