294 - Embracing Failure: The Key to Growth in the Marketing Industry with Geletka+'s John Geletka

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.

John Galecka, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of an agency, marketing agency in the, in Chicago. Actually, I think you're on the West Loop in Chicago, and you're a Chicago native. Welcome to Listening with Leaders.

Glad to be here.

So you— I interviewed you for Authority Magazine back in February of this year, and it's great to have you on the show. I always enjoy meeting the people that I've interviewed. I'm not working for IETC anymore in Authority Magazine, but I just, I love meeting really creative people. Tell us a little bit about your background. From what I know your background because of the interview, but tell, tell our audience how you, how you got to where you are today with your agency, Galecca Plus.

Yeah. So I think it really started, my professional career really started when I was in college, right? I had the opportunity as a South Side kid in Chicago to get into the Art Institute of Chicago, which I had to take, but I also had to figure out a way to pay for it. So what, so what I ended up doing is getting a job through a friend at a corporation called Navistar, where I worked there for about 4 years in various roles in IT. And when I graduated, I jumped into the business when I started learning about all these things called agencies. As a marketer, as a young marketer, you get, at least in the role I was in running the website. I got, uh, a great, some great agency partners to work with, some of the best in the world, and started to work on a number of projects, everything from launching things like their internet to various campaigns and just really learning the business. That, that foundation led me to the agency world where I eventually left corporate and joined one of my agencies, a tech company out of Minneapolis, and then Throughout, throughout the next, let's call it 5 years, moved my way through other different agencies, larger agencies, Tribal DDB, Deutsche in LA. And midway through that agency growth process, I had a personal event happen where my ex left and I had to move back from LA to Chicago. And I ended up coming back with little money and really living with my parents And from there I ended up at a small agency, which was really fun. I went from tech agency to big agency to small agency. And really what I learned there was really how to get things done and the impact going from 400 people and obviously having fun and I think making an impact, but really making an impact with work and 25 people. From there, I moved on to the startup world because after a good run in the agency, I thought it'd be fun to build something again and just a little bit bit more context, right? I'm a, I'm a more of a hands-on professional or, or as a practicing manager or some of my mentors call it the curse, a business owner who, who dives in and likes to do things. And having the curse brought me into startup land where I got to dig back in, learn programming, and then move on from there. After that didn't work, Wikipedia has a fun name for us, a now defunct micro donation platform. Moved back into the agency world and worked really hard at a mid-sized Chicago independent agency and then ended up getting the opportunity with some old partners from that previous tech agency to buy into an agency and actually run it. Ran it, sold it back to the family after a good 2-year run. And then I went on to take over what was called Agency Services back at that one of those agencies I worked at before called Fusion and really got the opportunity to grow a team, hire different services. A lot of the stuff I learned along the way in the previous agency journey, I applied there. We ended up growing the business, but I think my values were a little bit different. And so I ended up just taking a break, left on a, a really good note. And I, I remember this was December my, this is probably, let's call it September 2019. My wife was like, what are you doing? You're, you're, you need to get a job. And it wasn't like you need tons of money. It's just, you need to get out of the house and do something. So I ended up starting this agency right before COVID hit. And I believe the official start date was September 19th.

Wow.

And yeah, we've been running this shop for 5 years, had a really nice compound annual growth rate, made the Inc. 5000. And really just been living by our values.

Well, so you, you've got IT background, you've got background as a coder. By the way, I learned how to code in 1969.

Oh, so you're a real coder.

Way back. Punch cards, punch tape, mainframe, learning using BASIC, All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, BASIC programming taught by the guy that invented that program language.

Wow.

John Kemeny.

At Dartmouth. I was a Dartmouth grad. So I go, I, my coding experience, I don't code today, but it goes way back. And once you learn the concepts, every language follows the same basic structure for the most part. You just have to learn the language, but the concepts, the Boolean logic is pretty similar through everything.

It really is.

Anyway, so you're coding and then you have this whole artistic creative side to you. That strikes me as being very unusual.

Yeah, I've always been throughout that journey, that high-level journey that I took you through, I've always been merging the two disciplines, right? Tying what it takes to build product and bring it to market at all levels to what it takes to bring a brand and ultimately a business to market and thrive. I found a real lot of similarities and patterns, right? Just like you do in a lot of things.

Right.

And I often tell people I found more similarities in art. And I kind of jokingly, right, when I tell people I learned more in my BFA than I did in my master's degree, just about how to understand the business from how you look at a painting.

Wow.

So that merger has been great.

So today, who's your typical client for your agency?

Yeah, so we, it's funny, we have a, I like to call it like we're a mini full service agency, which is hard to, makes it hard to dimensionalize our clients because we've got media in-house, we've got tech in-house, we've got a creative team and a design team in-house. And we do really, we're launching a skincare brand that we've designed from scratch and tooled the product where we're doing traditional ad campaigns and broadcast and radio and doing truck design for a plumbing company. So we really run the gamut, but the common pattern we see, there's, there's an underlying pattern we see in our clients is that they're, they're often in, in difficult businesses. Folks, we're not always selling pasta sauce or milk. We're a lot of times we're selling automotive software, which is really at its highest level, very simple, but really hard to understand. And this, this amazing technology powers 3 to 4% of GDP. And how do you market that to dealers and ultimately their customers and the experience and roll that into how do I bring a skincare line to market? But the common trend is people come to us really when they're in a complex market, uh, or they have a complex audience. Across the board or something new that hasn't been done. Early on, 5 years ago, we cut our teeth in AI when it was hitting the market in its infancy. We've cut our teeth and actually are actively engaged in Web3 and had multiple Web3 clients and blockchain, which is really hard to explain to business professionals in the community. So that's really been the— why folks hire us.

So you've been doing this now for a long time. 20 years plus. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

Yeah, so I, so back to that curse comment, I love the chaos that the agency brings. I'm a very, I don't perform well in structured environments, but I perform really well when, and this is more of a personal thing, right? When I have multiple challenges coming at me that force me to think different and think faster versus mulling on a situation, following a structure and a methodology. And don't get me wrong, we have those. We can do it, I do it, but I really thrive and enjoy the chaos of it. The world is built around that.

You were that way in high school, bored the heck out of you.

Most school did.

And, uh, yeah, because it was, it must have been too structured for you.

It was. And I was one of the first people in my high school to, I think they probably changed the system because of me, but I only had classes in my senior year from 9 to noon and I had these independent studies where I would play chess, join the yearbook, play basketball, run track, and do all these things that weren't part of the program and art.

Yeah. And, but fast forward now you're in an environment and in a, with a company where it can be chaotic and at times, and that's when you really thrive.

Yeah. I've created my own, I've created my own world, which gets me pumped every day as something new. It's a good challenge, a bad challenge. But it is a challenge. And I personally, I think this is important for a lot of professionals. If you're not learning every day, you're dying.

That's exactly right. You could, you can quote me on that. How many people you have? What, 20 or 20, 30 people in your organization?

Yeah, we have about 26 people right now.

So how do you go about, how do you go about hiring people when you need to either grow or scale or fill a position that you need filled? What's your process for finding people? It seems to me that the. Ordinary creative duck is not going to fit well in your agency.

I would say yes and I think like any small company and company our size, we have to, we like to hire multidisciplined people, right? So we look for people with a major and a minor, right? I love hiring people that do something else outside the job. Maybe they've got a, maybe they're a musician, maybe they are making another app, maybe they've got a t-shirt design company, maybe they, that other interest that other business venture, that other miner, is extreme value in our business. Then we look right now in hiring at this company, the thing that, that we, I think we've done different and done a good job is we've hired for, I call it aptitude. It's not quite the right word. It's more aptitude and attitude. And it's, it's a psychological profile of somebody who can learn fast, wants to learn fast, is involved in doing different things. And isn't afraid to go all in and knows that they have to deliver no matter what. Those individuals are sometimes hard to find, but if you break down the traditional silos of hiring, there's a lot of people that, that fit that mold more than you think. And so we've— what that means is we've taken chances and we've hired a lot of our team, they're career switchers, right? They've been maybe a musician in a past life, maybe a framer, maybe a fashion designer, et cetera, et cetera. We look for that because they've had the aptitude. Attitude and the will to switch, that mindset thrives incredibly well.

Well, yeah, mindset would— yeah, I can see that. By the way, I play jazz violin.

Oh yeah. And you're a lawyer and a skier. Yeah, exactly.

And a peacemaker. And I've got multiple graduate degrees, author of 4 books. It goes on and on and on. Helicopter, airplane pilot, whitewater rafting.

So you're sending your resume after this, right?

Yeah. So I get it because the more you do, the more you accomplish, the more you do, the more you're, you be, you develop a, not only do you develop a growth mindset, but doing so many different things gives you perspectives that people who just go home and watch television don't have.

Yeah.

And I think that's, that's a really crucial feature. So when you think about yourself, John, and, and what, you bring to the table? What is it you think that's unique about you that you bring to the table that kind of makes this whole agency work?

Yeah, good, good question. I think at the highest level, I think perspective, right? Uh, from all those different disciplines and all those different things, the perspective matters. And especially as I've been doing this for a long time, it counts. Number 2 is just a hunger and a want. I want to do this every day. When I look at this industry, I'm so lucky to be here. Like, how many people would kill to make things every day and to solve problems? Like, I'm like the luckiest human alive.

Wow.

Uh, so that level of hunger, it, it, it also translates to appreciation for this. Um, gratitude. Yeah, gratitude. And, and then just, um, some of the risks I've taken on people have, have really paid off. Betting on people that other folks stopped betting on or didn't bet on and finding that, finding that amazing person and giving them an environment where they can thrive and removing all the barriers that they had in previous. That's been really good. And just betting on my people over and over again.

That you, you, you just said something that I think is critical in leadership and that is you're going to bet on people that you think are going to work, but most importantly, setting them up for success and creating the environment where they can thrive and they can do— they can grow into what makes them spectacular. And that makes your job as leader and manager so much easier because you're not— they're not— you're not going upstream with these people, right? They're in the flow.

Fun too. It's more fun.

Oh, of course. Absolutely. And do you just have a knack for hiring people like that, or is there a strategy that you've used to find these people who are round pigs that have been squashed into square holes?

I, I don't know if there's a, a real, I don't know if I have a defined strategy to it. I look for cues when talking to people, right? I look for, are they, are they constantly learning, right? The patterns, right? The constant learner is key. Do they value and want to push themselves further? That's really critical as well. Those two things really are really telling. And then are they just a good person? Well, do they have a story that they're willing to tell? And, and will they tell me? And another good sign, another good little trick in hiring is they're not afraid to talk about their failures. That's really— I won't hire a project manager, as an example, that hasn't messed up a project. If you've been in this business, you have messed up. I've messed up.

Yeah. And that's how you learn, by messing up.

Exactly.

And that's how you get better. And hopefully you mess up in low-risk situations so that when you come to high-risk situations, you have some experience to know how to manage the risk.

That's interesting, right? I always think about that when managing people. I always try to create low-risk situations where they can fail, have room, and it won't tank a client or tank the business because we've, we've given that room and sometimes they fail, but more often, and it's once you play the odds, they, they win.

Yeah. And they grow. Yeah. And that growth process of making a mistake, learning, growing, eventually blooming is what turns one of your people into somebody spectacular. Is your, is your, it sounds, it sounds like your retention's pretty good.

Retention is, it's a little bit below industry average. But when people leave, and this is what I'm really proud of, I think the agency world, I've read some different numbers that, that on online and in different reports, you know, it's like a 38% attrition rate. Wow. Again, I don't, that's, I gotta check my sources on that, but it's high. It's higher than most industries. And my goal is that when we don't have that, we're not that high. My goal though, is when people leave, they go somewhere better or they up their, they up their career game. So I'm really, as sad as I am to see people go and leave, as long as they're going up, um, I'm happy, right? Because, because we can point to, we made an impact, whether we drove them to the ground and made them mad or got them out, or hopefully gave them a ton of value and superpowers to go thrive in the market. Place, which is really the best you can do. And then some stay and some go, but as long as they go up, I'm good.

But, and the ones that go hopefully leave with a positive experience and can always be a source of new business down the road.

Exactly. That's, that is, we've had folks leave and come back and bring us on as partners. So we're doing that right now, which is awesome.

That's cool. Something else I was gonna ask you, I just lost it. Oh, I know. In our interview, I was struck by the importance of creating meaning in your life. Tell me about, tell us about that. It's just not enough to make a paycheck for you.

Yeah.

It's not your values are in serving others in other ways and other than through the agency as well.

Yeah. I think the paycheck comes, right? I think there's, I think one of the things I've learned is I've been in this business for a long time is that if you work hard, you're good to people, you listen and deliver. You can do well enough to live. But the real power in starting a business, maybe this is, I think this is actually the point too, beyond just learning that the money comes, the real value of starting a business and the real power behind it is that the impact is greater. I used to volunteer at a drop-in kitchen right next to the Inspiration Cafe in Chicago, and I volunteered there for years. And I love going there, sitting down with some of the homeless folks, bringing them food. But more than that, just having a conversation and listening and talking to them, and it made an impact. But I can only make an impact on this very singular level, very individual level. And when I, I had finite resources and finite time, but with a company I could start year over year. We— the more money we make, the more money we can give. The— can go from helping 5 people to 10 people to hopefully one day hundreds and thousands of people as we grow. And that's really important to me, that impact that we can make and just the power of business if you do it.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think that what I, I left the practice of law in 2000 and because I wasn't, didn't feel like I was being of much service as a trial lawyer and it completely changed my life. Once I started being able to serve people in a very deep and meaningful way, that's what truly makes me happy today. And that led to some incredible experiences for me at the Prison Project for 10 years, from 2010 to the pandemic, working in maximum security prisons, training lifers how to become peacemakers to stop prison violence. And that was amazing stuff. I look back on it, right?

It's, it's almost like you've experienced this too. The more you give, the more you get. That's exactly right. That, that service world, it always comes back, and it doesn't come back right away, but it always comes back tenfold.

And, and, and you never know. You're right, and you never know. But even if it just comes back in the sense of feeling satisfied, I'm leaving, I'm leading a good life, I'm sleeping well at night. Yeah, and just wake up in the morning joyous because every day is an opportunity to serve. It's really that, that's the life I'm living today. So let's talk a little bit about listening. This show is called Listening with Leaders because I teach people how to listen. I teach people how to stop fights and arguments in their lives forever, how to Have difficult conversations and make them transformative, how to never be afraid of anger or confrontation ever again. And my clients learn these skills in about 8 weeks, which is, that is really cool. Tell me, you could not get to where you are today unless you learned how to listen. So describe for me a little bit your journey about learn— you didn't start out as a good listener. I'm pretty sure of that. How did you, how did that all evolve with you?

I don't know if I am a great listener today, but I've gotten better at it over the years. I wanna think about that just for a moment. I've taken that chaos of the agency. I've tried to, I don't know if this is quite listening, but I've always tried to plug in multiple inputs to help my decision-making across the board. Right. And that, that almost volume of chaos that I've created, I've tried to create inputs that, that, that feed that, whether that be in the form of mentors, advisors, people I trust, people that I just meet and that I probe. I've always, I'm always looking to use the people around me to shape a different, to shape a different an idea to shape it. And that, that, that takes listening. And then that takes connecting the dots and that takes a lot of questioning. Yeah. Almost like you're doing, right? Just very simple questions with a story. And I get a lot out of that when I follow that model.

Did you, how did you develop it?

I think I developed it, right? I was naturally, I think I'm an introvert. I used to get energy by sitting in my studio. Looking at a wall, hiding from people. To survive, I had to go out into the world, talk to people, learn to pitch, learn to be in a room and network, learn to tell stories. And when you tell stories, you have to learn to take stories too. And just over time, I think it was just the sheer force of— if I go back to when I left corporate and I was working at Ratchet and out in the field, listen, talking to different customers. Talking to different people at events and then learning their stories and digging in and asking questions. I think that's the root of where it came from, being out, being out in the wild. And over time it grew.

Wow. It's so funny. You're approaching my 300th podcast, so I'm getting close in there. I think that of all the leaders that I've interviewed over the last 2 and a half years, I maybe interviewed 2 extroverts. Every single guest— and I'm an introvert— but every single one of the leaders that I've talked to, extremely successful, all characterize themselves as introverts. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah. What do some other leaders say? Because I'm— do they get energy from being alone?

They all talk exactly the same way, as do I, which is I do not get my energy than being in a crowd. When I'm in a crowd, I'm getting drained. Energy's coming out of me. My best place is when I'm by myself or with a small group of family or friends, and I get my energy from inside of me. I— maybe that's why I like jazz violin, because it's— I can— it's internal. Or maybe skiing, because skiing is a very individual, quiet kind of sport. All these things are all about where do I get my energy? And I do not get my energy— I, I am not a party guy. I do not like going to big events. I do not go to concerts, uh, or big— or the thousands of people. But, and there are a lot of people who really get off on that. Not me.

Yeah, not even jazz violin, because I've— that's a rare— do a lot of people play jazz on the violin?

Probably not. If you look at the entire violin world, there are very few people that play jazz. But when we say very few, probably thousands. But it's becoming— we can digress on this a little bit— violin pedagogy has always been based on the Western European musical tradition, and the teaching of violin has been violent and brutal and abusive. I'll just put it out there.

Yeah, yeah.

I fortunately have a teacher who is not that way. She's amazing. And what she's been able to do over her career, Julie Lieberman— Julie Lyon Lieberman— is begin to teach string teachers around the world how to introduce world music into their violin pedagogy. So we're not just playing a Bach partita or Mozart or any of these other classic pieces that you learn on the violin, but you can learn how to play bluegrass. You can learn how to play old-timey music and Irish and jazz and klezmer music and all these different beautiful world styles. That opens up on the violin. And the violin is an amazing instrument because it's so expressive. And there are some really high-end beautiful jazz violinists today that are out there playing around— Mads Tøling, Sarah Caswell, some of these people, young, younger than me, of course, but just, they're just amazing players and just take the instrument and turn it into a completely different experience. So it's really—

I'm gonna check those guys out because I'm super interested. There's a couple folks in town that are like they'll play jazz on the trombone, and apparently there's not many jazz trombone players. I love the merger.

Yeah, the trombone players were playing in the big band, so there were probably not a lot of jazz quartets with a trombone player, right? So it's got an interesting history. And jazz violin, of course, came out of blues, um, and there were jazz violinists at the turn of the 20th century, but they got blown out by the big bands. And it wasn't until— but then there were people like Stephen Grappelli and people like him in France, and then people here in the United States that started playing jazz violin that were pretty amazing. And then when amplification became a little bit more popular, then the violin people started coming back to the violin because now you could compete for the sound over the bands. So it's pretty cool, it's pretty fun, very creative, very— it's— I will say it's very difficult.

Oh, I mean, there's nothing—

there is nothing easy about jazz that's for sure. That's what makes it fun. Anyways, one more question, I'll let you go, John. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh, good question. I'm— that's a rough one. Okay, I haven't told this story, I don't think, anywhere to anybody, but a lot of us in the industry, we all wear We all wear black, right? We're, we're designers and we're dark goth people. But my reason for wearing, for dressing like I do, and I'm a pretty consistent dresser, I've got my, we'll call it creative uniform, if you will. But it goes back to when I was a kid and in pre-professional life, I had a little bit of a professional life and I worked at a VFW hall when I was 13 and 14. And I worked as a, I worked as a bus kid. And this was the uniform we wore, right? If we really got back, if we really get down to it, and I say I learned a lot in art school, I also learned a lot when I was young, bussing tables, bringing people coffee, tea, water, trying to earn those tips and really increase my $10 a night take. I learned a lot about service, introducing myself, going up to people, very uncomfortable as a young introvert, but I just like, again, trained myself and learned to do it till it was like it was a game. And I've kept that uniform because to me it meant service, right? And it goes back to what you said a little bit early on in the discussion about what it means to serve and the joy of it and also the empowerment. And it's, it really for me represents that. So it's more than just a cool creative uniform.

I love that story. This has been a great conversation, Jan. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be with us today.

Yeah, thank you too. Appreciate the great questions and everything. This was fun. You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for 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 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.

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