MKT1's Emily and Zuddl's Ketan on the fuel and engine concept

Emily

I think it's really important that you set all four of these 

types of goals. Whenever you're doing goal setting, whether 

that be, if you're doing an OKR process or a regular goal 

setting process, and even if your whole company, isn't doing a 

rigorous goal setting process you as a marketer, even for 

yourself, make sure you're balancing these things appropriately 

for your role. And this will help you get that fuel and engine 

myths, right? If you think about all this, 

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Kishore

Welcome to backstage with Zuddl, I'm your host, Kishore from 

Zuddl’s very own marketing team. And this is a podcast where we 

share eventful stories from thought leaders across industries, 

to give you epic insights into the world of events and beyond 

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Welcome back, good people. How you've been for this fifth 

episode of backstage with Zuddl, we're throwing it back 

to a fireside chat that we had hosted earlier this year. Now 

the team of that chat was the fuel and engine components to 

hire and scale in an effective marketing function. Now does the 

insightful conversation give us a lot of input into, you know, 

how to approach the whole task of building a marketing function 

without being intimidated or weighed down by the general jargon 

and other obstacles. So without further ado, let me just take 

you to the chat. In this episode, we've kind of curated the 

best points that you can kind of take away with you and listen 

to it wherever you go. Because backstage, as you know is 

available on leading streaming platforms. Now, this chat was 

hosted by roots, very own head of marketing, Caden pundit, and 

joining him was a special guest, Emily Kramer from market one. 

Okay. That's enough from me. I'll leave it to the marketing 

experts to take it over. All right. See you on the other side. 

Guess 

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Ketan

Hello everyone. Thanks for joining in. It's going to be an 

exciting 40 minutes of conversation about building marketing 

teams that can scale. Uh, my name is <inaudible>. Uh, that'll 

uh, joining us today is a marketing superstar, Emily Kramer. 

Who's the co‑founder at market one advisory in market when 

capital and she's built and scaled marketing teams at many 

organizations, uh, in this session, we will seek Emily's 

guidance on, uh, understanding the fundamentals that need to be 

in place to build a strong marketing team. The session will be 

recorded and will be shared with everybody. So don't worry 

about that. Uh, thank you for joining us. Uh, Emily, um, before 

we get into the old fuel and engine framework conversations, 

why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself? 

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Emily

Yeah, thanks for having me, um, and settle. Um, I, um, I've 

been a marketer for the last 15 years. Um, and over the last 10 

years, I've worked at four different startups, always as the 

first or second marketer. Um, joining in when there's not a lot 

of markets, not a lot of place in the way of marketing and 

building that up and at both a sauna and Carta, I built the 

teams up to, to a pretty large scale, um, about 30% marketing 

teams at, at large organizations. Um, and now I both advise and 

invest in early and growth stage startups through market one, 

um, and have worked with about 50 plus companies that way, 

helping them on marketing side. 

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Ketan

Fantastic. Thank you for that, Emily. And thank you for also 

agreeing to mentor, uh, one of the businesses from the 

registers today, uh, at the end of the session, we will reveal 

which business gets an opportunity for a personalized 

consulting session with Emily. Um, Emily, do you want to 

outline, uh, how these sessions work and what is it that you 

will work with these businesses on? 

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Emily

Yeah, really it's up to it's up to the business, what their 

biggest challenges are right now on the marketing side, and 

that could be hiring and who to hire next and building out a 

team that could be prioritizing and goal setting and what to 

focus on, but really I'm just, uh, available to chat through 

any challenges and sort of be a sounding board and offer some 

advice there. 

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Ketan

Fantastic. Um, also just so that, uh, everybody knows at the 

end, after the Q and a, we have a brief networking session plan 

for everyone. Uh, this is a great opportunity to meet a fellow 

marketers and event organizers. So please make sure that you do 

attend this. You'll see a small notification on the top of your 

screen, just click on it. It'll take you to the networking 

session. Awesome. Let's let's get into it straight. Right? So 

Emily, over the past few years, right. Marketing and especially 

tech marketing has become very complex, right? There are lots 

of jargons floating. There are these new niche roles coming up 

every now and then, and marketing increasingly has had a seat 

at the revenue table. Right. You've built teams that Asana and 

Carto, and I'm sure these, it wasn't the same at that time. 

Right. So why don't you talk to us about how it was when you 

joined and what were your mandates when you had joined these 

organizations? 

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Emily

Yeah, so I joined a sauna when it was around 35 people. I was 

essentially the first marketer there, um, and was responsible 

for building the team up from scratch. Um, you know, from my 

cell phone up to about 25 people over about four years. So I 

don't know, I think at that stage there was a lot of ambiguity 

and there wasn't really a, a mandate. It was just, we need to 

grow, we need to build a brand. Uh, let's do that. Um, so, uh, 

that was sort of, you know, I think there's generally a lot of 

ambiguity in those situations and I was really given, um, the 

trust and authority to sort of go and build a team and do what 

I thought was best for growing the brand. And, and, uh, you 

also describing growth in revenue, um, at Cardell was a little 

different in that adjoining when it was around 300 people. Um, 

and they had a fair amount of revenue at the time, but they 

didn't have a marketing team at that time. Um, they had a large 

sales team, um, and they had some people in sales doing 

marketing and some people on product doing marketing, but there 

wasn't a marketing team and they had just rebranded from 

iShares to Carta and there wasn't a marketing team at the time. 

So there was a lot of, um, adding in process kind of cleaning 

up and building up that marketing ops foundation, even though 

it was later in the company's life cycle and getting alignment 

on positioning and redoing the website and adding a lot of 

consistency in. So there was really kind of get the marketing 

foundation in place and also grow really fast. So it was like 

build the plan and flag the plan at the same time. So, um, it 

was, that was a, uh, a true test of, can you, can you, can I do 

what I did at a sauna and building the team, but also do it in 

sort of double time? Um, and yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the 

names for roles have evolved and a lot of the, um, you know, 

some of the tactics that we use have evolved different things, 

work at different times for different businesses and the way of 

marketing. But I think, um, you know, a lot of the things that 

you need on the marketing side have remained consistent. Maybe 

some technology has become more advanced or there's, you know, 

now, uh, you know, certain ad platforms work better than others 

where there's more options for targeting on your website. But 

generally the, the core functions of marketing have stayed the 

same over the past, you know, five, even 10 years, in my 

opinion, like, uh, you still kind of need that product marketer 

that deeply understands the audience and product. You still 

kind of need the content and brand marketers that understand 

the story, um, and how to add value to the audience. And you 

still need that growth side, whatever name we're calling it at 

the time. It was digital marketing. When I started now it's 

demand gen or growth marketing. Um, you still need that, which 

I call the engine, um, to, uh, actually reach these, reach your 

audience, um, and grow. So, uh, yeah, w we as marketers, I 

think just like to change the names of things a lot, cause 

that's what we do. We, we remarket marketing all the time. Um, 

but I think the foundation has stayed similar, which is the 

whole point of this fuel and engine concept that we'll, that 

we'll talk about. 

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Ketan

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Yeah. That's, that's a good analogy. You market the marketers. 

Yeah. So, I mean, uh, yeah. Walk us through this fuel and 

engine framework that you've built. 

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Emily

Yeah, for sure. And if you want to throw up this slide, it's a 

little easier to kind of see it in action or not really an 

action, but see the different parts. So there's other targeted 

marketing. And as I mentioned, the titles and roles change all 

the time. Um, and it can be confusing, especially for people 

outside of marketing to understand who does what and where 

there are gaps and within marketing, it can be confusing to 

say, you know, where do we have too many people and where are 

we really excelling and where did we not have enough? And so I 

use this concept of fuel and engine to kind of strip away all 

of the jargon and say, what do you really need in marketing? 

And in marketing, you need fuel and that's a messaging and 

content, creative, everything that's kind of going out to your 

audience and customers. Um, I mean, it's the fuel that makes 

sense. Um, and then the engine side is, again, everything 

you're using to get that message to your audience, um, all of 

the different channels and also the optimization of those 

channels, um, the tools and foundation. So that's your engine 

and, you know, you need, you need a fuel to run an engine and 

you need an engine to get the tool out there. So, um, that's 

the, that's the generally, you know, fairly simple analogy and 

here all like here are some of the parts of marketing that I 

think fall under each. And there are certainly areas that kind 

of fall in the middle and we'll get into that. But this general 

concept hold that is really helpful, especially when explaining 

marketing to people, new to marketing, which is usually the 

entire organization. 

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Ketan

Okay. So, so, so if I've got it right, then the fuel is all the 

assets that you create over a period of time, right. In the 

end, it's really the distribution arm for those. 

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Emily

Okay. That would be it. Yes. You nailed it. 

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Ketan

Um, so, so what happens when, you know, either the fuel or the 

engine are not up to mark, they're not seeing together. Right. 

What happens then? 

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Emily

Yeah. So I see a few, I see a lot of the patterns and problem 

areas that marketing teams, no matter how large get into that, 

there's some consistency. And when I, when I talked to a lot of 

companies and I, and I talked to tons of companies now every 

day, and I see a few things, some companies will have what I 

sort of call like the, taking this fuel load engine analogy a 

little further, like the empty tank problem. So they'll have 

all engine, no fuel, they're be doing a bunch of paid, they'll 

have optimized their website's conversion flows and spent a lot 

of time on forums and sort of like girls hats, but they have no 

fuels. So they're not saying anything when they reach out to, 

um, potential users or customers, they're just hitting them 

with the same message, like request, demo, request, demo, 

request, demo, when they haven't actually stated the problem 

and the solution and how they can be helpful. And they're not 

adding value when they're reaching out. So that's like, there's 

no fuel, it's all in. And then there's the flip side of that, 

where you're all fuel and no engine. Um, and that's 

essentially, um, you've made a whole bunch of content. You've 

perfected the words. Maybe you spent way too much time on the 

words, but you have no idea of say the copy on your website 

works and your content isn't getting to anyone because you're 

not focused on distribution. You're just focused on churning it 

out, but you're not bothering to see is anyone reading this? 

Are we, how are we distributing this? What channels are we 

using, et cetera. Um, and then the other thing that I see is 

just like wrong fuel, wrong engine. Like maybe you built a 

great engine for a different business and maybe you've built 

great fuel for a different audience, or you've built great 

fuel, but you're not sending it out through the right engine. 

Like you've, you know, created great, um, great thought 

leadership content, but you have no content further down the 

funnel to actually drive people to convert. So, um, if you kind 

of try to diagnose yourself or your company or your marketing 

team and say, where are our gaps, it can really help you figure 

out where you need to focus, where, who you need to hire, um, 

et cetera. So these three patterns, I see them pretty much 

every company and even teams that I've built at different times 

have had different problems. You know, you kinda over‑index or 

do too much on one side versus the other. So I try to think in 

my mind, like, where are we right now? Okay. Like we have a 

major field problem right now. Um, so can be helpful again at 

any stage, no matter how people, how many people are on the 

team. 

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Alright. Okay. 

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Slide for me, which is just about the org chart. Um, so this 

slide is really just saying, um, and I, and I kind of hinted at 

this a little bit earlier, but different roles in a marketing 

team, um, kind of fit into fuel engine or both. And so if 

you're breaking down, this is sort of a example or chart that I 

made. That's probably more applicable to SAS businesses, but, 

uh, you know, can be pretty easily changed out for consumer 

businesses as well, where basically there's this, um, 

communications brand, you know, contracting community comms PR 

and brand side, which is mostly fuel. And then there's growth 

marketing. And then there's product marketing and growth 

marketing is very squarely. The engine. I think that's obvious. 

Um, content marketing is very obviously fuel as is brand and 

creative, but there are some things like community and events, 

which are both, and they shouldn't be both if you're doing it 

right. Uh, if you're doing events right, since we're at an 

event, it's an engine for reaching new people and it's fuel 

because the content that you create as part of that event, like 

this is being recorded and now that's fuel for other things. 

And you can get mileage, which is another like car traveling 

analogy. And I'm not like a big car person, but you know, here 

we are. Um, so there's, there's, you want to get mileage out of 

all these things that you do. So if you're doing, um, events, 

right. If you're doing, uh, PR right, or even product 

marketing, right. It's both. Um, so just kind of wanted to 

point that out and also like not to plug my own stuff, but a 

lot of people get confused about how to build a marketing team. 

And I have a newsletter, um, that has this diagram. And if you 

want to look at it a little closer and have it, uh, broken down 

a little bit more, um, yeah, so that's 

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No, I would just say we'll circulate it amongst the registers, 

but yeah, go ahead. 

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I think that's it on the, on the sort of basics of the fuel in 

the engine and then how that breaks down into the New York 

chart. 

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Okay. So just diving a little bit deeper into this. Um, so this 

is great from a strategy perspective, right? Building a 

frameworks, what are the processes and what are the tactics of 

tactics of practices that somebody could look at should look at 

while, uh, you know, implementing this fuel and engine 

framework? 

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Yeah, for sure. So if you want to go to the next slide, I 

believe on goals. So one of the things I see a lot that really 

kind of makes teams overly focused on the engine and not focus 

enough on the fuel is setting the wrong types of goals are 

specifically only setting goals around metrics, you know, like 

hit this number of qualified leads or generate this amount of 

pipeline. Um, but they're not actually they're prioritizing 

these things. So they're doing quick wins often to get short 

term gains, but they're not really thinking about the long 

term. And one of the differences, in my opinion, especially in 

B2B companies, between sales and marketing, is that sales is 

really focused on hitting revenue that quarter or even that 

month, or even that year. And marketing needs to be responsible 

for supporting that and driving short‑term growth, but also 

building up long‑term growth, whether that be through building 

a brand or creating customer evangelists or whatever it might 

be, you need to focus on the longterm too. Um, and you also 

need to add value to your customers. So they, so they stay with 

you. So you should never on a marketing team, just have goals 

that are numbers based. And I see it all the time, just have 

the numbers goal. You need to also to carve out time to do 

things on the fuel side or to build, uh, a longer lasting 

engine to continue this analogy. You need to also set goals 

around what are the key projects? What are the big projects 

we're going to do this quarter this month, this year that could 

drive step change growth, meaning like non‑linear growth, but a 

step change, um, or drive long‑term growth. Um, so you need to 

actually call out these projects because sometimes they're not 

going to have a short term benefit. And so it's sometimes hard 

when you're just had those metrics goals to prioritize these 

things. So things like this can be anything from like, we're 

going to experiment with a whole new channel, like we're gonna, 

we're going to, uh, for our own conference, I'm in events, land 

with digital and doing an event, but we're gonna, we're going 

to try a conference. Um, we're going to rebuild a website, 

whatever that might be, the project goals. I also think it's 

important to make time for testing because you can get so 

stumped what you're doing. So making sure you have some tests 

running, I often use the analogy like, or not the analogy, but 

just tell people if you don't have a test running at all times 

on your homepage, you're wasting traffic. Like, yes, you want 

your traffic to convert, but you also want to be learning from 

the traffic that doesn't convert. Um, so after a certain scale, 

when you're getting some significance on who's visiting, you 

always want to have a test on your homepage. You always want to 

have a test on your welcome email, that's getting your most 

volume and your email drips. So making sure you're, you're 

setting specific goals around this. The other thing here is 

that sometimes your tests or experiments, aren't going to have 

the best conversion rates or match the conversion rates and 

have proven out channels and tactics. So you have to make room 

for tactics to kind of have the time to perform. So setting 

different benchmarks and goals for some of these tests can be a 

good way to make sure you don't just get stuck in your ways. 

Um, and lastly, there's obstacles and these are just around 

making sure you're making time to build out that foundation. 

Like I said, when I joined quartet, it was 300 people, no 

marketing, there wasn't a foundation. Like we couldn't just go, 

we weren't going to have success with anything else we did. If 

we didn't kind of go backwards and fix some of that 

foundational work on the op side and on the hiring side. So 

it's okay to call out these goals and say, we're going to 

dedicate a chunk of time for this so we can go backwards to go 

forwards in the future. So I think it's really important that 

you set all four of these types of goals. Whenever you're doing 

goal setting, whether that be, if you're doing an OKR process 

or a regular goal setting process, and even if your whole 

company, isn't doing a rigorous goal setting process you as a 

marketer, even for yourself, make sure you're balancing these 

things appropriately for your role. And this will help you get 

that fuel and engine mix. Right? If you think about all of 

these things 

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Fantastic. So in one of your newsletters, I also read about a 

GCC framework that you implemented, uh, to guide the team. 

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Yeah. 

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We can guide into that work as well. I think we have a slide on 

that one too. Yeah. And I won't, I'm not trying to just hit you 

with frameworks. I'm actually, uh, actually someone who very 

much on the marketing side is like, you can't just follow a 

playbook that you've implemented at another company. Every 

company's marketing strategy is going to be different for the 

audience, but you can use certain frameworks to help guide you. 

So I'm very much an advocate for like frameworks and structure 

and process, but not necessarily an advocate for like I came 

from this company, this is what worked. And I'm going to like 

plug in that playbook at this new company. So all that said, 

here's another framework. And this one is essentially every 

time you create something on the fuel side or every time you 

even to create a campaign on the document, you're using to plan 

that you should put a mini marketing, brief what I call the JCC 

or the GAC or whatever you want to call it. Um, and it doesn't 

have to include this set of things. This is just what I've 

found the most useful. It should always include what's the 

goal. Um, and sometimes it should include what's the non goal. 

So let's take an example. I'm writing a piece of content. Um, 

I'm going to put the goal at the top. I'm going to put what 

high‑level goal. Like we were just talking about this ladders 

up to, and also what's the immediate goal. Like we're trying to 

drive, um, conversion of this new, you know, vertical that 

we're targeting. Um, you should also put the audience so often 

people create fuel. That's just for no one or it's for 

everyone. And therefore it's for no one. You need to know who 

you're creating it for. And if it's for a niche audience with, 

or for a niche within your audience, even if it is going to be, 

um, for a small set of people, if it's going to be highly 

valuable for that audience, it can be worth it. So put who 

you're creating something for like big mistake. I see on the 

fuel side, I'm like, who is this for? Where are you targeting? 

And it's like, I don't know. I was like, well, that's why your 

content. Isn't great. Um, I think lastly, um, or not lastly, 

there's, there's two more things. The next one is with 

everything that you create, make sure you have a unique take on 

it or a unique asset to share, or a unique angle. Um, making 

duplicative content, maybe with the exception of some SEO 

content, um, making duplicative content that already exists out 

there with no new angle that's boring and has no interesting 

take it. Doesn't do anything. Um, it's not valuable. So on 

every piece of content, I try to say, what's the unique angle. 

What's the creative, what's the, what's the interesting take 

here. And then the final C is for everything that you're 

creating, you should know where it's going and how it's going 

to be distributed. If you are creating something, let's go back 

to this piece of content and you don't know how it's going to 

be distributed. Don't make it, um, because it's not going to be 

worth it if nobody sees it. Um, so on every single on the top 

of every document that anyone on my team ever creates with some 

exceptions, there's a JCC. And at first it might take some time 

to figure out how to do this, but in the end, it's really fast. 

It's like, you know, usually eight to 12 bullets and it really 

saves time in the editing process. Um, for two reasons, one, 

someone can quickly get a sense of, I know what this is. I know 

what I'm editing for. And two, you take the time upfront to 

plan better and you produce better, better fuel. So that's this 

one. 

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Yeah. So, and I think with the, you know, teams being more and 

more distributed, a framework like this definitely helps, uh, 

set alignment across everyone. You know, because a piece of 

content is not just the content team's job. You've got design, 

you've got distribution, you've got the demand gen folks who 

need to be aligned. So on your newsletter, I did see a good 

example of it. And, you know, folks maybe should check it out 

sometime we'll drop the link somewhere. But yeah, it seems like 

along with the fuel in the engine, right. Uh, the why is, is 

equally important, right? You start with the why, and then 

everything falls into place. Um, so you, you, you know, you 

mentioned that there were these roles that keep coming up 

across the past few years, right? So when a startup, an early 

stage startup begins or building the marketing team hiring is 

one of those decisions that that's crucial, right? Because it 

will define the next two or three years and whether that 

organization will survive or not. Right. So in your opinion, 

what, who should be the first hires? And, you know, we can 

answer this in the context of B2B and B2C, but I love to hear 

what you think about that. 

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Yeah. This is the question that I get asked probably five times 

a day. Maybe not that much, maybe, maybe three to five times a 

day. I get asked this question, who should I hire first? Or who 

should I hire next? And the answer unfortunately is it depends, 

but there's some, there's some common profiles to think about. 

And I think it might make sense to go back to that org chart 

slide if that's easy, just so we kind of wrap it up. Um, yeah. 

So something that I tell people to think about when they're 

making their first marketing hires is that there are kind of 

these three buckets of marketers on product marketing side, 

creative content, et cetera. Um, and the growth side. So 

there's squarely engine, there's squarely fuel, and then 

there's going to product marketing, especially on the B2B side. 

That's very common and people always think they just need a 

product marketer often that early stage startups, it's like the 

hot roll at the time. And I, and I kind of get that, but 

they're like, we just need product marketers. Don't really know 

why, but the truth is is that normally, um, you know, 

conventional wisdom is to like hire up a T‑shaped person that 

like spikes in one area and has, you know, general knowledge 

across all of them. And that's especially true at startups 

getting someone that's just really deep in one area and doesn't 

have the sort of breadth. And this is in like mid‑level to 

senior roles, which you should probably hire some limited level 

as your, as your first person, um, or yeah, mid to senior. Um, 

you, you need someone that has that top, that can understand 

strategy across everything and know where to put in contractors 

and other hires, et cetera. I'll put my arm down now and then 

you need someone that likes not one area, but like one and a 

half. So I call this a pie, shaped marketer, not pie, like the 

food, but pie, like the symbol, like 3.14, um, where there's 

the top. And then there's, you know, two, two spikes. So when 

I'm trying to hire first or even second marketers, I want 

someone that is an expert in one of those areas I talked about. 

So an expert in, in fuel, an expert in engine or an expert in 

sort of product marketing or things in the middle and then is 

pretty competent in another area. So typically this looks like 

a product marketer who also can write, or is really strong on 

that side of things. Or it looks like, um, someone on the 

demand gen side who also has some experience, um, you know, 

writing some email copy or, you know, can create content if 

needed and, and kind of has that like growth marketing, product 

marketing hybrid or pie shaped marketer. So I'm looking for 

people with overlaps, um, early on, but they still need to be 

really, really good at something, um, and then hire around 

them. And the key thing here is that every point in the 

marketing team's life cycle, I can't think of any large 

marketing team, um, or any really successful marketing team 

that doesn't have some contractors and agencies supporting 

them. Um, and there, there are lots of reasons for this, but, 

um, and, and different agencies feel different needs than some 

of that is like the work ebbs and flows. And you need to scale 

up or scale down at certain times. And some of it's just that 

hiring people with very specific specialties is sometimes it's 

easier to outsource that to someone who does that all day long. 

And one of those examples is like, um, SEO, like there are 

people that live and sleep SEO. I'm not one of them. Um, but, 

uh, I mean, I, you know, I know a little, but that's, I'm not 

an SEO expert and, um, hiring someone even on like a, you know, 

20 person team that just is an SEO person. It could make sense 

if that's the crux of your business, but if it's just one sort 

of thing that works for you, all, it probably makes sense to 

have a contractor or an agency work on that because they're 

doing it all day. They know the ins and outs, they see what's 

working across a bunch of businesses and the benefit of seeing 

what works across a bunch of businesses, you know, it can't be 

understated. Um, if that resonates. 

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Yeah, sure. I mean, this could probably be the second most 

asked question about what to outsource and what to keep in 

house. You come across that very often. 

‍

Yeah. People ask that question a lot or, you know, it's kind of 

binary. It's either I want to outsource everything or I'm going 

to outsource nothing and that's neither. One of those are the 

answer. If you outsource everything, contractors are only as 

good, like great contractors and agencies that that can do 

really great work. Um, aren't going to be able to do really 

great work if they're not given guidance and context from the 

company. So you have to well to manage them really well. Often 

I work with founders who don't have marketers yet, and they're 

working with sort of a paid agency and they'll be like, they're 

horrible. They're, they're not working. I'm like, look, this 

agency has worked with three other companies I work with. 

They're great. They do great work, but they're only as great as 

you help them be because they don't have the context. They 

don't know your business and you have to fill in the gaps 

there. They are working with lots of companies. Um, so look 

like the things that always make sense, and there's different 

types of contractors and agencies at different stages of your 

business. Like you will probably have to search, switch, paid 

agencies as you scale things like you will have to switch PR 

agencies as you scale, but no matter where you are the 

marketing team, at least for me, I have always had an agency 

that does paid search. Again. I usually switch the agency at 

some point in the, in the company or marketing team's life 

cycle. Cause there's a difference between finding your first 

whatever number users and your next, you know, there's a 

difference between going from zero to 1 million in revenue, 

there's a different difference, 10 all the way up and lots of 

different increments. And there's different agencies that are 

good at different points, but I always have a paid search 

agency agency at some point in your life cycle, not usually 

early on, but eventually it makes sense to have a PR agency 

because they have media relationships, immediate relationships 

are one of those things that you gain when you're working with 

lots of companies, you have lots of reasons to reach out. And 

any note, you know, your relationship piece is huge. So at some 

point you're going to hire a PR agency. Um, and that compare 

with someone in house who's more on the storytelling side. 

‍

Um, so PR paid search SEO is a good one. And to monitor all the 

things that you're trying to rank for, give you guidance on 

technical SEO and content. Um, and then what else I think when 

you're working on web projects, it can make sense to bring 

someone in to you do the development and design because you 

don't always need all of those resources. 

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Um, and sometimes on the marketing ops side, just getting 

things set up or doing a big project, kind of, you know, 

implement multitouch attribution later on or whatever it might 

be. It can make sense to bring on a specialist, cause maybe you 

don't have that specialty on your team because people are only 

doing this once every few years. And so marketers that don't 

work at agencies, haven't done it like many times, whereas 

agencies have. So those are the things that I say, I think 

require that deep expertise or have those spikes. And that's 

where it makes sense to really bring in contractors, new 

agencies, in my opinion, 

‍

Current. Got it. Um, a slightly tangential question to what 

we've been speaking about right now, right? Um, a lot of 

organizations in the past two years, because everybody's been 

working from home or it's work from anywhere now, you know, 

offices have just made it much more easier for people to work 

from where they want. Right. So it's brought in a lot of 

different kinds of folks that you probably wouldn't have been 

able to hire earlier. Right? So you've got a team that's spread 

across the globe that brings in different, uh, you know, 

diversity into the team and, you know, it's become a different, 

um, the mix has changed basically, right? So when a team is 

growing now in a lot of startups, I hiring across borders, how 

do you ensure that, you know, the diversity and inclusivity 

remains in that team when you scale? 

‍

Yeah. I think this is like all the more reason to be really 

clear on goals upfront. So everyone knows what they're working 

towards, whether, you know, so they understand the why, um, 

really clearly, no matter when they're working. Um, and cause 

you can't just ask or be like, well, why are we doing this? I 

think it's all the more reason to have clear responsibility to 

sort of defined like who owns what, and again, understanding 

where you have gaps on the fuel and end inside, um, and making 

sure the team knows who to go to for both sides of these 

things. Cause you have to work together. Like the people 

writing the content. I, this is always the easiest example have 

to be, you know, working closely with the people that are 

distributing that content. So you have to make sure it's clear 

kind of who's doing what, um, and making sure those people know 

how and when to collaborate. I think also, um, the idea of 

making, putting little briefs on the top of everything you're 

creating, like JCC model is also really helpful because you 

don't need to just tap someone on the shoulder and say, Hey, 

like I'm editing this, but I don't really know what it's for 

because you just know. Um, so I think some of these things make 

it a lot easier to do asynchronous work, um, or to not be 

working in the same set time zone. Um, and even to, you know, 

just to kind of, uh, bring everyone together in that regard so 

that when you do have time to chat or meat or whatever it is, 

you're not stuck in the weeds and you can actually spend time 

talking about strategy together or getting to know one, because 

you have less opportunity to do that when you're not in the 

same place in the same time zone. So I think all the more 

reason to just like get this stuff out of the way, um, in, in 

writing and then you can spend more time on the, on the, 

getting to know people and, and talking about strategy and 

having interesting conversations that, that moves you forward. 

‍

So GSEC so far is my favorite. I'm going to be implementing it 

very soon. 

‍

Yeah. I have to say a kitten. It's so funny. Like I, I'm pretty 

sure it's about the JCC. Like as, you know, sort of a marketing 

leader, there's always things that, you know, not everything, 

but there was always a lot of things I wanted to review that 

went out, especially on sort of the, the larger projects. And 

I'd be like, I'm not reviewing it until there's a JCC on the 

top. And people on my team would be like, that's so annoying. 

Like, well, how can I, I don't have the context, like go back 

and put it on there. And they'd be like, oh, you're so annoying 

about this. And I'm like, I know, but I have to be like, I have 

to look at a lot of things. Um, and then those same people will 

tell me, like the people that complain about the most when 

they've gone to other companies and led marketing teams 

themselves, they didn't like, it's like my secret weapon. Like 

I have to use the JCC. Like it is so great. I'm like, you know, 

told you so like you got it. So it's one of those where it can 

seem annoying, like, and like seeing, like it's taking more 

times to put these things at the top of the document, but it 

actually saves you a ton of time in the end and saves the 

collective time in the end. 

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