[Top Agency Series] The Value of Participating in Knowledge-Sharing Events With Samuel Adcock

Samuel Adcock is the Managing Director of The Ortus Club, a B2B marketing agency that curates high-end executive knowledge-sharing sessions through roundtable discussions. He’s also the Co-founder of mClub, a peer advisory group that helps professionals improve their leadership skills and grow their businesses through targeted peer group coaching. 

Before The Ortus Club, Samuel worked as a subsea engineer at BP, where he focused on subsea riser maintenance in the North Sea. He earned his master’s degree in civil and mechanical engineering from Oxford University.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Samuel Adcock talks about The Ortus Club and its offerings
• Samuel describes his experience working with Stripe 
• The Ortus Club’s process for creating roundtable events 
• Tips to invite guests to events and achieve a sizeable turnout
• What is the best format for roundtable events?
• How — and why — Ortus follows up after each event
• Strategies to create intimacy in virtual events and discussions

In this episode…

Networking and knowledge-sharing events are fundamental to the growth of a business. So where can you find these opportunities to learn from fellow executives, improve your leadership skills, and grow your business? 

Through years of experience in the business world, Samuel Adcock discovered that entrepreneurs must sharpen their skills frequently to run and scale their companies. He recommends immersing yourself in environments with other senior-level executives to learn and establish long-term relationships. In this episode, Samuel shares his journey in founding The Ortus Club to provide opportunities for executives across the globe to share expertise and business insights. 

Listen to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he welcomes Samuel Adcock, Managing Director of The Ortus Club. Samuel talks about The Ortus Club’s mission and process, why executive roundtable events are key for business growth, and tips to facilitate a close-knit community through virtual events and roundtables. Plus, Samuel shares strategies to continue extracting value after events have ended.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• The Ortus Club
• mClub
• Samuel Adcock on LinkedIn

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Stripe

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital”
• “How to Set and Achieve Goals With Ian Garlic, Founder of Video Case Story”
• “[Top Giver Series] The Power of Video Storytelling to Transform Your Business with Ian Garlic of StoryCrews”
• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier”
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]”
• “The Impact of Automation and Email Marketing with Tom Kulzer Founder of AWeber”

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Sam Adcock of Ortus Club. And before I formally introduce you, Sam, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people’s check out. Since you’re an agency owner, we have Todd Taskey was a great one. He talks about how do you sell your agency and he kind of does that with private equity and talks about the second bite. So check out and he’s got a great podcast, a Second Bite. Ian Garlic who does video case stories and he talks about some of the unique marketing he did and even his dad did for a restaurant. They live dolphins in the restaurant and that restaurant, Sam was in Wisconsin, so it wasn’t like in some sunny, sunny place. Also because you deal with a lot of tech companies. I know Sam, we have Zapier on Pipedrive on AWeber and those are all great episodes as well. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and how do we do that we actually help you run your podcasts. We are an easy button for you to launch and run your podcast we provide the accountability to strategy and full execution. And for me, Sam, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade than a profile that people and companies I admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com to learn more. And today I have Sam Adcock, he founded The Ortus Club in 2016 while in Manila, and he started his career this is interesting to me as subsea engineer after graduating from Oxford University as a mechanical engineer, so we’ll find out how you landed in Ortus Club after that, and their clients include companies like Microsoft, Zendesk, Dell, IBM, Adobe, PayPal, Zoom, now, they don’t only just help tech companies, but a lot of companies, small, medium sized businesses, but for some reason tech companies are just attracted to you. And he also started mClub, which is an agency group is a spin out from The Ortus Club. And Sam, thanks for joining me.

Samuel Adcock 2:37 

Thank you, Jeremy. Excited to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 2:39 

So tell people about Ortus Club and what you do.

Samuel Adcock 2:47 

Ortus Club effectively, if you look at it on a website is always not clear. But if you speak to me what I’ll say it says specialist b2b marketing agency, we help our clients get in front of the right people, typically executives, from other businesses, allow them to build relationships and ultimately helping them sell their service. Now we do that through a niche way we do that typically run LinkedIn discussions, roundtables, virtual roundtables, very intimate small events, where we’re bringing a select group of typically senior people together for topical discussion. And then our client will be positioned as a host that effectively a sponsor and they’ll use that as a platform to build relationships and do business.

Jeremy Weisz 3:34 

I love it. It’s so powerful the human connection, the relationship, and I want to talk, pre pandemic, and post pandemic or during pandemic and post pandemic. But before we do so, let’s walk through a scenario. Okay, I know you’ve worked with Stripe before. How did that work?

Samuel Adcock 3:54 

Stripe is an ongoing client of ours. And I couldn’t tell you how they came in touch. But everyone’s been saying the gear and gearing up for an IPO for some time now. So gross growth, growth they want to grow. And this was in Asia Pacific, where we started we started in Manila. And so we have a track record there. They’d come to us and say we want to penetrate these specific industries. We want to go after logistics companies. We want to go after IT service providers. We want to go after the FSI financial banks and financial institutions. And then we’d put together a plan of dinners or intimate events where they’ll be talking some something that they can align themselves with or a problem that they’re trying to solve. It might be the future of payments, or it might be the changing landscape of the payments for e-commerce, whatever that topic that they want to align themselves with. We would come up with a series of roundtables where they can really just position themselves as the experts and the problem solvers. We bring in the CEOs, we bring in the CFOs, to discuss their issues and talk about the problems that they have running their respective companies. And then there would be Stripe at the center of that table at the center of that event. Ideally positioned themselves as problem solvers. So yeah, we stripe is one of our clients, and they’ve actually grown from doing the one roundtable to doing many in different countries, be them dinners, and we do a lot of dinners. Now we do mainly dinners. But I think they came to us during the pandemic, and you said, pre pandemic, and post pandemic world during pandemic, or I don’t know what you call it that but during pandemic, it was all about virtual, everybody couldn’t meet. And so we were very fortunate to be one of the only types of events company that could really thrive because large events was off the table. Or if people did do them, they were useless. No one enjoyed them, but roundtables, intimate events, where everybody could actually speak and interact and really involve themselves in the conversation. They thrived. And that’s what we focused on. And that’s all that we do. So we were lucky there.

Jeremy Weisz 6:14 

Sam, what frequency do you recommend for Stripe? I’m sure all companies are different.

Samuel Adcock 6:23 

I sort of statistic that stripe has got kind of 2000 salespeople. So when you’ve got 2000 salespeople, you can run an event, if you’re going to earn five a day and you can get a service for your salespeople. You’re not going to get enough leads for your salespeople. But yeah, it depends. It depends on the size of your company, we, we run a lot of events for ourselves. So we’re going after CMOS, or heads of business development, typically from the tech community, but it varies outside that occasionally. Here we’re running about three, four, for a month. We’d like to do more. But it’s time intensive.

Jeremy Weisz 7:06 

That’s I was gonna say, the I would love for you to walk through the process, because there’s so many moving pieces here, right? Like for Stripe, let’s say they want to do get manufacturing companies, right Stripe, you know, I don’t know, it feels like they dominate the market. To me, maybe that’s true. But let’s say there’s a manufacturing company you have to your processes, you’d have to reach out get attendees, or do they have a list of people that they want to invite for start there for a second?

Samuel Adcock 7:38 

Interesting, you say that they usually tend to dominate the market, I mean, they do have the largest market share. But there are some competitors out there that are nearly as big, it’s just a really focused on the enterprise clients. And so Stripe have a massive tail, and they pick up a lot of SME, so being a smaller company or be a consumer, you hear about them a lot more, because literally a company of one can have a Stripe account, then use it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re getting the market share. They want to penetrate the larger enterprise company. And now they want to chat penetrate the gotcha enterprise companies always have. But now that’s what they want to focus on. And that’s where we come in. Our solution is to help clients who really want to get in front of enterprises, the fortune 500, or the large enterprises wherever they are in the world. That’s when they engage us with the deal sizes are large. So sorry, I’ve lost train of thoughts.

Jeremy Weisz 8:34 

No so the question was about, are you having to source and reach out to these people? Or do the companies typically have a list that you can invite? Because there’s very different processes for you?

Samuel Adcock 8:51 

Yeah. So we’re not magicians, meaning if you give us and we’re dealing with people, which means if you give us a list of their wish list, we will work with that we’ll do our very best to get those people in the room. And we’re pretty good at what we do. That’s why we’re at the stage where we’re at now. Yeah, I always say I’ve dedicated my life to this craft, which is true. He’s just getting something seemingly simple. giving people advice, sending them an invite, and getting him to accept a dinner invitation, which is always free in a really nice location. Typically, the nicest restaurant, the city can provide whichever city that is. And invite them along with peers for interesting discussion. And you think it would be easy getting people to say yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 9:43 

I don’t think it’s easy because sometimes getting people off their couch is hardest, right? I mean, you’re gonna get someone to show up with Zoom is not necessarily easy. So no, I and people are busy, especially the people you’re contacting they’re super busy.

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