OTH #2: Lindsey Groepper, EVP, PanBlast -- Embracing Uncertainty, Pursuing Happiness

I shit you not, there was a stuffed bison and a polar bear in this office. And I mean, there was like, it was insane. 1 10, 100.

Hey, I'm Eric. Thanks for watching this episode of the 1100 Show. With me today is Lindsay Groper. Lindsey is the executive vice president at Panblast, a very large B2B marketing agency. I met Lindsey way back when as the co founder and president at blast Media, a B2B focused PR firm that services primarily SaaS companies. Lindsay is really funny and she's got a great story. And she recently completed her 101st consecutive month as a Rev Boss client, which makes us all really happy and really proud. All right, thanks for watching. Let's get into it and welcome.

It has been a long run with us, and you are part of our growth journey. Like, a big part of it. So excited to be here and so glad that you started this podcast. It's long overdue.

Thank you. Well, I'm not fishing for compliments, but I will accept them as they come. So you joined blast in 2005. According to my crack research team. Can you take yourself back to that place? What were you doing before that? What got you to that situation? And, yeah, give me the sort of the birth story, I guess.

I love talking about this because I am going into celebrating my 20th year working with the same people, which I recognize is an anomaly today for sure. But it was really, it was truthfully a leap of faith. I was living in Chicago, working for a big global agency called Fleischmann Hillard. We, you know, between Edelman and Fleischman, we were always one or two of the top global PR firms. Loved my job, first job in pr. But my husband at the time was looking for work and found a job that he wanted in Indianapolis. And I said, no problem. Indy's a little bit closer to my family. Like, we can go there. And Fleischman, surprisingly, because I was a no one, said, you can telecommute. You can live in Indianapolis. Telecommute, like, you know, was a thing.

Back then in 2005. Wow.

So, like, basically I would have to come to, in or come to Chicago for a couple days every two weeks. And I was like, sweet. You know, I mean, I was 25 years old. I was like, this is a nice deal for me. But I had already lined up this interview with this company called Blast Media that didn't even have a website. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna just hold this interview and go. And at the time, it was the two co Founders hard stop. They sold me on their vision and I was like, you know what, I'm 25 years old. If this doesn't work out, there will always be and there will always be jobs. So I ditched the safety of Fleischmann Hillard, bought in on the vision as the first full time employee of this company with no website and fast forward. I'm about to celebrate my 20th year. So indeed the gut instinct was right on this one.

Pretty good bet. Geez Louise. 20 years. My wife and I recently celebrated 20 years of marriage last year. So I know what that's been like. And work is a different kind of hard.

Both hard though.

Yeah. Did the company have customers when you joined?

Yes. So the two co founders had come from another PR agency and as part of that deal, they took some customers with them. So it fortunate from that standpoint. But I do remember my first client which was. Might have been one of the first like new clients. Wow. I started only a couple months after Blast Media was founded and I came from. Okay, number one, I was young. I came from an agency where I was doing all sorts of things. I mean, I was working on Nike, I was working on, you know, Abbott Labs, I was working on some consumer tech. But I was thrown into tech PR with Blast Media. So my first client was a company that provided. It was on a. A disk and it was, I mean, dating myself. Right. I mean, SaaS didn't exist. Nothing was in the cloud. So that's not true. Their salesforce was around. There were things in the cloud.

Yeah, it was early, early, early, early, early.

So it was a disk, literally. But it was cyber protection for your PC or for your Mac. And I remember being like, I don't even freaking know what an operating system is. Like, are you kidding me? I was thrown into a trade show. I'll never forget this, my trade show in Philadelphia. It was with the founder of this company. I'm like working their booth and I mean, you talk about like fake it till you make it. I mean, I had no clue what these nerds were talking about. Zero. But I was, you know, feeling press opportunities and doing, doing the best that I could. Luckily, the client was like literally, literally an absolute angel. But I, I learned a lot really quickly from that standpoint. And my partner Mindy was doing sales for the agency at the time. So I mean literally phone, email, anyone that she could find in the technology space whose check would clear. That was basically our. Our client filter is, did their check clear? Let's go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you were primarily in a like service delivery role in your sort of initial responsibilities?

Yes.

How long did it take for you all to get to a point where there was initial scale or initial repeatability? You know, the proxy for that, like customer number 10 or whatever makes sense. Like, you know, how long were you in that? Like as long as a check clears phase. And what did it take for you to get to the next level?

I would say our, once we got out of our first office. So our first office was, it was literally a favor from a friend of our, of our co founder. He had office space and he was like, dude, yeah, we, we got nothing. Can you have four cubes? Can we get these four cubes and we'll just work out of your office space. It was like part of an architecture firm was in it. I mean there was all sorts of different. There was someone who loved taxidermy. So there was, I shit you not, there was a bison, stuffed bison and a polar bear in this office. And I mean there was like. It was insane. So we were in that office space for you for like less than a year. But we ended up hiring a couple people. We actually hired a controller. So our invoices were actually going out on time and we had hired a couple of people. I'd say once we graduated and actually could afford office space, we moved out of there and got our own lease. And in this, you know, wonderful, lovely building that we were in for gosh, at least, I mean over 10 years. So I feel like once we, we could afford office space and actually pay rent, that's when we, we reached a level of scale and at least some level of predictability with our client base. We had somebody doing sales full time, we had someone managing finance on a part time basis and then we had a team of account people. So it took, I mean I would say about a year before we felt like we're in a good, a good groove. That's pretty. We've had at least 10 customers by then.

Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty quick. But that's also doesn't sound surprising. It sounds like Mindy like had a little bit of a, a rolling start.

Yes, yes, for sure.

With the founding story.

Yeah.

How did that make you feel as a 25 year old?

It was awesome. I mean we think back about it now, like we just laugh, like we didn't know what we were doing. You know, it's like none of us did. Mindy was the same age as me and then our co founder was in his, you know, mid-30s and we just were doing the thing and my God, Erica, it was so fun. Yeah, like, it was so much fun. We wish we would have written a book along the way because we were kids, you know, like just with the dream and a vision and it wasn't that really far, you know, it was a pretty, I guess, nearsighted vision. It was like, okay, we're good today. What are we doing tomorrow? And the next day and the next day. It wasn't like in 10 years we're going to be here. It was like, I. Who knows? But you know, we've, we made incredible friends along the way and you know, in the early days it was scrappy and you know, we wouldn't have kids and so, you know, we're just working till 7:30, 8:00 clock at night because what else do we have to do? And you know, just everybody has bought in. So it was incredibly fun. And to work with two people that are still my best friends today, like, we got so lucky to find each other that, like, I do not take that for granted. And I know that that is not normal that to have, you know, three partners that have stayed together and still like each other for almost 20 years is pretty insane.

Yeah. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. At what, at what point did you start to narrow your focus on service and target customer?

Yeah, so we were always PR for technology companies, but for the first 10 years of our business, we were both consumer tech. So gadgets, headphones, you know, Bluetooth speakers, you name it, as well as B2B tech. And this is. Makes me sound like such a dinosaur. But at the beginning of our agency it was pretty pre iPhone and pre social media. And so which sounds like that should be like 50 years ago. Right? But it was definitely wasn't. Yeah, it was not. But the, the path from awareness to conversion was super short compared to today. So PR had a different value specifically for like the consumer tech clients. It was impulse buy, you were featured in whatever and people would buy your shit. I don't need to go into the whole how the world has changed in buyer's journey and all the different areas of influence. But what we started to realize quickly as media changed and different channels became available, is PR didn't work the way that it traditionally had for the consumer tech companies. And so we started to bring on some digital ad folks. We had social media, we had somebody, you know, we had someone running like a specific YouTube practice. And all of a sudden it was like, who are we? And I remember I had moved into a sales role at that point and I was president of the agency. And it was like, it almost felt like a, you know, like a Chinese menu. It's like, you know, it's. They, they would say they want one thing and then say, you know, and then, and then, and then, and I'm, you know, I'm trying to piece it all together and all of a sudden, you know, I'm trying to split 10 grand a month into 10 different people. Yeah, our profit was shit. So, yeah, I literally remember sitting, I was in an airport with Mindy. We were traveling somewhere and we just had the like, very real conversation of like, what do we want to do? Like, who are we? Because all of the sudden we were a lot of things to a lot of different people and I wasn't passionate about it. I mean, my passion's in PR and storytelling and so is Mindy's. And right around this time too, our digital ad team was not surprising because it was literally the advent of, of that channel was growing and had a lot of revenue in it. And it was at that point in time, at the 10 year mark where we said, okay, Kelly, one of our co founders is really in the digital ad side of the house. We ended up taking those people and those clients and doing instacompany, creating another agency called Statwax. We sold that company three years ago. It had a really great run, but decided that we are only going to focus on PR and specifically for B2B companies because that those types of companies, they were number one. SaaS was just emerging and we realized a lot of our clients were in that emerging space. But on the B2B tech side is where they paid us the most. They stayed on longer. They knew it was more of like an education play. There wasn't this justification of like, well, I've spent X amount on Facebook ads that, you know, this roi. Why am I spending money on PR for my headphones? Um, so we drew a line in the sand, the 10 year mark and we literally have never looked back.

Yeah, it's. It's a pretty common theme that in my, my personal experience and working with lots of founders that when you're there during the as long as the check clears phase, yeah, it's really scary and unnerving and it can take a lot of courage to get to the point where you say no to revenue.

And that took 10 years. I mean, it really did. But we drew a very, very firm line and said, we, we are not going to stray from our focus and we literally have not. And it. To your point, it's scary because when we made that decision, 30% of our clients were still on the consumer tech side and we said goodbye to those clients and didn't let anybody go. So you don't have to be a mathematician to know the level of pressure that puts on then the sales side. But it was a leap. I mean, it was a leap of faith and it was scary to do that.

Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about a little further down the road. You got something that's cooking, you gotta focus. You've got a message, you've got a target set of customers where, where you've got traction and repeatability. What did the team look like at that point? And what, like what was working in terms of your go to market?

Yeah, so we had built out teams with a lot of middle managers. And I'm, I'm going to asterisk that because I'll come back to that later. And it worked well. We had a, you know, pretty good delineation of, of who did what in roles. You know, an agency model is not one that we created. There are plenty of agency models that you can mimic and try and form agency around. So we had a handful of VPs and then it goes through a director and on down. And our titles have been all over the place the last 20, 20 years. You know, you invent all sorts of things. You're like, what does that even mean? But we had someone dedicated to sales and marketing, we had somebody dedicated to finance and operations. And then we had dedicated sort of people or client relations managers. And one of the things I think we did really well at the middle stage is define swim lanes early. And that's a hard thing to do. You know, I grew up in the client relations side and so when I moved into the revenue role, it was difficult for me to see things that were happening in any other sort of lane and not jump over the rope and get in there. It's difficult. You have to find good people and trust them that they're maybe not going to do it your way, that's okay. But that way, you know, there it works. And you know, you've scaled an agency as well. So I, I know you know exactly what this feels like.

It's very hard to watch either from afar or even watch up close knowing like, I wouldn't do it that way. And sometimes you have to let the mistake happen.

Yes. And sometimes it is like, sometimes I'm like, in my head I'm like, well knew that you know, but it's, you know, it's like a minor, minor fail, right? Or like a minor, it's like no big deal. But lo and behold, there are also way more times where I'm like, man, I wouldn't do it that way. And it turned out great or was just fine, you know. But I, I do think that's one of the things that we did really well early on was define swim lanes for our leadership team and everybody focus on what their area of expertise and the, the, you know, the value that they bring to the agency. Stay focused on that. So that, that was something that worked really well for us that I would recommend is tough as it is when you get to a stage where you have well functioning teams and good managers and other good leaders is, you know, as the founders, you've got to, you've got to let go as hard as it is and let other people rise to the top.

How would you say you changed personally over a 20 year marriage, man?

I wish you could ask the people I've worked with for as many years. Um, ah, that's a really good question, Eric. Let me think on that. How I have changed personally or from a leader standpoint or just any and all of it.

All of it, whatever comes to mind.

Yeah. Um, I know you said your goal is to make your guest cry and I'm not going to do it because I'm not a crier.

It's a stretch goal. It's a stretch goal to make a guest.

I'm not a crier, but I will get personal with you. I, you know, you hold you. I was 25, now I'm 45. You can imagine a lot. You know that was pre kids, right. I had, you know, wasn't, obviously wasn't a mom at that point. Different priorities and you know, fast forward to where I am today in my life. So it's like, I can't say that necessarily like work has changed me because I've been fortunate where I have. I found a place early on in my career that allowed me to be me and that gave me a ton of autonomy and trust. And as a result I've been like, you know, loyalty has been the fabric of, you know, my relationship with. But over the course of 20 years, I mean I have certainly changed a lot having kids as you, I'm sure can relate. Certainly as you look at the world the differently it, it's, it's interesting. It's like a double edged sword because on the one side it gives you more patience because you Sort of understand as you're hiring, you know, people right out of school, you sort of understand where they are in their lives and maybe how they were raised. And you have, you know, more, you know, a bit more of this like motherly or parental feeling towards them. But on the flip side is you like have very little time for bullshit. It's like I, I, I don't, you know, I have a finite amount of time before I turn into a taxi for my other, you know, job as a, exactly.

My, my second full time career.

Yeah. And so it, it's like you, you just make decisions. I feel like I'm make decisions a lot quicker and I am much better at prioritizing. But I, I do feel like I almost have less patience in some areas just because I don't have the time. I'm moving too fast and have again a finite amount of time. Unlike when I was 25 and working till 8pm what else I going to do? I'm like, I, if I'm not out of like literally if I do not leave at 4:02, I'm screwed. Like, like I know exactly how much time. And then the other thing too is just being more comfortable with like what your boundaries are as a human in general. I was not good at communicating my boundaries and like what I was willing to accept and not willing to accept. And this isn't, you know, not, not necessarily that, that there were people at work that were like pushing boundaries. But you talk about clients, right? It's like you, you have clients that will really overstep the boundary that you set.

You, you, you can get bulldozed very easily, particularly in a service based business.

Absolutely. And working in tech we also worked with a lot of males. And so over time I certainly have changed in that aspect of understanding like what, what I am willing to accept and not accept and being an advocate for our teams in how to handle those situations because it's not easy and it, whether you're female or a male, you're on the client services side. Right. You all are on clients in client service and it, you know, you grow up with this, this idea of the customer is always right. Well I'm here to tell you that is bullshit.

Yeah, I know that that's been a hard thing for us to learn and a hard thing for me to teach. It's like they hired us because we know best. Tell them what to do.

Yes.

And you know what? Sometimes just do it and then you know, tell them, oops, I'm sorry, I did the right thing. Right. Like apology, you know, apologize for not getting their feedback. Like that's way better than getting pushed around, being passive, etc. That's one of the things that drives me crazy.

It's hard though, right? I mean especially when you're younger. It's like, you know, I'm the. And, and two, if, you know, I mean you're at 25 and you're dealing with a, you know, 50 year old male CEO who has an, you know, type A personality. It's like you, you have, your confidence has to be pretty damn high to have those conversations. Unfortunately, that's not something that I, you know, really ever struggled with. But it is, that is an area that I've improved and been able to perfect as the years have gone on and can mentor the younger team members that we have and how to navigate those situations.

Yeah, yeah. If you could detach yourself from time and speak to 25 year old Lindsay at her first or second week joining this company without a website, without a office, without much of anything like what. What would you say to her?

Man, I would, what would I say to me? Is your question? What would I tell myself in that same situation, like joining Glass Media or just like in general as a. What would I tell my 25 year old?

What would you say?

Yeah, yeah, I would say don't worry about the plan so much is, you know, you are, I'm assuming this is the same way. I have twins that are in high school and I'm assuming that they hear all along as you get into college, like what are your plans? What do you want to major in? What are you going to do after school? What do you want to do for your life? And you feel like you ha. You have to have the answers to that and have this like path. And what I would say is like don't worry about the path. Do what makes you happy. And if that makes you money initially, cool. If you're just getting by okay. But don't worry about. So don't worry so much about the future plans. And the path is make just make the best decisions that you can for the day because I will tell you what I would tell myself is there will always be a job. It might not be the job. And you know, for if you're younger and listening to this is like I got super lucky at 25 to find like my career and my people and my passion. That is not normal. And so embrace the struggle that you're on and it is totally fine to have no idea where you want to be in five years. Do what makes you happy, chase your passions, and just live in the best decision that I can make for today without so much, like, debilitating anxiety around. Like, but what's it going to be in five years? And am I saving money and I'm supposed to buy a house? Like, don't worry. That all will come in time, but live in the moment and do what makes you happy.

Very, very well said. I love hearing people that have had a lot of success in their career and in their life talk about luck.

Yeah.

Because it. It's a big part of it. Let's leave it there. Lindsay, this is really wonderful. Thank you for doing this. Last question for you. I'm repping the Steely Dan today. Give us a music recommendation to listen to later on.

I have been in a very, like, calm, peaceful era right now, and this is not a new artist. It's just who I'm listening to a lot right now, which is Ray Le Montaigne. Are you. I don't know if you're familiar. You're nodding.

I have an autographed post poster of Raylan from where? My house? Yeah. It's a long story, but my wife ran the front of house for a big theater at UNC Chapel Hill. I've met some pretty crazy people, and she's met way, way more pretty crazy people. He's wonderful. He's so good.

Yes. I. That is just who I'm listening to right now. So if you haven't listened to Rayleigh Montaigne, it's a very good morning or, like, rainy afternoon type of listen. And if you just like whatever you listen to and you say, like, Ray Lematon radio, you'll also get a lot of really cool, similar artists. So that is my artist recommendation for right now. It will change next month, but that's it for right now.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, that's a good one, Lindsay. Thank you very much.

This was so fun to catch up. I really appreciate it. You know, I mean, Eric, I'll talk about myself for an hour if you want me to. I mean, are you kidding? It's great. Thank you so much.

Yeah. Thank you. All right, I'm going to hit stop now. Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the 11000 Show. I'm your host, Eric Boggs. Thank you to our production team of Rachel Velasquez and Danny Chiu, research team of Benjamin Rogerson and Heinie Blargwood. Screaming in the intro and outro provided by the Boggs children, Thomas, Catherine, and Barbara. We'll see you next time.