217 - Unveiling the Secrets of Success in Boutique Marketing for Emerging Brands with Pennock's Nikki Lindgren

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Nikki Langren, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and managing partner of a company called Penock, P-E-N-O-C-K, found at penock.co. And as I'm sure you'll tell us in more detail, you guys are a marketing agency for lifestyle and women's health products, beauty products, stuff like that. And fascinating journey. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to chat with us.

Yeah, Doug, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

For those of my audience who have not jumped onto our Authority Magazine interview that we did with each other, why don't you start out with a little bit of a backstory?

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up the professional ladder in digital marketing. I first was at Pottery Barn back in the early 2000s and moved over to Cost Plus World Market. So really excited to start e-commerce marketing for both of those businesses that had more of their emphasis in brick and mortar. While at Cost Plus, I worked with really great agencies. I was able to choose which agency partners ran our paid media, our SEO, and some other parts of marketing. And it was there that I realized that the agency folks seemed to be the masters of it all. They had so much more rich, detailed knowledge than anyone at my company had related to digital marketing. So from there, I moved in, uh, into an agency where I helped 45 brands across entertainment and lifestyle and even music, um, grow and scale their e-commerce products and bebopped around from in-house to agency side a couple more times before starting Pennock, um, having a full view of what both sides of the parties needed to come to the table with to really have a strong relationship with the in-house team. And so I think that's what Penok does a little bit differently. We're boutique in nature. It's just a bunch of females who are working fully decentralized from our home offices, and we help these lifestyle and beauty brands really grow and scale their e-commerce business through a more integrated approach into their overall marketing mix.

How do you come up with the name Penok?

Pennoch is the name of this really small town I'm from in Minnesota.

Ah, yeah. Always a story there.

Exactly. So just the nearness to my heart and my roots, it just seemed like the right thing to do. And knowing that the firm I would be building would be a little bit smaller, bespoke, and boutique in nature, it seemed really fitting.

That's cute. I know a little bit about digital marketing, probably enough to really get me in trouble. The one thing I do know is it's an area that is far more complex than it was 10 years ago. And it's constantly changing. The algorithms are constantly changing. Everybody is trying to beat the algorithms. Everybody's trying to game the system. The platforms are all trying to game back. It's like a huge war out there.

It really is.

Does that sound about right?

It really is. And I think it's like just when you figure out one part of it, the whole model flips. And now another part of digital is where the focus is. I'll give you an example. 2, 3 years ago, really building out in granular detail, the audience persona and targeting that person precisely on any paid platform was really the hero and the, the winning piece of the formula. Nowadays with so much machine learning and, and LLM in general, broader audiences are better and all of the insights and like opportunity really lie in the creative mix and what your assets and your ad units look like.

Wow. I know that right now I've got my, my marketing people are doing what they call Post-it notes and they just we've come up with 20 different pain points around anger and de-escalation, stuff like that. And they're running really simple little Facebook ads with different texts to find out what resonates. And they're not targeting anybody. They're, they're gonna let the algorithm do the— they're gonna let the computer do the work. And that will tell us, one, is there a market out there? And two, what is the market?

Does that sound like an okay strategy? Yeah, I think the— it's definitely a solid strategy, assuming the objective of the campaign is what you plan to have for your long-term objective. So sometimes people get into a little trouble if they're going to start testing out a bunch of different creatives and test it out against a video view-through rate or something like that. But after they find the winner, they're going to optimize against conversions and purchases.

Exactly.

Because the algorithm's finding people who take the action of the objective of the campaign. So you just can't switch. Objectives and you're usually pretty good to go. Yeah.

So what gets you up in the morning? You've been doing this for a while.

I have. Yeah. I think for me right now, I have a really small team. There's just 8 of us full-timers. The 9th is on maternity leave as we speak. And to me, it's really just building, helping them build something that is exciting for them to wake up to every day. So what I really like doing as an operator is like tweaking and refining what we do. And one of the things we constantly find in the agency lane is how do we stay within like the hours allotted? Per brand we're helping. And so finding ways to like tweak that with the team, make sure we're not exceeding our 8-hour workday, things like that. So for me, it's really finding ways to make my team happy about the work they get to do with us, happy enough to stay long-term, and that ultimately lies in the results we're able to create for clients. So we've been an agency for 4 and a half years, and our average client stays with us for 2 point— 3 months at this point, so, or 2.3 years rather, not months. So we're pretty happy with the results we've been able to drive with these clients and the longevity of our relationship, just because paid media is a lane where people just cycle through different firms and different freelancers like it's a load of laundry.

So how do you attract business?

Yeah, that's, that's the question.

Is it though?

It really is. We run our own paid ads, so that's one avenue for finding new clients. We do paid sponsorships in newsletters that we believe our audience will be in, and we do our own SEO. We do SEO for some of our clients too. So those are the ways in which we do it. But I think for us, it took about 2 years to really figure out what niches and verticals we want it to be in. So now it's just, you know, getting our tentacles more wrapped in those types of verticals instead of staying really narrow to them.

That's in the beauty and lifestyle. And then, and your typical client, how would you do, do you have a typical client?

Yeah, our ICP is brands that are still emerging. So we're helping brands who've already achieved $1 million a year and are going on to upwards of $10 million. So that's our sweet spot of finding them is $1 to $10 million yearly revenue. And about $30K in monthly spend is where we start most of our brands. And then our larger brands are probably $60 to $80 million a year. And I think thereafter a lot of brands are finding other solutions than boutique agencies to help them.

Maybe needs a bigger agency with a little more breadth and stuff.

Exactly. Or an in-house team or other avenues.

So what is it that's unique about you that has made all of this so successful?

Yeah, I think, I think the looking under the hood is one of the things I do really well and I bother my small team about it all the time. We're at this week or month of like calm and collected, like just everything's going smoothly and I'll say, okay, but I think there's this thing over here that we can make better. And so I think it's this constant tooling of what we're doing that really helps us present and. Articulate what we're doing with our clients quite well. So we really feel like an extension for them. Um, not to say other agencies and freelancers, consultants don't do that, but I think that's one of the things our clients really respond to us well about. And then we're usually looking outside of the typical channels and venues. So we're not just a meta and Google agency. We do Spotify ads, we do programmatic, we do a lot on TikTok, Pinterest. So really whatever the client's objective is, we'll find the best possible solution for helping them get there.

How do you, how are you all able to stay on top of the constant change that we were talking about just a few minutes ago?

Yeah, we have someone who's moved up the ladder in her 2 years with our agency, and she now oversees trends, new technology, and really like the training and getting the rest of the team up to speed. So we've just got our go-to internally in our little team who keeps all of that under wraps.

That's her job is stay on top of what the changes are.

Yep, exactly.

Where is AI going to take you guys?

Yep, that's something we constantly evaluate. We found a lot of solutions for AI for media buying that are not necessarily better than humans. So yes, for now on that front that we're better than AI, but we're finding some, there are, there are paths to AI starting to beat or be at the level of humans. So we're going to think about how to augment what we do by humans and what we do by AI in the media buying lane specifically. Media planning. And then on the creative lane, we're also looking at a couple different solutions. One, creative briefing is really sometimes painful and tedious with our brands and their creative partners. And then also just actually making the assets is something AI will be helping us with. So in those two lanes in particular, landing page AI is coming a long way too. So it's definitely going to be our bread and butter in terms of how we operate and what we do next.

What's a landing page AI?

Yeah, and I could be misspeaking, but there are platforms in which you go, you load into it what your ad unit looks like and they augment a landing page that seems very fitting for that ad experience and drive people to that.

They actually create a landing page.

Yeah, a human still has to do a decent amount of lift, just even with AI creative. It's usually not completely done once you push it through an AI system, but it's getting a lot closer.

Wow. The title of this podcast is Listening with Leaders, and I am, I teach listening, deep listening, emotional listening as a lawyer turned peacemaker. And I'm, I am sure that listening is important in your business for many different reasons. How do you, we are not taught how to listen. How do you learn how to listen?

I think I didn't for a long time. I think I was really on my own track and kind of waiting for my moment to say the next thing. So it's definitely a learned skill. How do I learn to listen? I think whether it's, hopefully it's before a conversation, but definitely after a conversation, I like to take some time to debrief and understand what I might have missed, what I might have moved through too quickly, and just like areas of opportunity and in my operations lane to make things better in the future. I don't know that I could ever say that like I'm done learning to listen or I've listened to the best I ever could. But it's something I think as long as we're all tuned into as humans, that there's the opportunity to expand there. We could be better because we're all looking for our own objectives at the end of the day.

You strike me as being a woman with a very fast mind, lots of stuff going on. How do you, when you're in a team meeting and a conversation, you've got all these ideas bubbling coming through you, how do you discipline yourself to not just blurt out whatever is popping up?

Yeah, that's a good question because I do think I might throw a lot out there all at once. But to me, there's a level of the rhythm of the way in which you have to outline what you're saying that lands with people. So I'm very much like the 30K-foot view to the 300-foot view. So I really try to distill, at least when training team members or clients on how we do things, that it's in a way that's like the beginning to the end of the journey and the least detail to the most detail. So to me, that's an important thing to try to think through when articulating any, anything to to anyone who is engaged.

So when you're meeting with clients, is it typically a team, a client team, or individuals, or a combination?

Yeah, so when we meet with clients, it's usually their VP of marketing or marketing director in-house at the brand, and usually a support staff member or two on the marketing side. So my account manager will be leading all of the conversations. We have 20 clients, so I'm not involved in every client conversation, but I do try to listen in to, to at least one a month or one a quarter when we do our quarterly business reviews. Uh, but I'm really active listening then because I'm not the account manager and to all of a sudden swoop in and pretend I am for one call a month or one call a quarter, I think leaves a really interesting taste in our client's mouth because they're like, why does Nikki present every 10th call or every whatever? So I'm really in the lane of listening and note-taking and telling my team members what they did well and what they can improve upon. Mm.

So what do you do when you encounter people who are not so good listeners?

I'm usually pretty blunt and I'll ask them to take notes and write this down. So if they have a pattern of, of, yeah, not really retaining what they're hearing, I ask them to, well, tell them I'll pause and they should write that down.

Wow. That's pretty direct.

Yes. It's a, a true fact about me. So I am a pretty direct person.

I, I think that's a good thing. You, which is what you get, right? So what do you think the future of Pennak is going to be?

Yeah, we carved this niche intentionally, so I don't think we're going to be broadening the niche to any extent. While we're a small team, I don't think we'll be adding on a ton of different service offerings because I think the reality is no matter how much AI comes into the marketing landscape, we can't all of a sudden be good at 8 different parts of marketing. So I think we're going to intentionally carve out and work with hopefully bigger and growing brands in our vertical and continuing to increase our yearly revenues and profits so we can continue to sustain and ideally grow our team size.

Um, so how do you measure, how do you measure your personal success?

Oh wow, that's deep. I might have to go back and talk to my business coach about that. A few ways in which I would do that is maybe the overall happiness of my team, the, the length of time they've stayed with us before turning over. We try to be pretty open with NPS and stuff like that that we do with our teeny tiny team, but like just getting that feedback and making sure that the team is not only just sat— satisfied because it's a place to be employed, but satisfied cuz they're growing in their careers. And then similarly, like the length and time in which we keep our clients and overall why they're leaving us. And I'd say like most of the clients who've left us have left us for reasons to some extent beyond our control. So that makes me feel better about the work we're doing and I sleep pretty good at night, so that's good.

And that kind of leads into work-life balance. So you've got all your team members are women, I presume. Are they mostly all women with children? And maybe so they've got to manage and balance a whole bunch of different stuff going on.

Yes, exactly. We, we're all a group of multitasking women. Yeah. So it's really important to me. I didn't start a small boutique agency so that I could work people to the ground and then have them turn over every 11 months. So for me, I think this month already we're about 12 business days in, my team team has been working an average of 9-hour days instead of 8-hour days. So it's really important for me to say just that extra hour every single day is not something that really impresses me, right? Like, we should be working within an 8-hour day. We could work 7 hours, I'd be totally fine with that too. But for me, I don't want to get a team or a culture or company that's in this burnout mentality and overworked mentality.

So that raises— that's a really interesting leadership problem. You got You've got these women who are all remote, all friends, probably friends and colleagues of yours. They're all dedicated to the job. They love what they do. And, and I suspect that they'd rather spend time working than maybe doing diapers or something like that.

Possibly.

Yeah.

The men should take a more active role in all of that. That's for sure. But still they should have their free time back. That final hour of the day to go work out, to do some meditation, whatever it is that kind of refills their cup, I think is a better use than them spending an extra hour in front of the computer trying to crank something out.

Yeah. How do you, so you're, are you, how do you manage it? How do you keep your really aggressive go-getters from overworking?

Yeah, I think the commonality between the ones who overwork is that they tend to be a little bit younger and a little bit greener. So I think they just have to some extent in their stereotypes in there too, but they're not as busy with their time. How do I keep them from overworking? Was that the question? Yeah. I think they see that I'm not online all the time. So I think leading by example there, active listening, whatever it will be, leading by example, I think is important. And then we use really sophisticated project management tools. So time tracking is just a built-in expectation, especially for a fully remote team. We do, and being a services-based business, we have to stay on top of what we expect we will be doing for clients versus what we're doing. And that boils down to hours too.

Do you guys ever get together as a group in person?

I think 2014 will— or 2024 rather, will be our first time doing it. So the agency started in San Francisco Bay Area. So we used to do it when everyone was still local. But at this point we have people in many different states. So the current group will get together later this year.

That sounds like a party.

Yeah, I hope so. I hope it's a good time.

Good for you. And, and how do you manage work-life balance?

I think I'm in the mindset now of figuring out how to work. I wouldn't really— smarter, sure, not harder, right? So be giving myself a little bit more of that space to figure out what's a task on my list that I'm just trying to check off versus really going to move the business and the team. So I'm giving myself a little bit more space to do that, whether that be like go out for my morning walk or whatever. But like I'm trying to create a little bit more me space so I can be more productive when I'm at it works. So I think that's a big focus area of mine. And once I've been able to prove that it is helpful for me, I think it's something I'd like to encourage the whole team to feel okay doing with their day. We should all get an hour to go over to the gym or whatever we want to do in the middle of the day.

Yeah. Or I get up and get out of my office and go walk around my property. I got 10 acres, take a walk out in the woods.

That sounds amazing. Yes.

So what do you do for fun? When you're not working?

Yeah, I do have 3 small kids. There's a lot of soccer momming going on here, just moving kids around. I do like to run, and I recently took up aerial silks where I'm moving up silks, probably, I don't know, 40 feet in the air, just doing tricks and seeing how strong I am and stuff like that.

Wow.

Yeah.

So if you were to go on the perfect vacation with your family, where would you go? Oh my gosh.

We just went on one. My family windsurfs. So I think we would go, there's a little island in the Caribbean called Bonaire and it's the best place for beginners. I have a 10, 8, and 6-year-old. And so they're all just getting up to speed with windsurfing. So our goal is to go there every winter during winter.

Yeah.

How much fun is that?

Super fun. Yeah.

I was the first guy in California to ever break his leg windsurfing.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

I'm sorry to hear, but it was nice.

When was that?

Holding that record. 1984. Okay. Yeah. The sport's come a long way from since then. Hopefully you wouldn't break your leg today.

It was a wild night. That's for sure.

I bet. I bet.

One more question and I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us, Nikki?

Hmm. Oh man. These are the questions I should have prepared. One thing, I grew up in rural Minnesota on 10 acres years, just like you live on today. And I was really a speed demon, so I was a snowmobiler, and I really wanted to race snowmobiles for a bit of time. That was really the profession I was after.

Wow. And did you race snowmobiles?

Um, very unprofessionally, uh, with a group of my friends. So yes and no.

You just go out and roar on the back road— roar on the back roads, huh?

The back roads? Yes.

And frozen lakes. Cold and scary. What happens if you break through? You're, you're finished.

You're going fast enough, you'll make it a little ways.

That sounds like a voice of experience. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the conversation, Nikki.

Yeah, this is great. Thanks so much, Doug. You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much. Watch or listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.