An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Pay attention to your company’s core cultural values, be clear and consistent, and do not compromise on whom you hire. New hires that demonstrate cultural fit will, over time, maintain your company culture for the long term and not work against it. Consistency with these values can also become a key retention mechanism over time. The book “Culture Code” explains how defining, maintaining, and upholding critical values with your team can help mold the company’s culture. Providing opportunities to model corporate culture through daily interactions can have a profound effect on instilling cultural values for the long term.
Startups usually start with a small cohort of close colleagues. But what happens when you add a bunch of new people into this close cohort? How do you maintain the company culture? In addition, what is needed to successfully scale a business to increase market share or to increase offerings? How can a small startup grow successfully to a midsize and then large company? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experiences about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Jennifer Apy.
Jennifer Apy is an accomplished growth marketer with 30 years of success at fast-growing B2B, B2C software, SaaS and services companies, from Fortune 500 companies to startups. She excels at aligning sales, marketing, product, and development to drive revenue growth using traditional and digital marketing strategies. From steady 10/20/30% YOY growth to 200% annual growth for new businesses, she gets results and builds skilled teams that drive metrics-based marketing excellence in deadline-pressured environments.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
I studied computer science in college because I relished the challenge but had no idea how I was going to use it. After a few years, I realized I wanted to be in marketing so that I could talk to customers and make sure the products I represented met their needs. Fast forward 20 years to the digital marketing world, where understanding the “Martech stack” and data analytics is critical to revenue generation. I never realized that my technical background would help me quickly expand beyond being a brand/print/broadcast/direct mail marketer to the omnichannel B2B and DTC marketer I am today, helping companies achieve growth through digital channels.
You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
Being at Adobe during my transition to Creative Cloud was a highlight. Helping a large organization think about ways to analyze user behavior and develop predictive data points for accelerating free-to-paid conversion was a seminal learning moment that has helped me adopt a test-and-scale approach that I use with growing companies today. After the launch, I applied what I learned to help startups and small businesses in various industries bring their products and services to market and deliver steady growth rates while navigating channel, competitive, and company culture challenges.
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
Disc golfers are amazing people. They care about their families, the sport, and each other. When I helped ZUCA launch into the disc golf market, I traveled the country to understand how and why they needed disc golf carts and how the product fits into their lives. Those experiences enabled me to craft a cost-effective go-to-market for disc golf carts that achieved market share leadership within a year from launch, despite heavily entrenched competitors. I discovered how accessible and enjoyable the sport is, why it is so popular even in cold weather climates, and how a cart provides utility both on and off the course. I witnessed the fierce pride and camaraderie the community shares on the course and on social media, leveraging this to drive a lot of earned media. These insights helped me form a cost-effective marketing mix focused on amateur players that competitors had ignored. Enabled a Blue Ocean breakout value curve!
Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake and the lesson you took away from it?
As digital channels become more crowded and noisy, achieving the performance required to scale a business has become more complex. This means more time and energy to get each channel’s approach (creative, keywords, landing pages, nurturing sequences) right. Which might mean pulling back on the number of channels you start with. The mistake I have made in the past is to be overly ambitious with the number of channels needed to scale and spread the budget too thin at the start. Instead, I have learned to focus on one or two channels initially, iterate quickly to get them right (or nix them fast) then move on to others.
Sometimes the challenge is that a market is narrow, and it takes time to get significant data to prove efficacy. In this case, I have learned to look for early signals that a campaign will work or not by combining customer insights (qualitative) with early quantitative data. It also may be possible to focus on one critical metric to optimize to provide early go/no-go decision data.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
As a fractional CMO for small ready-to-scale companies, I am often brought in at a time when there are very few marketing people. Sometimes their marketers have transitioned from another area, or the company is ready to hire an internal resource but only has a budget for a junior-level person until they are confident they have a strategic marketing plan to win. In these situations, I often work alongside the marketing team, developing the messaging, positioning, and competitive foundation, then testing and scaling into the channels and campaigns that deliver cost-effective execution. I love working with people who are driven to succeed and ready to learn, and when it is time to either promote or hire my replacement, I can take satisfaction that I helped the career of a marketer that will carry on what others have taught me.
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
I have worked with some incredible CEOs of all ages and stages in their careers. I always admire the ability to understand a situation and create clarity that helps everyone arrive at a logical conclusion or reasonable course of action. Moreover, if they do not fully understand a situation immediately, they ask great questions to help them achieve the clarity they need to act. It takes a lot of patience and humility to listen actively and ask thoughtful, clarifying questions before providing a point of view on a complex or emotionally charged topic.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s talk about scaling a business from a small startup to a midsize and then a large company. Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”? Please give a story or example for each.
Tip #1 — Determine the most cost-effective channels for each stage of the customer acquisition funnel. Whether you are marketing a product or a service, B2B or B2C, think of customer acquisition as a funnel. Be clear on the purpose of each marketing campaign or activity — does it primarily generate awareness (top of the funnel, cold outreach) or does it build on pre-existing awareness and nurture to conversion (middle of the funnel), or does it create urgency and endeavor to convert with an incentive or offer (bottom of the funnel). Understanding the role helps define the metrics you are looking for. Pay attention to conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel first. Otherwise, you may find yourself paying for top-of-funnel leads, only to see them “leak” out because the bottom of the funnel has not been optimized.
Whether the channels you test into are social media or institutional influencers, eCommerce, referrals, content marketing, paid search, conferences, and trade events, if you lead with insights about your customers first, you will keep your marketing mix focused on the most critical channels at the heart of your customer acquisition engine. Then, continue to test into new channels, scale the ones that work, and pivot over time if necessary (your channel mix may shift as awareness grows, or as users migrate to new channels, you might need to shift your mix).
Tip #2 — The more you can harness the enthusiasm of happy customers, the quicker and more cost-effective your marketing mix will be. The challenge is to figure out how to get them to do this naturally. Hiring influencers or celebrity pitch partners may not work for your business or may have a limited effect. However, getting authentic recommendations from friend to friend will never go out of style. Think about where and how a happy customer might use your product or service and how you can create a natural sharing moment where someone asks your customer — where did you get that? Can you tell me where to get one? Cultivate V-Factor!
Tip #3 — Look for a blue ocean breakout curve to create a new way to compete in any given category. This requires careful attention to what is essential to customers, especially emerging trends your company/product/service can capitalize on. The Blue Ocean Strategy Framework developed by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne provides examples of how companies have navigated out of the red ocean of competition and created customer-driven differentiation.
It could be as straightforward as finding a new target audience to cultivate or launching a new product to help you break out of your current competitive set. Or it could be as drastic as disrupting yourself before your category gets disrupted (see Tip #5). Either way, making these shifts based on shifts in customer needs and demands will ensure your marketing motions have merit.
Tip #4 — Pay attention to your company’s core cultural values, be clear and consistent, and do not compromise on whom you hire. New hires that demonstrate cultural fit will, over time, maintain your company culture for the long term and not work against it. Consistency with these values can also become a key retention mechanism over time. The book “Culture Code” explains how defining, maintaining, and upholding critical values with your team can help mold the company’s culture. Providing opportunities to model corporate culture through daily interactions can have a profound effect on instilling cultural values for the long term.
Tip #5 — Future proof your business by staying close to the wants, needs, and experiences demanded by customers and prospects, and the actions of direct, indirect, and adjacent competitors and substitutes, so that you can spot potential macro disruptors that could upend entire categories and could take you and your competitors down. If you are zeroed in on core customer and competitive insights, you will hopefully spot these category disruption trends before they disrupt you. And if you are a first mover in making necessary shifts, you could reap the benefits of being in a blue ocean (Tip #3) before other companies catch on to the trend.
Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest to address those errors?
Don’t mistake spreading your budget too thin or spreading your efforts too broad too soon, or you will not learn quickly enough about what works and does not. In their haste, companies often mistake doing too much at once, feeling they must invest in everything quickly and hoping something will stick. Avoid these random acts of marketing in order to more quickly assess the channels that deliver the best results, leading to a more consistent performing marketing engine.
All channels are not equal. Some might perform more cost-effectively or require more investment than others, and sometimes there are interaction effects that help with their combined effectiveness. Methodical testing and scaling will provide the information you need to prioritize the channels you need to invest in.
Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?
The first step is to be very clear on the company culture and ethos and make sure that the company’s values are clearly articulated. Then ensure that the existing organization is aligned with company values daily. Next, encourage everyone in the company to celebrate everyday examples of cultural values in action through daily shoutouts. Catching people doing the right thing will foster a culture of encouragement rather than penalization, allowing you to address actions that work against company values effectively. Having plentiful examples at the ready demonstrates “culture in action”; without it, your stated company values might be perceived as “all talk and no action.”
Think about the onboarding experience carefully. How do you introduce cultural values simply and clearly and help new people see them in action every week, every month? What are the signals that someone is not falling in line with the company’s cultural values? Having consistent criteria will help people internalize vital aspects of the culture.
A key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
In smaller organizations, you cannot just leave this up to HR (or you might not even have an HR person yet). However, everyone in the company should be able to explain what they do, the best way to do what they do, and the processes for crucial workflows and projects. I know there are other tools, but all of the small-scaling companies I’ve worked with since 2015 use Google suite and Slack as their leading platforms for company-wide communication, both formal and informal. And a basic CRM/marketing automation platform such as Hubspot or Salesforce. Even Intuit, a global organization with over 10k employees, uses Slack.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
Shortly after the company-wide announcement informing everyone of a new person’s role and scope of responsibility and where they fit in the company org chart, give them access to whatever communication tools they need quickly. For example, in today’s hybrid and remote working world, using Slack as your “digital HQ” can help new hires see how the organization communicates and works on projects together, giving them daily examples of company culture in action.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
I believe everybody has a story, and if we heard it without filters, we would have a greater understanding of others in this world. However, we do not always have opportunities to listen to others’ stories, appreciate them, learn from them, and incorporate them into our understanding of the world, much less shape our thinking, actions, and decision-making in new ways. How much do we miss because we do not take the time or make the space to hear each other’s stories without filters? In today’s pressure-cooker world that seems to spin faster every day, I, too, am a guilty proponent of crisp 30-min zoom calls that are all business. However, when the time feels right, I do try to make a sincere effort to authentically insert a few personal comments or questions that open the door to deeper understanding.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Connect with me! Chief Outsiders has published several of my articles on their blog, and I have written a few for The Startup on Medium and Linked in. So reach out to me anytime to chat about demand generation, channel development or campaign trends. I especially love hearing about emerging businesses that have found product market fit and are ready to scale!
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
Jennifer Apy Of Chief Outsiders On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
