E032: Why Strategy Always Comes Before Tactics

Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and I’m delighted today to be joined by Angelo Ponzi, who is a highly experienced marketing and brand strategist, fractional CMO, keynote speaker, podcast host and author of the strategy blueprint, with a career spanning over three decades, Angelo has led marketing, branding and research initiatives for global brands like Disney, Ericsson AT and T and Kendall Jackson, as well as numerous startups and mid sized enterprises. As founder and president of Kraft, Angelo helps small to medium sized companies develop research driven strategies to accelerate growth, maximize ROI and reduce risk. His work combines deep expertise in customer segmentation, positioning, brand messaging and integrated marketing execution. Angelo also hosts the business growth Cafe podcast, where he explores the challenges and opportunities businesses face in scaling sustainably with hands on experience in B to B, B to C and D to C sectors, Angelo brings a unique blend of strategic insight and creative problem solving to leadership and growth conversations. Angelo, hello. Nice to meet you.

Angelo Ponzi 1:20
Hi Mark. Now that was a mouthful. Yes,

Mark McBride-Wright 1:23
I didn’t do my vocal warm up, I must admit. Because, as you know, I’m a bit late in getting to this recording because I got lost on the New York subway. So thank you for still being around and available to do the recording. So your biography has helped me do my vocal warm up. There

Angelo Ponzi 1:42
you go. Well, I appreciate the lengthy introduction.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:46
So I was saying to you before we before we started recording, that I’ve worked with some service specialists to do sort of fractional services for different different organizations, but I’ve never actually worked with a chief marketing officer, fractional CMO, or a strategist. I guess you’re going by given the title of your book. So tell us a bit about what you do. What keeps you busy?

Angelo Ponzi 2:12
Yeah. So thank you for that. I am, as you said, a fractional CMO, and really where I focus is on the strategy side. Now, I grew up in, you know, a lot in the advertising agency business. And throughout that, I went client side and went back to the agency side and, and we can explore any of those that you want. So I jumped back and forth, because I wanted to know what it was like to be a client. Because, you know, in the agency world, I was always complaining about my clients didn’t know anything. And of course, then I got to be a client and and learned what they had to go through. But that experience was, was really terrific. I ventured out a few times during that path in not to go through the entire story yet, but what I recognize throughout this journey was that I where I really like to focus, was getting data, getting information and and dissecting it, you know, peeling back the onion. You know, being I used to jokingly say, I’m like the Sherlock Holmes of marketing, right? I really just kind of looking for the nuances. Why? Because ultimately, how do I market to you? How do I market to you? Mark, I don’t know you, right? So I have to learn about you. I have to understand what your behaviors are, what’s important to you, whether it’s B to B, B to C, doesn’t matter. We used to go, and there was days when you go, well, they’re a business to business to business person. They’re completely different than a B to C person. But we’re all people, right? So now we can reach us in all sorts of different ways, regardless of where I sit. So I have to understand what drives you, what motivates you. Why do you purchase a product in the B to B side? Where are you going to invest $500,000 in a new valve for the oil and gas industry, because it’s not like you can go down the supermarket buy one, right? So, but, or, how am I going to convince you, like somebody’s tried to do to me, to get walk away from tide, which is what my mother used. So if that emotional connection with that, you know, to move on to a new product to wash my clothes. If I don’t know any of those things, I can’t mark it to you. And so I found that during my tenure, if you will, or multiple 10 years, that was the most important. Because, you know, in the creative side, you would use this information to come up with your your creative executions, but it but the strong ones were, were really based on strategy, not just I got an idea, I want some pretty even one of the clients that are client side journeys was in the research business, but it was an evidence based research company, and I had no idea what that. It was, and when they told me, I go, wow, that’s fantastic, because why I’m always believing I got to talk to customers. So they had a process where you never actually had to talk to customers, which was interesting. It was kind of a deconstruction, reconstruction process and this coding. But ultimately, it was about, does the campaign solve or address the strategy issues. And that really kept driving it even more so that that I was on the right path and and, you know, the time I’ve invested in doing all that over the years. And then ultimately, when I left that company and started this 12 years ago, I had a choice, do I become that strategy guy and continue down the path that I really loved, or do I go become an agency again? Because I had already done that once before, and I decided I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want those headaches. I didn’t want a bunch of employees. And I liked the idea from previous experiences working with multiple companies. So I got the kind of the best of both worlds. Get to work with multiple companies. I get to do the things I really love from a strategic standpoint, and helping companies address problems, whatever they happen to be. So you’ll

Mark McBride-Wright 6:09
work with companies at all levels, offering CMO, CSO type services, helping and do you work mainly in products or in services or a bit of both, in

Angelo Ponzi 6:21
both. In both. I don’t venture too far into the sales leadership or fractional sales. I have a partner that I bring in, and vice versa, he brings me in, but more of that, cmo and I mentioned earlier, maybe Chief Strategy Officer, because it’s me. It’s all about strategy and and sometimes when I talk to companies, they they hear they bookend, they forget the chief, and they forget the officer. They think of marketing, and then they go write the tactics, yes. And so when I sit there and say, we’re going to spend the next 30 days, you know, digging into your company data, and it’s like, well, no, we need that social media campaign. And again, I say what I just said to you, it’s like, no, we need to understand. I worked with a company we and we did this, and this was about five or six years ago. I now sit on their board, and we dug into their data, and what we found, for example, that over their 20 plus year history, they won or win, 30% of every proposal, 30% of all their proposals, they went. Now the question becomes, which 30% do we want to win? You know, so when you start dissecting the accounts and sales, and you know, one sales person had 750 accounts, maybe 100 of them or so were really the big revenue drivers. But the rest, you know, $1,000 here, $500 well, they added up and and so now, how do we take those accounts that are not generating money? So we brought in an assistant that could, she could handle those. She got the salesperson, got the focus on the bigger business and and she made more money, and she, you know, we had more success, because why we refocus people on how they were selling? Now that was not my wasn’t sales coaching, right? But it was more that strategic shift that impacted the company. And also we had to look at, well, what happens if we get big orders? This was what we wanted. But then I would ask the talk to the inventory people, and they said, well, we don’t have inventory that could support an order like that. So we had to now say, Okay, we need to think, how quickly can we get stuff out of China or out of Belgium? Was what we’re getting our other products. You know, are there six, eight week lead time? Well, that would hurt us, right? Because we can’t fulfill the orders, yeah, and so we so that’s when I talk a lot about strategy. It gets beyond, you know, something Tactical. In this particular case, it was like, Okay, we want to expand across the country, but we can’t be shipping product and get it where we need to go. So now we need to look at distribution centers. We put one in the middle of a country. We put one on the East Coast. You know, what are our target audiences? Which, which vertical markets are generating revenue for us? And when I got there, they had five target verticals, but only three of them were really generating money. The other two we’ve been living along for years yet, and they were investing. They’d never cut, never, nobody, ever dug into the data. They just were, you know, going and nobody analyzed stuff. And that’s what I was saying. It’s just taking the time to really understand. And then in that particular case, we did research, we did we interview, we interviewed their dealers, their customers, and really started to understand what their expectations were when they bought the product. Then we could shift our messaging from a company center ground we have great products and their quality and the last to more of what’s going to benefit you we’re going to create in this particular case, it was malls. So we’re going to create memories for your customers. Of MERS. It’s a totally different speak after the same result, a totally different speak that wouldn’t have come about if we hadn’t done what we’d done, or working in the wine industry. We worked with a brand was years ago, called Callaway coastal. Well, we’re in California. We went coastal. Wow, we’ll go down and shoot a lot of pictures on the beach, and that’d be great. And then along the way, we’re like, Well, you know, we really didn’t do a lot of research. We just lot of gut feel. And so we stepped back, we started doing research, and found that our perception of coastal is very different from somebody that’s on the East Coast or, you know, in the Great Lakes, or, you know, the middle of the country or the Gulf of Mexico. So our campaign would have failed, yeah, just by not understanding those nuances of coastal and then we were able to address that. So again, all came from, from using research to provide the insights for people to make strategic decisions.

Mark McBride-Wright 11:00
Yeah, I think people are probably too quick sometimes to want to just go straight into action and sort of project what the perceived solution is for the market to the market, rather than just taking the time to figure out is what you think is the right thing, actually the right thing. And then through a process of engagement with your intended customers, which is listening, you’re not selling anything. You’re listening. You’re doing research, right, market research, ultimately, what you then come up with is a better solution. And then do you find, when customers have clients have done that, they then have higher returns because the people that they consulted with, that they engaged with, actually then want to buy the services or products that have been developed.

Angelo Ponzi 11:48
Yeah, if you close that loop, I just finished some studies for a company that’s in the in the B to B space, and they got number one, a lot of recognition. I mean, people were saying, the people I interviewed were saying, you know, let them know we really appreciate the fact that they they did this right So, right there and then they already try something attaboy, so to speak, right? Because a lot of companies don’t do this, and it shows that they’re interested in better understanding how they can help their customers do a better job. And so, so we do see a change as my research studies I just finished, I’m actually presenting on Thursday, and there’s nuances, and I’ve already been able to apply. I have the insights. They don’t have them yet. So I like, I took some of their emails that were fairly generic. We’ve got the best this, we got the best that, and I applied all the fine, some of the findings to the emails. When I shared it with the with one of the folks, and they were like, oh my god, this is great. We’re actually giving you know, value, and give rationale why what we’re saying is backed up by now the data and yeah, and what we know, the customers think about us and all this kind of stuff so that so it just really the information you know, can go across to our in our process. Typically, we end up doing messaging, and we do overarching messaging and sub messaging and kind of foundational messaging that can apply to any execution, or even if you’re going to craft something new, we now have the structure of what’s our character as the brand, you know? What are the what are the key points that we always have to say, Yeah, you know, we it’s interesting in this process that we go through internal, external, and one of the questions is, you’re in an elevator, you get 30 seconds. How would you describe the company? Yeah, it if I interview five people, if I interview 50 people, I get 50 different answers. Right there. There’s a disconnect. Why? Because all these people are, you hope, talking about you, but they’re not actually talking about you. They’re, they’re, you know, their answers a lot of times they’re not very comprehensive, right? It might be one point, or there might be just an ongoing rambling. And so part of that process is, how do we get those messages succinct, and whether it’s internal sales teams or external customers, to really understand what our value propositions are? And do

Mark McBride-Wright 14:17
you find for the organizations that are successful then, and having 50 people in the elevator pitch assessment say the same thing, more or less, are ones where the value state, the mission statement, the value statement, except the vision statement and all that stuff that underpins a company and why it exists. There’s a real water tightness around it all, and the show up as that in every service that they deliver, in every product that they make, and every client interaction that they have,

Angelo Ponzi 14:52
yeah, oh, absolutely, that’s always the goal. You know, yeah, I can’t say it’s easy, but that’s all always the goal. So when I look at a business. I look at not only externally, but I look internally. So I have to know, are they in alignment? Yeah, you know, my, my, my belief is, I go in and, you know, there’s whatever, the the C suite and, and I if I don’t know how they think internally, and you know what their kind of perspectives are. So I have an assessment tool that I use, and so we part quantitative, part qualitative, and I can see very specifically if there’s misalignments or alignments, and then I can point those out. And ultimately, it’s not up to me, it’s up to them to fix things. But I highlight these are the important, you know, 25% of the things you really need to fix. And there’s one case where I always use this as an example, because, you know, this was a seven decade old company. Current management was there about 30 years and one of the questions was about onboarding, customer, employee onboarding. And it said, you know, do you have a whatever the question was, Do you have a strong onboarding program? I can’t remember now, can’t remember now. And the guy responsible for it rated it a one, the CEO. And he was the number two guy in the company. The CEO rated it a five. And so when I put it on the screen, they looked at each other and said, Well, you rated it a one, and you rated it a five, and why? And I said, you know, gentlemen, the more important thing is, you guys have worked together for 26 years, and, yeah, this is now being raised. I mean, that’s so I need to know what we’re going to fix, what the issues are. So when I present my findings, if we’re not in alignment now, we’re not going to be in alignment when I show up. And so my goal is to try to figure out what I need to help them change or mitigate or bring in a lot. Again, I use the word alignment, so when ultimately we get to the end, we all know what we’re trying to accomplish. We all know we’re going we all don’t agree on what the kind of the brand positioning is. You think you do. I hear this. This is who we are. Then you go out and talk to customers, and you say, describe this company, and it’s like, it’s totally different, right, right, right? So, so somebody’s wrong. You have to decide you’re going to let the market define you, or you’re going to start changing the market behavior. The one thing that that it’s important to understand, right? It is, building a brand reputation takes time. Doesn’t happen overnight. Tactics can happen overnight, and they can also hurt the brand building, if you will. And that sometimes is hard for for folks to understand, is we can change the perception of your brand. We’re going to do this through some of these tactical things, some short term, mid term, long term, but it takes time, and we takes time to build a brand, and we can destroy it in minutes. And it could take hours to fix right so, or hours to to fall apart, fall apart. Thank you.

Mark McBride-Wright 18:01
You’re remembered. If you have one bad action, you’re remembered for that bad action, rather than the years of reputation building that you had. I’m listening to you with real interest. As a business owner, myself, thinking about the process that we’ve gone through, and even I’ve gone through as an entrepreneur running a business for eight years. You know, I was guilty of creating a very bloated product mix. And sometimes the training that I did that really helped me was that sometimes founders can’t let go, and you have and that’s then what leads to a very bloated product mix, and you you always, you continue to do what you’ve always done, and you keep adding on to your repertoire of stuff. And what we used to run careers fairs, connecting diverse talent with Inclusive employers. And it just got to a point where companies weren’t spending as much on them. We never quite got the compound growth that I wanted from the events, you know, going from 10 exhibitors to 20 to 40, maxing out venues, scaling the, you know, the footfall, etc. And actually, they’d served a purpose to get our company name out there, equal engineers, our company name out there as a conduit for, you know, diverse talent, but we needed something different. We needed we needed a new way of engaging with the audiences. Because business behavior patterns were changing, student behavior was changing, what was wanted, what was needed. So we, we sunsetted them. As a new phrase that I learned, we sunsetted them, and it was actually quite cathartic as a founder, because I found that I’d lost the joy in them a little bit, you know, and no longer were finding them fun to execute and run, and I’d still enjoyed the buzz and the energy when we. Did them, but that was a real interest. That was a real learning point for me. And when I’m listening to you now, I’m thinking about the other services that we used to have, and we used to kind of meander between fully business, well, B to B business, fully secured through work that we’ve done, or um public procurement opportunities, you know, so submitting responses to bids, and both have their strengths, and both have their weaknesses, and both bring about different types of anxiety if they’re not not quite going the way you want them to go. And we just had too much of a too deep a strategy on too many fronts, we had too many services. And I think, on reflection, I think I tried to build a business too quickly that the market wasn’t ready for yet, you know, we tried to come up with solutions on recruitment and on leadership development and on student development, you know? And actually, some of those services, we had some contracts that we won, some successful placements, but they never really took off. And so I’ve been on a process in the last year of refining, narrowing back to what is our reason for being. And I’m as I listen to you, I’m questioning, I wonder if actually, we’ve been guilty of going straight to the market with what our perceived solution is to the problem. And the reason we’ve done that is because we’ve had anecdotal success with certain clients. But maybe if we were to just engage the market in a sort of fact finding mission. It might then make sales easier in three months time or so, because we’ve consulted and engaged with the organizations that we ultimately want to work with, you know, but we’re not coming at it from a sales angle. We’re coming at it from we want to hear from you angle to help inform what we’re creating and developing.

Angelo Ponzi 22:03
Yeah, well, I think it’s, you know, it’s, I’m chuckling inside, because I still have some things that I I have is in my repertoire that I probably haven’t done anything with years. But it’s kind of hard to let go. It’s very hard for a founder to let go of certain things, and we’ve gone through some iterations, for sure, but it’s that that getting that perspective of what’s important and how they perceive is, is there, it’s it’s it. I see it so many times that, especially when I get into, like product profitability and things like that. Again, I would you call that marketing or accounting, or find Chief one, you know, Chief Financial Officer, but I have a process, and I mentioned that it’s actually one of the chapters of my book. It’s about, how do you determine what products are generating, sales, generating revenue and profit. Which ones you’re looking at, it might be generating some profit, but not a lot of sales, and vice versa, generating some sales. Or ultimately, you’ve got a bunch sitting around that you just can’t let go of, because they’re maybe what you founded the company with, and nobody’s buying it. But it’s just, you know, sucking up energy or time or and if it’s a, you know, physical inventory, right? You got now get inventory sitting around, doesn’t go anywhere. And so really understanding that kind of a combination, but it’s what it what we believe, what I believe everybody needs is necessarily what everybody needs, right? It’s Yes. And so by trying to understand and and this kind of exposure. I I did this for a for a meeting. I belong to an organization, and there were several marketing people. And the guy was like, you know, I hear marketing, marketing, marketing. I don’t really understand what everybody does. And so I put together this, this map, in map, but example, strategy, tactics, sales, and so the people in the room, there was five of us were supposed to highlight where you focus. Now, as a CMO, I can do it all, but where I focused is this. One person came in and highlighted the entire 1520 things, which was ridiculous. Another person came in and highlighted the digital another person came in and highlighted the sales. But that was, for me, such an a simple tool, that nine out of 10 times when I give somebody like wants to know what I do, I just bring that up, yeah. And I explain all the differences, and I say, this is where I focus very, very succinctly. I do these things. We we can do it in fractional we can do it in projects. But ultimately, I don’t care about the right side of the screen. I don’t care about the tactical things, digital, traditional. I don’t care if we can’t do this, then I don’t know how to make this happen. And and part of that process. Us, though, is, is, you know, looking at revenue growth plans. Yeah, I get this. Hey, we’ve been around for 20 years. We’re still $15 million but hey, we want to be 50 million in three more years, because I’d like to sell the company. I was like, okay, so what are we gonna What are you gonna do differently? You know, I know you got cash in the bank. I know you know customers are buying your products and services, but ultimately, that’s what you’ve been doing for 20 years. That’s not going to get you from go from 15 million to, you know, 50 million. So are we going to do differently? Let’s back to like did with that other company. Let’s dive in. Let’s look at everything. Look at inventory that we have the deal. It’s really just digging in and understanding. Because then, once I know where you want to go, once we know how you got to where you are, and really know your customers, and know all these kinds of things, then we can lay a strategy that says, to get there. These are the channels. These are the paths. These are the things you need to do. These are the short term, mid term, longer term, things, you have to kill these product lines, or kill these services, or you have to add these. One of the company I worked with recently, or a couple of years ago, in doing their work and talking to their customers, what we found is they dealt with engineers that the older engineers were getting ready to retire the next two or three years at the time. So let’s say five years the younger engineers, 2550 actually didn’t like them very much because they didn’t have any environmentally friendly products or sustainable products. Everything was was, you know, old, not old, but traditional products, yeah. And so we by recognizing that they had a product shift. Well, now they had to go find new suppliers, and because they were really a rep organization, so find new suppliers that already taken by their competitors, and really kind of change some of their infrastructure interest in order to continue on. If they hadn’t actually asked those questions, they might not have ever known until their, you know, people started retiring. And so also, from a strategic standpoint, it was like, Okay, we need to get these younger engineers on our side. Yeah, we can’t do that project, right? We got to go out and we got to go out and we got to educate them and talk to them and

Mark McBride-Wright 27:23
things like that. It speaks to employee retention as well. You know, it’s like a changing in the value set of what’s important to to your current workforce. And of course, when you’ve got an intergenerational workforce like we tend to have more so in engineering relative to other sectors, because, as you say, there’s people that are long time served in engineering, and there’s there’s different habits, there’s different viewpoints, different perspectives. It’s diversity, right? It’s diversity of background, of upbringing and perspective on where the future is. So I’m interested to understand bit more about the different types of cultures that you’ve worked with in different sectors or in in high risk industries or engineering centered organizations. Do you find there there is a greater propensity to embrace strategic thinking like this, or because engineers are quite, we’re quite number focused and data focused, you know, we like working with data. So do you tend to find us an easier audience to work with when you’re doing a project?

Angelo Ponzi 28:35
You know? Honestly, it’s, it’s a personality thing, you know, I work. I just started working with a company, very engineering driven a few months ago, and when they were coming on to talk to me, because originally the call was, we need a website, and I told them, the people that were recommending me, that I can help them, but that’s, you know, I’m not going to start there, but they that they’re open to it. Love to talk to them, tell them what I do. I’m happy to make a referral, but let me, let me. And in the CEO the company came on, which I had not expected. And so I brought up my little chart, and I was telling them what I do. And And again, remember, he wants a website, not even a new website. He wants it refreshed, right? And at the end, he went, I want that. I get it. I get it. If I’m just going to tell you what I think should be changed, why do we need you, right? I go, exactly. I mean, like, we were like, you know, some simpatico, right? Yeah, we just were like, yes, why do you need me? I same thing. I tell people, they at the end, and they go, Well, we think we’re going to go in a different direction. So we just spent 90 days doing this new plan. And if you weren’t going to listen to me, why’d you hire me? Yeah, right. I’m here for I’m here because there’s a problem, not because everything is wonderful, yeah. Yeah. And what? Do it, sir, yeah, whether it’s an employee change, I was brought into a company in the consumer side a few years ago because the CMO left and the team didn’t like them, and there was a lot of disorganization. A lot of people were quitting. There was just and that was like a full service agency inside this company. It was like 15 to 20 people, right? And so when I part of my assignment was get these people to like each other again and to work together and and so when I got there, I called everybody in a meeting and sat down because they didn’t know me. You know, I’m the new guy, right? They’re all going, Okay, what’s this guy going to do? And I said, Here’s my thinking, here’s my plan, here’s what I’d like to do. I was literally looking at their white wall, their whiteboard, and it was very sketchy on stuff that was going on. Okay, there’s no real plan here. And then I sent the group out after lunch, one by one. Come on in. Let’s talk. So what’s going on. Tell me what the issues are. Why is, why does this board look like this? And at the end of the day, I had a pretty clear picture of who the players were, who the ones were really working, who were the ones that were just going to be, you know, the worker bees. And understood the dynamics of what happened to the to the CMO and the relationships with him previously, right? So I knew right off the bat I could change those things. And so again, the goal was to, you know, talking about people dynamics, right? I have to understand how people work. And then, you know, 15 feet away, we’re, you know, 2530 sales people, and I need to understand their process, and I need to understand where we got the inventory from, and what happens if we’re marketing products that don’t exist. So there was just a You’ve inspired

Mark McBride-Wright 31:51
me to maybe reach out to our top 2030 sort of target customers, or work people organizations we work with, on and off, and really try and figure out what, what value can we add? You know, what? What are your current pain points that you’re struggling with? Not from a perspective of we want to come in and solve that, but actually, like I’ve always valued being a dot joiner, being a kinda integrator, as an s as a small medium enterprise, sort of, you know, because when you work in a big company, big companies are still all consuming as a single entity. And of course, there are many of these single entities that then make up the engineering sector. And what often happens when I find we work with our big organizations is that it’s like a mini universe, just one company, and there’s all these many universes. But what what gets missing is the conversation between these mini universes, you know, and that that’s where talent moves between or or falls out completely from, from the overall universe, you know, and so what, what I’d like to try and look for is patterns of similarity that come up in cultural barriers or enablers In terms of progressing underrepresented groups or retaining talent. And I think maybe we’ve been too quick to sort of project a solution on to all of these micro entities and actually just having a conversation to see if our to test our hypothesis, if what we think a solution is so like the safe leader, right this podcast, you know, it’s part of my book, The Safe leader book, you know, safe stands for share, act, feel, empower. And fundamentally, what I believe is that we need to get more men talking about their difference, talking about their diversity story. So if we get more people be in little metaphorical lighthouses that talk about what they’ve been through their trials and tribulations, because men are not doing that at the moment, will then have an increased probability of people that can then relate to one another. And so we can bring down the high rate of suicide and self harm that we have in engineering, which is actually a a large cause of the loss of life in the sector, and my big, big picture, transcendent kind of vision is, is this a way to architect a conversation for a more integrated humanity in a world of very polarized politics and division and them and us? Is this a way to like sort of bring people together, no matter what their beliefs and backgrounds are, because ultimately, we’re all we’re all human at the core. And I think people get to are too caught in their day to day to even be thinking that broadly or thinking that big picture. And maybe I’m jumping the gun too much with how I’m trying to sort of go. Build My legacy with equal engineers and,

Angelo Ponzi 35:02
well, I think, yeah, I mean, there’s, you know, there’s that saying working in versus on the business, right? Yeah. And you’ve got a, kind of an overarching concept, and it sounds a little bit not that we’re that it’s more of a top down, yes, right? And versus, let’s, but that’s the goal. Let’s build up from the bottom, and by understanding through conversation and and digging into into you know what the issues are, that’s going to help you figure out better ways to solve it. You might think this, it’s x, but the reality is it’s x and y together that caused the problem. And you only get to know that by Frank talking, or, you know, survey work, whatever it happens to be, and focus groups. You know, there was a period of time when focus groups were like a major and I’m sure they are, I just haven’t done them in years, but I’ve probably done over 200 Yeah, but, but I probably haven’t done one, and I don’t think I’ve done one in 10 years, because number one, they got too expensive, but number two, they’re just, I can get at these dynamics a little bit different, right? You can do an online focus groups. You can do, you know, smaller groups, three, six people, but I find the the one on one interviews are much more constructive because it’s like, like we’re doing here on the podcast. I say something, you say something, we can go down a path, right? It’s not a quantitative study. It’s not check the box. Do the drop down. I’m not going to ask you too many open ended questions because I can’t. It’s going to make the time go up, and plus, I’m going to get a lot of garbage that now I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it meant. And so the kind of that one on ones for me, anyways, replace the focus groups, because it’s hard to get people into a room, but it still works in those dynamics are really interesting and and because you can start to understand what someone’s background is and the way they react and the way they say things, yes, that allows you to probe. And the probing part is is very dynamic, because ultimately, you know what you’re trying to accomplish, but you can also use that to to bring out emotion, or whatever happens to be. And I’ve done some, I mean, I’ve worked in a lot of, you know, with teens, I’ve worked with in food and beverage and all sorts of things. But I, but I worked in, in doing a lot of financial groups and talking to people’s money. People get very emotionally talking about their money and their banks and you know what’s happening and you know down the road and their concerns about life. I’ve done stuff in women’s health, which was really interesting, considering it was a group full of ladies and me asking very personal questions. Yeah, those it took me a while I could get past the mental thing that I was doing that. But, yeah, but, but I think that if you kind of step back and say, What can I do different, you know? And so part of my background over the year, you know, the beginning has always been research, and foundation of research. And you know, when I first started this, it was like, I got the research flag. It’s like, everybody’s gonna do research and, you know, I’m gonna help you do a better job. But what I found very quickly, and I’m finding this with AI right now, people want the solution. Give me the solution. Give me the application. Tell me how it’s going to benefit me. I don’t care how you get there. You know they care, but, you know I’m saying it’s they want it faster, but, but if this is what I’m trying to solve for, you’re trying to solve for and these, all these things underneath that are the pillars, or whatever you want to call them, that make this happen. That has to happen first. Yeah, versus going right to the end, or going top down and telling everybody how it’s done. If that made sense,

Mark McBride-Wright 39:06
it does, because it means, then that you’re so I guess what you’re the risk of, what you face is there’s a lower willingness to engage in the process that you like taking them through. So you have to then spend more time advocating for having patience to do the process, because you know from experience, it’s going to yield a greater impact. It’s going to work. You’re going to get there. You’re going to get a solution that will solve the problems, rather than a quick fix.

Angelo Ponzi 39:41
I can honestly say, in almost 12 years of this company doing my process and doing what I do, I can honestly say at the end of the day, I went, yep, everything you told me is exactly the same. We got no benefit out of it. Never happened because. You’re because you’re there’s always something why? Because, guaranteed, they have not done a competitive analysis. Yeah, maybe they did it for their strategic meeting, which I actually have clients that go, we don’t do that stuff and and they probably, last time they talked to their customers, was never why? Because the sales people talk to the customers, and they’re telling us all this stuff, yeah, but they’re also telling you, maybe with a little bias. But one of the statement I use a lot now I’ll tell you, because I think it applies, is when I’m working with a company and they’re telling me things and to get them to understand, Mike, what I say is, I appreciate everything you’re telling me. This is great, great insights, and I will use it, but I don’t really care, because how many of your services are you going to buy? How many products are you going to buy? You’re not, you’re not the target audience. So I need to talk to the target audience to figure out what they want, in order to provide insights and that. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been in business for 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, the dynamics change. One of the slides I use right off the bat in some of my presentations is is we have to understand the motivations and behaviors. And every day we’re bombarded with politics, finance, family, weather, you know, events, all sorts of things that change and influence who we are on a daily basis. And if I don’t have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on,

Mark McBride-Wright 41:39
yeah,

Angelo Ponzi 41:40
how do I address that? And so I always also say to companies, it’s not a one and done, just because, you know, I’m making a presentation on Thursday to one of my clients, and there’s one more kind of the end of the road with all the messaging and everything else. Yeah, that’s the day we should be starting again. Yeah, the same process, but we can’t let that go. Otherwise, it’s a year from now and you say, Okay, we well, this company’s never done anything like this, right? So, and it’s hard for people to understand that I have to look at my competition on a regular basis, or I have to stay in communications. I worked with a software company who radically change the way they they they were a custom software radically changed the way they did their builds and stuff that they used to charge for, they were able to actually package it and offer it as part of the services. And in doing research, I found that that they loved, I forget her name, Becky, that’s the person they talked to. But they hadn’t talked to management in five years, and some of these clients were getting ready to terminate them, and then they have those new services. And when I would bring it up, people would go, I have no idea what you’re talking about. So my my number one recommendation when coming out of all that work was build a new PowerPoint presentation. You too, CEO and president, get on a plane and go visit every one of your key customers, do a road show. And they did, and they were able to solve the pro some of the problems that their customers that were getting ready to can them. And they were able to eventually, you know, do more new business. And, you know, there,

Mark McBride-Wright 43:24
and even was, you’ve inspired me. I’m moving back to the UK soon, next week, actually, so I, I want to go and visit my customers, yeah, because I’ve been away for a year and not sort of at the cold face off that side of the business, which I enjoy, which I love.

Angelo Ponzi 43:45
Yeah, it’s important. And you know, and there’s no reason not to, especially considering we can do this, right? Yes, when a call. So you know some, most of my customers now are local, but for a while they were all out of state, and even though I would physically only go there once a quarter, I was on a on the zoom with them every

Mark McBride-Wright 44:05
week. Yeah, where are you based? Where are you based? I’m

Angelo Ponzi 44:08
in California. In

Mark McBride-Wright 44:09
California, California, Southern California. Very nice, nice weather all year round,

Angelo Ponzi 44:15
mostly. But yeah, so we

Mark McBride-Wright 44:18
went straight into just a technical conversation for the whole time. I never got to find out about your younger self and your motivations to do what you do and what what I feel like I’m missing that information Enlighten me. Are you doing now? What you always thought you would do? Or did you think I

Angelo Ponzi 44:37
always thought I was gonna be Superman? But right?

Mark McBride-Wright 44:42
You film out, you film out, you can go and see,

Angelo Ponzi 44:45
I did see it already, actually. Oh, there day two

Mark McBride-Wright 44:49
committed. Yeah,

Angelo Ponzi 44:51
I was, I grew up a Superman fanatic, but I switched to Batman over the years. But Superman, if there’s, if it’s out, I watch it and you. Anyway, what you know is interesting. I can’t, I can’t say that as a younger me was like, I want to be a marketing guy, yeah, but I certainly was a consumer. And in when I went to school and going through marketing and business, my goal actually, was to work in a film studio as a as a marketing person, not not an actor. I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I was very an introvert at that point in time in my life. I couldn’t stand in front of people and and so I knew so I grew up and went school in New York and Europe. I went school in London, actually, at the Polytechnic, which now called Westminster University, I believe, yeah. And so I went school there, and then I came back and I finished up in New York. But in my senior year, my sister, who lived in California, does live in California. Her friend’s husband was a monkey muck at Disneyland, and he said, When you graduate, come out, I’ll take care of you. And got on a plane one week, came out. Well, I’m a, I’m a New York Italian and, and if you know New York Italians because you’ve been living there. You say something, you mean something. Apparently, out here in California didn’t mean anything. So basically, gave me a couple names, and, you know, gave me a little facetiously, oh, Pat in the butt, and said, go have it, you know, get out there and go get them. So it was a struggle, because I didn’t know anybody. So I literally, every day I lived in Santa Monica, every day I drove into Hollywood and in Burbank and, you know, basically knocking on doors. And after a while, my sister had another friend who said, you know, hey, I’ve got, he’s got a marketing agency, advertising agency, in Orange County. He said, you know, come, go meet him, which I did. And he said, I’ll tell you what? I’ll give you an internship, get you started, make you some money and teach about media and stuff like that. So immediately I was right into analyzing media numbers, right? And so that was kind of the first inclination that I like dealing with all that stuff. And you know, when you go to school, you get all these great classes, and all of a sudden it’s, how do I actually apply

Mark McBride-Wright 47:22
it? Yes, yeah, yeah.

Angelo Ponzi 47:25
And then I left there. I went to a small creative studio. But right off the bat, they went, you know, we’re gonna work with you on how do you develop a marketing plan? And so literally, they taught me the importance of planning. And so right off the bat, for two and I was there about two and a half years, and they were just constantly, you know, write the plan. Now, this is why it doesn’t work. And data that because we use that plan to do our creative and so I kind of really saw it there. I took a short venture into my first new business, uh, venture. So I was probably somewhere around 23 ish, I think maybe 23 and a half. We had been doing a lot of television commercials, which, of course, was great for me, because I got to actually get a little taste of Hollywood. But the the two people I worked with convinced me that we could start our own production company, and it would bring Hollywood to Orange County. What do I know? I’m wet behind big and

Mark McBride-Wright 48:27
ambitious,

Angelo Ponzi 48:28
big and ambitious, and no strategy, by the way, not a single one behind it. We opened our doors and had our first job, like, within two weeks, and it was great. We were doing all this work, and then all of a sudden they were like, man, we’re not coming in the office today. We’re not doing this. And they started to disappear on me. So eight months in and out, went up and Cliff. I mean, a big cliff crashed and burned. I thought maybe I wanted to be a creative director at that point in time. So a friend of mine was an illustrator, and I went over there and he said, look at you know, you’re in between jobs and and let me show you some stuff. And so I would do some work with him. And he basically came to me after a couple weeks, and says, you know, you suck. You can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. This is not you go back to the stuff you’re really good at. And so I ended up with an agency called bozell, which is, you know, a lot was a large firm at the time, and so then I was there, same thing. I walked in, and now I’m the account guy, but I’m also doing all the planning for all my clients. So what now I’m really starting to utilize the tools, and again, just recognizing that that the creative really should be dependent. There was a lot of that siloed stuff at that point in time, right where the creative and the marketing people were always fighting and and I recognized that. And so it was like, How do I get past this? That was kind of a personal goal, is to find teams that could work together. I can’t say we actually accomplished it there, but then I went client side, and now I’m in charge, yeah? And so I could start to force things the way I wanted to create the culture, yeah, create a different culture. And ironically, the agency was still my agency, so now they looked at me as that, you know, nasty marketing manager. So I was there for a while and got to really experience data. I was in charge, and I was in the oil and gas industry at the time, as I was doing rig tracking and doing all this data analysis and distribution of product. So I got to see, you know, I’m used to guy doing ultimate product. Was creative. Now all of a sudden my product is

Mark McBride-Wright 50:42
stats, yeah. So that

Angelo Ponzi 50:45
was a really good, good experience. And then I got the bug to go back to an agency. And so I ended up courting this one agency for for about a year, and I finally got the job, and then I went in and back to the agency world. When I was there, started as an account guy and ended up being, you know, the number two VP, and I wanted to buy it. He wanted to retire. I wanted to buy it. I put together a little Consortium. Turned out to be there was another group from from our Northern California office that was also putting together a concern to buy it. And so then we started fighting, and, and, and then we settled. I got the advertising side, she got the PR side, and, and then he reneged on the deal. Oh no. And so that I was a little upset about that. And so I was like, I’m done. And I had been kind of nosing around this friend of mine who I at, bozell, started an agency. She got wind me and my team were looking to move. She brought us there. We’re there about a year. But during that time, I started thinking, do I really my parents were entrepreneurs. So I was like, you know, I don’t really like working for people, per se, yeah. So I went out and I talked to a lot of my competitors at the time. Said, what if you could have someone like me as a freelancer, you know, contract work, doing your research, your planning, and all 10 of them said, Man, we’d hire you on day one, not a single one did. And so it took me about 45 days to get my first job, which was actually writing a letter for like, $125

Mark McBride-Wright 52:36
and that that first bit of money from that first training session, or writing a letter, or whatever it was, 200 words, you know, just, it’s, it’s that, yeah, it’s like, when you’re I arrived, yeah, exactly. And

Angelo Ponzi 52:54
then it just started to snowball. My wife was working for a advertising agency in their media department, and she introduced me, Hey, meet my husband. He’s a freelancer. And next thing you know, this guy’s hiring me, and you know, and just another one, another one. And that went on for about five years, and it was great. I had one rule. I had about 12 agencies I worked for, right? Which was a lot, but 12. And the rule was, whoever calls me first for a new business pitch gets me

Mark McBride-Wright 53:27
when you have availability, yeah, or did you work on right?

Angelo Ponzi 53:31
Yeah. But normally it was the agencies I was working for that would bring me in going, but right now, right over about a six week period, I got screwed twice by these two of the agencies, and they reneged down their deals, and I put a lot of time. I wasn’t really fairly compensated, because the prize was I get to do all this work if we win. And we did win, and then it was like, Well, why am I doing this for these people? I’m just going to start my own. So it was purely marketing, doing research and planning, and then all of a sudden I’d say, you know, hey, do you guys do PR? Yeah, of course, we do get a PR person. Hey, do you do media buying and planning? Yes, we do. We had a PR but actually it was my wife. I convinced her to quit her job. She was the Director of Marketing at the fast food chain. At the time she came over, she became the media planner. And then do you need? What else do you need? You know, we’re adding these folks. And then they would say, What about creative? And I said, Well, no, we’ll partner with people, because I don’t want to be tied down, because I I wanted to get into consumer and B to B and all these things, and I want to have just one group focused so over the next 1012, years, we built a firm. But it was right in the last two years that a friend of mine called me and said, I met a creative firm today in a pitch they. Didn’t win because they didn’t have any marketing. And I think they’re a good team for you. It’s strategic fit so. And so we got together and and at the same time, quick side, I also started and ran a research company in the action sports industry. So I’m running an agency, and I’m running this research company as well. And so this creative team and I, we got together and our team and their team, and I’m not kidding, we couldn’t look at a piece of business that came our way and we would win it. So all of a sudden, we’re winning all this business. And then this large PR, or large advertising agency, independent agency, in Los Angeles, came and approached us both, they bought us both and put us together into a new firm. And so I like to say we started from scratch because some of our clients didn’t like the idea. Now we’re part of a, you know, billion dollar organization. Even though we were not a billion dollars, they just saw, you know, silos and big, big expenses, and they were wrong, but so we went zero to 28, million in eight years, and then they decided to absorb us, yeah, and I didn’t want to move, and bunch of us didn’t want to move. And so all but three of our staff, only three went and they quit, I think, within three months, and within six or seven months, they lost all $28 million of our business because it was different, right? We went from this very linear strategy. Now they were being siloed. You want to talk to media in our group, you want to talk to media person. You can talk to anybody. Yeah, we create teams that, regardless of what the account called for, like, no we, you know, with one particular account, like no media, it’s strictly creative in marketing. Well, we had the media person involved, and they were part of the pitch. Why? Because eventually what we do is going to go to media, and we wanted to show them how it works. And at the end of the day, we won the media business. It’s and it happened all the time, though, our structure now of a sudden, is like, here’s media, here’s marketing, here’s research, here’s account service.

Mark McBride-Wright 57:08
A big, a big model that doesn’t apply to the small boutique sort of service that you’d curated,

Angelo Ponzi 57:14
exactly. So then after after that, and we decided not to go, I took like, client side again, and that was the kind of evidence based research company I talked about earlier. And I was there about two and a half years, 233, years and, and I was told by the recruiter us, mom and pop, they’re, you know, whatever, 30 years old, and it could be opportunities for equity and blah blah, about six months into it, they sold and sold to a technology company and and they were after we had government and commercial, and I was on the commercial side, but they wanted our government side, but they also inherited the commercial side. And over the years, they just didn’t understand what we did, because they were after government. You know, their contract win was, you know, $400 million right? When might be $50,000 out of Disneyland, right? Yeah,

Mark McBride-Wright 58:06
completely different.

Angelo Ponzi 58:08
They didn’t understand it. And so it is a funny, but not funny story. So new CEO comes in. So I’m in the last, last 30 or 40 days of me being there, and but then I didn’t know I was going to quit, right? So, new CEO comes in and he wants to hear presentations, so I’m making a presentation from him, but I which I never made to anybody else. The old CEO was sitting next to me, and when I was done, he leaned over, he goes, Wow, that was really fascinating. I had no idea what I wanted to say was something more than, Oh, thank you. It’s like you’ve known me for two and a half years and you never once understood what we did, but about about a, let’s say, a month later, give or take, whatever the dates are, they made. The new CEO made a huge presentation the entire staff about the future of the company. I really appreciated that. That was fantastic. They were letting us in the inner circle, yeah. However, at the end of the meeting, I raised my hand and said, I didn’t see my division up there. And I could see the panic on his face and the oh, well, you guys are tucked into this group. Yeah? And I came home and I said to my wife, it’s like, I can’t do this anymore. You know, if you’re okay with it, I’m gonna go back and be me. So I quit and started this, and it’s just shy of

Mark McBride-Wright 59:28
12 years. Congratulations, amazing.

Angelo Ponzi 59:31
That’s my, that’s my that’s my long, long winded history. But you know, they’re the bumps in the road and the things that work and the things that don’t work. And it shaped my first business, right? It failed miserably. I mean, there was a point in time I’m 23 I’m working, maybe in the first few months, I’m only working, you know, let’s say 15 days a month, and I’m making more money than I ever had. And all of a sudden, eight months later, you know, I could barely go to McDonald’s, you know. So. So it but that learning lesson about working with partners and running a business, I made a point in time. They go like, well, you just run the business like I’ve

Mark McBride-Wright 1:00:11
never run the business in my life. You learn so much through failure, so much you learn through doing, through failing, through iterating and through growth. That’s how you get personal growth.

Angelo Ponzi 1:00:22
Absolutely, absolutely. So what can I give you one more real

Mark McBride-Wright 1:00:25
quick? Yeah, sure. Then we’re going on the quickfire question.

Angelo Ponzi 1:00:28
Okay, so as I mentioned earlier, growing up, I was probably a little more of an introvert, but when I came to California, and I won’t give you the big story, when I came to California, I played in a band, and I was a drummer, and I was always put when I played drums, I was, I was like, you know, 10 feet behind everybody, because I don’t want to be anywhere near the audience. Yeah. And we were practicing one day, and we had girl singers in the band, and one of them was standing next to me, and I was singing along with the song, and she said, Why don’t you sing? And they go, I can’t sing. And I can’t No, no, you can sing nice, well, I can’t stand in front of people. Long story short, she got me up to sing. That moment changed my trajectory. I now do. I’m on podcasting. I’m doing public speaking. I, you know, for that moment, which was now, you know, 2530 years ago, yeah, changed how I interact and what I do. And you enjoyed it. You enjoyed it. Really enjoyed public speaking and doing these. And I love it, having that standing in front of people versus again, if I go back to when I was a kid, I would have never

Mark McBride-Wright 1:01:35
thought that. I apparently there’s a stat that it some it’s like the most feared thing, even, even more so than the fear of dying like and I just, I love it. I love I love public speaking. I just love it. Okay, quick fire question round. So what’s the best piece of leadership or marketing advice you’ve ever received?

Angelo Ponzi 1:02:06
It’s going to sound probably not real strategic marketing, but it’s pay it forward.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:02:12
What’s one campaign or brand story you’re most proud of?

Angelo Ponzi 1:02:18
Jackson Family Wines?

Mark McBride-Wright 1:02:21
What’s one skill every cmo should develop in today’s climate?

Angelo Ponzi 1:02:29
Insights into how to do analytics and read data,

Mark McBride-Wright 1:02:33
coffee or tea? Oh, coffee. What’s your go to? Productivity hack when deadlines are tight,

Angelo Ponzi 1:02:46
you know, I tune everything out, I turn off my calendar, I turn off my emails, close the doors and just focus

Mark McBride-Wright 1:02:58
one business or marketing thinker that inspires you.

Angelo Ponzi 1:03:05
I do this. I say this all the time. It was Jim Collins, the Good to Great was probably one of the books that I really kind of go to. But earlier on, it was actually I enjoyed reading Sun Tzu. But what was that the Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:25
What’s one thing you do to unwind or recharge after a big project?

Angelo Ponzi 1:03:32
Probably play music. I play

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:37
what’s the most surprising thing people learn when working with you

Angelo Ponzi 1:03:47
that I’m a collaborator and open communicator,

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:52
what a book or resource you often recommend to your clients,

Angelo Ponzi 1:03:55
oh, I have to be my book.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:59
You can have that. And finally, what advice would you give your younger self just starting out in advertising?

Angelo Ponzi 1:04:10
That’s a tough one. Be patient.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:04:17
Be patient. That’s That’s a good one to end on very good advice. Thank you so much, Angelo, if people want to get in touch with you, if they want to find your book, how can they do that? We’ll put we’ll put information in the show notes.

Angelo Ponzi 1:04:31
Sure, best way is probably through LinkedIn. Okay, through LinkedIn. All my stuff there in the contact form. You can get to my website or any of that. I have some free ebooks. I have a free mini marketing course. There some videos. The book is actually there as well, but it’s going to take you to Amazon, which is where the book is. It’s either paperback or a Kindle.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:04:54
Fantastic. Well, we’ll put up there, and I’m hoping you’ll get some some click throughs after people have. Listen to this. Thank you so much. I’ve really I’ve really enjoyed it.

Angelo Ponzi 1:05:04
Yeah, me too. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate it. Thanks. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai