Streamline Your Operations | SVP at STN Digital Cammille Arciaga (Podcast 218)

You don't need to know everything to start. I'm someone who wants to know all the information. I want to be really good at it before I start. Two things happened to me in the last several years. I had a baby and a pandemic hit right as I became a vp. So both of those are great examples of you don't need to know everything to start.

COO alliance member and Senior Vice President of STN Digital Camille Arciaga STN Digital is a social first marketing agency focused on launching brands and building building highly engaged audiences. Focusing on digital strategy, social media management, paid media, influencer management, branding, sponsorships and more. The STM team strives to be a seamless extension of their partners internal teams. On any given day, the team at STN could be helping build Elton John's TikTok to launching a new stadium for SDSU to producing a live stream event for a feature film. Camille started at STN as a creative director and over the past three and a half years has worn many different operational hats and is now the SVP and second in command to their CEO, David Brickley. Over the years she has harnessed her passion for developing teams, implementing organizational change and processes while fostering an innovative work environment that helps drive a white glove service that STN is known for. Camille, welcome to the Second Command podcast.

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, looking forward to learning a little bit more about you and your growth and then also even a little bit more about stn. Why don't we start with stn? Because I'm kind of intrigued by, you know, just in the bio what it mentioned, you know, Elton John's TikTok to a new stadium for San Diego State University. Like really?

Yes. Everything under the sun. So sdn, we're a social first marketing agency headquartered here in San Diego, but we have teams all over the US now since we've gone remote, but we work with brands like the NFL, the Olympics, Hulu, Amazon and helping them with anything from 360 Marketing, on site activations, paid media. As you know, this industry is changing every three months there's always a new platform, a new update. So many things to keep up with. So our team really likes to be those experts for our clients so they don't have to figure that out all on their own. And yeah, we're like extension of their external teams and we really want our clients just to be the editor in chief of their content and we help them reach their goals.

Amazing. So with brands that are this big and Brands that are this well known, I would imagine that your company and your team has to be good at saying no to some of them because if you say yes to everything they ask for, you're going to screw it up and then you're going to kill all the relationships. So how do you say no to them? Or am I right? Maybe I'm wrong.

That is right. I actually was thinking about that one. Saying that we've been repeating over the last few years is we could do it, but should we? And if we don't ask ourselves that, we will just say yes to everybody. But really understanding what's at risk here because these are such large brands, so any quality issues is on us. Any mistake on these very visible platforms could really kill your whole business. So very important to us to have that integrity behind what we're offering, making sure that we can stick to our promise of giving the best output possible and also protecting our team and our culture of just not driving people into the ground because we said yes to everything.

With the clients that you're working with, are you a premium priced service? Are you kind of middle? Where does your pricing stack up? And my guess again would be that you're in the premium price side of things with the brands that you're working with because they need the best. Is that accurate or.

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I'm not too familiar with how our competitors are pricing, but we know what we are offering to our clients and our team is on seven days a week and always available. Especially in social media. Things are happening all the time. An athlete gets released or traded or news just drops. So our team has to be readily available to, to respond to those events for our clients. So, you know, I think with our pricing you're also paying for that dependability always. On which I think a lot of agencies can't always offer.

How many employees do you have now?

We have 90 now.

90. Okay, so that's a huge agency. When you started four years ago, how many were you then?

25.

So from 2025 employees up to 90, so you're four times bigger than you were when you got there. What's that growth been like?

The funnest, wildest ride. It's been really fun. When I joined, yeah, we were 25. The agency that I came, I saw this, a very similar trajectory. I also joined at 20 and by the time I left it was like 300 people. So I've been very familiar with this kind of space and I find it so fascinating to be a part Of So when I saw SCN Digital, I just, I don't know, I just had this gut feeling that they were on the same trajectory and I wanted to be a part of it. So having a pandemic happen and your whole company going remote and kind of seeing a lot of your contracts be put on hold almost overnight because in person events are all not happening, that was a big part of our bread and butter. So, yeah, it's been fun trying to figure it all out.

You said that you do social and social media, but then on site. Is that your on site taking photos and doing live streams and reels on site? Like what are you doing on site for events?

Yeah. An example would be at an award show where they have an activation with on the red carpet as celebrities are walking through. They, you know, maybe the network wants to get content that they can post on their social media. So we've built like full activations where we only have one minute with a celebrity. So we have a team on site capturing this content and turning it over and sending it to their publicist to post on social media within 30 minutes. So just really maximizing the footprint that they have and the time that we have with these highly visible people to really amplify the presence on social media.

Wow, amazing. Okay, so Covid hits and on site contracts. Stop. Did you have to lay off people? Did you have to sit back and I hate the term pivot. Did you have to pivot? What did you do?

We didn't lay off a single person. We really got together as a leadership team and figured out what other offerings and where else could we add value? Because the other side of the coin was that everybody realized they needed social media. If you weren't in person, then you at least needed to have a social presence to just stay top of mind and be visible. So because that was what our expertise is in, we created playbooks, we gave people tools to help navigate. How are you going to, you know, use a budget? How can we maximize what you have to use and keep your audience engaged during such a unknown time?

There's been a huge trend in the last few years for offshoring. I mean, probably in the last 20 years, but even more so it seems a lot of what the work, kind of the back end work on social, like slicing up content and captioning it and pushing it out on feeds, blah, blah, blah. A lot of that's being done overseas. What percentage of your 90 employees are overseas? What percent are in the U.S. they are all here.

But we also, we do Have a team of freelancers that are overseas, but they're not full time employees for us. But we do use them to create content for us. And yeah, it does help when they're over, especially in this quick turn nature of our industry. Like I said, if somebody is about to be traded or news is about to drop, we can activate someone overseas. And by the time we get in, the graphic is already done. But all of our full time employees are here.

That's amazing. Okay, so the 90 are in North America, but you are leveraging some freelancers as well overseas. Makes sense on the on site and the360. So the COVID hit you a little bit on the products that you're offering, the services and having to refocus with some of these clients around, some of the urgency. Less on site. What changed for the company itself? Were you all based in San Diego at the time or were you throughout the US Pre Covid?

Yeah, we were all based in San Diego with a few people who were in other states. But that wasn't even a standard for the company. It was like everybody who got onboarded had to be based in San Diego. But that literally changed overnight. And it's interesting to think back now because that was. Even working from home was something as a culture we were trying to like move towards. It was like one day you got to work from home, it was Wednesday. And then overnight we just was like, okay, everyone worked from home. And it actually worked out just fine. But actually since then, yeah, everyone that we've hired, we've opened up all of our jobs to anybody in the US which has been amazing actually for our talent. Because San Diego is very limiting for what we're looking for.

Well, every city is limiting. If you think about the fact that, you know, you got to live within 20 minutes of the office to have a reasonable life. If you're driving more than that, your life is kind of messed up. So then you're hating your job. Like you said, it's odd that you're going to have so much talent, you know, just in that one marketplace. So are you going back to the office? Are you getting rid of the offices? What's going on there?

We have a headquarters in San Diego. We've kind of turned it into a wework kind of space. So there aren't really any assigned seats, but there is a desk and a monitor if you want to plug in and pop in whenever you need to. Our executives have private offices here, but for the most part our headquarters is more of a place to collaborate or have larger meetings if we can. But it's by no means mandatory anymore.

Wow. Like, what an unbelievable change and cultural shift in every organization. It's unbelievable. Nobody ever would have thought this. Like you said, like, you know, Wednesdays you could work from home, but we were. Now it's like, if you want to come in once in a while, it'd be nice to see you.

Yes, it's such a difference.

So what's changed in terms of your systems culturally and on the hiring and onboarding, how have you adapted to that?

I feel like we've actually just gone through like two years of wild hiring and man, our culture has changed so much. I think the pandemic just forced us to really look at what matters and listen to what our team needs. We actually gave everyone a one hour mental health break. It was free time to do whatever you needed to do. The whole company took it. We had this agreement that we wouldn't slack. Email called during that hour and it's actually something we've never gotten rid of. It's just on the company calendar that we've adopted. So changes like that because we just felt team needed it. We've been working with next level growth. Just recently, my CEO, David Brickley, I think heard about them from you.

Yeah. Michael Erot's company. That's right.

Yeah. So Scott is our implementer and he's been incredible. My CEO is very familiar with eos and we've implemented some principles, but not with a true implementer. So it was kind of was there, but not really and we weren't really following through. So now we're fully invested in the visionary integrator seats and accountability chart and KPI. So it's interesting because that's kind of coming after a lot of this growth, but we're moving in the right direction.

Okay, so I'm curious now. EOS Traction by Gino Wickman. The Solid Systems Amazing program. My feeling has always been that it tends to start to break down around, you know, 70, 80 employees and you need something different. Is that why you're now working with Michael Eross company? Next level Growth is you need something next kind of after EOs.

Yes, yes. And at the size that we're at and the leadership team that we've developed, I also just really like the platform. I think they've got us on 90io, which keeps us accountable and just that's the thing with all of these processes and programs. Right. There's just documents that live everywhere and halfway through the quarter you kind of forget that they exist. So trying to create something that is. Yeah. That we look at weekly and we're all accountable for.

You've had to hire 70 employees over the last four years, but really in the last two years, you've had to do it remotely. So what specifically have you done to change your hiring process, your interviewing process, and your onboarding process? Let's go like interviewing and then onboarding.

Even before interviewing, the game changer for our company was hiring a recruiter. I think we just couldn't crack the code. But a lot of other businesses that had scaled that, we spoke to hiring that internal recruiter was. Was massive for them.

Where did you get the recruiter?

We just hired for it. Just had a job posting up and they've been. And we actually just hired a junior recruiter underneath that person. But they've really helped us get people to the hiring process. So that was a big change. I would recommend that to everybody because otherwise everyone's accountable, but really nobody is in the hiring process. We really just systematized everything and we use recruitee as a platform and, you know, just moves people in buckets throughout the process. So you're very clear on where people are. A big thing that we've also integrated was predictive index. So we actually asked our applicants to fill that out in the hiring process. So we create job targets before the post even goes up. And all of our hiring managers are trained to look at what their PI scores are and if they're even just a fit for the job. And that actually helps us cole through so hundreds of applicants, because if they just aren't in the right job target, it's just not going to be a fit, period. So that was also huge. Otherwise, you're just looking at every applicant without a compass, I guess. Yeah. Our interview process has about like five core steps. Our onboarding, we actually did a whole overhaul of the process. We realized that people were joining the team and had no idea what the goals were, had no idea what they. What their impact was to the whole company. Just felt like a fish out of water. So we actually. They actually spend two days with our director of HR and go through a company onboarding. So just a baseline picture of like, what are our goals? This year they actually rewatched our State of the Union. They watch a video about our vivid vision. We record all of those. So we make all of our new hires watch them so they're caught up to speed on what the whole company has agreed on and what the vision is. We go through platforms, benefits, all the Basic things that I feel just get overlooked. And you're expected to kind of figure out by asking people, and then you get shuffled over to the department training, and that's a whole process. We also have internal manager training. Depending on what kind of hire they have, everybody gets the basic STN digital company training, and then they get the.

More specialized branch out from there. So in terms of the culture side of things, I mean, the culture clearly changes and adapts through Covid. How do you onboard people, People. When you used to be a strong culture company and you were all in person, how do you indoctrinate them into that culture? But it's like, but go back to your living room or go back to your bedroom.

I know it's been a fun experiment to see what works. I mean, even when I first started, we always sent out a little questionnaire to our new employees and sent it out the Friday before they started. And everyone in the company actually welcomed you and responded to that email. So you kind of felt already welcomed by the team before your first day even. Our slack is probably the most lively it's ever been. And it's been interesting to see how well I know people that I haven't met, because I think we've created a really, like, transparent, safe, bring your whole self type of environment that people are happy to share photos of their dog, their children, whatever's going on at home. And that's very welcomed here. But I will say, a big investment that we made this year was having a goat retreat. So our mascot is a goat, and we call our team the Herd. We have a go retreat here in San Diego. It was the first one we've done, like this size. So our employees who had been on the team for like two years hadn't met their supervisors, their colleagues in person yet. So we flew everybody out to San Diego. We had no sales discussions, no company meetings. It was really just focused on team building foundations. We had Olympics on the bay. We did a whole tour of our new headquarters. We did a nice company celebration, but that really helped us see how much we need to invest in culture and probably do that more often.

I love it. A friend of mine and a former COO alliance member, Mike Arcey, his company's called Loud Rumor. Mike hosts a podcast called the Goat show, and he has some really, really strong content that I think you guys would actually like. He's actually a digital marketing agency as well, but he only does digital marketing for firms like F45 and OrangeTheory and Chains of fitness places. So there's no competition. I think your might love some of his goat show episodes because.

Yeah.

Greatest of all time. Yeah, he's amazing. So talk to me about what you're noticing with employee compensation. I mean, we've heard this whole thing. The great resignation. I think it's about time that employees left crappy companies working at crappy jobs and they moved to companies like yours where they can work for a great company and a great job. But what's happened to compensation in the last two years? What are you seeing?

People are empowered to ask for what they think they deserve. And on the company side, it's forcing us to reevaluate all the levels. And I think that's a common challenge. We've talked about in CEO alliance about strong talents. You want to get in the door very quickly because also if you don't offer them within a week, they're gone. It's kind of like the housing market. It forces us to reevaluate the levels that we have within the company just to meet the demand of potential candidates. I've never seen anything like it.

I haven't either. It's extraordinary and it's extraordinarily fast. So are you paying more than you used to pay? Are you trying to drag it out as long as you can, getting ahead of the curve? Like where. Where are you guys with all that?

We're definitely paying more. And I think, especially when you're competing, our competitors are thousands of employees and have a lot more.

You're in a hot. You're in a hot space.

Yes. So we have to stay competitive. But I also think that we double down on our culture and we know that the environment that you're going to join and what we offer here as far as protecting your work life balance and really looking out for our employees, I don't know if you can put a number on that. But we're also confident that if you choose to work with us, you'll be much happier.

What are you giving people for vacation time? Where are you with all that?

We have four weeks of pto. I can't remember the number of holidays off the top of my head. But we also have this policy internally. We actually have people on staff who are looking at have people worked seven days in a row or over X amount of hours and we actually work with that employee to give them time back. So nobody in the company ever works for 14 days and goes unchecked and isn't given, you know, some time back to recoup.

I like that you actually said we protect the career life balance as well. That it's kind of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. We're actually going to be spending a lot of time in September at our two day in person event on building a world class culture. And it's only coos from around the world will be at that event just focusing on building that workplace so that we can attract more employees in like a magnet. And it is the base level pay is only the bottom of that five level pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy. Right. That safety and security and the camaraderie and the feeling of friendships and the career growth and their own personal growth. And it's kind of good that you guys are focusing on all that. I want to go back four years ago. So you were working at another digital agency and then you decided to go and work with stn. Were you still at the other agency? Had you quit? What was the transition to stn?

I was still there when I applied at STN Digital. I was there for several years. That's where I really like got all my understanding of agency world. It was in public health marketing. So totally different subject matter. So after six or seven years of that, I was just like curious to see how my skills would translate in another industry. And STM Digital, you know, was another agency in San Diego which I felt was like a unicorn to find because sports and entertainment agencies are in New York, in la, in big cities that I couldn't move to at the time. So I knew that, I don't know, there was something about STN that I had to jump in, test it out.

What role did you apply for and why do you think they selected you back then?

This is a funny story. I wanted to get in the door that I just applied as an account manager. That was like the open position, which wasn't what I did. But they actually called me back. I didn't get that role, but they called me back after their creative director ended up leaving. So several months later they called me back and actually offered me the role that I really wanted, which is great.

What was that?

Which was creative director. So I had initially applied as an account manager, but I just wanted that to get in the door, even though that really wasn't what I did.

It's crazy. So how have you moved from the creative director side into kind of the operations side? Like you're now the senior vice president, you report to the CEO, you're kind of that second in command. How did you move into that role?

You know, I was thinking about this, how did I get here? Because I know that's a very unorthodox way to get to the role. But yeah, I knew that the company was like right on the precipice of blowing up and scaling very quickly. And it's funny, I learned about Colby at CO alliance and I revisited my profile and I'm at 8-913-SO-LORE systems and process and that kind of everything makes sense to me. I'm always asking, well, how are we doing this? Why are we doing this? What's the most efficient way to do this? So even in the creative world, there's so many steps to get an idea out the door to be client facing, you know, so that was what I geeked out on. It's like, okay, I have project managers, I have freelancers, I have account managers, all of these people. In the process of shepherding this idea out the door, I just realized that I always was excited about creating a system around that. So I think at the time, my CEO also realized he needed a right hand person to think through the how of all of this. And that was naturally what I gravitated towards. And I've sat in the director of HR seat twice. I was in the VP of Ops seat before I was in this seat. So I actually think that as unexpected as it is, all of those seats actually help me see the whole picture, understand the very, very tactical aspects of the role. Because I think when you're so far removed, it's actually kind of hard to enact change because you don't really get the day to day experience of that person. That's client facing. It's actually helped me see the full picture.

Did your CEO David, did he do his Colby profile?

He did.

Do you know what his four numbers are?

Surprisingly, he's at 8, 6, 3, 3.

Okay, so he's an unconventional COO. So what's his background? Is he out of the sciences or something? Or tech or.

No, no, this. I mean, he started this company, so he was in sports broadcasting. And that's actually what he wanted to do, was become a broadcaster, but has always been in the social space.

Interesting. Your second number is the highest with a 9, which means you initiate projects by putting systems and processes, playbooks in place. David's first number is highest and that means he likes to start things by asking questions. So I would guess that between the two of you with two very first high numbers and then with systems and processes, you're not making a lot of mistakes or are you making some mistakes?

Both of us really strive not to.

Yeah. Have you made any.

Plenty of mistakes.

Give us a mistake that you've made as a company or like that you've made that you've learned from not moving.

Quickly enough when it comes to culture. Oh, we actually learned about this tool, this, like the people assessment tool. And there's that part of it where they're like a high culture fit but low performer or high performer but poor for your culture. And those are the. Some of the mistakes that we made just not moving in those areas. So it has ripple effects that affect so many people, but those are the ones that stand out to me. Because they take all of your energy.

Yeah, they do. It's kind of like that cultural cancer that if you found out you had a cancerous tumor in your body, you'd get it removed right away. I don't know why we let the cancerous people stay in the organization because they do spread.

We realize that the more and more that we are talking about someone or trying to make plans for somebody or create a role for somebody that doesn't exist is already a telltale sign for us that we've spent too much time thinking about this.

This is an odd question because I don't know that. I actually don't know the answer to this, but have you signed up any of your managers yet for the invest in your leaders course yet?

Not yet.

Okay. What do you do to grow your managers and leaders? The reason I launched that course was to give managers the 12 core leadership skills that they need to excel in their role. So things like situational leadership coaching, delegation, time management, conflict management, problem solving, interviewing, running meetings. You know, the soft skills of management. When you're growing this quickly, you've got a management team that you're either needing to continue to grow or you're hiring from the outside. Let's talk about the growing them from within. What are you doing to grow their skills internally or are you just hiring people that grow themselves?

Oh, well, in the last few years, we actually built a manager training program internally. Our CEO and myself sat down and recorded videos about mindset shifts that change when you become a people leader at the company. How you show up now changes and people that are watching you. So a lot of those mindset shifts we recorded videos on. He also has a coach that he did some videos with about having difficult conversations. It's a huge deck that is kind of tracked with a checklist, but we also walk through all of the platforms and now the manager level aspect of all the platforms that they're used to using also just corrective action. I think some people didn't know that performance improvement plans existed or development action plans existed. So walking them through what their options are if they are in a situation like that and who to go to as a company. We also. Well, as a leadership team, we read Radical Candor. We reference that often. That's really big for us here. That's like the initial and we're actually working through right now how we make that a more ongoing process and how we can talk about it more often actually. Because they'll get through that. And then I think the application of it in the real world now that they have to do these things, a lot more questions come up. So we're trying to think through what that next step looks like.

Organization that you believe in growing people too. It's nice that David has a coach and then you're involved in the COO alliance and you've got next level growth kind of working with you on implementing traction and the L10 stuff and all their systems. You're growing your people. Have you had to bring in any external senior hires over top of the existing team at all and how did that go if you have yet or are you just starting to have to think about that?

Yeah, we actually hired out for our VP of operations. That was just the operations side of the company, I think was kind of lagging with the rest of the company. And then you scale and then you realize we really need these people, the engine behind all of this scaling. So that was like a big red flag moment. In one of our off sites, me and the CEO, we realized that both of us were probably sitting in that seat. And that is so ineffective for both of us. But that was one that we hired out and just knew that there wasn't anyone on the team that could possibly fill that role.

So when you had to hire for that outside and bring them in, I mean this typically happens when you're going from kind of the 70 or 80 to you know, like you're in the hundred zone is when you typically have to do it. It's very normal. And then when you're at 300, almost every single senior person is coming in from the outside. It's very hard to grow from within. So what did you have to do to bring that person in from the outside? What were some of the negative ripple effects that that caused and what were some of the positive ripple effects that that senior person caused? Because either way, they're like a boulder. They're going to cause ripples what did you notice? And what can we learn from the good and the bad?

Yeah, I really appreciate bringing somebody in from the outside because they ask questions that I don't think get asked enough. Just why? Right? Just why do we do it that way? And anytime I didn't have an answer for why, it was like, well, then why do we even do that? So I actually welcome those questions that they. And how they poke holes just to try to understand. Right. Because it makes you repeat back what you're trying to te and if it doesn't make sense, then it's like, well, then let's remove it. So I think that is like such a huge benefit of bringing in someone from the outside, them joining an existing leadership team. It's a different energy. We've all been working, you know, together for several years now, and there is a relationship building that has to happen because especially in these leadership meetings, we talk about sensitive topics, we talk about what's going on in the business, and it takes a while for that person to understand the rhythm and the culture. I mean, for any employee to get integrated. But fortunately, that person's also local, so he's having a much easier time figuring it out.

I want to go Back to the 22 year old. Camille. You're just getting started in your career. You're just kind of getting going. What advice would you give yourself at 22 that you know to be true today but you wish you'd known back then?

Oh, that's a great question. You don't need to know everything to start. That is what I would tell myself. I'm someone who wants to know all the information. I want to be really good at it before I start. Two things happened to me in the last several years. I had a baby and a pandemic hit right as I became a vp. So both of those are great examples of you don't need to know everything to start. Because as a parent, you read all the books, you think you know everything, and then they arrive and you're like, I don't know anything. And you're googling everything and you're noticing that other parents also don't know what they're doing. So you'll be okay.

Yeah.

And then. Yeah. When Covid hit. Fortunately, I think I had already joined or I joined co alliance during the pandemic. So just to have other people in my seat and realizing we're all figuring it out, no matter what size your company was, no one really had a clear answer. That was actually very comforting, and it just reinforced like you're not going to know everything and the resources will present themselves when you need it.

That's amazing. I love it. Camille Ociaga, a COO alliance member and the senior vice president for STN Digital, thanks very much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast. The challenge is because we've got customers from, like, 197 countries. So, like, where do we start? I think what we'll probably end up doing, like, we love the online model because we can reach so many people and because it's quite convenient and obviously, like, the. The outlay of having to run venues and all this kind of thing for our model, it's comfortable to run it online.