Adam Cooper (00:01.704)

Hello and welcome back to the Fractional CFO show. I'm here today with Dean McKenna, who is a digital expert and has made a career out of bringing digital strategy into focus. So Dean, welcome to the Fractional CFO show. How are you doing today?

Dean McKenna (00:20.974)

Thanks Adam, I'm excited to be here with you.

Adam Cooper (00:23.664)

Excellent. Well, very excited to have you here. Very excited to have you here and looking forward to this one. And I guess to start with, would you be able to give the audience a bit of an introduction to yourself, your background, how you started your company and where you're at now?

Dean McKenna (00:38.606)

Yeah, of course, Adam. So we're Cassia Digital Agency. And I say we because it's a husband and wife business partnership. My background, I guess I started out in fairly traditional commercial retail situation, working in bricks and mortar retail as a buyer with Sainsbury's way back when. And then I also spent 10 years at McDonald's in corporate roles. So really strong foundation.

in those more traditional retail environments. And then more recently I pivoted to work in the Amazon ecosystem. So I spent around seven years in and around Amazon learning a lot about digital. And it was a really rich learning environment, which I enjoyed. My life and business partner Anne, Anne Cutting, similarly has quite a deep history in traditional corporate roles.

She's a qualified FCPA accountant, but spent 20 years doing a lot of business transformation programs for big multinationals like McDonald's, UBS, BBC and Worldpay. So together, we bring together quite a broad range of corporate careers, both in business and digital spaces that we like to bring in to work with clients.

Adam Cooper (02:04.932)

Excellent. Okay, great background. And I'd love to dive into that to start with and understand what it was that inspired you to make that move to go because you've got some great blue chip companies on your your background. What inspired you to move from corporate into running your in your own consultancy?

Dean McKenna (02:24.268)

Yeah, well, I think maybe like a lot of other of your listeners, Adam, it's that fantastic opportunity work in big corporates can sometimes also be a little bit restrictive. so Anne and I both felt we wanted somewhere where we could have a bit more autonomy and flexibility in driving forward projects. And we also wanted to have the opportunity to work directly with founders.

and business owners. We really enjoy leveraging our corporate experience and sharing some of that experience and expertise with business owners where it can be really practically applied and we can help see the fruition of those projects and really have first-hand involvement in making things happen.

Adam Cooper (03:16.892)

Hmm, absolutely. Absolutely. know from firsthand experience, value you get from helping entrepreneurs and small business owners can be a lot greater. So that's great. And obviously when it's the two of you and you're bringing the home life into the work life and the work life into the home life, I can imagine that could be quite interesting. Like how did you manage that early on and was it easy to divide roles and choose who works on what?

Dean McKenna (03:42.946)

Yeah, it's a really good, it's probably the first question we most often get asked when we talk about a husband and wife partnership. I think the biggest challenge that we both face is switching off. And I think any business owner is going to tell you, you know, work never really stops. When you're a husband and wife team, that compounds even more. So, you know, we're always talking about the business and about work. So we have to be quite disciplined to try and separate

home life from work life. I guess the other downside is if you've had a tough day at the office, so to speak, and your work colleague has annoyed you in some way, it's hard to come back and over dinner complain about your work colleague to your life partner. So that puts an extra dynamic in it as well. But overall, it works really well. and I bring a lot of complementary, slightly different skill sets.

to the team. Anne's definitely the more creative one from a visual perspective, so she definitely takes the lead on those more creative sides. And I leverage a lot of my particularly Amazon experience, being very analytical and doing a lot more of the analysis and deep diving into the data. So it's quite a good complementary level of skills that we bring to the table.

Adam Cooper (05:06.952)

Absolutely, absolutely. And you touched on there about the skills that you're bringing from the corporate world into sort of advising clients. What lessons have you brought? What are the most personal lessons? Because often, know, entrepreneurs will really value that corporate experience and the fact that you know how to deal with these big behemoths. So what are the key lessons that you've taken that you sort of most advise clients on today?

Dean McKenna (05:34.69)

Yeah, well, think and maybe no surprise with what we're talking about today about digital strategy. I think it's bringing a strategy and a plan into place. So often we find with founders and business owners of SMBs that there's an idea or a concept, but there isn't a strategy that's been documented and put in a step by step approach. And that's really the lessons that we bought from

our corporate experience. think particularly for Anne, working on large multinational business transformation projects, she's got a really strong depth of experience in putting together plans that can be rolled out across the world. And so we bring a lot of that discipline into the small business owners operations.

Adam Cooper (06:30.758)

Okay, excellent. And obviously, Cassia, you you're looking at businesses, digital presences. Often these are small businesses where they won't have very much in place. What are some of the sort of things that you see when you first open the kimono, if you will, and look at the business? When you do that initial audit, what are those things that you typically see for the first time?

Dean McKenna (06:57.56)

Yeah, well, mean, there's a lot of typical things that we do find, Adam, and I like your analogy of opening the cabono. for us, we will go and have, as we all do when we're meeting a client or perspective business partner for the first time, the first place we'll go and look is their website. And we'll go and check them out and look at the website. is that website really explaining what their business does?

in language that their grandmother, I like to say, would be able to understand in simple layman's terms. Is there an up-to-date bio of the business owner or the senior team so that I can understand their experience and what they're bringing to the table? And does the website really present the business in a way that we think the business owner wants to be seen in the online world?

Adam Cooper (07:56.889)

That's great. I like the language that their grandmother can understand. That's a lovely way of putting it. And it would be interesting to understand sort of how you balance and prioritize things. You mentioned there about the bio and presenting the business publicly, but there's obviously lots of elements that go into that. What is it that's the priority when you're doing that first audit, when you're going back to client with...

those initial recommendations, what do you feel that is most important for them to prioritize?

Dean McKenna (08:31.576)

Well, I think like I was describing there, about them and what they do specifically for business owners and small businesses, I think having that connection with your experience and what you're bringing to the table so that you can build a rapport immediately is incredibly important. But above that, perhaps the homepage, that first landing page, that first impression that someone gets, it's just the same as if you're opening the door to

to a shop or coming into the reception of an office. You want to make sure those first impressions are really good, that the website looks professional, has got good branding and good design. It's easy to navigate. It's easy to find the information that you're looking for. So those first impressions really, really are essential.

Adam Cooper (09:28.048)

Absolutely, absolutely. That's great. I guess something that must have changed in your approach in the last few years is AI and the importance of that, you know, relative to Google and search. How has that changed your initial sort of approach in terms of, you know, is it even more important that the landing page is there and those first impressions are there from the from the official front of the of the website? Or is there are there other

tips and tricks that you've learned over the last couple of years that you're now implementing that you weren't before.

Dean McKenna (10:05.246)

Yes to both of those, think, Adam. I we can't get away from the fact that 68 % of experiences still begin with a search engine. So a lot of people are ending up on a homepage or part of a website after they've used Google or another search engine to arrive there. So that's still incredibly important, but AI is layering another level of technical challenge on top of that.

And we're seeing ChatGPT's adoption growth rate is something like five times Google's adoption growth rate. So it's accelerating its importance and influence. So we have to be really mindful about how AI is searching and looking for data and scraping data to present back to its user in search results. And we know that AI is a much more shallow.

looking tool. And so we need to make sure that the websites are structured and presented in a much more clear and easy to understand way for the AI bots, even more so than Google's search bots.

Adam Cooper (11:22.404)

Excellent. There's some really interesting stats there and fascinating that search is still so important, but as you say, the rate of growth coming from from ChatGPT and other AI agents. Yeah, very interesting.

Dean McKenna (11:35.63)

Yeah, well, there's some stats out there, Adam, to say that the chat GPT will overtake Google by 2029, 2030 in the number of searches undertaken. So it's accelerating and it's getting more more important.

Adam Cooper (11:56.309)

Yeah, so there must be a fascinating conversation there about what Google do with their business model in 29, 30 and beyond. I'm sure there's plenty of conversations going on about that. well, obviously the approach that you mentioned before about those skills that you've taken from corporate around strategy and planning, that remains the same, right? Regardless of whether it's Google or it's ChatGBT or whatever other way of finding.

your digital presence. And I noticed when we were speaking before and on your website, you talk about your grow model as a way of kind of helping your clients and you think about this in a framework. you give us a bit of a background on what that is and how that helps?

Dean McKenna (12:44.696)

Yeah, absolutely, Adam. And I think the GROW model is the how we've worked with our clients and help them get to their objectives. And the GROW was standing for gather, reframe, outputs, and wins. And really, it is exactly as you've described, Adam, how we leverage all of that corporate experience and best practice that we've learned over the last years.

and bring that to bear to support business owners. And the first part of that gather is what we find is really, really important. And it's often the area that's overlooked the most with projects. And that's where we will diagnose and discover the business ambitions, understand what their current analog successes look like, undertake a digital baseline, and really identify those blind spots.

and the opportunities that will help shape a roadmap for the future. And we'll use a combination of analog insights, in-person workshops, and also digital diagnostics to really establish a really strong baseline. Then the second part of that is the reframe. And that's where we take all of those insights and turn them into actions. And that's where...

particularly with business owners that maybe aren't as tech savvy as they would like to be, will demystify digital for them, translate the digital space into business ambition and harness those analog strengths into initiatives that can be prioritized and put together a roadmap that will deliver real impacts for the business.

Adam Cooper (14:33.724)

Okay, great. Could I stop there? Cause I think there's a lot to unpack within those first two. So you mentioned about the gather stage and those blind spots, excuse me. What are some of the sort of maybe one example of like a real aha moments? Cause that's when you get those aha moments, isn't it? You've heard from the prospective client, I guess. This is what I think the problem is.

And then you do your diagnosis and your discovery and you go back to them with, actually this is the problem. It'd be great to hear if you've got any examples of like an aha moment where that there's been a disconnect there and you've like opened the client's eyes to something new.

Dean McKenna (15:18.903)

Well, it perhaps picks up on what you were saying, you know, we were saying before there, Adam, about a website content that can be understood by someone's grandmother. And particularly for clients that are operating in a slightly more technical space, then often the danger is that they will write the content to their peers. And so often what we find is content and particularly blog articles that they're wanting to post onto the website.

are very technical and very, very difficult for laypeople to understand. So the aha moment for a lot of business owners is, wow, what reads very logically, very sensibly to me in my professional space actually isn't understood by my potential customers. And so it's totally missing the mark. I've invested all of that time and energy writing really detailed, almost like academic papers.

that are then published onto the website, but they're absolutely serving no purpose to promote the business.

Adam Cooper (16:24.71)

Yeah, fascinating. And it's so, so true that when you're in a world and I guess you, you see this and I've been in corporate worlds as well, where you become so immersed in the language of the corporation and the culture of the corporation that you completely forget that sort of importance of, of simplicity and, and ease of translation. That's really interesting. And you mentioned about

within the reframe about the of the insights that you're able to then translate into ambition. Obviously I'm interested from a financial point of view, this being a financial podcast, in the sort of the financial returns and how that feeds in to your thinking. Is it at this reframe stage that you will start to frame those financial returns and how they will?

align with the digital project.

Dean McKenna (17:20.845)

Absolutely, and that's where both in the gather and the reframe stage, we're trying to harness the ambitions of the business. What are they wanting to achieve from a digital strategy and implementing those improvements? And how does that tie into their ongoing business plan and their ongoing vision for the business and really marrying those two together? And this is why it is such a very unique and business

specific part of the process. This isn't a cookie cutter, fill a questionnaire out and have a plan. This is about understanding the business. What are the particular business challenges and how can we leverage digital to help solve those business challenges? So the metrics we've been looking at are going to vary from client to client depending upon their specific business needs and what they're wanting to achieve.

but it's incredibly important for us to have hard metrics and KPIs in place so that we can demonstrate an ROI and deliver benefits to the business in a very tangible way and help the CFO, in your case, Adam, justify expenditure and investment.

Adam Cooper (18:40.052)

you've read my mind. You've read my mind. I think it's so important, as you say, that you're helping them leverage digital to help solve that business problem rather than creating a website for the sake of creating a website. I think having, from a CFO perspective, having that tangible business goal in mind and those metrics in mind from the outset makes it so much easier when you're trying to make your business case and get it across the line and get the funding.

They're really interested to hear that. So we've touched on the first two elements of the Grow model. Perhaps we could just dive into those second two now. The third one, outputs, was it?

Dean McKenna (19:23.437)

That's right, Adam, outputs. So that's really where we turn the strategy and the on paper exercise into execution. And that's where we start to put things in place and having that high impact solution that can elevate visibility, generate leads, and building credibility for the business in the digital environment. So really creating that digital footprint as we've referred to.

Adam Cooper (19:53.631)

Great, and then I was gonna say it, and then once you've done the outputs, it's then the fourth and final stage, right? Yeah.

Dean McKenna (19:53.899)

And then once we've...

Dean McKenna (20:01.623)

which is the wins. that probably music to your ears, Adam, that's where we're looking at capturing the results, measuring those results, reporting them back, and then refining the plan to optimize. And that's really just a continuous cycle then of analyzing, reporting, and optimizing.

Adam Cooper (20:27.036)

Amazing. Okay. That's really useful. And because often I like the way that you framed it as you're, going through the strategy or identifying the framework. And then you'll continue that continuous optimization. think that's a really smart way of thinking about it. Coming back to the finances and how do you sort of rationalize that approach? Because often clients, and I know from my own work,

will want you to dive straight in. They'll want to understand, how do I save myself money here? What's the best way of getting a return on investment there? And they, as we said previously, they don't often fully understand the shape of the problem. So how do you explain why you start with that sort of the gathering stage and then reframing it? How do you explain the starting with the strategy saves them money in the long term?

Dean McKenna (21:26.423)

Well, I think it's exactly that. It's working out where are we going to get the best return for the investment. And too often in the past, and this is the aha moments that we often uncover, is we've gone down this path, we've thrown a whole lot of money at one particular avenue. It never worked. But when you peel back the layers of the onion, you discover there wasn't a strategy at the beginning of that. It was only maybe one part of a strategy.

maybe not very well executed and no surprise in those situations that the results aren't there and you get a poor ROI. So really we want to dial things back and really understand what it is that the business is trying to achieve and what are the tactics and tools that we can build around the strategy to help deliver on that.

Adam Cooper (22:21.78)

Excellent stuff, excellent stuff. And when we were talking before, you mentioned, think, and I might get this wrong, so apologies. There was a client case study that you had, was it co-design for all? Where you had that kind of, you gave a really good example of how that worked in practice. So it's often easier for the audience to understand it when we use these case studies and examples. So could you, whatever you can, confidentially wise, et cetera.

give an example of how it worked with that client and take us through that journey.

Dean McKenna (22:54.914)

Yeah, thanks Adam. Spot on. Co-design for all is the clients and they're an Aussie client and picking up on Anne and my Aussie heritage, we're pleased to partner with them. And really the situation we found with Co-design for all was they came to us with an idea and it hadn't yet been fully developed into a business strategy or even a digital strategy at that moment.

It was an idea and a concept. So we were able to work closely with the two founders and really understand their business purpose. How would it come back and understand their vision for their business in taking a successful real life in-person workshop delivery system that they wanted to scale and take it beyond just word of mouth in Australia.

to a global audience. And by having that deep conversation early on about what their total business vision was, we could really help understand what they were wanting to achieve and then put in place a go-to-market and a monetization strategy that was going to help deliver on their ambitions. So really, it was bringing the idea to life through some very distinctive branding that helps

And as I was talking before about a website, making it easy to navigate on the website and find your way around. And also putting together a membership platform so that people can join and have different levels of access. And in the future, we're going to be building a community engagement around that so people can share best practices and learn from others in the community that are using the co-design for all tools and techniques.

Adam Cooper (24:52.36)

That's really helped bring it to life. Now that's amazing. And really interesting to hear how they came without any idea, without any, well, they had the idea, but without any strategy, and then you're able to help them expand it as extensively as you have done. And one thing that you mentioned when we were speaking before was I think that the founders had day jobs and they were not necessarily working on this full time. And then you helped them with that in mind. And that's the case for a lot of the audience.

and a lot people starting up businesses will be doing it as a sort of side hustle. What lessons could you take from that co-design for all sort of use case of working with those founders who had juggling multiple balls, spinning multiple plates as we all do. What lessons did you learn from helping them that you could sort of pass on to the audience?

Dean McKenna (25:44.642)

Yeah, absolutely Adam and both the founders are incredibly successful and busy executives. Bit more of a side hustle for them that this is a passion project and for them it's a part of giving back to the community as well. But with two really busy people, they needed support to help execute on some of the tasks and tactics that they wouldn't have had time to do.

And I think also bringing some of our corporate experience as well. We were able to set up a really structured process and program with them. So we had clear milestones, clear deliverables. We weren't also bashful about holding their feet to the fire occasionally to hit on some of those deliverables as well. And I think they valued that structure so that they knew the clear milestones that they had to deliver, the content that they

needed to deliver upon. And also they appreciated some of those tough deadlines as well to make stuff happen. Otherwise, as is often the case, things drift. You don't get the deliverables as quickly as you would like. And a project that might have been delivered in the kind of six or nine months that we were working with these founders on could have been 12 months, two years, or maybe never even happened because

They just didn't get the time aside to work on a business because they're so busy working in the business.

Adam Cooper (27:20.53)

Yeah, I love it. I love it. That's really helpful. so you touched on there some of the milestones that you might put in place and how you hold their feet to the fire. And we talked before about business cases. So I'd like to just dive into, yeah, what are those metrics, know, those key performance indicators that you used with this client, with Co-design for All or with other clients? What are the...

the metrics that you recommend that any founders who are thinking of going into a digital project like you've just described that they think about, just the sort three or four that they can have front of mind to help guide them. There will obviously be more than that, but just to really help focus minds.

Dean McKenna (28:05.547)

Well, in this case, startup new website that they're wanting to get out there and some reputation and some traffic onto the website is critical. here we're focusing with them on number of visitors, click-through rates, page views, and a lot of very specific website metrics, and then also building up their visibility in Google. So we'll be looking at some of the classic SEO metrics like organic keywords.

organic ranks and so forth. For other businesses that maybe a lot of clients that we speak to have been highly reliant on referrals or word of mouth to get business in the past. So for those sorts of clients, we'd be probably looking at leads to client conversion rates. So understanding people that are coming in at the top of the digital funnel, how they're converting into repaying clients and also looking at

cost of acquisition as well. So how much are we investing in analog or traditional marketing activities versus how much are we investing in digital activities and what's that cost of acquisition like?

Adam Cooper (29:17.402)

Mm-hmm. That's really helpful. Really helpful. And I think it's great that you so easily are able to rattle those off as well, because it's not often that a business will have those in mind straight away from the outset. We work with a number of businesses where we spend time guiding them towards those. So the fact that you're going into the project with the clear metrics that you use to help other businesses, I'm sure is incredibly valuable for your clients. So that's great.

And so just changing tack slightly and moving on to what I like to call our business book bonus section, which is where we like to ask our guests to recommend a business book or to make it a bit easier, a podcast or other resource that's been particularly helpful for you in your journey. yeah, Dean, what would you like to recommend to the audience as a business book or other piece of content?

Dean McKenna (30:11.745)

Well, it's not a straight business book, I guess, Adam, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Total Recall, is my book of choice that I bring today. And that's a book that I read as I was beginning my transition journey from corporate life into Cassia Digital Agency. And I found that was really inspiring story that Arnie's got to say.

And there was a couple of milestones for me that I really, that I took away. And one of the three that I took were have a vision and having clarity of that direction. And Arnie was amazing at having that very focused approach to what he was wanting to achieve. Trust yourself. Even when you've got people that may be doubting your change in direction.

or what you're trying to achieve. know, really trust yourself and bank on your skills and capabilities. And then the third was learning from others and, you know, look to others that have trodden on this path before and find out how they've succeeded and what it was that they put in place. So those are kind of, had loads and loads of different learnings. Those are the three that have really stuck with me. And then above all others,

Everything is reps, reps, reps.

Adam Cooper (31:40.436)

Nice weight training metaphor there and Arnie is a legend and but no one has given me that one before in the history of this podcast. So I love that. Thank you very much. so Total Recall, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. So just before we wrap up, what's next for Cassie O'Deen and where can people find you to understand and follow what you're doing?

Dean McKenna (32:07.501)

Well, I guess it it'd be remiss not to talk about the website, which is cassiadigitalagency.com. That's where you can find out a little bit more about the business or my LinkedIn profile and LinkedIn profile. can see a little bit more about what we're doing, who we're working with and some of our experience, but happy to have conversations. I know for a lot of people, business owners, particularly, there's a hesitation. I've heard it all before. I've had a consultant and so forth, but

That's not our approach. We like partnering. We like working with people. We're very happy just to have a conversation and have those initial Q &A type sessions for people that are a bit uncertain and so happy to have any sort of Q &A people might like to just understand what it's all about.

Adam Cooper (33:00.272)

Excellent stuff, excellent stuff. Okay, brilliant. Well, thank you very much for joining me today on the Fractional CFO Show. Dean, really appreciate your insight, your perspective and your time. Thank you.

Dean McKenna (33:09.665)

Thanks, Adam. It's been great.