FULL INTERVIEW: Bob London & Industry Dive's Sean Griffey on Strategic Messaging, Listening & Growth

Sean Griffey, CEO and co-founder of Industry Dive.

Industry Dive is a company that produces business journalism for executives in competitive niche-targeted industries. So every day we have teams of journalists who cover the trends that shape these industries, help the executives understand what's happening to their companies, their careers, and allow them to make decisions that further both.

You've grown from how many to now how many?

Well, we launched with 5, uh, when we first started, and I think that's part of our thesis is, um, you can go into these niche industries, but if you want a scaled company, you have to do it repeatedly. Um, so we, we were very ambitious, launched with 5, which was more than we could do on day 1, but we wanted to force ourselves to do that. And we're in just over 20 right now with ambitions to go to more. So, uh, every month we reach north of 11 million executives. We have almost 80 full-time journalists now and 230-some employees. So we started this business 2012, myself and two co-founders, Eli Dickinson and Ryan Williamson, with the idea that media was undergoing a huge transformation and that there was an opportunity to create the next generation of media company. We knew that there was value in serving targeted readers, and so we have publications that cover the electric utility industry the waste and recycling industry, retail industries— large markets overall but with, with small readership. And so we thought there's real power in reaching those folks because they control large sums of money and make decisions that impact all Americans in the world over every day. We went after great design, and I think one of the great things of the internet right now is that you can use design to differentiate yourself from for folks out there. A little bit of money can make a small company look very large.

Can I just dive into that for a second? Design. When you say that, help people understand what you mean by design. I mean, it's web design, graphic design, user experience, user interface, all of it.

User experience is the first one, but it's, it's getting the information, getting content that you have in a format that doesn't block your audience from consuming it, right? It doesn't block your customers from consuming it. It eases the transfer of knowledge and information to them and your message to them. Too often, I think, and I was the same way, I, you know, in our last iteration, our partners and I, we didn't spend much time or effort in design. We thought that the message itself was important. It was more important. And in some ways that's true, but good messages can be lost if they're not in a package that can be consumed and design and user experience is what delivers it.

I love the fact that there are two sides of this coin. Oh, design, you know, sitting in a studio designing something. It has an extremely important benefit to the reader and ultimately the client, your advertisers, because it's taking stuff away that's extraneous and it's putting the most important stuff forward. You had not taken in outside money other than I think some friends and family type financing. Was that the goal to be bootstrapped or was it just something that you realized you could achieve and continue?

We were fortunate, you know, the friends and family, I would say sort of sophisticated angels from the DC area. Right. But we raised $400,000 to start with. And that was sort of a number that we felt could get us moving. At one point we hoped that there might be venture dollars along the way, but the reality is we were a bit contrarian in our thinking at the time. And it was a harder story to tell some of these venture capitalists, the ones who were investing in media. And at the time, the folks were chasing the BuzzFeeds of the world, the Vices of the world, which were all about getting as many eyeballs and scale as you could and sort of, we'll be profitable, monetize it later. And what we were doing was distinctly opposite of that. And so we knew venture was going to be a hard sell. So we wanted to bootstrap for a while. We went out and started looking for money maybe, you know, a year in and got a couple term sheets. But what we realized is the term sheets didn't see the value in the business we saw. And we thought, if we can hang on for another 6 to 9 months, we can go back into the marketplace and show a much different company. And what transpired is, you know, 6 to 9 months later, we were profitable and generating cash and we just never needed the money. Interesting. And at that point we just thought, why would we sell away parts of our company when we are now, you know, we're running now.

Yeah.

The business we can grow.

Control your destiny. When you mentioned something just now about the term sheets didn't reflect the value in the business that you saw, do you, in retrospect, do you see that as that's just the way investors were thinking, or could you guys have done a better job of expressing the value?

I think it was both, and I think there's parts of this that entrepreneurs always see, you know, a bigger value in their business, right? Like, that's why you start a business, is because you truly believe that this thing is going to be fantastic. I think we also could have done a better job telling the story, and quite honestly, there are some things we wouldn't tell. Like, I didn't want to promise anyone, no, no, this is going to be a $500 million business in 5 years, right? Like, that's just not how media works. That's not how successful media works. There's a You know, when you're trying to grow audiences, that takes time. When you're trying to grow traffic, you can buy that, but audiences takes time. And so part of it was we didn't— we could have told a more inspiring story, but part of it was we didn't tell a story that venture capitalists at the time wanted to hear.

So last year you decided to get private equity involved and you sold a majority stake. What was the intent and what was different then versus a few years before that?

I think there's two reasons, right? And one, if you're incredibly honest as an entrepreneur, right? Private equity allows my founders and I to take some chips off the table, return an investment to the people who gave us the $400,000 when day one. And that's a part of being an entrepreneur, right? Is capitalizing it. But I think the bigger piece of this is we just felt like the business deserved more. And there, there comes a time when you have scale and it's appropriate to sort of make heavier bets and to accelerate and the rest. And we felt that the platform was there, the foundation was there for this company to grow much faster than it had been and to have a much bigger impact for our readers and our clients than we were before. And bringing in a private equity firm allows us to do it. And so far, you know, we've just been just over a year since that happened, and it's been fantastic. It's been exactly what we wanted in terms of having a partner that truly kind of helps us and having resources that allows us to grow in ways that we might not have been comfortable doing before.

Were they familiar with media and journalism?

Yeah. You know, this was one of those situations where we didn't go to the market. We weren't looking for a transaction at the time. And I think a lot of times people will hire an investment bank to sort of shop to private equity and strategics and look to sell. We actually were happy growing on our own. And these guys really deliberately came to us and worked really hard to get in front of us. I kind of ignored their outreaches for a while, and they finally had to get mutual contacts to reach out and say, hey, these guys are actually serious and you should take their call. But they came to us with a, with a thesis on media and how to grow that really mirrored our own. And some of the slides that they presented us on day 1 looked like ones that I've been using for 10 years. Really? And yeah, it was a fascinating way to look at the audience in the center of it and how you leverage those audiences in different ways and how you serve them in different ways in, in different industries. And so it, it just felt like the right partner, felt like someone who really understood what we're trying to do, and so far so good.

I've seen you say on Twitter that people underestimate the level of effort and time and strength it takes to build an audience. You're talking about the difference now between audience and traffic. What is the difference?

I think one is an affinity with a brand and a feeling of community that's a part of it, right? When you have a real audience, you have people who are choosing to spend time with you in a in a way that you become part of their routine, you become part of how they identify themselves as the source they go to when something happens. It's really easy to get traffic. It's really easy to game the Facebooks of the world and the social media platforms of the world or buy it, quite honestly, with an arbitrage of low-cost places. But those people aren't necessarily coming because of you. They're becoming— coming to you because of the platform, because of the tricks, because of the ads. And I think you can grow the traffic really quick, but you can't build the loyalty without time. Strong brands are built over time. They're not built over days and weeks.

So one of the things— then we'll talk about the work that we did together— but one of the things I know we asked in a survey, and I think I also asked when I interviewed folks, readers and your clients, was is let's just say Industry Dive went away tomorrow, would you miss it? When you have an audience, the answer to that is, yeah, I mean, I need it and I can't, I can't, that would be terrible. The other end of the spectrum with traffic is, yeah, the world would go on. I mean, if I lost that source of information, I think that's good explanation of the distinction between audience and traffic and the difficulty of building audience. Then you made an acquisition not long ago. Making an acquisition is important to grow, but it's also fraught with things related to integration. But one of the things I always look at is cultural aspect. Did you feel like, you know what, we have to get to a point with our culture that we stand for something internally and externally and mission that before we can absorb something else into it?

Our culture, I think, has been strong from from day one. I think that's one of the things that we're fortunate about. And culture is really driven by the employees more than it's driven by the leadership. It can be guided by the leadership. Listen, you know—

You just said you're fortunate, fortunate to have good culture. I think a lot of people would say it's pretty intentional. You're very self-deprecating also.

So listen, we spend a lot of time on it.

Yeah.

And it is very intentional how we treat people and how we talk about what we stand for and how we show people what's important. But at the end of the day, the culture is driven by the employees more than whatever, you know, than anyone else. And a leader can stand up and say, this is what we stand for, but that's just— those are just words. It's how it's lived by people. So much of what we've done has been driven by the employees pushing us, and maybe it's that we're receptive to that, but without that, we wouldn't be who we are.

I think I understand what you're saying, that you're not responsible for every nook and cranny of culture, but you set a tone, you hire the right people, and they hire the right people in turn, and people that fit a number of criteria, including culture. And then, you know, good things happen if you continue to kind of nurture it.

When we went to do an acquisition, I, you know, I think you're right, like acquisitions fail all the time, and they're fraught with risks, and there's integration issues, but The, you know, one of the most important things we looked at was what is the culture of the company that we're looking to acquire and how will it fit with ours? And will this be an organ transplant rejection or will we kind of absorb each other? The fact that the company we bought so mirrored ours is what made us willing to do it. And so far, that's, that's been the easiest part. The culture part of This has been the easiest part so far. Everything else is hard.

How do you really find out the true culture of an acquisition target? Because they're all on their best behavior when they're talking to you.

It's not easy, right? But I think you can do, you know, you do the outside snooping when you talk to clients of theirs. You do the stuff when you talk to third-degree people who used to work there. What does the Glassdoor review say about what it's like to work there and all those types of things that kind of get a picture of where it is. But I tell people all the time, the worst person to ask about a culture is the founder or CEO. Yeah, because they describe, they describe a culture that they want perceived. They don't necessarily describe the culture as it is. And Paradise— know the— if you want to know the culture of a company, you've got to talk to the people at the bottom of the pyramid that work there, not at the top.

Several years ago, you and I met and connected and we just sort of stayed in touch. And then we had a conversation at one point where you were, you were saying to me that you felt like you needed to focus on the company's messaging. In some ways, maybe you had outgrown it is the way I tend to think about it. So can you just talk me through that? It's an important insight for a CEO or founder to have is when do we need to focus on this and why, and what outcomes do we expect?

I think there's a, there's a number of reasons why, you know, people should think about this and do these exercises. I think for us, what I started to fear is that the way we talked about ourselves was trying to serve too many people and it served no one. And that you have to stand for something for your clients, for your readers, for your employees. And I felt that we had been so wishy-washy or generic that it didn't reflect who we were and more importantly what we aspire to be. And I've never been one that takes these, hey, we're a company of, you know, 3 people and our mission is to change the world of whatever. I'm like, hey, how about you assemble desks first and then talk about changing the world, right? Like, let's get a little bit of a momentum before your mission becomes—

Assemble desks?

I mean, Register the business, assemble desks, you know, then talk about changing the way the world buys goods. Yeah. Get a little progress. Maybe I wasn't ambitious enough in how we looked at ourselves, and that wasn't inspiring for our employees. And that certainly didn't reflect where deep down I was, right? I'm a little bit more modest on like, let's do step A before we talk about step Z. Our language really didn't reflect what we had become. And it didn't reflect where we were going.

So what happens? You wake up one day and look at the website and you just kind of go, wow, this— or is it a period of time? It's nagging. What— or somewhere in between?

It was a nag in the back of my head for a while. There wasn't one thing. It was, you know, it was 50 things. It would be on a customer call and just kind of cringing, hearing someone in our company describe us in a way that I no longer described ourselves. Oh, we don't, we shouldn't talk about that anymore. Like that was 2012. This is the 20, like we're 6 years into this and we're past that. That slowly builds up to the point where we need to do something.

When I was doing some discovery in working with you guys, I noticed that the media coverage would refer to your audience as, yeah, they cover industries that are unsexy, boring, or kind of overlooked. These B2B industries like waste management or supply chain. And of course, that's the farthest thing from the truth. I mean, those are all— all the industries you cover are important, obviously, otherwise it wouldn't be 11 million people paying attention. What happened after our work together, and how do you think about those industries now?

I would sometimes run to those descriptions. I would allow people to say that, and I would affirm them in a sense that I enjoy personally being the contrarian at times. I fuel myself a little bit by trying to prove people wrong that these industries go. And so I was okay with that on my personal level. But what I realized is that I was doing a disservice to those industries and to the people in my company who were covering them. There is nothing boring about the supply chain industry. There's nothing sleepy or unsexy about waste. Those are billions of dollars industries that are being disrupted by players that have mass amounts of money going through them. And shape and impact every single American today. Yeah. Right. So it, it was doing a disservice to the people to allow them to be called by names like unsexy. And, and so now I just won't tolerate it when we talk about it. But that's part of just showing what those industries are. It's, it's part of giving credit to the people who work in those industries and what they're doing, uh, as well as to our reporters who live and die and are wonky about them. They don't view 'em as unsexy, and I shouldn't allow people to say that they are. Well said. Honestly, I wish, I wish it didn't take as long as it was. You know, I think it was branding and messaging is one of those things that it's easy to not do because nothing's going to fall apart if you don't change it. But it's an anchor that you're dragging that you don't realize how heavy it is.

That's a great way to say it. In my view, there are a lot of misperceptions about brand. I appreciated that you had that distinction already, that this is not a logo exercise, because the logo is important. It could be an anchor in some ways, it could be uninspiring, but, but that's not what we were talking about. We started talking about the things you just elaborated on. I think there is a lot of confusion about brand strategy, which is the thing that sort of, if we add up all the experiences that our constituents have with us, you know, 1,000 touchpoints we have with them, what's their impression of us? What do they tell other people when we're not around? Or what do they complain about when we're not around? That's really more of the brand instead of sort of the design. Is that the distinction you share as well?

Absolutely.

I was excited to talk to you about doing work together because I'm privileged to be able to work with interesting people and interesting companies, and I learn a lot from every engagement. There's a moment where I say, so in order to do this right, my recommendation is we have to interview customers, advertisers, readers, and employees. We have to get some voices from outside of the bubble. I hold my breath when I do that because it costs money. But what I found is that my best engagements are the ones where there's, there's a complete realization that of course we have to do do that. Yeah, it's more money, but that's the only way you can do it. I remember very clearly that, that reaction. Tell me why it's important. Why can't you just sit in a conference room with, with some smart people inside the company and just come up with a new messaging strategy or mission?

Maybe it's a bit like the voice you hear in your own head versus the voice you hear when you hear yourself talking recorded sounds so different. I don't think you can have a full appreciation of how you're viewed by looking inward and sort of self-reflecting. Here's, here's how I'm viewed, right? Here's how the world sees me or the customer sees me. You, you need to talk to other people to get that. If you want to talk about what you want to become, I think there's a big piece of it that starts with what are you today, right? If this is what you want to stand for tomorrow, what are you— what do you— what do people think you stand for today? And that has to come from listening to your customers. That has to come from listening to outside perspectives. And when you, you know, for us at least, so that the listening to the customer piece of this, absolutely have to do it.

Were there some interesting deltas between what you thought you were versus what you heard the way readers and clients thought about you.

Media companies have two core constituents. We have the people who read us and who are the audience, but the people who predominantly pay us are the marketers who advertise to reach the people who read us. What we saw was that I think our messaging sort of tried to serve both of them. And, you know, I said earlier, I don't think it served either one of them. It took away from the journalism. It took away from what the core mission is. And I don't think people understood or respected the amount of work and original content we had, the caliber of our journalists and what we produce on a daily basis. I think we knew it inside. We were proud of it. We knew that we were hiring journalists from, you know, some of the biggest companies out there, the Politicos and Bloombergs of the world, you know, their reporters were coming to work for us, but I don't think anyone understood the value of the content we were producing.

How many journalists work there now?

Just about 80 full-time.

So I remember talking to you in your office back in the good old days of offices and you telling me this and then going out into the market and asking readers and clients clients, advertisers, questions about their perceptions, and it was clear that they didn't appreciate that. They're getting inundated with sources of information, and if you're just another source of information because you're an aggregator scraping headlines from around the web and putting them in a slick copywriting format, like some of the companies that purport to be, you know, news providers, that's so different than journalists who dig up a story, report the story, they pursue the story, and they break the story and the news because they understand their audience. I think one of the distinctions was you can't get this stuff anywhere else. You can get different coverage, but you can't get this anywhere else. So to hear you guys talk about journalism, and when I interviewed your employees, it was the same, you know, digital media journalism, the outside world needed to have that, that appreciation. And I know that from what I've seen, that you guys have produced in the last couple of years, it looks like you're working hard to get that perception where it really should be because that's where the value of the company is.

Absolutely. And I think your point about the aggregation, I mean, one of the things that we did is we tried to make it in the early days, particularly when the focus was much more on mobile, get in and out of the stories as fast as you can, right? We didn't want someone to have to like spend 10 minutes with one of our stories. So we tried to make it look as clean as possible, as brief as possible. And I think that gave the appearance that it was aggregation, that there wasn't more underneath it. And so I think there's some of this, it's the language piece. Some of it was a design piece. Yes. To highlight the people and to show what it is. So it's all of it working together in concert that really went to change what we're doing, right? The way we talk about it, the way we show it, how, you know, how we show it, all of that has changed since we've worked with you.

You've also talked about the internal impact that the new messaging has had, especially on the journalists themselves. Just talk about that a little bit because I, again, I think it's easy to look at this as it's a luxury to do a branding exercise, but if there's tangible, meaningful results and perceptions internally, that counts as well as part of the ROI.

Absolutely. Everyone today wants to believe that the work they do and feel that the work they do matters and that there's a mission component to it. And journalists, as much as anyone, that matters, right? That they are helping people understand really complex things and they're, they're helping them make decisions that change the lives of everyone in this, in this country. For us to, to use words that didn't reflect that importance takes away a little bit from, from them, in my opinion, of the importance of the work that they're doing. And by putting it in front as a company serves both as a, as a guidepost that here's where we go. It's a reminder of here's, here's what you're here for, here's why it's important. But it also is reassuring that, that we value the same things that they value, that why they got here in the first place.

I'll put forth something that really struck me when I was interviewing readers. The impact and the value of the work you guys do, it's very important to be precise. Yeah, you're publishing original journalism.

Great.

But what impact does that have to readers? Like if you ask them, well, what happened? What would happen if this went away? Well, I couldn't do my job as well. I need that information.

Why?

I don't know. It sparks ideas. It's— we get innovation from it because we're getting perspectives from people who are objectively looking at the industry. It helps me bolster my case internally for resources. It helps basically shape outcomes and ultimately it helps us fuel growth and we're all trying to grow. What I loved was— I'm going to answer my own question, I guess. What I loved was the fact that I think that language, the reader's language, sparking innovation, fueling growth, shaping outcomes, ended up on your homepage. So you really took it to heart that we can't just say what we do. We have to talk about the impact we have.

Well, thank you. And thanks for getting us there. I mean, I think it, it, as I said, it is now a guiding light of where we're going as a company and what we want to do. And it's also something that we can see when the world turns upside down. We can see our audience come to us. In much more of a need, much more of a— they need information when, when a pandemic hits, you know, the how this is impacting my industry, how is this impacting what we're doing? They come to us and it's important for those reasons that you said. And I think we knew it, but we never said it. Right. And you can know something in the back of your mind, but then you can also say it and it becomes that much more real for the people here and it becomes that much more important. When you start talking about it.

I didn't think about this before, but in a world where sometimes it's hard to decide what's truthful, what's the definitive point of view on something. So when there's a pandemic and a lockdown and economic downturn, what do you rely on for information? I go to Industry Dive. These guys are going to tell me— Industry Dive's journalists are going to tell us things that are happening and that might happen based on this crazy new world. And I can rely on that. And that, that is a brand.

Why isn't this an internal exercise, right? Like, why did we need you to come in? I think there's two reasons, right? One is a very practical standpoint, which is we have a lot of very smart people in our company that are doing different things. This exercise isn't a core part of anyone's job. And if you want it done right, this, this felt like one of those exercises where we needed an expert that was going to kind of shepherd the process and guide us through it. And that's from a very tactical kind of piece. Like, I don't know who was going to do the job and who had the expertise to do the job while doing what they're there to do on a daily basis. I think there's another piece, though, where it really helps to get someone to come in and challenge you and challenge your thinking And to get an outside voice that can call BS when you're saying this is who we are and what we are. And I think one of the roles you had was saying, this isn't how the people I talked to that your customers said, you know, said about you. And you can, we can say this all along, but here's what they said. If we don't change the way we're talking about, you're still going to perceive the way they perceive you today. So I think both of those were why bringing you in and getting help really mattered. I do see a lot.

Company says, you know, we need a new website. And then as they get into that, they hire a digital design company who makes their money off the website. And at some level, someone says, you know, what messaging is going to go in that website? And that's not the agency's core competency. So they go through this and then someone says, well, we should probably do some interviews. And then you look in the scope of work and buried down 10 lines deep in the budget is 3 customer interviews performed by, you know, someone who's 2 years out of college at the agency. And it never gets reflected in the work. So that, that's a warning that you're going to spend $100 grand on this site. You're not using it for what it is, which is a welcome mat that says, here's who we are, here's who we want to be, in a way that resonates.

Absolutely. I also think, not to be blatantly plugging you, but I think it's important to get someone outside to do it for you and with you, right? I think you get more honest conversations with clients when they know that, that you've hired someone to help you improve. Right. It's very easy to go to clients and say, hey, we brought Bob in to help us get better. We want you to be as honest as you can with Bob so that we can get better. And you'll get really great answers from clients with a third party versus when you come up and say, hey, tell me how I can improve. You may get— so you get like some clients will give you good feedback. But most of them will say, "Oh, we've got a relationship. You're great. I love you." And that's not necessarily how they really feel.

I appreciate that. And I think the independence is important. I think that the other thing, the questions you ask and the way you listen to the answers and the way you respond are actually the most important thing. I could teach someone to ask those questions and listen, you know, actively. It's really the questions get people to think differently before they answer. I've done over 2,200 customer interviews and the number of times people have said, huh, that's a good question. And no one's ever asked me that before. I know I'm going to get some insight there. What would you say if another founder or CEO said, I think maybe we've, we need to update our messaging. I'm not sure, just, but it doesn't feel like it's broken necessarily, but I know it's not optimized and it maybe feels like the proverbial anchor. Maybe it's not helping. What would you say to them?

I think what we said, the analogy kind of before, right, is It is, it's something that you're dragging behind you. It's the anchor you're dragging behind you and you won't realize how heavy it is until you're freed from it. And what messaging should be is the sail that pushes you forward, right? It should be something that propels you. And if it's not, you have some work to do and you have an opportunity, quite frankly. It's one that maybe doesn't feel as immediate because you can, you can get through today and get through tomorrow without changing it, but you really can't, can't move as fast as you want without it.

I might have to steal those analogies with attribution. What would you say to them if they say, well, we're thinking of hiring a website firm to redo our brand?

If you truly believe that the message matters, if you believe the brand matters, And if you believe it's more than a logo, then you need to go to someone who actually has expertise in that.

You've spoke strongly about the need to have the customer's voice in there somehow. How much of the effort should be, yeah, we can build a new website, but we have to dig in and understand what the world thinks of us today and what we want them to think of us like. Is that a— is it 50% discovery and understanding and insights and 50% designing the website? What I see is it's 5%.

Unfortunately, it has to be more than that. Where my thinking's evolved on this is it can't be a one-time thing for this exercise. Hearing from your customers has to be more important than we did it 2 years ago and this is the results, right? It has to be the feedback loop you get has to be set up so that you get it, you know, all the time in real time and that you're speaking to them. I think you have to be very deliberate at times, right? Like you have to stop and say, Okay, we have these, these mechanisms to hear from our clients on a daily, weekly basis when we're done with a campaign. And I think at times you need to say we need to do even more than that. It needs to be a bigger project and let's take a timeout and be very deliberate about it. This is a good time to do that. If you're thinking about your messaging, it's a good time to do it. But there are other good times to do that.

When you say this is a good time, are you referring to the pandemic?

I mean, I think pandemic is a great time. But I meant more of when you want to change your messaging, it's like a perfect time to do it. But there are other perfect times to do it.

Well, thanks for your time. I think people will get value out of it, and I know your time's really precious. So thank you so much, Shawn.

Thanks, Bob.

All right. All right. Take care.