Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
45–Courtney McAra: Taming the Chaos — Marketing Ops
23 Plays9 days ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum is joined by Courtney McAra, founder of Mustang MarTech, to explore the art and science of marketing operations. Courtney shares her journey from a startup generalist to a highly specialized marketing ops consultant who’s helped teams at places like SurveyMonkey and Marketo bring order to chaos.
She breaks down the critical components of a functioning marketing operations infrastructure—from clean folder structures and naming conventions to lifecycle management, compliance, and campaign execution. Courtney also discusses the real-world challenges teams face when scaling their MarTech stacks and offers practical advice for avoiding common pitfalls.
Whether you’re deep in the weeds of a Marketo instance or trying to align marketing with sales and product, this episode is full of useful, actionable insights.
Topics Explored:
- Courtney’s Journey: From lean startup teams to SurveyMonkey and Mustang MarTech
- What Marketing Ops Really Is—and Why It Matters
- Taming Wild Databases: Clean architecture, folder structure, and segmentation
- Lifecycle Strategy: Lead scoring, prioritization, and CRM integration
- The Mustang Methodology: Cloneable, scalable, and measurable frameworks
- Why Good Ops is Invisible but Critical
- The Human Side of MOps: Communication, trust, and long-term collaboration
- MarTech in 2025: Trends, AI tools, and the expanding MOps ecosystem
Links:
- Courtney’s Company – https://www.mustangmartech.com
- Connect with Courtney on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtneymcara/
- Scott Brinker’s MarTech Landscape – https://chiefmartec.com/2025/05/2025-marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-100x-growth-since-2011-but-now-with-ai/
- MOps-Apalooza – https://mopsapalooza.com
For more episodes, visit: https://unfoldingthought.com
Join the conversation by emailing Eric at: eric@inboundandagile.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Unfolding Thought Podcast. My name is Eric Pradham. Today, I'm speaking with Courtney Makara, founder of Mustang Martech and an expert in marketing operations.
00:00:14
Speaker
With deep experience in SaaS marketing, Courtney has helped teams tame wild databases, optimize marketing tech stacks, and turn messy systems into streamlined, scalable operations.
00:00:28
Speaker
In our conversation, we talk about the often overlooked discipline of marketing operations, why it's so critical to modern business, what makes it uniquely challenging, and how her methodology helps clients create clarity, accountability, and results.
00:00:47
Speaker
And now, I bring you Courtney Makara. Courtney, thank you for joining me. We talked about this just before we started recording. So before I ask you a question, I will state this for everyone here.
00:01:00
Speaker
You are for the foreseeable future, the person that I've known the longest that I'm having on the podcast, and I don't know who else I will have. So I really appreciate you being here. I'm very excited. And with that preamble, would you mind telling me about yourself?
00:01:17
Speaker
i' Sure. hi Eric. Thanks for having me. Thanks to all the listeners. Yeah, what a blast from the past. I think we met 18 years ago or something like that. um And it is very surreal to be coming back now in my mid-40s and talking to somebody that I met ages and ages ago. So we met during an MBA program in the beautiful Bellingham, Washington.
00:01:40
Speaker
It was a wonderful few years of my life. And after that, I kind of entered the workforce and lo and behold, ended up working in tech. I didn't really plan that. It's kind of just happened with the jobs that I got and specifically in like the B2B sales and marketing side of tech.
00:02:00
Speaker
um So I got a job at a very small startup that used Salesforce.com as their CRM. And I remember in the interview, actually in the job description that said that Salesforce experience was required, which I had none.
00:02:12
Speaker
But I wrote in my cover letter that I would figure it out and I was a smart cookie and that I would learn it. And then here I am now, you know, 15 years later, kind of still running on Salesforce, customizing things, integrating with Salesforce. And I'm now doing marketing operations consulting.
00:02:30
Speaker
as an independent consultant. Well, thank you. You said, ah forget how you phrased it, but you said something about B2B sales and marketing or something along those lines. So at some point, were you doing things that might be characterized as sales enablement?
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit. I would say the smaller the company, the you know more hats that I have to manage and plates that I have to juggle. So I've definitely done some sales enablement, essentially working with the sales team so that they know, you know, who am I supposed to be following up with? Who am I talking to? How do I talk about the product that we're selling?
00:03:11
Speaker
How do i you know, speak to their pain points that they might be having or talk about how our product is better than competitors? So I definitely have touched on that a little bit. the bigger companies that I've worked at and like the more mature the organization, then they usually have someone that specializes that. But in marketing ops, I actually like to say we're the team that has relationships with every other team in the organization. We obviously have a relationship with like the brand side of marketing and the website manager and then the sales team and then also the finance team and then the product team and the legal team. So um marketing operations kind of has to talk to everybody.
00:03:48
Speaker
And so explain then for me marketing operations as being distinct from some of these other groups. ah Great question. um Many people, including my family, would hear that I'm in marketing and they would talk to me about like magazine advertisements and logo and like what color green should this logo be? And that is not the type of marketing that I ended up in.
00:04:11
Speaker
um It's not branding or even advertising. i am the database behind all the marketing. So you might have a very creative person trying to come up with an advertisement, whether it's a billboard or commercial, but At the end of the day, once that's gone live, how do you analyze if that's been successful? Is there a return on your investment?
00:04:31
Speaker
as there' certain How many eyeballs have seen it? And have those eyeballs actually turned into revenue for your company? um So that's kind of the high-level view of marketing operations is like all the data behind the scenes is like if the marketing team is...
00:04:45
Speaker
asking for a $3 million dollars budget from the CEO at the end of the year, the CEO is going to be like, okay, gave you $3 million. dollars What have you gotten in return? And usually it's the marketing operations team that is trying to help figure that out.
00:04:57
Speaker
And you mentioned Salesforce. i think I have seen that you have experience with some other similar systems, but it sounds like some heavy Salesforce background. So Are marketing operations people typically the Salesforce managers?
00:05:17
Speaker
Not typically. um We partner with usually the Salesforce administrator. It's usually you their title. um My software that I manage most often and I think is probably the most powerful right now is Marketo. Marketo was...
00:05:34
Speaker
established, I think, in 2008 and then was acquired by Adobe in, I think, 2018 timeframe. So now it's an Adobe product in the Adobe suite of products. But Marketo integrates with Salesforce really, really well.
00:05:47
Speaker
They just, it's like the peanut butter and jelly analogy. They just talk to each other. And, you know, Salesforce is such a huge player and has so much market share that Marketo The majority of my clients and my work experience back when I was a full-time employee has been with a Marketo and Salesforce combination. But for other marketing operations people, HubSpot is another really big player. HubSpot can integrate with Salesforce, but also has its own CRM component.
00:06:14
Speaker
um There are a ton of other marketing automation tools. There's Eloqua and Pardot and the list can go on and on. ActiveCampaign, ActDot. I don't want to not and list them all because I'm going to leave someone off the list. But just where my career took me and the companies that I ended up working at, it was really a lot of Salesforce and Marketo. And it's worked really well for kind of those Series A small companies that, you know, might have a little bit of money up to really big enterprise companies. It seems to be a very common kind of suite of solutions.
00:06:46
Speaker
With your experience, you know, so my experience, I should say, with Salesforce is fairly limited, but I'm aware of the various products that they have purchased and then renamed. You mentioned Pardot, which I think is now account engagement.
00:07:04
Speaker
Something like that. I think there's that Salesforce Marketing Cloud. as Could be. S-F-M-C. Marketing Cloud was ExactTarget. ExactTarget. But ExactTarget acquired Pardot.
00:07:16
Speaker
And then Salesforce acquired ExactTarget. So I do think there are two different things now. But yes, they have renamed, they've acquired and renamed a lot of different tools over the years.
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah. With your experience with Salesforce or any other tools, you have a number of different software packages or providers that you, you know, you may be managing or deeply involved with Marketo, for example,
00:07:49
Speaker
And yet you have to share data with Salesforce or you have to develop lists or you have to be able to track back to, I think you were saying like, we spent X amount of dollars.
00:08:03
Speaker
What did it result in? So there's a lot of data integration or sharing and management of the database. How You know, as your career evolved, how did you either end up gravitating towards those kinds of roles? Or maybe when did you recognize that this is what you wanted to do?
00:08:27
Speaker
Hmm, that's a really good question. definitely was not a light bulb moment. It probably took months, if not years, because I was always in the marketing department. You know, my first job after getting the MBA, think my title was like marketing coordinator. I mean, I was like the gopher for the marketing department. I was, you know, going to Kinko's and printing off flyers. And then I was kind of managing Salesforce and doing some sales enablement, a little bit of everything. But I was always in the marketing department.
00:08:56
Speaker
department So there's always some aspect of like creativity or coming up with new ideas or how do we pitch this product or position our software to be better than somebody else's.
00:09:07
Speaker
And I just found myself... gravitating more towards the data, something that was black and white. And I was like, if there was an Excel spreadsheet that someone wanted me to analyze, I would raise my hand because I would much rather than do that than work on, you know, what should the tagline be on the homepage of the website because that was so subjective. And I didn't like that gray area of like,
00:09:27
Speaker
Well, the CFO likes the tagline, but the CTO doesn't like the tagline. And that just stressed me out to be so uncertain. So anything that was, you know, um I always liked math, too. Even when I was back in school, i I realized way too late that I should have been a math major. I loved business calculus, and I really struggled in some of the more subjective material. um So I always know that two plus two is always going to be four. And if I could get that right,
00:09:53
Speaker
And I would feel much more confident in my job. So I think that's how I kind of ended up in the operation side of marketing. I liked the people in the marketing department. And I actually think back to school and I like the people that were in all my marketing classes socially, but I did not relate to them on the creative side of things. I more wanted the like definitive answers.
00:10:13
Speaker
It sounds to me like you and I are actually drawn to or perhaps have, we're drawn to similar things or we have maybe had similar feelings about some of our work experiences. So don't let me put words in your mouth. I will just tell you how I have often felt.
00:10:34
Speaker
So very often my title or role, whether it's been a full-time position or I've been consulting or whatever, it has been strategist.
00:10:45
Speaker
You know, it could be digital strategist, marketing strategist, could be something strategist. And that's, it has become very nonspecific, you know, very vague.
00:10:56
Speaker
And that's okay. But some of the frustrations, I guess, that I've had with a lot of other marketing strategists is that I am much more drawn to that spreadsheet.
00:11:09
Speaker
I am drawn much more to, well, we're going to do this thing, whether it's an exciting or necessarily highly creative thing. it could be an email.
00:11:21
Speaker
It could be a pop-up on a website. could be a direct mail piece. If we're going to do the thing, how are we going to know that it worked? And then even if it didn't work, will we have some idea of what maybe we should do next based on that feedback or data that we got?
00:11:41
Speaker
And I have often found that a difference between me and some of the other strategists that I've been with is they're often much more creative than am. And that's okay.
00:11:55
Speaker
It's good and bad for both of us, right? But because I'm so focused on like, well, is the tracking in place? And what does the data tell us?
00:12:06
Speaker
Then i end up looking at some of the more creative people who it's like, it's just a foreign language to them. And feel like i feel like While, yes, I miss out on having just the completely original thought, maybe, that it it also seems odd to me that you could propose an idea and you could spend the client's money, but then not have the ability to show them whether or not it worked.
00:12:38
Speaker
So again, I didn't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like maybe you've had some similar feeling. Very much so. Oh, my goodness. And I see these people that can present and pitch with such confidence on their creative ideas and really have no you know data behind it, but they just believe in it so much. And I just am not that personality. I want to have the data behind. And as we're planning things, I'm all also type of person that wants to poke holes and like, well what if this happens? What if this goes wrong? Is there a contingency plan?
00:13:10
Speaker
You know, I imagine we're going to want to measure X, Y, D on the road or a lot of my clients and, you know, companies I work for were small kind of startup. e And I would would say, OK, we have a sales team right now of three people. and they're like, well, we'll just round robin. If we've got, you know, new leads that come in from the website, we'll just round robin. I'm like, that's not going to last forever. Eventually, we're going to have, you know, an America team, a team in EMEA, a team in APAC. We're going to have people different languages. We're also going to be selling different products.
00:13:38
Speaker
Are we going to have each salesperson going to be really, really advanced knowledge on all of these different products, especially if we acquire companies or are people are going to specialize? So I am always like trying to pre-plan, like putting gaps within the processes because someone's going to come along someday and be like, in between step one and step two, I need to add like six or seven more things.
00:14:03
Speaker
So that's why operations has just always appealed to me. And actually, my like side story is my family has always teased me. i wanted to pack the car for the summer road trip vacations and like reorganize the refrigerator. I'm like, oh, no, if you put this on this side and you put the bread over here and the milk over here, like making all those things fit together just like works for my brain.
00:14:26
Speaker
Well, one, I love several things that you said. And two, I'm going to guess that there have been at least a few people in your career that are those highly creative people.
00:14:39
Speaker
But when you too have been able to to find a way to work together, then you've probably really valued that highly creative person who maybe is incapable.
00:14:54
Speaker
you know, I have dealt, worked with people. They're just incapable of working a spreadsheet, for example, or looking at Google analytics and yeah they can go through a how-to and still they will not understand what, you know, what the training that they've gone through. And I'm overgeneralizing here, but Yeah, I think it's either gone really, really well with someone or gone really poorly.
00:15:19
Speaker
You know, some people are just, oh, this one and boss that I had years ago and who was a great guy, loved by the team. But his whiteboard was such a mess because he would draw arrows and diagrams and then the data is going to go over here. And I i took the whiteboard way too literally and I kept looking at it.
00:15:37
Speaker
And it would be diagrams on top of that. I mean, it would be dirty for weeks and weeks. And I just it gave me anxiety looking how messy it was. And if I was to whiteboard something, it would be like very clean lines and nice handwriting and, you know, very much more literal. So sometimes it could mesh together really well with someone and sometimes it could be oil and water.
00:15:57
Speaker
Well, you've been running your own business for quite a while sit and you work in marketing operations. So you what kind of organizations do you work with and what sort of engagement do you tend to have with existing marketing or salespeople or Salesforce administrators or anyone else at those clients?
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I started my little business called Mustang Martech in 2019. um And kind of the reason I started it is because I had been at my last employer for about four years, which was a great experience and a long tenure and They had really grown and they had actually IPO'd.
00:16:39
Speaker
Shortly after they IPO'd, it's a different business now. You know, it's publicly traded. You've got quarterly releases. And so there was a change in some leadership. The CMO had changed. um And I liked the the new team. It wasn't anything of like, oh, these people are bad by any means. It just, I think, was time. it had been four years and I had kind of cleaned up the Marketo instance to kind of work on ah on its engine. And I was looking for a new opportunity. So I did a lot of kind of coffee dates and informational interviews with people because I never really wanted to say, oh, I'm actually applying yet. And all these conversations I kept having, the job was already the job that I was doing. It was a very similar job description, title, compensation, all that. And i said, well, why would I leave this great company with this, you know, it's a very stable company now and gone public and, you know a great brand recognition and logo. Like, why would I leave for the risk of something else?
00:17:34
Speaker
And I ended up having a coffee date with a friend. It was someone who I had worked with before when I had worked at Marketo at their HQ and they were still, um a you know, pre-IPO public company and a public company.
00:17:47
Speaker
She said, well, I wish I could hire you, but we can't afford you. And not that I was, you know, making some crazy salary, but it was more like they just didn't have headcount. They just had a couple of demand gen people, a couple of salespeople and They were migrating from one marketing automation system onto Marketo and said, I wish we could just have you as like a mentor for my team, for my junior people. They've never done Marketo before and I think they're going to be great, but I just wish we could have your brain for five or 10 hours a week. And I was like,
00:18:15
Speaker
We can maybe we can work something out like, I don't know. Let's try it So, um yeah, time to ah to quit my job. decided I didn't want to do moonlighting. i didn't want to do nights and weekends because I knew her team was not going to be working nights and weekends. And I never felt comfortable trying to juggle a client work while I was.
00:18:35
Speaker
like This was, you know, back in. Again, 2019, I was still in office and you know working my day job. So I decided to quit. So most of my clients are this in this tech world of using Salesforce and some sort of marketing automation system. They have a demand gen team supporting some either ADRs or BDRs on the sales side that are going to process leads and introduce them to the account executives.
00:19:02
Speaker
um From Series A all the way up to big enterprise companies, In the work that you do, do you have clients that you work on implementations of Marketo or other systems?
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I do this migration thing, like I mentioned, for the first client. They were migrating from one system to another and needed help kind of moving the data over. So that's like a brand new instance.
00:19:28
Speaker
um Or someone who has never had a marketing automation system at all. I also do a lot of... um parental leave coverage. That was actually something that I was thought was all gap in the market. So when I was was in my last role, that we had a team about three people doing marketing operations. And one gentleman, um his wife was pregnant and he was having this parental leave. Well, they had a very good parental leave coverage at this and this company. And so he would take off six weeks, but then he would come back to work for like ah month And then he would take off six weeks and go back to work for a month because he knew about like sleep regressions with the kids and he was trying to time when his leave was. And it was really hard for me to find coverage while he was out that would be that flexible. There was obviously agencies that we could have hired, but agencies didn't want this like on again, off again.
00:20:15
Speaker
Or they were asking me if I wanted to hire a really junior person or a really expensive senior person. So I kind of had this epiphany when I was on my own of like, I can cover a maternity leave, but either maternity or paternity leave for people, and I could do six weeks on and four weeks off. That sounds great.
00:20:31
Speaker
So I will come in and kind of, you know, help out a team while they're in the middle of a gap. Sometimes it's a parental leave. Sometimes it's a sabbatical or if someone's left the job and, you know, they've given their two weeks notice, but it's going to take them three or four months to backfill for that role because ah the interview process is really long and I can come in you know, the next week and,
00:20:50
Speaker
kind of just help out, keep the lights on while they're going through a transitional phase. So you mentioned some of the things that you provide I think the realization that you had or the opportunity that it sounds like you first recognized was providing some oversight, coaching, mentorship for a team during that transition, during that migration.
00:21:19
Speaker
Do you still generally provide you know, coaching or senior level input as opposed to, you know, just coming in and and um filling a need when they have a a gap, executing.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think there is more of the senior level. I guess i I hesitate to use the word senior because it sounds so mature, but it's just the best practices. I hear a lot of these whispers on calls of like, how have your other clients done this?
00:21:52
Speaker
You know, how how do other people manage like GDPR compliance? How do other people do lead scoring? Yeah. um if we have acquired another business and they have their own instance of, you know, Salesforce and Marketo or HubSpot or any other tools, how do we do this? How have you seen this before? So I definitely like to share but the knowledge that I've seen and what I've witnessed in the past. And I also feel like I can just do things a lot faster. I have all like some templates of how I like to do lead scoring, again, consent compliance, a preference center. And I say, well, we don't have to start with a blank piece of paper. Like I have done this before. you Here's like a skeleton framework.
00:22:28
Speaker
Does this make sense for your company? You know, how big is your sales team? How many products are you selling? How big is your database? I mean, i have one client right now whose database is only like 75,000 records, which is actually quite small.
00:22:40
Speaker
Most of my clients are closer to a million records or sometimes 3 million records. So all of those different sizes of clients have different needs and requests. And I luckily...
00:22:51
Speaker
you know, had a little bit of experience with all of them. So I try to give more kind of guidance and oversight of what I've seen in the past. um And my favorite is actually when like the student becomes the teacher and there are some people that you meet and they, it's like you give them the keys to the castle. They get into Marketo and all of a sudden they're trying to do API calls and hook up to CDPs and do all this stuff. And I was like, yes, the person has like, they they've learned it all. They've seen the light at the end of the tunnel and then they can start teaching me how to do stuff.
00:23:20
Speaker
That's awesome. And you said you largely work with B2B SaaS companies? Is that right? Yes. Yep. It's generally a software companies selling their technology to other software companies.
00:23:33
Speaker
um Sometimes there's like a B2B2C approach where there are some general users, but usually the software that they're selling is so expensive, you know, $30,000 $75,000 year, up to even a million dollars a year, that It's someone in their job has realized, oh, I can't do this without I need either accounting software or one was like architectural design software in the cloud and um security software, that kind of thing. So they're selling it.
00:24:04
Speaker
Someone in their job has realized I need this. I'm going to go out and find the the expert in it and then have to go through the whole sales cycle and. go through contracts and red lines and try and buy what it is that they are looking for. And going to trade shows too. If you've been to a trade shows, I think are very interesting. I remember my first trade show I went to was actually an orthodontic show.
00:24:27
Speaker
The AAO, the American Association of Orthodontics, this company I worked for at the time was specialized in websites for dentists and orthodontists because they would integrate with orthodontists.
00:24:38
Speaker
this so like the practice management software that a dentist or orthodontist would use so appointment setting and collecting bills but also like invisalign tracking we went to this orthodontist conference and there's booths where people are like selling the chairs that dentists use or like the little scrapey tools or the lights that are overhead and then we had our booth that was like we do seo and sem for dentists and orthodontists half of them were like what's seo we don't even know what this is so I know exactly what you mean.
00:25:06
Speaker
how are How are things changing in marketing operations, whether you talk about AI or other changes in technology? Is this a space where there have been big changes already or that you see things on the horizon?
00:25:23
Speaker
Huge changes. There's so much technology out there that is just wild to see what is coming through the pipeline. There is a gentleman named Scott Brinker who has done this MarTech landscape, calls himself Chief MarTech for Marketing Technology. And I think he did his first one probably around 2010 or so.
00:25:46
Speaker
And he put them kind of to categories of like technology that's good for CRMs and technology good for marketing and some that's good for scoring or predictive things. And it went from, you know, couple hundred companies to now it's like over 10,000 companies out there have marketing technology solutions. It's wild.
00:26:04
Speaker
um AI is definitely being talked about. There are, you know, conversations whether people think it's working or not working, but there are agents and bots that can now create newsletters and campaigns for you that you can just, you know, type in a couple sentences and send a newsletter to everyone in my database telling them about all the great things we have coming up over the next couple of months. So...
00:26:26
Speaker
I nothing is completely taken over yet. I still think there's a lot of like quality control and quality assurance steps that I think we need to have human eyeballs on. But it's definitely making things a lot faster um to be able to like clone and repeat, you know, builds that we used to have to have humans do all the time. Like webinars are a very common thing that we do and and this space in this space. You know, once a month you're trying to get a guest speaker to come in, but to set up the actual technology piece of like the webinar has to be scheduled and the invitations have to go out and the reminders and does everyone have the correct link in there if they're on a Google calendar or an Outlook calendar.
00:27:03
Speaker
So we're getting to this space now where AI can you can just have a brief about what your webinar is going to be about and when it is and it should be able to build the whole thing for you. So I think we're very close to that becoming reality.
00:27:14
Speaker
Within or specific to AI, I suppose, or I don't even know if I'm necessarily terming things correctly. If I call it AI, let's just say automation.
00:27:27
Speaker
and Okay. And or, and or intelligence are some of these capabilities, things that you are taking advantage of that are built into, for example, a Marketo already.
00:27:41
Speaker
And or or are you seeing that some of these automations or intelligence are tools that bolt on to the bigger technologies that you're currently using?
00:27:54
Speaker
Adobe, who obviously now owns Marketo, is doing some things with AI. I just went to their annual conference in March in Las Vegas, the Adobe Summit, and they are showcasing some really cool things. They have so many different solutions. They definitely have graphics and video, things that are ai Going down into like Marketo specifically, i think right now it's integrations and things that are bolted on, but I think it's in the very near future um getting to be, although, you know, now that you said, is it automation? Is it AI? There was one cool thing that they showed where you could have like a sketch of what you would like an email template to look like, like literally ah like back of the napkin kind of sketch and take a picture of it and upload it. And it would create your email template in HTML code from an image. I'm like, that's pretty cool.
00:28:47
Speaker
That to me feels like AI-ish. um So, yeah, it's getting there, but it right now it is still bolting on. I know people are using, you know, OpenAI i and ChatGPT and then pushing data into Clay. And then from Clay, it goes into their marketing automation software or to CDP. So right now it's still kind of piecemeal, but I think Adobe has got their eye right on the prize as well.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah, I cannot speak to Marketo, but for some of Adobe's AI, whether it's highly complex or not, you know, you can do for anyone that is familiar with podcast editing and all that. One of the big tools right now is called Descript and Descript.
00:29:33
Speaker
Podcasters love Descript because you can do text-based editing, but you can do text-based editing right here. we are recording in a platform called Zencaster. You can do that in Riverside, which is one of the big platforms I edit in Adobe Premiere Pro, and you can do that in Premiere Pro.
00:29:51
Speaker
And that's something that is a very basic. But then there are tools that integrate into Premiere Pro, like Autopods, Multicam Editor, which I will use, and it will cut back and forth between us based on when we're talking and how long it's been since I have said something, it'll cut back to me for a second and show me while you're talking and whatever.
00:30:14
Speaker
And I noticed maybe a month ago, which will probably be three to four months by the time this is finally published, that within Premiere Pro, you can...
00:30:27
Speaker
extend audio and video by, i think it's two seconds or so. And so I could, if one of us gets cut off in what we're saying, I can basically just drag the audio and it will sort of estimate what was the word you were saying.
00:30:46
Speaker
And then it will try to replicate your voice and it will do a similar thing with video. And so it sure seems to me that we have a common, you know, the big players trying to integrate everything, which makes a lot of sense. I'm guessing that with Marketo or with Salesforce, that you're always getting pushed, right, to integrate these new features. And yet you have an existing code base and you have a lot of change management and UI issues. You have to go through data issues.
00:31:21
Speaker
But With Marketo or with marketing operations, generally, it's just a space that I'm not familiar with. Like, how are the big players handling things versus being pushed heavily by ai startups, you know?
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I definitely know that there is an appetite for it out there. I mean, marketing operation teams can be really big. they There's already been a shift of actually outsourcing a lot of marketing operations to outside the U.S., whether it's there's Central America, I think it was like Costa Rica has a bunch. There was a bunch of and in Ukraine. There's always a bunch in India. So getting those resources in other places. And then there's time zone difficulties of, you know, someone's working at 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night when it's, you know, nine o'clock on a Monday in on the East Coast.
00:32:12
Speaker
So then getting into AI, I think as hope they're hoping to streamline some of that. Obviously, they want to cut costs for the marketing department to you know, cut overhead. So the goal, I think, is to get to a place where, you know, you can run your entire marketing department with just one person and an agent and a chatbot. But I think it's going to be a ways. I mean, just looking at how long it took all the marketing on automat automation platforms that we are familiar with today to get to their maturity point. I mean, like I said, Marketo started, I think in 2007 or 8.
00:32:43
Speaker
I started using it in 2010. And i remember what the tool looked like then for you know, and they're still adding to it and improving it. And there's still features that, you know, we're building and making them better and stronger. So it's going to take a few years to get to that point.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. and there are certainly unique aspects of whatever change we go through in a new technology or new media or something.
00:33:11
Speaker
And yet at the same time, it helps to look back at, well, how quickly did the change come? I was talking to someone recently on the podcast and they said that when they were about 16 years old,
00:33:26
Speaker
All they wanted to do was drive. You know, they just wanted to get their license. And, but what people were talking about at the time was when are we going to have flying cars?
00:33:38
Speaker
No, he felt like no one was talking about just how cool it is to be able to drive. It's like, all I want to do is drive. And I forget what it was that his father said to him.
00:33:50
Speaker
But one of the things that he said is, you know, now we're 20, 30 years later, we still don't have flying cars. But that's all people wanted to talk about at the time. yeah And he was sort of illustrating that, well, yes, that may be a ah different thing and there are different considerations.
00:34:09
Speaker
Often things don't change as quickly as you think they're going to change. Right. And maybe let's focus on the skill sets that we can use right now. Rather than there's always hedging the bets of like, what should we be preparing for? But thinking that like those autonomous cars are going to take over and no one's going to be driving or know how to drive.
00:34:31
Speaker
um Sure, maybe a couple of generations after us. But yeah, we're still driving. I also still just enjoy driving for fun. Like I want to go and ride like ATVs around in the you know, in the forest or something. So I think that, you know, some of those skill sets can just be really interesting.
00:34:46
Speaker
I did want to talk about um AI for a different department, actually, for the sales side, because I do know that that's come up. And even though it's not marketing marketing operations, we touch that team. We work with that team so much. A lot of the data that we're trying to collect from either trade shows or web website visitors, we're showing to you know, BDRs, the business development reps or sales development reps.
00:35:09
Speaker
And they have heard of a shift towards, you know, eliminating that role and just using agents and AI for that to go through and vet all your inquiries to see who is a actually prospective buyer, um which I think is interesting.
00:35:28
Speaker
i i don't, I guess I'm hesitating because I don't know exactly how I feel. I always feel a little guilty about getting rid of a a role or a job because I feel like if employment is such an important thing.
00:35:40
Speaker
But if you're taking the emotions away from it, is AI actually better? Is it cheaper? Is it faster? And how does it work for the end user? If you think like I am, you know, I'm Sally and I work for ah this big company and I have this really hard job that I'm trying to do and I want to go and buy this really expensive $75,000 piece of software If I go to the website and I say I want to talk to someone about pricing, what's the best process for Sally, right? Is just is she want to work with an AI bot or do a questionnaire and then get some sort of procurement document or RFP that for something? Or does she want to talk to a human? and
00:36:20
Speaker
And I don't know if we have the answer to that yet. Some people don't want to talk to humans at all. I mean, no one even answers their phone anymore. Everyone just texts. So... You know, you're reminding me of, I was just having this conversation with my father who is a doctor and something came up about the future of healthcare.
00:36:41
Speaker
And he was saying, it's really not going to be that long before he believes that there will be robots of some sort that will be doing surgery.
00:36:54
Speaker
Oh, my gosh. wait yeah I was nodding and going thinking like, yeah, they're going be ones taking your blood pressure and, you know, taking your temperature as you come in. But you went to surgery. they That's how he thinks we're close to that.
00:37:07
Speaker
Well, so they have robots, like one of the big robots right now that is, I don't even know if robot is the right term, but is that the Da Vinci robot.
00:37:18
Speaker
I think it's sort of the colloquial name. Da Vinci is maybe the company. or i will include in the show notes for so that we can be specific, but. DaVinci has been around for a while and they're sort of new iterations that get approved every few years from one manufacturer or another.
00:37:37
Speaker
And my neighbor actually is a specialist in robotics surgery, robotic surgery. And He will describe that, you know, you you manipulate the machine and then the machine is what is actually so sort of touching and manipulating the person. And my father was basically saying, well, how long until you don't even need the doctor to do anything?
00:38:04
Speaker
You know, you've heard probably of the remote surgeries that have been tested out where there's a surgeon of some sort that is in New York and the surgery is occurring in Los Angeles. And I don't know how often this has happened, but it has happened.
00:38:18
Speaker
And what I was saying to him, because around the time we were also talking about family members who have had dementia and, you know, when somebody gets pretty deep into dementia,
00:38:33
Speaker
They often will, and anything that you do that is out of the ordinary will make a lot of these folks i'm uncomfortable. So you go to visit them at their care facility and you say, hey, we're going to go out to dinner and you get about halfway to the car and some folks get really worried.
00:38:53
Speaker
you know And I was posing to my father because I've worked quite a bit with healthcare care providers, pharmacy, healthcare care logistics, organizations, home healthcare, care organizations all around healthcare.
00:39:08
Speaker
I was saying it sure seems to me like while there will be improvements in surgery, that what I think we're going to be more likely to see is a home care robot that those people who have dementia become a lot more comfortable with.
00:39:28
Speaker
I presented this at a conference recently. i so I posed, what if Amazon gives you Alexa, the cat, and Alexa is you know can change bandages, has defibrillator paws.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah, can like check your check your oxygen level. Yeah, check to see if your heart rate is yeah a spiking. Make sure you're taking your medication. And you become comfortable and Alexa can talk back to you.
00:39:53
Speaker
So that becomes your friend and, you know, but can also take care of you. Well, at the same time that you maybe have this, you know, i'm I'm guessing that Alexa is not going to do surgery on you at your home.
00:40:09
Speaker
That seems a ways off, if ever. At the same time that you have this, by 2035, we will have tens of thousands of unfilled general practitioner positions in the United States.
00:40:23
Speaker
The There will be more people 65 plus than there will be 18 and under. And the fastest growing demographic will be people 85 plus. And a lot of these people will live in rural settings where you can't even get someone to move to do healthcare.
00:40:39
Speaker
So coming back around to what you were saying about some of these sales roles or sales facilitation roles and business development roles,
00:40:50
Speaker
ah tasks that need to be done. It sure seems to me like the Alexa, the robot cat aside, that there will be a need to have AI facilitating or potentially even completely taking over prescriptions, automated insurance approvals, predicting that, hey, you have a 60% chance of having some sort of heart cardiovascular event in the next 60 days and a human won't be involved at all.
00:41:24
Speaker
until such time as it's something that kind of only a human can do. And so then, you know, when you get into sales or business development, There are AIs that do a very good job of mimicking humans, but there will probably be some things where like you walk into a showroom and or you go to that trade show and that's when the human takes over.
00:41:51
Speaker
But the AI can do everything else to sort of like glu you know provide the ah oil in the gears up until then to keep the machine moving. Yeah, man, I don't know how I feel about the age where I'm at in where society is at right now. Like, I feel just a little bit on the too old side to be really comfortable with it.
00:42:14
Speaker
I'm a little bit of like a laggard or, you know, a little bit hesitant to go all the way or to see my future. And I'm like... at what age am I going to be, you know, in 2035 when all this is happening? Like how ah out of touch am i am I going to be the, I don't have children, so I can't say I'll be the grandma, but I'll be like the old aunt Courtney who's calling to my nieces and nephews going, I don't know how to turn on the television.
00:42:38
Speaker
Well, you know, With some changes in technology and the fact that you have been through migrations and implementations and, you know, there are people, whether they're in marketing operations already or someone is in college right now, they, or they will be in college soon, you know.
00:43:02
Speaker
There are a lot of lessons from the past that we can learn. Yes, things change. But as you look forward into the future, based on the missteps you have seen with organizations, so when they go through migrations, when they manage their marketing databases, what are some of the common mistakes that you see?
00:43:23
Speaker
And I guess either what would be your advice for your clients, people working in marketing automation, or And or do you see solutions coming like an AI solution would fix this mistake? It'll never be an issue again.
00:43:37
Speaker
I think one of the biggest mistakes is really overcomplicating things. I think that's a lot of what I try to advise people on is they always want to say there's a random use case for, you know, this prospect because i met this prospect at this dinner or my next door neighbor's ex-wife's brother is the CEO at this company and they need to be treated a certain way um and try to Build solutions. And really, I'm thinking about like the life cycle of a prospect through the very first time they hear about their company and they meet you all the way to having a closed one opportunity of to try and keep it you know as general and simple as possible.
00:44:19
Speaker
And kind of going back full circle to what I said at the beginning, that marketing ops department, you've got to get out of your shell of only talking to other marketing ops or just thinking yourself as like you're supporting marketing or supporting demand gen.
00:44:33
Speaker
You really are supporting the entire business. And I really just advocate for think the marketing ops people out there are like the future CEOs. They see the entire organization again from acquiring a new name all the way through to an opportunity being one. And then what happens after they become a customer? We still want to continue to market to them. We need to make sure they get onboarded.
00:44:54
Speaker
um And it does get a little bit harder now that everyone's working from home or working remote. You know, we're just, you you know, online doing emails and video conferencing and instant messengers with each other. But sometimes I'll just go to a client and say, I need to talk to your legal team.
00:45:10
Speaker
You know, who's your chief chief of legal? And they'll give me a name and I'm just randomly on, you know, Slack or Teams introducing myself. And they're like, I've never met anyone in marketing operations before, you know, but they need to be involved.
00:45:23
Speaker
So that would be, I think, my two pieces of advice to to keep it simple and to introduce yourself to everybody in the company, because at some point you're going to need a favor from them or they're going to need a favor from you.
00:45:36
Speaker
I don't want to lean too heavily into currently popular stereotype, but I think it's important to ask, do you think that either with culture change, generational change, and or people working remotely more and more that it gets harder for people that you work with or people generally to take that step of reaching out and and introducing themselves to someone in another department that they've never talked to?
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's harder for some, almost like but my age and a little bit older. Like I said, I feel like I'm at the the youngest side of those people that were so used to being in the office and that, you know, might not feel comfortable just doing it. It's like cold calling, but over slack, you know, just that's a little bit awkward. But I do feel like the younger generation and people that I've met, I've done some mentorship through like a highway education and People that are really focusing on trying to get the next generation to learn marketing, automation, operations. I feel like they have no fear. And they're like, yeah, I'll send.
00:46:39
Speaker
They won't pick up the phone to call somebody, but they'll send an email, they'll send a message. um And they're comfortable with the kind of the digital introduction. So I think it's a little bit of both. I'm glad to hear that because it's really easy to simplify whatever it is that we encounter down to, well, this must be the explanation, right? You know, you encounter this in discussions about diversity, right?
00:47:07
Speaker
I look at you and I just put you in one or two categories and yes, you fit in simple categories, sure. But the uniqueness of you comes up in the fact that you are in multiple categories. That's just one way in which we're all diverse or unique whatever. And so it's really easy to simplify things down to everything is worse today because no one will talk to it one another.
00:47:35
Speaker
But just because they're not talking to one another doesn't mean that they're not communicating. and And the changes come with positives and negatives, of course. But if I don't spend a little bit more time thinking about it, then I might very well just miss out on the reality of the situation, which it sounds to me like I might portray my question as, or imply in my question that communication is just getting worse. And you're kind of saying, not really, it's just different.
00:48:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's just different. And I think one great thing that is happening in culture and society now, that this next generation is i think people are a little bit more like self-aware over their own preferences and behaviors. And some people are like, I love working from home.
00:48:26
Speaker
i'm I'm happier. I'm more productive. I'm a better coworker. And some people are realizing i don't like it. And I think college kids are even realizing this. And I think it's becoming a lot more normal to find the way that you thrive and even working hours. You know, the people that want to work really early in the morning and wake up, you know, bright-eyed and bushing tail and some people are the night owls. And I think that's a little bit more okay and finding people that, you know, find their own strengths where before it was, you know, you got to be in an office and there's going to be a all hands on Mondays at eight 30 in the morning and you better be there or, you know, i shame on you. I think this, the next generation, i mean, along with mental health and all that, I think it all ties together of like, what is, you know, spurring anxiety in you or depression or whatever. And how can you make your life, including the working part of your life, but your entire life work for yourself?
00:49:16
Speaker
I want to come back around a little bit to your company because I think at at least two points, it sounded to me like you were hinting at a bit of a methodology.
00:49:29
Speaker
And I think I have seen it either in your LinkedIn posts or maybe on your website. So your business is called Mustang Martech. And I think I have seen that you have a Mustang methodology.
00:49:44
Speaker
And it kind of sounded to me like whether this is robust or not, or it's just general, it sounded to me earlier, you're talking about, I try to plan in gaps because somebody is going to come along and they want to add six or seven steps.
00:49:57
Speaker
And there was something else as well that you said. What I was wondering is Do you have sort of like core principles about either the Mustang methodology or just generally about marketing automation that you feel like these are the things that we need to uphold or the way to work?
00:50:18
Speaker
Something of that nature. um It was not that seriously planned out. I just like the alliteration of the double M. um And I think it's just been kind of my best practices, things that I thought I could put out there in the world as a swipe file for someone else to come along and copy and paste and say,
00:50:37
Speaker
I don't really want to you know, use my brain too hard to figure out how to do consent tracking for, you know, the UK and the EU and Canada and Germany and all that stuff. So it's kind of this is my method and how I do things. And I'm also completely open to being proven wrong and that my methodology needs to be upgraded for 2025. So, yeah, it's just kind of my thoughts and best practices on how I have done things in the past and how I've seen them be successful.
00:51:06
Speaker
and Okay. And so you have your website. i see you share things on LinkedIn about being involved in sometimes speaking at conferences. But even I think if you're not necessarily speaking, you seem to attend ah decent amount of things you mentioned. I think it was Adobe's summit.
00:51:29
Speaker
So yeah. Is there, yeah with being involved in the community, if I can call it that, do you, is that a common thing in marketing operations? Are there a lot of marketing ops people that are active in a community?
00:51:44
Speaker
And if not, I suspect you're going to tell me that people should be more active in their industry communities. Yeah, there definitely is a community. i cannot say it is large because numbers are so subjective, but there's a a couple hundred of us that actually, i feel like we've known each other now for a decade and have grown up together. And, you know, my foundation really is in Marketo because I started using it so long ago. And Marketo had such a wonderful customer marketing team and initiative. It wasn't just customer marketing of like
00:52:15
Speaker
hey, your renewal's up, you're going to renew your contract. They would always, they did a roadshow every year to tell us about the new products that would come out. They encouraged everyone in their geographic regions to get together.
00:52:27
Speaker
So in Seattle, I got to meet all the other Seattle Marketo customers. And so if I got stuck with something or I didn't know how something worked, we would, you know, have each other's email addresses. And again, this is back before really everyone was on Slack. You don't really knew how to get a hold of other people.
00:52:44
Speaker
And then we would go to Marketo's annual conference and they would get us again all together. And they did a thing called the Champions Program. So you could submit a story about how you use Marketo in your job, how you used it either to, you know, to get a raise, improve your boss,
00:52:59
Speaker
whatever you did that impacted the your business and you would submit your story and then they would pick a bunch of winners in different categories of like the, you know, champion marketer of the year, a biggest impact and getting selected as a champion is, you know, a great honor. And then you got, you know, either a badge on your lanyard or you got invited to a special webinar. So I'd been a champion a couple of times and you just started running into these champions all the time and you'd go to lunch be like,
00:53:24
Speaker
wait, you're a Mercado champion from class of 2012 or you're from class of 2013. And that has just carried on now, even though it's Adobe, they still have a champion program. And I think even beyond that world, even to like HubSpot, there's inflection, there's Eloqua. I think just the concept of being um an advocate for your not just for your software, but for your career and for your experience the type of work that you do in the business as a whole and like to advocate for marketing ops and that, you know, we can be viewed as overhead because if you're not in sales, then you're a cost center. But what's the value of having a marketing operation? So there's a great community now, marketingops.com. And they actually like went and bought this very expensive yeah URL. So it's very easy to find.
00:54:15
Speaker
They now do a conference every year that is platform agnostic. So they are their own organization. They are not funded by Adobe. So they're not sitting there pushing it to you all the time. But you I have gone to, I think, three of their conferences before they even launched. They did like a little summer camp in Seattle with like 20 or 30 people to kind of test out the market. And it's been great.
00:54:37
Speaker
And I think the last couple of years, there's been about four or five hundred people that come to They call it Mopsapalooza, which is in Anaheim in the fall. um And it's a great community. And, you know, they they obviously have vendors there to help pay for the conference. But you're surrounded by people that know what you do for a living, have the same challenges that you do.
00:54:59
Speaker
You're trying to get more budget or headcount and do what the software changes, dealing with AI. So if anyone is listening to this and you have not been to Mopsapalooza, come this year. It'll be in Anaheim in October.
00:55:10
Speaker
I will link to that in the show notes. And if I can build upon or support some of what you're saying, I mean, I, I i am more of an extrovert for sure than, you know being an introvert. And I understand there are plenty of people who have social anxiety or they just, it drains them to be around people they don't know or whatever the specifics are of your situation. So I don't want to ignore that. However,
00:55:39
Speaker
to hopefully support some of this. I think that there are so many investments that you can make that will pay off later when you can go to ah lunch, a user group lunch, for example, or a morning you know local it could be marketing operations networking event or happy hour whatever it is or could be just general digital marketing whatever it is that's appropriate for you yep and do you want to get up early in the morning and go do this thing and have to delay some meetings for example probably not i don't like to
00:56:21
Speaker
but The thing is that if you can go and do something and not have to be in a position where you're asking people for something, you know, then you can put hopefully a relatively small investment into building a relationship or being networked in a community.
00:56:41
Speaker
And it might be next year or it might be five or six years from now where you could be looking for a job. or you may just find that you have some friends that you wouldn't have had before, and now you go through a hard point in your life.
00:56:56
Speaker
And, you know, if you, people nowadays, right, like there aren't a lot of people who go and play pickup soccer when they are adults, right?
00:57:08
Speaker
Because they're busy with work or kids or whatever. And it's so much easier when I can just flip on Netflix or when I can have DoorDash deliver my food or i don't have to go to Starbucks or the local coffee shop because I have an espresso machine on my counter.
00:57:24
Speaker
And not that you I think you were saying exactly this, but you know just to wrap it up or to restate, I feel like a big piece of what sticks out to me and what you're saying is that making that small investment, putting forth that small effort when you don't need something.
00:57:43
Speaker
can really be a huge benefit later on, especially in times like these where we certainly have a lot of uncertainty. And if you aren't dealing with the change right now, I suspect many of us will be dealing with substantial changes in how we do our work,
00:58:05
Speaker
who is working versus the AI working next year, two years from now, three years from now. And now would be a good time to, as the phrase goes, if you didn't plant the tree, you know, the best time to plant the tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
00:58:18
Speaker
Plant the tree today. Go out to Mopsapalooza. Yep, absolutely. No, you're totally right. And I think getting some face-to-face time is really important. And i I encourage the introverts and the extroverts to come. I think the one, i i like the Adobe conference, but it's obviously about a specific suite of solutions. The reason I really get behind Mopsapalooza is that it is so focused on our niche that you know you're standing in line to get lunch and the person that you're talking to, you don't have to explain what Marketo is. You don't have to explain what HubSpot is or you know what PPC is. Everyone already kind of knows what you do.
00:58:54
Speaker
So you can really get down to like the problem that you're having. Is it that you're dealing with an ICP formula or you're trying to figure out a segmentation or you know you're trying to customize, you want to have like graphics in your emails or something like that. Like,
00:59:07
Speaker
the introduction part of the conversation, like there's there's very little small talk because you can just get right into the weeds of it. So I think it's been, it's great. And I personally even have made friends. Again, you just kind of hit it off with a certain people um that during, again, hard times in my life, I obviously have been consulting and um kind of independent. And with parents getting sick over the last couple of years, I've been able to pass off clients to other people and just be like, you know what, I mentally and at my capacity right now. Can you help me out and, you know, work on this client for me? And it's been great.
00:59:41
Speaker
So that's awesome. I think the face to face part is still pretty important. um And I think that's actually even carrying over outside of, of, you know, marketing operations. I think just the concept of trade shows in general, you know, we were so closed down after COVID and then it kind of i think, lingered. A lot of people were like, well, it's easy to stay home, but I think we're going to kind of see a resurgence of the value of faceto face to face.
01:00:06
Speaker
because it is going to be more rare and it's going to make it more special. Yeah, i think this is an area where There are things that are different, but it's not necessarily lost. You know, the deep human need for connection and the unique things that you can get out of being together physically.
01:00:28
Speaker
Is it different from five years ago, from 15 years ago? Plenty of things are different. But there is that, there's a deep human need for being valued, feeling productive, being part of a community and so on.
01:00:43
Speaker
Yeah, I even have had clients, not very often, but I've had two clients probably in the last 12 to 18 months walk to do in-person like whiteboard sharing session, you know. And it's a lot of travel to get someone from but someone from Denver and someone from Washington, D.C. And I'm in Portland, Oregon. And to get us all to go to a room to physically be together to literally draw on a whiteboard for five or six hours, it seems like a lot, but it makes ah big difference.
01:01:09
Speaker
just to get the juices flowing. And again, you can interrupt someone. It just seems a little more natural to interrupt in person than you are on camera. um So I think it is it is important. So maybe we'll see each other again at some point, Eric. It has been far, far, far too long.
01:01:26
Speaker
It has been quite a while. Yes. Well, speaking of connection, people don't have to fly to Portland, Oregon to connect with you or follow you or whatever you have your website, which I will link to.
01:01:41
Speaker
Do you recommend that people connect with you on LinkedIn, sign up for an email newsletter? What is it that, where do you send people? um LinkedIn is great. That's probably where I'm the most active. My website, Mustang Martech, is great as well. um If you were trying to get a hold of me, I have collected those email addresses, but I will say as a marketing operations person and ah essentially an email master, I do not have an email newsletter. I have not done a blast because I think...
01:02:11
Speaker
People are emailed enough. Yes, it is. I feel like it is my job to um make sure the emails that you get are the ones that you really, really want and not me just spamming you. So yeah, find me on LinkedIn.
01:02:23
Speaker
i would be happy to to chat. And again, I will be at Lopsapalooza in October. um HubSpot is having their conference actually in San Francisco this year, as I'm actually thinking of attending. They're normally in Boston, but they're doing it on the West Coast for once. So I might be attending that one.
01:02:40
Speaker
um And I'm always open to hear about other conferences and events, and especially if they're in cool locations. I will do one more plug from Mount Sapalooza. The day after the conference, um it is open invitation for anyone who wants to go to Disneyland together.
01:02:55
Speaker
And so it's very fun to go and ride around on a roller coaster with a bunch of people that you know from your um professional life. So I highly recommend that as well. Well, I have not attended Mopscalooza, but having been to a ton of conferences in my career, i can definitely say that just about every time I've gone and done the extra activity, that it has been well worth the extra expense of being there for an extra day or paying the tour fee or whatever.
01:03:27
Speaker
And, you know, it doesn't matter that you're an adult. Disneyland's pretty cool. It is cool. It is very cool. And, you know, we all end up talking about work anyway. It's, you know, that's what we have in common. Sure, you get to know about people's personal lives and their families and stuff like that. But, you know, we all are there, you know, they're living and eating and breathing work. You're going to end up having something in common and solving some solution that you're like, oh, you know how to do the JavaScript code for that token? This is amazing. Give me your email address. Yeah.
01:03:58
Speaker
Nice. Well, Courtney, I appreciate you being here. As I said, i was really excited to be able to talk to someone that I've known for so long. And I also see you post and i think that, you know, the impression that I have is you really know your space and your work very well. And you have, you've confirmed that in, in ways that I really value, you know, like being very structured and disciplined and all that. So it's, you, you, you delivered upon my excitement. So thank you for being here. appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. was very,
01:04:39
Speaker
surreal, um never planned to be ah an entrepreneur or an independent or consultant. And um I actually will say I feel very proud of it So I appreciate the compliment.
01:04:50
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thank you again, Courtney. I appreciate you being here. Thank you. Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you got a lot out of today's conversation.
01:05:01
Speaker
If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe, and please share it with someone you know who'd appreciate this kind of information. If you want to bring this kind of thinking to your own business, check out mine at inboundandagile.com.
01:05:18
Speaker
We specialize in helping leaders with challenges around marketing, communications, and leadership so they can inspire real action in their people and audiences.
01:05:29
Speaker
Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll come back for future episodes.