Change The 'Could' To 'Should'

What does a former CMO actually think about MINT and lone marketers? 👀

Spoiler: he wishes MINT had existed 20 years ago 💙

This week Emma sits down with John, former Marketing Director at DPD and founder of Peer-to-Peer, for a conversation packed with the kind of straight talking, no nonsense marketing wisdom you don't often get to hear 🎙️

John's career has taken him from night school to the boardroom, from Manchester to Paris, from running marketing across an entire European operation to setting up his own business from an office at the bottom of his garden 😂

In this episode they talk about why everybody thinks they're a marketer (and why that makes your job so much harder), the power of a transparent marketing plan, why you should never try to be exceptional at 20 things, and the one piece of advice that every overwhelmed marketer needs to hear right now 💙

Whether you're a lone marketer juggling a hundred things or a marketing leader trying to figure out where to focus, this one is absolutely for you 🤝

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Mint, Marketers in Need of Therapy. Yes, we joke that we're marketers in Needotherapy, but the team stands for so much more. Training, thought leadership, time-saving tips, tools, a team enabling us to thrive as marketers.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

So, John, welcome to Mint, and it's lovely to have you here today.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Tell us about your journey from marketing director at DPD to now peer-to-peer. Sounds exciting. Tell us more.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Okay, so let's go back a little bit further. So I I left school at 16, wasn't very good at school. Uh I was a late developer in terms of academia. And um I remember being sat as a number two cashier in Charleston in Manchester and realized I needed to pull my finger out and do something about it. So I I went to uh night school and did my uh CIM, uh Chartered Institute of Marketing, and I had to do a conversion because I I didn't do uh A-levels, and then I did two years, I think it was then. I think it's a lot harder to get it now. Um, but once I got that, I kind of I was a I I I woke up and I then went down to London. I was in marketing at Nat West on small business services and loans. Then I left them and went to SecurityCore and I was marketing manager for Cash and Transit, uh, the classic Securicore uh cash movement business. And then in 1995, I went to Parcel Line as the marketing manager. And fortuitously for me, the marketing director, a guy called Robin Parr Davis, left to join a competitor when I'd been there about a year. And he had three reports. There was myself, marketing manager, commercial manager, and sales manager. Sales went into operations, commercial went into finance, and I went into the CEO. And long story short, after a year kind of doing the job, he gave me the title and became a marketing director. So I was a little bit lucky, uh, but I guess you make your own look. Had I crashed and burned another terrible job, I wouldn't been offered the job. So I was now marketing director of of Parceline, owned by an Australian company. Fast forward a couple of years, um, we had three businesses: Interlink Island, Interlink, and Parceline. They were blended together under a single leadership team. I got the CMO job and I was also responsible for a business in Canada. Then in 2000, we were bought by the French Post Office, uh, now DPD or GeoPost. And in 2004, um, they'd just finished buying 28 businesses all over Europe, and the uh the president asked me to come over and work with I think it was McKinsey to um make the sum of the parts better and create something amazing. Um, so I put a blueprint together, I did loads of strategy work with lots of CEOs, and we came up with a blueprint, and then he invited me to come to Paris uh full-time. And I moved to Paris in 2005 with Greta and the three kids, and then the fourth was born in Paris, and I then joined the board in 2008 and I was responsible. There were five of us on the board. I was responsible for strategy, uh, cross-border growth, international growth, key account sales, marketing, branding, sustainability, and a few other bits and pieces. And um, yeah, what have I been lucky? Yeah, I think I have. Um, I'm not the best marketeer on the planet, um, but I've been I what I have my superpower is is getting people to work with me to achieve great things. And it's getting the right people to work with you, which is I think is super important.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Yeah, that's the next question I was going to ask actually, because you've you've obviously had an amazing career in marketing, but and you've gone you you've gone quite fast into that career to, you know, to get that that director role quite early in your career is just amazing. But yeah, what what sort of people did you bring in with you along the way to make sure that happened?

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Well, one of the first things I discovered, so one of the classic things marketeers do, and I've seen this hundreds of times, and it'd be really interesting to ask your mint group this question. But when they go into when they move from company A to company B, they tend to bring with them the agency they're used to working with and so on. Okay. So when I went into Parceline, the incumbent agency was called KHWS, and they were super nervous, I think, about that. I was going to come in and kick them out, sort of thing. And I basically said to them I said, Look, you've got six months to to uh to make me believe that you're the right agency for for us to continue. And they were brilliant, they were absolutely brilliant, and one of my best choices was to keep them, those guys on board. They were at the time about I know 25 people based uh in a really cool, trendy part of London. Nick uh and Andrew and oh forgive me, I can't remember the third guy. I need Mark, Mark, apologies, Mark. Um they were amazing. And I said to them, I said, look guys, if you keep making me look good, I'll never get rid of you. And they did. Their creator was amazing. What I loved about them, quite rare, is they would give me, they would be a strategic thought partner for me in terms of trying new stuff to grow the business and get attention and create awareness and interest, desire and action, all that stuff. Um, even if it meant the some of the budget was going outside of the agency to other agencies, that's quite rare. A lot of agencies, in my experience, will steer you towards what earns then the most money. Might not be the best thing for the client. Sometimes it is win-win, sometimes it's not, and it's a win-lose, right? So, my single biggest tip was have great agency support, like Amber Mountain, for example, right? Second super advice I give is hire really good people who have got the similar culture, similar values to yourself in terms of work ethic, in terms of honesty, vulnerability, um you but also really good people. Um, because marketing moves so fast, it's very hard to keep up with the detailed nuances of being really, really good. So you need your people to be very good at that so you can just operate strategically and let them worry about the all the details, the tactics, the the fine-tuning, the sharpening of the blade, all that stuff, because that's way beyond my capability.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

Yeah, I think there was a lot of marketing managers out there that still feel that they have to do it all and they have to be an expert in everything, and a a lot of people in their organizations think that too, and actually, you can't be an expert in everything, especially it, you know, even like AI experts now, they're not an expert tomorrow, but they're an expert today, it changes so quickly. So you have to have that kind of collaboration of different experts around you, I think, to really help you excel in your your career.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah, no, 100% agree with you. I think it's um it is impossible um to be as good as you need to be at every element. So if you imagine to be an amazing marketeer and drive the business growth that your company needs, there's 20 things you need to be exceptional at. You can't be exceptional at 20 things. Marketing head, whether it's a marketing manager or marketing director, their primary role is to assemble the team, the perfect mix of people, talent, experience, capability to execute the best plan for your business. And your job as the head is to shape the direction that we need to go in and lean into all these people that to harness their amazing capabilities and experience to help you do a great job, not to try and lord it over people and assume you're the only I'm the boss and I'll tell you what to do, and da da da. That is so like Neanderthon 1980s thinking, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Okay, so you had an immense career in marketing, and then you've moved to set up your own business peer-to-peer. Tell us more, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Okay, so my sort of journey with DPD came to an end really in 2011 when myself and Greta decided the kids of a certain age, we need to move back to the UK because we were based in Paris, and my job took me all over Europe. And uh, so we moved back in July 2011, and I then agreed with the boss, the president, that I'd we'd see how it would go with me living in the UK, but essentially being away all the time, and it it was never gonna work. So, long story short, in December 2011, I had dinner with my boss, Paul Marie, and we agreed that um I would be a good lever and I'd work with him to replace all the stuff I was responsible for and hand it over to lots of people. I ended up leaving a year later. I left in November um 2012, and I immediately knew that I didn't want to work for anybody else. I didn't want to, I wanted to try, I always harbour this notion of having an office at the bottom of the garden and I'd orchestrate something from there, and I did the classic icky guy uh technique where all framework, where what am I good at? What do I enjoy doing? What does the world need, and what will people pay me to do? And that sweet spot in the middle was was Glow Vista, and that's I set up Glow Vista, managed to get Glow Vista.com, which I still have. That was the first name, and I was doing strategy consulting work, and and we were bubbling away really well. And DPD was my first client, they gave me an amazing 12-month project to uh design a strategy to build a palette network across Europe, which was which was brilliant, and also doubly so for me, it sent a very clear message to everybody out there that A, I was serious about being a consultant and building a strategy business, and B, that I was a good lever of DPD, because people do like to see something that's not there, and oh, why did he get fired? He must have got fired. Nobody leaves DPD to work in an office in their back garden. Well, I did. I said, because you know, A, family's more important, b, it had run its course. The things I loved about working in Paris and travelling all over Europe, I started to hate. Um, so it was the right time for me, and and it was the start of something amazing. And then fast forward till 2017, I was doing lots of strategy work. I'd probably done over a hundred strategy resets, and um, I've just written a book, Pies of Pie Charts, all about that process and that methodology. And um I was approached by three entrepreneurs about establishing a like a peer advisory thing, not in itself not original, vestige, the alternative board, others have done it, but I did some due diligence and I thought it's so stale, so boring, so vanilla, so morally wrong the way they structured the business model. I thought this is perfect for disruption. So we set up peer-to-peer in 2017, launched our four first boards in 2018, and um yeah, onwards and upwards. And I I firmly believe in the power of once a month for half a day being a safe place with a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs who are rooting for you, helping you develop the right mindset, the right strategy, and the right execution to build an amazing business. So instead of having one coach, you've got ten. What's not to like?

SPEAKER_02 11:46

Yeah, amazing, fantastic. It's a bit like Min, isn't it? In a in the sense that, you know, you've got to be surrounded by people, I think, in your in your career or like business leaders like you're doing to kind of get that intel. So from a from your recommendations, what would you say to those lone marketing managers that, you know, if I remember being a lone marketer and I have an have an idea, and then if my manager shut it down, I would just think, hmm, that probably wasn't a good idea. So what advice would you give to those people on what they can do to make sure, A, if it's not a good idea, it's not just somebody that doesn't know marketing, but also, you know, how you can get that good idea through to your boss?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

I think I think first thing is everybody thinks they're a marketer. Everybody. You know, marketeers are the most targeted people in an organization in terms of you launch a new brand or a new product with a new product name and uh and everybody can critique it. You know, it's not like the the the CFO where half the company doesn't understand the balance sheet and a PL and they can just say what they like and publish the numbers, and half the company can't challenge. Everybody can challenge a marketing person, and that makes them uh in a way a soft target, which is harsh and it's not fair. And you know, marketing, if done effectively, is probably the lifeblood of the organization, right? The most important function. Um, so I remember years ago when I was the CMO of the UK and Ireland, and we used to meet once a quarter with the heads of marketing for our competitors, right? But it was umpired by a facilitator. The reason being was we were sharing in a safe place, legally under certain rules, our market share and pricing, so that we would all publish once a quarter where our market share was by product, it was hugely valuable. But remember, obviously, there's certain things you've got to be careful what you speak about because it's it's commercially sensitive. Also, you can't discuss pricing because that becomes it crosses a line in terms of fair competition. So hence the neutral party that ran it, I think they were a law firm. But I remember thinking, I'd love to talk about this other stuff, which I can't talk about because it is lonely at the top. And how do you guys do that? And what CRM system are you using? How do you get the salespeople to comply and enter all the day tree? You know, this horrible expression crap in, crap out. And I had a whole list of questions. I wish Mint had been around 20 years ago. I would definitely have signed up. I totally get it. I'm passionate about peer groups and peer support anyway. Why wouldn't any marketeer join Mint? I don't understand why you wouldn't.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

Oh, love that. Thank you, John. From your perspective, what do you think good leadership looks like for a marketing team? Like how where do managers go wrong when they're looking after marketing teams when they might not have that marketing background?

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Okay. Okay, so apart from the the early one where everybody's a marketeer and so on, I think I think the other thing that's really important, I've already mentioned about surrounding yourself with good people, good agency, good advisors, recruit well, and so on. But I think the other key element um actually is for the marketeer themselves, the head of marketing themselves. What I used to do, and it wasn't popular with the other functions, I used to publish every year a review on what we've achieved last year, and I published our strategy what we're going to do this year, this coming year. It was a contract between me, the CEO, and the rest of the business. And I gave every director of the company, all the CEOs, all of the over Europe, had this contract. No other function did it, right? And some of my more friendlier colleagues in Paris thought I was mad and they told me so. Others quietly chuckled, thinking, give him enough rope, he'll hang himself. But what I was actually doing was I was being transparent about the return on investment, return on effort across the whole group. We were smashing the numbers. When I joined the board, we were 4.2 billion. Um when I left, we were 9.2 billion. Organic growth. Our ROS went from I think 2% to 10%. We went from number five in Europe to number one in Europe, right? And that's because we were a marketing-driven business, right? So I'm passionate about marketing. Let's be clear though, I've left marketing to an extent behind. That's why I use people like I'm a mountain to help me develop our marketing strategy. Because, you know, I'm I don't know all the latest stuff and so on. So, in a roundabout way, I go back to number one tip is be transparent, make your commitments, publish them. Because when you post it out there, uh either in a physical document or or in a in an email to the boss or the rest of the business, and you're committing to do all this, and this will be the output you're gonna have, and this will be the impact on the business, it's a contract, right? And people like that, and then it's down to you to deliver it. And if you're any good, you should deliver it, which is great. And the second thing is make sure you use good people and don't try and do it all yourself, and um don't be afraid to be vulnerable and say, look, I'm not really sure about how we're gonna make the most of our social strategy. I know it's important, I know we need to do it, we're not doing it very well at the moment. Can you help? Never be never be afraid to get good people in to help you.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

And I think as well, with you know, once you've got a plan out there, that's another way for when there's loads of people that just want to throw more marketing in the mix and make you very busy being busy and not actually concentrating on the strategy, but you can say, where does this fit in with this plan that I've created? And that's where people you can kind of push back a bit and say, This is the plan, this is the vision, this is the goal. Why are we doing this? All of us.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

100%, 100%. That's thanks for bringing that up, actually. Because the other thing is is when somebody says, Oh, we need to do this, you go, okay, which of these things do you want me not to do then if we're going to do that? Because that isn't in the plan. This is the plan that we all signed off on. And it it becomes a uh a grown-up conversation, and you don't um get distracted. Because the other thing is, and it's whether you're head of marketing or you're the CEO or or ops director, having a plan, having a focus to deliver that plan and not get distracted and work on 90-day sprints is absolutely critical. Um, because otherwise, you know, time is our worst enemy. It marches by and you've not got done the stuff that you need to get done in order to deliver results that you promise you're gonna do. So you've got to have that laser focus and having a plan that you can show people and say, look, what don't you want me to do now from the plan that we've signed off? Yeah. Is is really powerful.

SPEAKER_02 18:51

Love it. I always say goal without a plan is just a wish.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

Absolutely. There's no place for hope in a marketing plan.

SPEAKER_02 18:59

Like yeah. Um, and then obviously, I always think now how are marketers really studying at uni? Like, I know we can have the basic toolkit, but now it changes so fast. So, what do you think? What skills do you think marketers now need on top of the basic marketing knowledge to really succeed?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Wow, um okay, I think um the fundamentals of marketing haven't really changed for 50 odd years. In terms of it's fundamentally we've got um products or services which we develop and we we find customers and users to buy and use those products and services in certain industry sectors, in certain geographical territories, those fundamentals have never changed, probably will never change. But with the advancement of technology and you know, global village and and you know, geographical distance needn't be uh an issue now, and and the world moves at such a fast rate. I think the hardest thing now is is is you know, skill up as best you can so that you understand everything that's out there and that's possible. You understand the value that can be brought into the mix by being really good at at um at doing podcasts and interviews or or social posts or um you know telesales calls and closing and going networking and all this stuff that we've all got to be good at, or or no, you've the first thing you've got to do is understand it all and then understand okay, how can I mix the cocktail that's right for our business to be successful? So I think as if you're a marketing student or you're just embarking on a marketing career, I think, you know, yes, specialise, but make sure you understand everything. Because if you specialise in A and become brilliant at A, but B, C, and D are also super important for what you need to get done, but you only focus on A because that's all you've you really specialise in, you've got a problem. So you have to have a good knowledge of B, C, and D, even though you specialise in A, right? But back to the point, get a great team around you. So you've got, you know, you can pull whatever levers whenever you need to pull them to be super effective and really agile. Agility is the key, yeah. I think.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

Fantastic, good stuff. And that's what we've got on Mint. You know, we've got all those experts there. If you're a member, you've got access to all of those experts in every single field. So um it's exactly why we've done that in Mint. So, John, what is putting you in therapy when it comes to marketing right now?

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Ooh, what's putting me in therapy? Um, so I suppose our biggest marketing challenge at the moment is for me personally, it's probably bandwidth. Um having the bandwidth to to focus on the really important stuff. I think I think for peer to peer, our business will grow if. We get one thing sorted, right? If we can get one thing sorted, and this is my brief to to our marketing team, and I'm using D Blick, who's who's is sort of I'm brought in board as a as a sort of a strategic advisor for me. Um, my if I can nail getting our new franchisees from signing a franchise agreement to having a board of 10 members within four months, bang, we're done and we will explode. Uh at the moment, it can take a franchisee a year or longer to get there. So we're not helping our franchisees with a turnkey solution. I need to have a solution that even if they're only uh you know an average business coach, but they're with our solution, if they follow our playbook, they will get to 10 paying members. Because our our board experience is amazing. I know it is. I run four boards myself, right? Um, I've just recently launched a board in London, I launched a board at Penley Manor. So it's a great product. That's my my uh silver board. If I can nail that and if Mint can help me do that, then then uh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'd be all over it.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

Fantastic. And then final question for marketers spinning a hundred plates, um, not knowing what to do, what where to look to next, what one piece of advice would you give them right now?

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Buy my book. No, that's super selfish. But they might want to buy it anyway. No, uh one piece of it. I'll give a marketer who spinning lots of plates. I would I would do what actually we did last week with Dee, and that's roll it right back to one fundamental and sort of at the end of the day, you know, if we can nail that, then from that we can kick on and build something amazing. I think the problem or the challenge we all face, uh but especially marketeers, is there's so much we could do, but we've gotta we've got to change the could to should, right? And really nail we should really just do that. Park all that stuff, get this nailed, and then move on, and then move on and then move on, you know, and take those steps in the good direction.

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

So changing the could to should is what I'd do.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

That's the thing. I think you can well win out of control, meaning loads of little things badly. Go strip it down, go back to basics, do one thing right and then grow from there.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

But definitely, you know, use a group like Mint. You know, go ask your other colleagues and say, because it you're you're not competing. It's a safe place to be vulnerable and say, look, I'm really struggling with this. And then get the advice from the room, listen. Try not to push back and meet and ban yes but. Yes but means I'm not listening, right? Yes, but I've tried that, didn't work. You know, forget yes but and keep listening and thinking, okay, maybe I need to strip this back and have another go, but in a more simplistic, more effective way.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

Love that. Amazing advice. Thank you so much for joining us, John. You have been amazing. Loads of nuggets there, which I'm gonna take with me for sure. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

My pleasure, thank you.