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Allbirds Hyper-Growth, Profitable Spend, and High-Leverage Activities | Jim Kingsbury
45 Plays1 year ago
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The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers are managing their media mix to drive growth!
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven over $100 million in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Jim Kingsbury is a Fractional CMO and E-commerce executive with deep expertise in customer acquisition, LTV growth, and digital product management. With a career spanning various high-profile brands, including a significant tenure at Allbirds during its hyper-growth phase, he has demonstrated a keen ability to drive growth through innovative marketing practices.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH JIM: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimkingsbury/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Efficient Spend podcast where we help marketers turn media spend into revenue. My guest today is Jim Kingsbury. Jim, thank you for being here today. You're excited to be here. Yep, I'm excited to chat. What I'd like to start with is just to give some context into Efficient Spend.
The Role of Marketing in Revenue Growth
00:00:18
Speaker
The way that I look about marketing spend and media spend is an input into a machine that outputs compounding revenue, if done properly, right?
00:00:28
Speaker
And so when you think about marketing spend and media spend, what are the components in the system that have to exist to actually produce those profitable compounding returns? Oh, man, that's a biggie. How much time do we have? Yeah.
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I guess I'll share some kind of quick thoughts and then maybe bigger picture thoughts so we can decide how deep we're going to go in the bigger picture thoughts. So the quick thoughts for sure, you know, what you're describing is, you know, from a performance marketing standpoint, like that's often how people think about it, you know, you sort of put money into the machine, and you do the right things, and you deploy the right strategies and outcomes, goodness in the form of efficient spend and profitable spend.
00:01:15
Speaker
And that can happen, and that's a good thing. The components to make that happen, it's a really, really, really big collection of skills and tools and capabilities. I guess I'll quickly start from the basics.
Crafting Effective Marketing Messages
00:01:32
Speaker
You need to have something that's compelling and interesting to the world that you can explain quickly.
00:01:40
Speaker
Right in like that's a starting point if you don't have that like forget it you know cuz it really does come down to that. But that's also just a start right that's just the beginning to have something sort of compelling and interesting that you can explain quickly like okay that's the beginning.
00:01:56
Speaker
you know, and again, then high level it, then you need you need a sort of environments where you can get that compelling and interesting and succinct message out to people and get it in front of people and then get them to engage with it, which usually or ideally means coming to your
00:02:13
Speaker
website, where you can then understand who they are and keep track of that and see what behavior they show on your website, and then have, you know, kind of analytical tools and expertise to make sense of all that all of that money you spent to get the message in front of people. And then the outcome that you saw, that makes sense. And so that's really kind of high level, kind of a conceptual kind of answer. But but that's, I guess, how I would think about it.
00:02:42
Speaker
Sure. And getting more granular, the idea is that I think some folks can look at performance marketing as a way to acquire a customer and they take one interaction, right?
Customer Acquisition and Retention Strategies
00:02:59
Speaker
When you think about profitability and you think about CAC to LTV and acquiring high quality customers, what are the components to actually drive that to make sure that we're not only acquiring a customer for an efficient cost, but that customer is going to retain over time and become valuable because that's what ultimately makes the business profitable, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's sort of two things that come to mind. One is,
00:03:29
Speaker
understanding the kind of the profile of your ideal customer, like, you know, for whom is my product or service an ideal match and really understand that and really have a clear sense of that and do everything you can to make sure you're in front of that ideal customer profile. Because there may be people kind of at the margins or on the fringes who will come in and be interested. But to your comment, they're unlikely to stick around because it's not as good of a match.
00:03:54
Speaker
You know, you can use the analogy of like, you know, sort of it's a family member. It's like a cousin or something. You're recommending something to your cousin. You want to make sure it's like a good match. It's your cousin for crying out loud. You know, so you want them to have a good experience, a positive experience. So be thoughtful about that. Be thoughtful that you're presenting something to someone who really is going to see value and thrive value out of it. And that's kind of maybe step one. You know, step two is
00:04:21
Speaker
doing your best to make sure those customers really get it and really understand it and really appreciate kind of the benefit or kind of advantages you're bringing to them. And again, it depends a ton about what you're selling. Some things are straightforward. I guess I think of true classics, the t-shirt guys.
00:04:41
Speaker
Like, that's pretty straightforward. It's like, oh, these are t-shirts that look good. And they're pretty inexpensive. OK, got it. That's pretty straightforward. Whereas they're much more complex products in the world. I'm helping a company right now that it's a sleep coaching solution. There's a lot more to a sleep coaching solution. So it takes a lot more to explain what it is and what it's about. But the more the customer fully understands your solution, what it's about, and how it's a really great match for them, the much more likely it is that they're going to stick with you.
00:05:10
Speaker
and sort of have ongoing, an ongoing relationship as opposed to sort of like, okay, one and done stuff. Sure.
Consistency in Marketing Channels
00:05:17
Speaker
Does that also impact how you adjust your creative messaging strategy and also the metrics that you use to evaluate? Yeah, I mean, absolutely, you know, and sort of like, you know, especially in this day and age, creative messaging is, is right up there on the short list of things that you just have to get right. And it's, it's hard, it's hard to really boil down
00:05:39
Speaker
you know, what can be a complex messaging to sort of a core idea that people that resonates with people quickly, and they understand it quickly. And, you know, I think it's the Mark Twain quote, both as, you know, I would have written you a short letter, a shorter letter if I had more time. So to get to succinct stuff, to boil stuff down, it takes a lot of time and energy. And so that is a critical step towards the outcome of kind of high value, long term relationships with customers that you're describing.
00:06:06
Speaker
Sure. When you think about creative messaging and you think about a customer buying cycle, how do you think about kind of saying things in a given ad versus kind of a full funnel or like multi-dimensional strategy where you think to yourself,
00:06:26
Speaker
I'm going to be able to show them 17 ads and they're going to get email and they're going to get pushed. They're going to get all of these things. And how do I align that to the customer consideration process?
00:06:38
Speaker
Yeah, great question. For sure, I think we should all be thinking about it as multiple touch points, communicating a core message to a customer multiple times in multiple environments, in multiple ways. I guess maybe a key idea that popped my mind as you were asking is
00:06:57
Speaker
keep that message consistent and coherent. So if you have message A over here, message B over there, message C over there, forget it. So really making sure you have your essential message and you're consistently communicating that in every environment. And so it is important.
00:07:16
Speaker
And you said it, there's environments where customers can see your message is obviously paid advertising, things like email, organic social. But best of all is when they hear your message from someone they know and trust. So that's the ultimate. That's by far the most powerful form of marketing customer acquisition. So that's worth thinking about. It's like, OK, when my community, when my audience is describing what I have for the world,
00:07:45
Speaker
Are they describing it in the way one that's accurate and two that's compelling and three that's just sort of going to get people's attention? And so you can't control that, but you can be thoughtful to try to get that language into customers' heads, your existing customers' heads, so that when they recommend it to others, it's consistent as well. Sure. And that is the importance of a cohesive message so that they're describing in that way, basically.
00:08:12
Speaker
Yep, for sure, for sure. Again, in all touch points in all environments. Yeah. How big of a challenge is that when managing large teams?
00:08:22
Speaker
It's a legit question. Obviously, the larger the team, the more complicated it is. A couple people sitting around a table, you can be consistent, but with larger teams, especially in remote environments, then you layer on contractors and freelancers. It's hard.
00:08:43
Speaker
Like it is more likely not that it's gonna get sort of dispersed and spread out. Like that's probably the natural tendency. And so as a leader or sort of someone sort of trying to pull it all together, you gotta be conscious and deliberate and do everything you can to make sure everybody in your team and again, team broadly defined gets it. And sort of, actually it's funny, I was talking to someone recently and they're like, you once gave me this advice like 10 years ago. I'm like, I didn't remember that, but it sounds like me. And it was basically this, is as a leader,
00:09:12
Speaker
If you're not kind of bored, or like a little bit tired of what you've said, then you probably haven't said it enough. Because because when it's fresh to your mind, that's fine. But it takes a lot of repetition and a lot of communication for a full group of people to grasp an idea and a grasp a strategy. And as the leader of that group, again, repetition is absolutely your friend. And you probably should be bored of what you're saying. Otherwise, you probably haven't said it enough.
00:09:43
Speaker
Sure. I mean, it's analogous to repetitive messages to your consumers. It's repetitive messages to your employees. Yeah, that's right. It's just like, we're all busy, we're all bombarded by a lot of stuff. And so you got to kind of be consistent and persistent in your messaging to break through.
00:10:02
Speaker
Sure. So I think a thing that a lot of startups are challenged with right now is the idea of incrementality and optimizing towards incremental conversions and profitable conversions.
Optimizing Conversion Strategies
00:10:18
Speaker
this idea that a lot of marketing budget is going towards a few channels due to strong digital attribution. And we're actually oversaturating audiences and not really looking for diminishing returns and incremental conversions. When you come into a brand, and I know you do a lot of fractional advising,
00:10:43
Speaker
what are the kind of core metrics that you look at and how do you think about optimizing towards that profitable conversion, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot in that question, I guess I'll start by answering. It really does depend on the size and stage of the company. And so for a company that's relatively young and relatively simple and maybe just sort of spends primarily in say one, perhaps two channels,
00:11:12
Speaker
it is easier, it's less complex, to answer some of these core questions about what's incremental and what's truly valuable. When you get into, you know, multiple, and I'll say three or more channels with spend in the millions and millions of dollars per year and definitely kind of above $10 million a year,
00:11:34
Speaker
Then, then it is a lot more complicated, and it is more challenging to sort of tease out, you know what's truly incremental. What is delivering a, a marginal return on ad spend that's favorable and positive, and those questions do become important.
00:11:54
Speaker
where to begin. I mean, so let's put the smaller company aside for the moment because that is relatively easy and sort of to speak about these sort of more medium-sized companies spending at least a few million dollars a year. The starting point is just like, you know, what I'd want to understand is, okay, what tools, you know, what tools are using and really fundamentally how are you answering the question today right now of whether your marketing is effective, is quote unquote working.
00:12:19
Speaker
And every company has that at some level. It may not be ideal, but they'll have a starting point. And again, it varies a little bit. I guess I'll give one quick example.
00:12:30
Speaker
Many companies rely on search marketing to drive their growth, or that's their primary channel. That one I'm a little less, reasonably less worried about, because someone proactively goes into Google and is like, I'm looking for backyard umbrellas.
00:12:50
Speaker
And so they are proactively raising their hand. They come to your site. It's reasonable to assume that that ad that you put in front of them when they raise their hand is driving behavior that wouldn't otherwise have happened. If they knew of you already, they wouldn't have gone to Google. They would have come to you directly. So in search marketing, so I guess the question I'm asking, what are their core strategies?
00:13:14
Speaker
How big are they? What are the core strategy medium sized company that's active in search? You know what, I'm not going to sweat it too much. I'm not gonna worry about too much because the nature of search marketing, there's more just kind of inherent incrementality.
00:13:28
Speaker
But then you then go into channels where all other marketing channels, frankly, where people are not raising their hands. So kind of mental ads would be the obvious way. But all of it, TV or just anything, then these questions about incrementality do become a lot more important. And so then it's a question of, OK, what's your scale and sophistication of the marketing that you're doing in these non-hand raising channels?
00:13:56
Speaker
you know, what are the tools that you're using? And yeah, and then it's just case by case. But but really, where I'd want to get to is, do you have some mechanism for understanding a baseline behavior, some mechanism for understanding people's likelihood to purchase in the absence of seeing an ad? Okay, great. You have that baseline understanding. So okay, great. Now,
00:14:21
Speaker
When you put an ad in front of these folks, what kind of purchase activity do you see? And then it's the difference. Then it's the difference between those two things. And that's your mentality. And there's a lot of ways to get there and a lot of tools to do that. But just that's the, do you have something or do you even understand that concept? Does that concept make sense? And then start talking through the tools and the processes to get there. It takes time. It's not like a kind of a one day, oh, we got this figured out. It's like a few weeks to really kind of sort it all out.
00:14:49
Speaker
Yeah, for
Measuring Marketing Effectiveness with MMM
00:14:50
Speaker
sure. And I think that's the challenge because if you look at someone that has a massive presence on paid social, they're running Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, Reddit,
00:15:04
Speaker
Quora, et cetera, et cetera, all based on pixel-based conversions, all looking for that user. None of those pixels talking to each other. So there's just a ton of saturation. You mentioned at a recent LinkedIn post that you think that MMM is going to be foundational to a measurement stack for most e-commerce brands.
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I do. And it's sort of I mean, the example you just gave us a perfect example, all these sort of, you know, this all this pixel based reporting, one, they're all it's all siloed. And so it's not talking to each other. So it over counts a lot that that's one big issue. The second big issue is there are more and more restrictions.
00:15:43
Speaker
on what that pixel-based reporting can share with the advertisers. So it's getting degraded just kind of almost continually now. So it's like anything that's kind of click-based or pixel-based is kind of fundamentally challenged. And there are these emerging tools like media mix models that are kind of agnostic or indifferent to a click. It's just not part of the model. So it's OK. So they're much more sort of privacy-friendly.
00:16:10
Speaker
And so that's one reason that they're very relevant to today's world. And then what's happening, this is kind of a fun part of the world we live in, so many startups, so many like good startups emerging to solve this problem, like thank you ecosystem, you're solving my problem. I'll say thank you capitalism, you've sort of given a reason for companies for entrepreneurs to create solutions that solve the problems that I have. And that's totally what's happening. And it's
00:16:33
Speaker
I find this stuff fun, but it's pretty exciting to see all of these new solutions emerging. I just heard of one more yesterday, and so it's just like it's a good time, or there's a problem in the world, no question about it, but there are all these interesting solutions emerging as well.
00:16:47
Speaker
For sure. Tons of new mmm models tons of new ways to do incrementality, a lot of folks talking about the studies and things like that. And yeah, it's awesome and I know that sometimes advertising can get a little bit of a bad name but
00:17:03
Speaker
It's really a beautiful thing that you can leverage to grow a business, grow an idea. And if you have a mission-based business, there's just a lot of cool stuff that you can do with it. I know that you focus on e-commerce brands. When you come into a company and you spend a lot of time in places like Auburn and Zappos,
00:17:22
Speaker
You look at a media mix, they're doing some search, they're doing some paid social, they're doing affiliates, influencers, they're doing some branding, and they have all these different spends and all these different ways of measuring it. How do you think about optimizing that, optimizing that thing? It could be from testing different budgets, testing scaling in different areas. What's your process for that?
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I'll start with something that's maybe not obvious or maybe people think about it, but I start with just like a little bit of common sense, right, a little bit of a story about like, okay, who are we sort of speaking to in the world and sort of I
00:18:00
Speaker
Last year I did a lot of work with a company that sells science project kits for kids. They're really these fun projects, but it's obvious. It's parents, but then also grandparents, also grandparents, emphasize grandparents, who are the primary buyers. And so it starts with a common sense approach. Like, OK, this is my understanding of who buys this product. What are common sense ways that I'm going to reach this audience? If it's parents, maybe, but grandparents, no way.
00:18:30
Speaker
I mean, grandparents are just not a TikTok. They're just not. And again, it's fairly obvious, but that's a starting point. And then at the margin, there might be things that are less or like a fun one that emerges. Linear TV, you know, linear TV like that is an aging audience. I mean, that's like 50, 60, 70 people consuming linear TV. But you know what? If you're targeting grandparents, then it's awesome.
00:18:54
Speaker
That's not so hard to get your head around, but it starts with these common sense conversations about who am I going after? What's a fundamental strategy that makes sense given that context? That's the starting point. I guess another thought that popped my head when you asked the question is, boy, the interactions between different channels and different strategies, you're running linear TV and you're running Facebook ads and you're running search ads.
00:19:21
Speaker
That does get pretty gnarly and really hard to sort of tease out and fully understand. And so things like a media mix model, that's what they're designed to do. They're designed at least directionally to get a sense of what the interaction impact is, but they're not perfect. And so the more channels you have, the more types of touch points
00:19:45
Speaker
frankly, the less fine grained your understanding is going to be. And you just have to live with that. But of course, there are tools that kind of help you get an insight. But it's just like, it's, it's not nearly as scientific as we all want it to be. And that's something I've just come to accept. And like, I'm okay with that. I'm at peace with that reality. Yeah.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I think it's true. If you're a startup and you're not spending anything, and there's a ton of folks, you know, Series AC, just getting started, and you start spending 10,000 bucks a month on paid search, basically 100% of that's going to be incremental.
00:20:20
Speaker
Totally. Right. Because you're just not doing anything else. Exactly. Yeah. Right. But when you are spending 50 million across 15 different channels and you have multiple product mixes, that's when it becomes a little bit more about looking at things like competition, looking at things like CPMs, testing kind of channels that you might not be thinking about that your competition might not be in. And that's something that I kind of
00:20:46
Speaker
struggle to talk about with startups, which is, hey, we actually should take a little bit away from Facebook and test this out of home, like hard to measure thing. Have you struggled with that? And how do you kind of approach that with talking to executives and things like that? Yeah, I mean, the word there, which does make it challenging, is hard to measure. So the harder it is to measure, the harder it is going to be to get buy-in for a particular strategy. You know, and so,
00:21:16
Speaker
Again, then it's like a human exercise. Like, okay, who am I dealing with? Like, who am I trying to convince? You know, is it a finance person? Is it a visionary CEO? Is it a meat and potatoes, you know, email marketing manager? You're just like, who am I trying to convince? And then you have to sort of craft your pitch in a way that's going to sort of speak to the biases of the person you have to convince. You know, I will say that
00:21:45
Speaker
it is important to test and sort of like the example you gave like, let's carve a little bit of money out of Facebook and apply it here. Like, yes, like that's worth thinking, even though it does come with this overhead of needing to convince some stakeholder, it's worth it. Like, that's just that's just how these things
Experimentation and Leadership in Marketing
00:22:01
Speaker
work. And so you got to do that. But don't don't give up because you're going to have to do this, this internal sell job. And like, that's just, that's just part of part of the role.
00:22:12
Speaker
to the extent it can be measured, to the extent it can be a low cost experiment. That's like a Jeff Bezos thing. He used to always talk about low cost experimentation. So low cost experimentation, that's a relatively easy thing to sell. And so the more you can find opportunities that meet that criteria, that it is a low cost experiment, the easier it's going to get to be to get it through versus these bigger, bolder, more expensive things that's harder to measure. Those are harder. Yeah. So not impossible, but harder. Yeah.
00:22:37
Speaker
For sure, for sure. Reducing risk saying, okay, we're going to spend 20k on this thing. And, you know, if it completely goes to crap, like it really totally, but the upside could be the upside is real. And even if it's quote unquote goes to crap, you definitely will have learned something, you know, and you've gotten smarter, they hopefully compliant other places. And so like, there's always positives, if you think about it that way.
00:23:03
Speaker
Sure, I was saying before, I know that you work as a fractional CMO, which is an interesting job title. One of the things that I'm always thinking about is how do I optimize my time? So a question for you and kind of a hypothetical, if you had two hours a week to work as a CMO, how would you be spending that time?
00:23:28
Speaker
two hours a week. And so like, not very much time. Is that what you mean? Not very much. Yeah. What's the high leverage activities that you're working on? Man. Okay, that's okay. Okay, I'm gonna assume a bigger organization, so a more complex organization, because man, this comes up again and again and again. And it sounds obvious, but it's always a problem is alignment.
00:23:54
Speaker
Like you got all these stakeholders, you're a marketing leader, you got your immediate team, but then you have other departments, you got the CEO, maybe you got a board member or investors. That's a lot of constituents that you're trying to sort of keep together, keep in sync. And when those stakeholders are not aligned,
00:24:16
Speaker
life can be bad. And you may not even realize why, like, what the hell's going on? Why is this so hard? And so often, it's because, well, this person over here thinks this, but this person over there thinks that. Oh, and then you sort of connect the dots, and you get them sort of thinking about the same way and, you know, kind of singing the singing from the same tune. And suddenly, that makes a world of difference. And so that's, that's so human. That's just sort of organizational realities. But
00:24:41
Speaker
kind of assessing alignment and diagnosing the issues and then working hard to fix those things. If that's the only thing I could do, that's what I would start with because life can be so bad if that's not the case. And again, these distributed workforces, like it is hard to be aligned. Yeah.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a great answer. And if you think about it from a cost perspective, it's kind of like, okay, you're not really talking about media spend being wasted, but you're kind of talking about like the opportunity cost of doing the wrong things for extended periods of time.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and it's sort of like one group thinks we're supposed to do this or focus on this outcome, but this other group thinks we should be focused on this other outcome. And then the two groups are like, what the hell? Like, what's going on? Why are we not achieving the outcome? It's like, well, because you thought this and I thought this, and then you're just burning time on on on misalignment, you know, and so like, that's that's really how I see it play out again and again for all this wasted, unproactive time, because you weren't sort of synced up from the get go.
00:25:48
Speaker
For sure. It's something that I've kind of learned as I've grown in my career, these things that bring people together, brainstorming sessions, certain recurring meetings, just to get on the same page.
00:26:03
Speaker
totally, you know, you're gonna get me really going. So then it's relationships, it's it's human relationships, it's people getting to know each other and understand each other, but also that trust level, like I know you, I like you, I trust you. So that a month from now, when there's some sort of confusing conversation, we have this base of connection and understanding and trust that makes the resolution of a challenge later on much easier. And the anecdote, which I'll share this a long time ago, this was as a Zappos, like,
00:26:29
Speaker
Oh, nine, 10, 11. So it was a while ago. And I don't know if they still do, but they did it for a long time. But this is crazy. For managers, any and every manager of people, Zappos would say, hey, manager, you should be spending 10%, maybe it's 20%, either 10 or 20% of every work week
00:26:48
Speaker
on non work related activities with your team, like bowling and improv, we were in Vegas, it was like shooting, the shooting range is just like anything, you know, it was like, what you get into that case crazy. And then here's what they would do. They would then sort of like, okay, manager, you've now been doing this for two or three months, you've invested all this time, not only your time with your team's fine, like 10 20% of non work related stuff.
00:27:11
Speaker
do you think your team is 10 or 20% more productive and more effective than they were before you started this stuff? And almost every manager is like, yes, like those investments were so worth it to get everyone on the same page. And it is so
00:27:27
Speaker
again, unusual and not intuitive. But it was such an eye opener for me. And I don't I can't say that I kind of uphold that, but I try. And the principles are it just gets people connected, trusted each other, understand each other, talking, just being friends. And that makes a world of difference. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder what the implications of that as we start to incorporate more AI based tools.
Personal and Strategic Alignment
00:27:52
Speaker
It's going to get it's going to get interesting. What I'll say also is like, as someone who is a big fan of financial independence retire early movement and investing and things like that. This idea of getting fuck you money that you can do what you want right.
00:28:10
Speaker
I've gotten to a place financially where I'm not as worried about losing my job tomorrow, which gives me this kind of thing about me where it's like, if I don't want to do something, I probably won't do it. But I'm also a really good employee if you motivate me and inspire me.
00:28:30
Speaker
Totally. All right. I'm going to keep going. I mean, you're really kind of pushing my buttons right now. So there's lots of good executive coaches out there in the world. There's one that I think is fantastic. This guy, Matt Moshari, he's a CEO coach. He's a high profile CEO coach. And he's like, I don't have any original ideas. I just take ideas from others. But he does a great job explaining them. But one he talks about that's not his original idea, but he talked about a lot is
00:28:51
Speaker
your zone of genius. And so it's the work that you do that just doesn't feel like work. You love doing it. It's just like, it's so engaging. You know, you would do it for free because it's so fun. He's like, that is what your life should be. Try to spend as much of your time in your zone of genius, and you will do the best work in the world because you love it. And that's all you want to do. And kind of what comes to that is you're saying no to the stuff you don't like.
00:29:17
Speaker
And so what you're describing, you're saying no to the stuff you don't like, and you have some flexibility to do that, but the positive side of that, that means you're spending more and more time in your zone of genius, doing the stuff that you love, and things like this podcast. This is valuable, original stuff that presumably, I think, energizes you, and that's why you're doing it, and that's why it's really valuable to the world, because the world kind of picks up on that kind of positive energy. So spend as much time in your zone of genius as you can,
00:29:45
Speaker
And I used to think that was like, oh, that's a little bit sort of selfish, you know, but, but Moshari helped me understand, it's like, no, you're doing your best work. And like rolling this planet so much time, let's do the best work we possibly can. So that's, that's something I'm pretty excited about. Yeah. Sure. I've dived into his his method a little bit. And he has a Google Doc, right? With just a bunch of great information. Tons. It's crazy how much content is out there. Tons. Yeah. Sure.
00:30:13
Speaker
Back to kind of planning and time management and things like that. I know you work with a bunch of brands, but how do you kind of plan out your quarter, your months, your weeks, your days? How do you think about that now?
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah. Some parts of my life, I'm a good planner. Other parts of my life, I'm a less good planner. But let's say on a quarterly basis, we'll open it next year, even annual. I do think it starts with this theme, one zone of genius. It's a different answer for every person. What gives me energy? What do I want to spend as much as my time in? And so that's a theme. That's a theme for next year. And I'm starting to define what those big themes are. I know, one example.
00:30:52
Speaker
I really enjoyed LinkedIn posts. I just shared one like 20 minutes ago or an hour ago. And it's just fun. And I get a lot of energy from that. So, so those are like the kind of the core blocks. Like these are the things I really want to put time and energy into. And then, and then it's like, okay, as opportunities come in and sort of, you know, kind of time conflicts come in, I have these kind of, you know, North stars or some things that I know are really important to me.
00:31:14
Speaker
I'm like, oh my God, A or B, okay, checking my North Star, okay, I should definitely do A. So that does help. And then, yeah, at a more practical level, I think that does guide it. I mean, sort of like, okay, these are the themes, this is what I know I love to do. And then there's some goals around it. What are some, I don't really have this, but how many LinkedIn posts a week or a month? Something like that, just to keep me a little bit honest, keep me a little bit disciplined. And on Sunday night or Monday morning, when you're mapping out your week,
00:31:44
Speaker
you know, your themes, you got a couple of goals. And that helps you sort of say, okay, this is what's most important for the week. And so, yeah, I guess that's that is generally speaking how I approach it. I guess a question more specifically, if you work with different clients, how do you make sure that you're kind of like spending an appropriate time, if you price that out as a kind of like monthly retainer, and then how are you ensuring that you're, you know, focusing where you need to?
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the ideal way that I like to do it, just when I have a couple clients is I do like to have a monthly retainer for, you know, a range of hours, it depends on the situation, maybe it's three to five hours, you know, per week, maybe it's five to 10, you know, and so like, that's a starting point, your basic expectation.
00:32:26
Speaker
And then I, I do like to have fixed times like, all right, you know, company X, you got me Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings for two hours, always guaranteed, I'm always gonna be available. And that creates some structure. And then that allows me to kind of manage a schedule because I'm like, okay, Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning, I got this company, this other company gets Tuesday, Thursday afternoons. So that that makes sure there's not overlap. So that again, some basic structure like that does help.
00:32:54
Speaker
And then in parallel, though, I like to say like, Hey, for ad hoc stuff via sort of email or text or like a quick chat, like, hey, like, that's fine, you know, just for a couple few minutes, because that just helps to move things along, but sort of structure time expectations about time per week. And then availability for quick stuff is essentially how I kind of keep things from crashing into each other.
00:33:19
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. And I'm sure that there's probably a little bit of testing and experimentation you do to. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it breaks, but you kind of start with the ideal. Yeah. So going back to one of my earlier questions around the two hours spent, and you kind of answered that on alignment, kind of after that, what are some other high leverage times? If you're spending five hours a week on a client. Leverage.
00:33:47
Speaker
most of the work that I'm doing these days is with, you know, senior leaders and exec teams and that kind of stuff. And so let's say it's working with a kind of an emerging senior leader, that's what I do a fair amount, it's like these emerging leaders. And so they have some skills, maybe in all of them. And so the leverage that I get is, okay, let's, let's talk about your, your, your kind of strategy, like, what are the goals? Okay, these are the goals. Okay, what are your your core strategies to make progress towards your goals? Okay, and then kind of,
00:34:16
Speaker
actions that you're taking to affect those strategies. And then that's for that leader, but it also applies to their teams. And so they having the same conversations with their teams. And so it is, it is that kind of alignment idea, but it's just getting specific.
00:34:34
Speaker
you know, goals, actions, and then accountability, goals, actions, priorities, and accountability to make sure the right kind of work is getting done. And certainly there's some discussion, oh, that's your strategy. Yeah, I like that and that and that. But this consideration over there is also important. So let's refine that strategy a little bit. That's, I think, where the most leverage comes from, because then it's like this sound foundation that then gets pushed out to a larger group of people.
00:35:03
Speaker
Yeah, I don't play as much at the executive level. I'm a little bit more junior, but one thing I have seen with leadership in the past is sometimes folks will present this strategy or this process that is very granular, technical, and great, and then leave it there. And then it becomes this thing that they spend five hours or 10 hours on or whatever. And if it's not operationalized, it just kind of goes away.
00:35:33
Speaker
Totally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the execution, like, you know, you got to make stuff happen, like, or, you know, ideas are easy, execution is hard, I definitely believe in that, you know, and what I thought you're gonna say you did, but I'm gonna go there for a second. Executive summaries, like, just make sure the executives get it. And the details may be awesome, but you know what, the execs probably don't care, they just want to know the what and why and maybe the impact. And that's worth it to really boil down the executive summary, because then that gives you the kind of the freedom and latitude to go do great work.
00:36:04
Speaker
For sure. Yeah, I will say personally that the one thing I need to do a better job of is being able to speak up to the executive team. Because say, for example, you're trying to sell an MMM tool, how do you do that? I can talk to my director, they get it, but how do you talk to the CMO or the CEO? Totally, totally. And that's important because
00:36:23
Speaker
if, you know, mmms can be a pretty big decision, they may have a point of view, and they want to weigh in, weigh in. And so you have to sort of understand that comes back to the moshari stuff. I mean, moshari, what I love about his books and his material, you really it's like you get inside the head of the CEO, you have like, oh my god, that's how they think about stuff. So okay, if that's what they care about, that helps you the kind of day to day person present something in a way that's going to resonate with them. And so that's, I find that valuable.
00:36:45
Speaker
Sure. So I know you spent some time at a number of high profile brands.
Case Study: Growth and Sustainability at Allbirds
00:36:51
Speaker
The one that I'm very excited about is Allbirds. I'm a fanatic and you spent nearly four years there during pretty hyper growth, right? So why don't you talk about that? Maybe just contextualize it for the audience. When you joined, when you left, what was that timing like? So I joined kind of Jan 2018.
00:37:14
Speaker
They weren't quite two years old. They're probably, I don't know, 40, 50 people, something like that when I joined. So it wasn't tiny. And it was definitely established. It definitely had some momentum. And I was there until kind of early 2021. My role there was, I think it was called head of e-commerce originally. And then it became head of digital, which is essentially the same thing, but all the kind of the digital touch points for the customer, you know, kind of performance marketing in the site. We had an app later, all the kind of
00:37:44
Speaker
retention and loyalty stuff, all that stuff. And so that was kind of my work. And it was growing rapidly. I mean, it was a hot brand when I joined and it got hotter and hotter. And I don't want to say it exploded. I really I love the products and what they really do want to say. The two founders, you know, Joey and Tim, they are absolutely committed. They are doing it for all the right reasons. You know, they really believe that, you know, kind of products made with all natural materials that don't have a
00:38:11
Speaker
negative impact on the environment, that is what the world should look like. And they so believe this, this is their life's work. And they've gone through a lot of challenges. But I thought the world of them then, I probably think even more of them now, because they've just been managing through so much. Right. What did the what did that growth look like from a paid marketing perspective, and maybe the components of the media mix and how that scale then changed over time?
00:38:38
Speaker
Totally. The headlines again, it was 2018, 2019. Those were good years for paid media, for iOS 4.5. They really were the golden days. What I'll say though, the early days of the brand, the first growth was really amazing word of mouth and amazing media. There was a New York Times article, I think it was August 2017, that just
00:38:58
Speaker
blasted all birds on. It was incredible. You could just see just to spike up. And there was a Wall Street Journal article, I remember it was Memorial Day 2018. And it's a front page Wall Street Journal article and then like Apple News picked up and like, boom, so stuff like that propelled a lot of the early growth.
00:39:17
Speaker
But the thing about that kind of PR, you kind of get it once, and then you don't get it again, you're kind of the shiny new thing once. And so that's sort of what happened that that was that first wave, sort of like, you know, organic word of mouth PR. And then that's where the kind of performance marketing came in in 2018 and 2019, to kind of drive that next wave of growth,
00:39:37
Speaker
And for sure, like everybody else, you know, it was Facebook at the time. And so the Facebook ads were just a cornerstone of that, like no question about it, because there was so much scale and the tools were really powerful and novel. And it was less competitive and less insane than versus is what versus where it is right now.
00:39:56
Speaker
So that was, you know, kind of key. But of course, I mean, we were a pretty big team and had a lot of money to spend. And so we, you know, kind of the other channels you would expect us to be experiment with, or kind of active in for sure, we were in kind of most of them as well. So it was, you know, an exciting time. And then COVID came around, and like, things really changed dramatically. And so there's a lot of a lot of a lot of change in the time there. Yeah. Was there any non obvious things that led to growth there?
00:40:26
Speaker
I mean, nothing that's non-obvious. What popped in my mind, I was going to say, the physical retail stores were a hit. People really liked those stores. And that kind of opened up the brand to this new basket of customers and deepened the relationship with existing customers and really told the brand story. And so that was a really good move that, as an e-commerce person, I don't know if I would have anticipated that one.
00:40:55
Speaker
But then the other insight, at the end of the day, it's all about the product that you have. It doesn't matter if you have your own stores or this shiny website or if you're selling with Nordstrom. If you don't have a product that people are excited about and people love, all that other stuff doesn't matter. I think that's kind of obvious. It's not non-obvious, but it's a good reminder that that is where it starts and that must always be true and then all the other stuff comes into play. For sure.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah, paid marketing, marketing in general is an amplifier. And if it is amplifying something that's crap, it's not going to work. Cool. Well, I know we're at time. So Jim, thank you so much for hopping on. Yeah, my pleasure. I love that you're doing this. It really seems like you're in your zone of genius. So keep doing it. You're bringing high quality stuff to the world. Awesome. And where can folks find you?
00:41:47
Speaker
LinkedIn is probably the place where I'm most active and just search for my name. I think it's LinkedIn slash in Jim Kingsbury. My name is, but easy enough to find. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you so much and have a good weekend. Likewise. Pleasure talking to you. See you later.