Jeremy Weisz 13:21
So Jake, what do you think you will do differently in 10cubed that you did and Methods Savvy and the previous agency?
Jake Finkelstein 13:29
Yeah, I mean, I think that some of the key lessons are not unique to us or myself, there are definitely cases where, I want to hire faster and fire faster, and making sure the core values of the lens for that decision, as I already mentioned, being sure to be clear-eyed about bringing in the right type of operator at different stages of our growth. Because getting from here to there is not always what was going to be the easiest thing. I also believe that, particularly for this business, because we’re technology first, we need to be much more intentional about our roadmap, because it just takes such an investment to build the tools and technologies that we are and that I envisioned that we will, it’s going to be very easy to make expensive mistakes unless we’re intentional. But without being too rigid. I think that when you’re primarily a services business, you can ebb and flow a little bit more easily than then we’re going to be able to here at 10cubed.
Jeremy Weisz 14:37
You mentioned pressure testing, positions and market and I know with 10cubed, I know you help a lot of different types of companies, specifically b2b software, b2b SaaS companies in manufacturing. Talk about what you are doing and what you will do to continue to pressure tests, let’s say b2b SaaS, for instance.
Jake Finkelstein 15:03
Yeah, so I’m actually going around and having additional conversations right now, with marketing leaders from across a very wide range of b2b SaaS companies, not because I’m trying to sell them anything per se, but because I really want to listen to what their current pain points are, and what they’re concerned about as they move ahead. The other kinds of conversations I’m having are actually with VC and private equity firms, I’m hearing some really interesting trends around where their portfolio companies are running into trouble. Particularly in the private equity side, I’m hearing a lot of issues around building scalable flywheels and doing it in a structured way, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel all the time. There’s a lot of folks that are competing with a broad brush, but there are too many marketing folks that will come in and try to do something really innovative when something a little bit more blocking and tackling is required first. And that’s not bad, like, you got to put those pieces in place. So you can be highly creative, and highly innovative, but you got to make sure that there are in place first. So, right now I’m exploring those kinds of issues on the b2b SaaS side. Also, we’re seeing some interesting trends, the hypotheses we’re creating, and the ones that we’re testing in terms of our campaigns, there is some movement in the market right now around hesitance on spending. So, requires better storytelling, more personalization, better data to make decisions, say we’re making sure we’re investing dollars in the right place to get the return that we’re looking for.
Jeremy Weisz 16:45
How does your team differ? Jake, you were saying, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes, and the clients don’t really care how it works. I mean, like you said, it’s kind of like magic happening behind the scenes, I imagine, there’s a lot more technology in this particular company than there was in previous, what kind of team do you need for that, that you didn’t need in the past?
Jake Finkelstein 17:11
So the engineering team is, is bigger, and it’s going to be funded much more aggressively. That’s partially because we need to build things that are going to be scalable, it’s also because I want to experiment a lot more with technology than they had previously. The way that we’ve structured our account management and Client Services team is different, we want to be much more white-glove in the conversation, but much more hands-off in the execution. So, our strategies are not necessarily bespoke, like they’re built on these plays that have structure to them. They have standard operating procedures, because we know that they work, that doesn’t mean that we can’t be innovative on top of them, we want to always test the 20% at the top. But we need to make sure that from a client’s strategy standpoint, that we’re not trying to be bespoke, in terms of how we’re approaching these things. And it’s just kind of a little bit of a different structure than we’ve had before. There’s also many things that we don’t do here, which is different, particularly at Method Savvy. And we were positioned as a integrated marketing agency and consultancy, which means we had lots of different skills. At 10cubed, we’re much narrower, we’re focused on a practice areas, because we believe that these practice areas are going to allow us to drive revenue, lower cost and increase the speed of go to market.
Jeremy Weisz 18:36
Talk about the eight practice areas for a second.
Jake Finkelstein 18:38
Yeah, yeah. So it’s brand strategy, campaign strategy, content marketing, digital advertising, email marketing, lead generation, search engine optimization, and social media marketing. I think that’s eight if I remember correctly. And the reason why we focus specifically in those is we’re doing a lot of Hub and Spoke work. So we’re making sure that there’s clarity of position in market where the real value prop is who we’re talking to, and what the pain points are? And all the broad why questions that you like to address and those that we have a central message map, a central set of messaging and content that’s going to support that. And then we’re putting it out in integrated digital channels. Why? Because that’s where the audience lives. So a lot of the tools and campaigns that we’ve structured is really about making sure, we’re telling these compelling stories in the right places, but we’re doing it in an optimally efficient and test-driven manner.
Jeremy Weisz 19:36
How do you decide sometimes is just as important to decide what not to do, right? How did you decide what things you are not going to do as a company
Jake Finkelstein 19:47
Anything that has enough complexity that we cannot build a standard operating procedure around it? So a good example of that is website design. So we have capabilities around landing page creation. But I’ve done enough web design in my career to know that like, unless you’re truly dealing with pure templates, which you can do, but most the kinds of clients we work with would not be real satisfied with, you get into some pretty decent customization, because that’s where the value is not interested in going through that level of customization. There’s also a lot of work on the brand side, even though we do brand strategy, we do not do branding. And that is a very important difference. The reason why we have brand strategy at all is that sometimes when you’re dealing with lead generation, or demand generation, the actual problem isn’t what you’re doing. It’s the story that you’re telling, or you don’t actually know why you’re different. And why you’re valuable. So we have to make sure that everything we’re doing is anchored there. So again, we’re trying to be very intentional about making sure that we’re doing the things that can build the flywheel instead of doing like the highly bespoke work because that’s where all the complexity comes in.
Jeremy Weisz 20:59
Yeah, branding is tough, people who do it, it’s difficult, it’s very subjective, also.
Jake Finkelstein 21:08
Yeah, I mean, if you’re doing it the right way, you know, it is defensible, because you’re doing a lot of work that is kind of research-based. So again, Method Savvy did a lot of branding and brand identity work. So, I have some very good methodologies and approaches to that. But it takes a lot of human interaction and elbow grease. And when you’re dealing with that type of complexity, you’re dealing with a very different cost structure and a very different value proposition than what we have. However, if I have a client come to me with that I have some very good partners that I can direct them to. So, we’re certainly not leaving them in the lurch. But there are specialists in those areas, while some others that you know, are going to be better suited for those types of problems than us.
Jeremy Weisz 21:50
Let’s get a little deeper on what you do? And we mentioned the b2b software, I know you have helped b2b SaaS companies in the tax space. What did they come to you with? Or some of the challenges, issues and what you do with them?
Jake Finkelstein 22:01
Yeah, so every company that comes to us once more sales and revenue. So the proverbial question is how to grow. And we’re no different in tackling those problems. And other folks in our space, when it comes to that particular example, historically, the brand had had a lot of success with digital advertising, and in particular, paid search and paid social, but it has become a very expensive space, I don’t know how familiar you are with digital advertising in general, but it’s essentially an arbitrage game. And when you have more dollars pour into these bigger channels, they just get more and more expensive, because that’s what’s best for the platform and not what’s best for the advertiser. So there’s an increasing amount of pressure to look at alternative avenues, both in terms of tests and learn on the arbitrage side. So like other digital advertising channels that may not have been explored, as well as certainly aren’t as competitive but have good audience profiles? And how can you lean more on owned and earned channels? Like how can you really create differentiated positions with content? And how can you be smarter about leveraging social media and search engine optimization and inbound marketing in ways that are going to lower the cost per lead or cost per transaction? So, without getting into nitty gritty detail, some of the tools and resources that we’re using in order to do that that’s really been kind of the focus of that particular program, but also a number of programs like it.
Jeremy Weisz 23:42
And then how does it work behind the scenes you were mentioning kind of the concierge? Is it your team is actually helping them use the platform, and then or your team is using the platform or a combination?
Jake Finkelstein 23:58
Yeah, so our team right now is using the platform. And that’s very intentional. The initial plan with this particular product was to make it a user-focused software as a service platform. And what we heard back is that the users which are typically the marketing managers, and the organization’s were already busy enough, and didn’t want to learn another tool to use at this point. So the way that we treat our account managers is really as client strategists so they sit with them, they understand the pain points the needs, they have training and skill set around marketing and digital marketing in general. And how you can approach them these problems, then we’ll come back and with our internal managers will say, okay, what are the right tools? What are the right plays in the playbook that we’re going to use for this, they get approval on it, and then we’ll go and we’ll run them. So from a client experience standpoint, it’s pretty easy. We have one 30 to 45-minute meeting with a client per week they get consistent reporting and things go well, as long as we’re doing our job correctly. In the longer run in the longer-term product roadmap, we do have products that are going to be user-facing in the end, we’re already starting to develop those. But in terms of this first product, that’s how it’s structured.
Jeremy Weisz 25:17
I’d love to hear your thoughts on team and onboarding team members, right? I mean, they’re so important. They’re talking back and forth to your clients on regular calls their clients, they’re maybe doing strategy, they may actually be doing strategy and doing some of the behind-the-scenes work. What do you do when you’re onboarding new team members? What’s that process look like?
Jake Finkelstein 25:40
A great question. And I’ll be the first to admit that, I haven’t always been great at this over the years. So there’s a lot of hard-learned lessons. And if what they’re doing right, and you know what, to stay away from there, at 10cubed, we do a couple of things. So first, is we make sure that for the first two weeks, there’s no client interaction at all. So if they happen to be client-facing, we want to make sure that they’re focused on internal processes and procedures, that they’re learning all the plays in the playbook. If they’re less technical, how the more technical items go, they’re more technical, how to deal with people, all this kind of fun things, then we’ll kind of slowly bring them into client conversations. So we’ll have them be involved in some of the weekly meetings, just to hear the context of the conversations and the kinds of pain points or questions that will typically come up. So even if they have a non-client facing role, I think that’s important to have that type of exposure, and part of our kind of ongoing processes and make sure that like they can continue from time to time that that kind of exposure, just to stay close to the clients. The other thing that we do is focused a lot on our core values. So we spend a lot of time talking about, why we’re here, what we’re doing, why we’re actually doing it. And the entire onboarding process takes about a month, and then at that point, they can kind of be off to the races and actually doing the work.
Jeremy Weisz 27:06
What are you mentioned, there had been learnings, mistakes, wherever you want to call them? Yeah. What’s an example of one of those that you definitely afterwards put a better process in place? Because of it.
Jake Finkelstein 27:20
Yeah, so number of years ago, and this is nobody’s in particular, for that it was, it was a blind spot, as typically happens in many growing organizations, you hire when you have pain, right? Like you have needs, particularly in a services business, like you don’t want to overstaff, because that gets you into the cashflow trouble, and you might have to do layoffs. And that’s terrible. So your way, basically, as long as you think you can, and by the time you open a position, it takes two to three months to hire somebody and get somebody on boarded at all. So, in this particular instance, that I’m thinking about, we hired somebody and started bringing them into client meetings their second day. And they had no idea what was going on. Like they felt a lot of pressure to participate, and ultimately, the individual and thinking of resigned on day four, we very quickly learned from that. And we’re like, we cannot throw people into these roles, even if the intent is just to have them listen, it’s uncomfortable. Now, one of the other interesting things that we learned coming out of that is, is that we swung the pendulum too far the other way, we said, okay, you’re not going to talk to anybody for your first month. And team members don’t want to get involved, like I want to start doing work, I want to talk to clients. So we had to find that and kind of nice, happy medium where we were creating space for people to feel comfortable in their roles, but also making sure that had MIDI good work that they could dive into.
Jeremy Weisz 28:53
Yeah, and people will probably vary, you could have thrown one person in after four days, and then maybe they’d be fine. And some people not, but I’d like to hear your thoughts. And I’ve heard varying opinions in the agency world on this topic of hiring local versus virtual. And I know that you from the previous company had a lot of local staff in North Carolina. So what are your thoughts on hiring local versus virtual?
Jake Finkelstein 28:54
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And I think it’s very contextual to the kind of work and the kind of culture that you want to run. So I am personally a believer that there is a huge amount of value in having people in the same room, particularly when you’re doing any type of creative work. And when I use the term creative, I don’t mean design. I mean, like creative problem-solving. There are plenty of ways to approximate brainstorming or workshop sessions virtually and none of them are great. They’re perfectly fine, but there’s not they’re not great because you don’t get the same energy. At Universal does intelligence which was my first agency and then Method Savvy was really second one. Any time that we had something meaty and creative-oriented, I got everybody into the same room, even if they were remotely located, I want to fly them in. Because I just thought it was that important. I think it’s a little bit different because we’re much more technology and engineering lead, I think that it’s not that we’re not doing creative work. But I think the type of creative work is different enough that we can support much more fully-remote staff in a way that’s going to be productive. I am personally not a big work-from-home person. So I like to have some local folks that I can see, interact with, but I think on the net, there’s certain kinds of work that you just really have the best outcomes if you can do it in-person.
Jeremy Weisz 30:56
How did you get into being an agency owner in the first place?
Jake Finkelstein 31:01
Oh, yeah, that’s a long and windy road. So I’m a serial entrepreneur, I started my first company as a teenager, and then a couple others before any ones that actually made me real money.
Jeremy Weisz 31:13
What was the company as a teenager?
Jake Finkelstein 31:16
It was called 42 records. So as a record label, I think I was 16 when I incorporated back in the 90s, when people went to record stores and then still bought records.
Jeremy Weisz 31:29
What was the genre?
Jake Finkelstein 31:30
Punk rock, hardcore, alternative.
Jeremy Weisz 31:32
So who is your favorite bands?
Jake Finkelstein 31:36
In general are from the label? Oh, geez. Replacements, Nirvana, No FX. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of them. I could go on for quite a while. But yeah, so I actually cut my teeth, as you mentioned in the music business. So, I’ve had an artist management company and a record label and then decided that, I was really passionate about music and wanted to work in and professionally took a role with Mega Force records, which discovered Metallica, Anthrax, Kings X, and they had a jam band label as well, Disco Biscuits and similar bands. And then I left there in 97, 98, and took a job with Sony Music Entertainment. So one of the big major labels and working with Columbia, and Epic and aware of all these great labels. And then I got kind of sick of the corporate landscape. It wasn’t really where I was aligned, and decided that I knew better than everybody else. And my co-founder agreed, and we decided to start a music marketing company. And I called Universal Buzz Intelligence. And very quickly grew into television, film and video games. And then ultimately, after the first couple of years, we had larger brands coming to us because of the entertainment relationships that we had. So think folks like Pepsi and Diageo, and Nike and like kind of those kinds of guys. And that’s how I ended up in the agency business. Like I really wanted to work with artists, and then suddenly the people paying the bills were the big brands. And then I was like, oh, I like this, this is fine. And then continue with that trend over the next 20 years or so.
Jeremy Weisz 33:15
What was the transition from that agency to the next one?
Jake Finkelstein 33:19
Yeah, so Universal Buzz got bought by a company, actually, at Chapel Hill, I think I think it was in 2003, or 2004, a company called Zoom culture. It’s kind of YouTube before YouTube. And then after about 18 months or so we were the only part of the business make any money. So we ended up buying the business back. And I was bouncing around a lot. So at a place in New York City at a place down here, my then wife was going to school down here and getting her Master’s. But I was also traveling like all over the country. So I was living out of a suitcase like two, three weeks a month. And I decided after a number of years that I just didn’t want to do that anymore. So I found a way to kind of exit Universal Intelligence. And then I actually got probably the sickest I’ve ever been in my entire life. Like I just got the worst flu was like my body just decided like, okay, after the sprint, you’re done. And I spent two weeks rolling around with nothing but this idea for Method Savvy in my head. And then afterwards, I was like, okay, I guess I have this idea. It’s time to move on and go do it and went through and did the customer development thing that I’ve done for every business.
Jeremy Weisz 34:27
What was the idea? The initial idea behind Method Savvy?
Jake Finkelstein 34:31
Yeah, so the pain point that I had heard at Universal Buzz, particularly towards the end is is that and remember, this is kind of the 2007-2008 market crash is that everybody’s budgets was being cut. Everybody’s team was being cut in half and they needed more accountability and transparency into their marketing and advertising investments. And to be blunt, as much fun as it is to get paid a couple million dollars by Virgin to produce a concert tour when I really pressure-tested myself, what I was giving back to them was pretty pictures and good press, I didn’t really understand how those investments were helping them achieve their vision, helping them move their business forward. And that was the core idea, I had no idea how to do it. I had lots of thinking about ways to explore it. But I wanted to create a business that allowed marketing to have a seat at the sea level table, because you could talk about the p&l, you could talk about the balance sheet, you could really prove the meaning of the investments and work.
Jeremy Weisz 35:31
What did you learn about the acquisition process?
Jake Finkelstein 35:37
In terms of just like going through the acquisition? Exactly. Well, a couple of things learned a lot about valuations and how they work, particularly the first time that was a interesting experience, learned a lot about equity structure, learned the art of the dance around these conversations that they’re, particularly when you’re dealing with unsolicited strategic acquirers. There can sometimes be conversation, where they’re presented as a little bit more serious than it actually is. And when you’re naive in the process, you can get excited before you’re actually need to be excited, I learned a lot about how to have conversations with existing investors as well, and making sure that their needs and interests and wants are protected, because they are at least partial owners in the business. And you got to take care of all the stakeholders, you know, regardless of what one, or maybe a couple stakeholders actually want. So you know, it’s a complicated, but enjoyable process, I think for me, at least was a little hard to learn on the fly, because I didn’t have a lot of training in it. But, you know, ended up on the other side pretty well.
Jeremy Weisz 36:53
We talked about b2b SaaS. But I want to talk about manufacturing for a second. And you worked with a package manufacturer, and I love your what were they coming to you for? And what did you do with them?
Jake Finkelstein 37:12
Yeah, so that was an interesting assignment and kind of take a step back for a second, what I really love about manufacturing in general is that it tends to be a laggard industry. So you can go in and do a lot of really great meaningful work very quickly, not because they’re dumb, not because they haven’t paid attention to this stuff. But it’s because the way the industry is you can differentiate very quickly, just by putting into place, some of these advanced tools and campaign structures. So that’s exactly what we did. With the packaging clients, the initial pain point was around their e-commerce structure. So they had moved into b2b e-commerce, which is a fast-growing segment of the industry. And they had never done it before the company had been around for decades, and they had their standard operating procedures that involve a lot of people that, there’s opportunity for efficiency around, and we were able to work with them to understand the efficiency of their process, how to better position themselves on the website, how to really do cross-sell upsell programs in a meaningful way. Yeah, because they had a smaller group of customers that were driving a significant amount of their revenue, but there was still kind of underselling to them. And then ultimately, we put into place an account-based marketing program that supported that as well. So, it’s kind of a fun adventure for us to go through and understand, how their systems restructured, and the ways in which, you know, we can apply, you know, some of these more advanced techniques to help them achieve their goals in a meaningful way.
Jeremy Weisz 38:45
I love what you said there gigawatt laggard industries that, like you said it, there’s sometimes it’s just maybe more regulated. And there’s a variety of reasons why that could be. And I find there’s a lot of opportunities in that. I mean, I’ve recently went through some real estate stuff, and it’s like, they’re not even using DocuSign. I mean, it’s insane. And there’s probably reasons why, because of the regulations, but there’s also a lot of opportunity there. What are some of the other industries you think of is like, they’re kind of lagging behind a little bit. You mentioned manufacturing, what are some other ones that?
Jake Finkelstein 39:27
Yeah, I mean, there’s a number of them. I mean, on the more regulated side, you know, pharmaceutical is a typical example, I’m really interested in the agricultural space. I personally have some experience there. Timekeeper has not done a lot of work in that space as of yet. But it’s another industry that, much like manufacturing, has done really well from a sales team standpoint, but hasn’t built broad technological, digital marketing infrastructure. So it’s an opportunity for those brands that are making those investments to really change the game within the industry. So I think that’s an interesting one. I think equipment is another very interesting industry, kind of quasi-manufacturing, but I’m thinking more like fleet management type of industries, because again, like any industry, that tends to be more sales lead than marketing lead tends to be laggards in my experience. So when you can go in and say, marketing is sales at scale. So if you can put these kinds of structural pieces in place, it makes your sales, 10x performance, and you can just put the blocking and tackling in place in order to do that, then you create huge win-wins, you know, for your clients, and, you know, across the industry.
Jeremy Weisz 40:45
Jake, I have one last question. Before I ask it, I just want to point people, they can check out 10cubed.co to learn more about what their company is doing. And you can poke around and see everything from the resources to the platform. My last question, Jake, is about software and resources. What are some of the, as an agency owner, technology owner, what are some of the software’s you like to use and or resources?
Jake Finkelstein 41:21
Yeah, I’m a huge productivity tool nerd. And so like, anything I can do to automate anything or get reorganized, I just love so my typical tech stack is HubSpot. I’m a big fan of that platform, particularly those sales and marketing cloud side. I love things, I’m a Mac guy. So it’s a good kind of getting things done-oriented tool. I’m a big Notion guy, as well, for note-taking. Notion can be pretty complex, if you want it to be like, because it’s very customizable, which I enjoy. You can also use it in a pretty turnkey, easy way if you prefer to. And then there’s a bunch of tools that actually, I have built kind of behind the scenes that allow us to do content marketing and or content creation, content coloring, big SEO nerd as well. So some good keyword research and kind of topical research, but none of those are public outside the organization. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 42:25
What about from a productivity tool standpoint? What do you use other apps or on your phone or your computer?
Jake Finkelstein 42:34
Yeah, so things in Notion are the two that I use the most Milesi will use a Pomodoro timer. We do time tracking, not because we’re billing back to clients, but I just like to know where we’re spending time myself included. So I use Harvest for that. Because I think it’s a pretty easy way to track time without getting into the nitty gritty, but those tend to be the big ones. Oh, I guess the other one is have a Google workspace person. So all the Google Apps there make my day quite a bit easier.
Jeremy Weisz 43:08
Jake, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey. It’s always a crazy winding road for people. I appreciate it. So people can check out more at 10cubed.co and more episodes of the podcast. Thanks everyone.
Jake Finkelstein 43:23
Thanks Jeremy. Bye. I appreciate it.
