Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
Navigating Startup Realities: Eric Holtzclaw on Entrepreneurial Lessons, Marketing Trends, and Conscious Leadership
Eric Holtzclaw, a seasoned technologist turned entrepreneur, joins us to reveal the stark realities behind the allure of startup successes. As we explore his career journey from IBM to founding Liger, a marketing powerhouse born from a merger, Eric shares candid insights into the grit behind the glam. He warns against the romanticized perception of entrepreneurship and stresses the importance of learning from experienced business builders to navigate the inevitable hurdles and personal sacrifices involved. Eric's own experiences serve as a testament to the value of understanding both triumphs and failures on the entrepreneurial path.
Ever wondered what it takes to stand out in the crowded startup space? Eric illuminates the vital marketing trends that can set a business apart, particularly focusing on the BATCOM concept where conversion reigns supreme. We dissect the essentials of maintaining brand consistency, which is often overlooked in favor of constant rebranding—an approach that can hinder long-term success. Our conversation draws lessons from major brands that excel at consistency, offering a guide for smaller businesses to follow, while also spotlighting the delicate balance between experimentation and maintaining a steady brand identity.
In a world where B2B marketing can often feel stale, Eric's innovative strategies offer a breath of fresh air. He draws attention to the challenges marketing departments face, including limited resources, and emphasizes the need for creative campaigns that cut through the noise. By blending humor with practical advice, Eric showcases how engaging marketing efforts can captivate even the most distracted audiences. We also touch on the core ingredients for entrepreneurial success—consistency and awareness—while highlighting the pivotal role of conscious leadership in fostering healthy and productive work environments.
Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm Gwenda Rieck-Creary, founder and CEO of Guide to HR, and today I have Eric Coleslaw with us. We're going to be talking about some lessons learned as a founder himself, as well as some marketing tips and trends. So, Eric, welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. I kiddingly tell people I'm a recovering technologist. So I started my early career on the technology side, running development shops and kind of working for some crazy CEOs during a period of time that being an entrepreneur, being in a startup, wasn't necessarily wasn't what everybody was trying to do. It was kind of a new thing. Worked for some sales organizations outside of Silicon Valley establishing professional services groups for them. I owned a research company for 10 years and I sold my interest in that in 2012 and swore that I'd never start another company. So I went back to kind of my first love of operations. I was right hand to some people who were starting businesses or trying to scale them and I would assist with that. And in that process they would give me their marketing department and say, hey, so could you run marketing too? And I'm like sure, and so I'd get their operations running. And they kind of look at me like well, why are you still here? And I'm like, well, remember that hot mess I walked into. That's fixed now, but I'm still doing your marketing, so I would keep their marketing department.
Speaker 2:I ended up with six companies and I was doing marketing for all six of them. I have a long-term person who's worked with me and she yelled at me one night and was like you don't have, this is not a consultancy anymore. You got like six jobs. You need to like turn this into a proper company. So I foolishly listened to her and I merged my business with another one, which is how we formed Liger, because Liger was mostly a strategy firm and I was using an execution firm. So I brought them together and renamed it to Liger after the movie Napoleon Dynamite. So if you've seen the movie, it is named after that. And here we are today. So I did recently merge the business underneath a larger holding company called Parkington and we are the marketing organization underneath that umbrella. So yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:So tell me, as a founder entrepreneur, what is the biggest lesson that you've learned? Or if you could go back in time and tell your younger self don't do this or do that. What would it be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So there's the younger. I went to work originally at IBM thinking I wanted to be in a big company and then I happily ended up in a startup that had been started by a bunch of ex-IBMers and really fell in love with that. And it was during a time that being an entrepreneur or being in that kind of space was not as cool as it is today. Being in that kind of space was not as cool as it is today.
Speaker 2:So I guess my message isn't necessarily to me because I feel lucky to have found where I am. I really do love business and I haven't interwoven into. I don't have a lot of hobbies, Like I don't play golf, I barely understand football, like all those kinds of things. Business is always kind of in my hobby.
Speaker 2:But there's this glamorization of entrepreneurship and that is a thing that I would warn anyone who's considering doing it, because it is a hard, hard thing to do. You know you're working 120 hours a week to not work 40 hours for someone else and the first three years are terrible and you're you know you're working for the worst boss ever yourself, Right? So a lot of those things that I, since I got into it, had been glamorized and so I have this conversation with people. It's kind of almost like people who wanted to join the circus or become part of a rock band.
Speaker 2:Being an entrepreneur isn't, is not what you see on television, it really isn't. And you have to be ready for it. And and if you ask if I would have done it again, I don't. So funnily, in our, in our company, we have this thing called retros, where we go back and look at a project and decide what we would have done differently. I literally wouldn't have done anything any differently than I did it based on the information I had in front of me at that point. So I don't live in that world. So I know it's right for me, but it feels right for other people and I don't know that that is true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so taking some time to really learn from others, hear what it's really like. Pull back that curtain before you make that leap to see if it is right for you not making the assumption. It's kind of like social media Everyone has such a fantastic, perfect life, but the reality is none of us have that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, if you think, like I was lucky and didn't know it, that I worked for a couple of serial entrepreneurs. So first, before doing my own thing and I see a lot of people who are like I'm in school and I'm going to be an entrepreneur and I don't know how that's possible. I don't know how you do that. You need to get out there and you may not want to go get work experience in the real world, but finding someone else who's building something and partnering with them and seeing the risks they take and understanding what you would never do, that they did or whatever is a great learning. I feel very fortunate to have kind of been in the shadows of some people who were doing this kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I know personally for me, I learn from others. I watch what people do, where they succeed, where they fail, and try to learn from that. So I don't have the same failures. I might have my. I'll have my own failures, right, but maybe not the same one, which is why I always ask here for those listeners that are like me you know, learning from each other is such a great way. If you can really learn from others, that's such a great way. So I appreciate you sharing that. So let's dive into marketing. So what are some of the trends you're seeing, especially in the entrepreneurial, startup, small size business world, from a marketing perspective?
Speaker 2:So at Liger we use a term called BATCOM, so it's B-A-T-C-O-M, and I wish I could figure out how to make it sound like a Liger term, but it's not, it sounds like a Batman thing. And so in BATCOM the most important letter is C, which is conversion. And so when people start a business, do a thing, everyone wants conversion. And so when people start a business, do a thing, everyone wants conversion, which means someone's going to typically. Typically, conversion means I'm going to pay you money for the thing that you're trying to sell. But if you haven't taken care of the other letters, which are traffic, so you're not getting any traffic to your site or to your store or to the thing that you're trying to get people to pay attention to, you'll never get conversion. If people are not aware of who you are and what you do, which is totally educational, and give back, it's not buy a thing for me, you know, it's like getting back into that community and then if your brand isn't right, you'll never make it to conversion. And so this idea of instantly standing something up and getting conversion while having not taken care of traffic, awareness and brand is a problem and you can't skip a step. It just doesn't happen, and if it does, it's lightning and luck. It really is like some celebrity picked up your thing or whatever and you can't replicate that. You just can't even pretend to replicate it.
Speaker 2:Now there is optimization and measurement. So, once you have conversion understanding what's converting, why it's converting, is it the right dollars? But getting to that C is the hardest thing in the world. And so you have to start off with consistency in your brand. Who are you, what's your voice? Those types of things to start stepping across those. Now, that doesn't mean go get a logo right Like that, yeah, but people focus on that precious little logo for so long. You've got to. How do you, how are you going to show up in the world? Where are you going to say you know things like so that there's this repeated pattern of consistency that makes people aware of you. That then drives traffic to you so you can get conversion. That makes people aware of you. That then drives traffic to you, so you can get conversion. So, just like going to the gym, I would love to be able to go run a 10K tomorrow. I could probably barely run a 1K.
Speaker 2:I've got to do all the work to get to that letter that you care about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's such a great perspective, and so, for the founders who are still working through that, what are some of the things that they should be thinking about or considering in their process of getting towards that wonderful moment of getting a C?
Speaker 2:Well it is. Marketing is as much an art as it is a science. Specifically at the beginning is you're kind of building the brand and who are you and how do you show up in the world? So not waiting until it's perfect. So you know, progress, perfectionism, the way of progress. Make some progress, get some stuff out there, try the pitch, build a few things. But once you start to find something that works, you need to build a very strong signature of that. So it's this.
Speaker 2:You know, as entrepreneurs, we like new things, and so it's time to change the logo, or let's do the website again, or whatever. That can really hurt you, because you need that consistency to be in front of people so that they're, even if they're not paying full attention, and they're subliminally seeing your brand and your name and those types of things. So experimentation, see what works and when you think it's working, double down on that baby and leave it in place for a period of time until you can prove otherwise. And so it's. It is a delicate balancing act of like a little bit of experimentation. Do it sooner than you see.
Speaker 2:People will eat the dog food and then, once you have something like, lean into it until you determine it's not serving you. And the way it may not be serving you is you're not attracting the ideal client you really want to work with, right, you can't make enough money off of it. We've changed the portfolio at liger at least three times now, where we've, like, seen all the things and decided that there's, you know, some new ideal client we want to go after, and it required us to change our pipeline and rethink the brand and the voice and the message. But it wasn't until we'd had a period of experience that we knew that it was time to do that.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, when I think back, when you say you know, don't change, because we we as entrepreneurs we love new things, we love to do a lot of different things, but don't change for the sake of change. Right, change because business needs you to, and I I doubled down on that, and also you've got a lot of other things you got to think about as a founder and building your business. Don't go after something that's already. You already got something like let it test out, let it actually. You know it's rooted, you know you've planted the seed, let the roots grow, let it grow and see what you get from it. And focus on something else for a second. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you'll notice, like what I see is smaller brands that can't make the mistake of consistency, do so. They don't use the same color over and over again. They don't use the same font. Whatever Big brands that could afford to make a mistake never do. Brands that could afford to make a mistake never do. You can watch a commercial Target, williams and Sonoma, old Navy several use white, publix they use white and you can tell the ad before you see the logo just by the color white that they're using. So they're very picky about how that shows up and what that is and they could afford to make a mistake. You can't. You have a very limited budget. You need things to be consistent and to show up the same way and have the signature that people almost identify it before they know it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, makes sense. So what are some of the things that you're working on today? Like you know, when I think of marketing, like there's just obviously a huge umbrella of different things, but obviously, in today's world, with technology and social media, like as a as a founder myself, I, I, oh my gosh, I don't even know where to go. Like there's so many different social medias out there and they're all unique to different types of audience and so forth. What would be some of the, maybe some ideas or or thoughts that a founder with their marketing person or just themselves thinking about, like why they should spend time in one place over another or how they should divvy up their time?
Speaker 2:yeah, so there's, um, there are. From a social media perspective, we were always suggesting at least two channels, because there was a thing called my space, right that's ages.
Speaker 2:For those that know what that is right, or you may not be a fan any longer of x because of the way it's moved. So if you and I had a huge when twitter, I huge following on twitter, spent a lot of time on it. Now I'm primarily on linkedin, but having like one primary channel and one secondary, so that that way and thinking of social media is more than the big you know, facebook's, whatever, like there's medium, and YouTube, like those things, are also considered a way to get in front of your audience. You don't own that content when you put it up there. So if that platform goes away, everything you've built, everything you've done, is gone too. So having some hedging you know as to where things are and what they look like and also including that content into something you own.
Speaker 2:So we talk about peso, which is a industry term in marketing. It's paid, so something I've paid for. So I pay you to place an article. I pay you for an advertisement, earned. I've gotten in front of you. You found me interesting, so you wrote about me, which is one of the highest ways to get recognized. Shared is what you and I are doing. So you and I both have our own network. We're doing a podcast together. I'll share it to my network, you'll share it to yours and then owned, which are things like our blogs and websites and places that we put content that we have full control over, and, regardless of where we share it, it's always going to live there. So investing kind of across all three of those knowing earned is the hardest to do but the most impactful will get you a really good mix of kind of where you're sharing content, what it looks like, how it feels.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. So what are the things that you're seeing that your customers are struggling with or that you and your team spend the most time on that? If you could get in front of your customers maybe a week or a month or a year earlier, they would have had not such a hard time dealing with.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what you just said. They don't realize how long the sales cycle is. So we primarily work with B2B companies that do complex sales. So we're like financial services, things like that the average have 180 day sales cycle and I can't cut that down Right. And they don't get it Like they think they're exceptional, like oh well, you can do it for I'm like no, I, I really I can't Right. Like it's 21 times that somebody has to see a brand before they start to establish awareness. Remember my brand where they start to establish awareness. Remember my brand awareness piece.
Speaker 2:Wow, 21 times 21 times 180 days.
Speaker 1:I feel like I need to flash both of our brands on our YouTube video right now, 21 times.
Speaker 2:Well, 21 and like what we're doing here is a great way of mixing it up. You can't be like you watch the golf channel and they play the same commercial over and over again Right. Oh my gosh, like that people just it just becomes noise, so it has to be something that interrupts me. The other interesting stat is that the human brain's attention span is seven seconds and a goldfish has an eight second.
Speaker 1:I love that one. I feel like it's getting worse too right With technology.
Speaker 2:I'm ADD in such the bad way, so bad, and so like I'm the worst, like it's like things happen and ping and whatever and so so that you can't start too soon. And marketing, for some reason, even though often mentioned, is the first department in a company you know, like how we've got a marketing, a sales, whatever is often the last apartment they build, it's the last one they invest in, it's the first one they cut, like all these things and it is the cash register that's ringing and it's. You're not going to necessarily feel the impact immediately, but you're going to feel it over time. And we also have companies this doesn't happen in B2B as much where they're paying for all of their traffic and they need to be investing also in organic. We see the opposite effect where B2Bs will invest way too much in organic and they add paid too late and they add too small a layer of paid. But you need a good mix of the two to really have a healthy approach.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think what you know correct me if you see differently is that it's because there's not that almost instant gratification. It's I brought you on. I need the sale by a month. You didn't get it for me. I'm going to cut. I don't like marketing. Does is not. Marketing is not an instant gratification. Hit Right.
Speaker 2:And a lot of us in the startup world.
Speaker 2:We got like fix right, right no, and I say it every single time. We start with a client and then we get like three months down the road and they're like they act like they thought they were unique. You know like, well, it took a month to stand it up and we're in the middle of seeing if things were gonna work, you know, and transactional businesses can get away with it. You can do a um, I want to get one 50% off, like things like that. But when you're doing a complex sale but in complex, in my opinion, isn't always even B2B, it's relational, it takes time. You have to educate people. There's a risk in making the decision and that's not something somebody's going to do because you give them a $10 coupon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's so true, yeah. So what are some of the like the fun? What is the funnest thing you've ever worked on in regards to like a campaign or marketing thing? That like was just so unique and you just had a fun time doing it.
Speaker 2:We because we are in B2B and so our tagline is saving the world from boring, broken marketing.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:And so we say B2B marketing is either boring or broken, or both.
Speaker 2:And it doesn't have to be Like they. People who buy for businesses are people too, so they want something unique and interesting that they're going to remember. So, you know, we've done all kinds of activations. Where you know, we have one it's actually in San Diego this month where we there's a conference and there's a bunch of competitors at the conference and we work with one of the companies and so we've rented pedicabs for the night that go from the hotel to the gaslight district and they're all wrapped in this company's logo and they're free, and so the competitors are going to have to ride in the pedicab.
Speaker 1:Almost like a mwaha moment.
Speaker 2:Right. So a little gorilla like that, you know I love it. Yeah, so, and we work with some fun brands that let us do, just, you know, more interesting B2B work than is traditional. We don't want the big inspirational sign with the thing in the background Like we come up with, we have a deck we use. We call the idea detention center. So the idea wasn't a bad idea.
Speaker 2:It just didn't get used by that client and so we'll use it when we're shopping with clients, when we're trying to pick something and we really do like those, because marketing used to be visceral. It either needs to make me hate it, love it but talk about it. Like, if you're talking about it, you failed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is so true. That is so true. Well, I love it. I feel like we could talk about marketing all day long, but as we wrap up today, is there any last tidbit or thought, or words of wisdoms or ideas you'd like to share with the audience?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So people always ask me I give you the top two things that make someone successful in this world of entrepreneurship and just business in general. One is consistency, just absolutely consistency. Getting up at the same time doing the same thing, showing up when you say you're going to show up, being a consistent person, will get you almost 90% of the way there. And the other that's important is awareness, so an understanding of why you're doing and reacting to things the way you are and getting underneath that. Because that awareness, when you have an unaware leader, they end up building really unhealthy organizations. So they think they're really good at a thing. They should give it to someone else because someone else would be better at it. They don't know what kind of impact they make on the organization when they walk in the room. You yield more power than you know when you're doing that kind of role and you've got to be more conscious of it.
Speaker 1:I feel like there is a whole podcast just about that last little piece about being aware. But, yes, great advice. Eric, it was such a pleasure to have you on the call today and, for those listening or watching, I hope you got a couple of tidbits out, like I did, and we will see you on the next podcast. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, thanks so much.
