The Benefits of a Remote Team with Susan LaPlante-Dube

Hey, welcome back to Inbound Agency Journey. This week, I have the pleasure of Bringing on Susan LaPlante Dube. Susan, did I get your name right?

You are so close. Laplant Duby.

I was, you know, I should have asked. That was the one thing I didn't check off my list ahead of time was confirm the last name pronunciation. And I realized as I got to the end of that, I didn't know. So, Susan laplant Dubey. She is on the podcast this week from Precision Marketing Group. Susan, how you doing?

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me.

Well, I'm excited to bring you on. And you and I, between the. Between just the busyness of flipping over the calendar and the sickness that's going around here in early 2017, it's taken a little while for us to connect. But I'm really excited to bring you on and dig into your story, the agency that you guys have going on. So let's start there with Precision Marketing Group, pmg. Can you give us the story on. I know you guys have been around for quite a while, but where did this come from? And then we'll dig into a little bit about the agency and go from there.

Sure. So, yeah, Precision Marketing Group's been around. We are celebrating 15 years this year. So we were founded in 2002, and it came out of. I had left a corporate job, which I adored, but that was about 85% travel. And I loved the consulting work I was doing for this company and just didn't want to do that kind of travel and said, you know what? I can do consulting work on a smaller basis. I was working with global corporations, do consulting work on a smaller basis and do my own thing. So that's kind of where Precision Marketing group started.

Nice.

15 years, long time.

That is awesome. There's those statistics on small businesses. 90% won't make it out of the first year, 95% in year two. 15 years. I gotta believe the percentages are very, very small. So that's awesome. But anyways, I cut you off. I'd like to know what the journey has been from where you started when inbound marketing is not even a term. And that's a sparkle in Brian and Dharmesh's eye at that point in time. But what's kind of the services transition and the story of how you guys have come to where you are today.

So, you know, my story starts a little bit even before starting a company because I went into marketing kicking and screaming. I did not want to have anything to do with marketing. I thought the field was too soft. A lot of event planning and making T shirts. And I wanted to do something that really had tangible ties to a business. And I had a boss who felt that I really should be in marketing. And he took me under his wing and had me start the services marketing organization for a software company. And really helped me see the connection between what marketing does and the impact on the business. So that has been a big. A big piece of. When we founded Precision Marketing Group to really make sure that we were always tying what we did back to the business results. And when we started the bulk of. So I was a solo preneur at the time. I have a business partner now. We merged our businesses in 2006 when the company started. Was doing a tremendous amount of positioning. So helping people really understand their unique selling propositions. What are their core messages? How do they differentiate? How do they make the intangible tangible, how to package services? So they seemed a little more tangible. All things that we could do that were really helping tie towards lead generation. We didn't have all the awesome tools that exist today to really, really track and measure that. But as the company kind of grew and progressed and new tools were coming out, we started doing more work in online and digital and optimization and then later in social. And in 2008, we actually got involved with HubSpot. We became a customer and brought one of our customers on board with HubSpot. And I remember when the client called, he said, I heard about this tool and he started describing what it does. And I said, oh, you have been sold a bill of goods. And he's like, that's what I was afraid of. So I want you on the demo. And halfway through the demo, I said, you need to buy this. And our client was like, only if you help us implement it. So that was in 2008 that we really started that kind of more structured and formalized inbound journey. It was a client that had been with us since 2006, and they're actually still with us today.

Wow. Wow. So you guys obviously there in Boston. How early were you into the HubSpot Partner Program then?

Well, there was no partner program. That's how we're.

All right. That's pre partner program in 2008. So did you come on early with them or was that not really a big part of the business until later on?

So when we. They didn't really have a partner program. And I think we were probably the third company that had, you know, that was going to be learning the software to help a client implement it. And we actually. And also the product was dramatically different. It was a tiny product. There wasn't that many features. But what it had was amazing for what was in the marketplace. And through the course of the Latter Part of 2008 and 2009, we actually drank the Kool Aid. Really drank the Kool Aid, and moved every one of our clients over to the HubSpot platform, which later we made adjustments in realizing it. You know, it's not necessarily the right fit for every client, but it was. The onboarding process was essentially sitting in a room with Pete Caputa for a couple of hours.

Yep. Wow. Back in the day. So fast forward. I mean, obviously there's a ton of history that we could get into in and probably talk all afternoon about. But kind of fast forward to where you guys are today. A couple of the things that.

Are.

Helpful to know about how different agencies are structured right now in terms of team size at PMG. Are you guys around 20?

We have a team of 16 employees and then we have 10 regular independent contractors that we pull in to help us expand and contract, depending on where we're at with the business.

Okay, awesome. That's super helpful to know kind of the team structure. And then with that structure, are the 16 in house folks. Are they all working in the same office building? Are you guys a remote team? How's that structured?

100% virtual. And we have been since the company was founded. So we have team members in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, all up and down the East Coast.

Wow. So, I mean, that's the way that we, our agency, Guavabox, and do inbound today. We've built those teams primarily as a remote company, but to think about that. So guavabox starting in 2011, and just the way that we've seen the environment and support system for remote teams evolve in six years or whatever, I just can't. I'm trying to picture what this is like starting in 2002 and moving from there. I've got to believe you've seen just an incredible, like pretty much the entire shift to being able to work remote. What were like. Are there any funny stories from the early days of trying to make it work? How did you guys do calls and coordinator? Were you just meeting up in person? Obviously. I mean, I know that phones have been around since 2002, but I'm making it sound like it's the 1890s here, but you're missing out on slack and it's Pretty much like phone and email at that point. Right.

It was phone and email and there were a couple of good instant messaging tools. There was actually still is a product called Trillion that was a core piece of our kind of chat capabilities. We don't really use that today anymore, but it's a great product. Yeah, it was really. You planned your time, you did a lot of email communication and then you got on the phone and lots of conference calls. At the time, the remote team was. We were all local to each other. Everyone still worked remotely, but we were all within the Massachusetts area. So it was very easy to pull people together and help build that team. But one of the benefits that really this has afforded us is we were able to get and continue to have really skilled, talented senior people. Because what they were looking for was that flexibility to be able to manage their lifestyle in a certain way and didn't want to be stuck in a corporate office and have to, you know, get up every day and dress in a certain way and drive somewhere. And as a result, we've been able to attract some strong senior talent that I think we would not have been able to attract in a. If we had everybody in the same place.

Right.

I think that is maybe the biggest. Definitely one of the biggest benefits of being remote is you're not limited to who's around and also who wants the lifestyle of having to be in an office every day in that corporate environment.

Yeah. And we found our clients, you know, because of the nature of our clients, which are privately held companies, they run up to about 75 million in revenue. But owner and founder is typically still involved. If they wanted to meet with us, we were going to them. They weren't looking to come to an office. So we just. As we looked at the business structure, we said, why have that overhead? And then of course, as technology evolved, it just made it even easier and even better to be able to build a team that's not physically in the same place.

Right.

Well, before we get into maybe a client success story, I am curious since you brought up clients are there. So just from what I've heard about you guys from other folks in the space and then obviously from doing some research on the website ahead of our conversation, you guys kind of position inbound websites, the strategy and design piece and the HubSpot management side of things, like three core services that you have. But in terms of the. The businesses who you're working with, is there like an industry or vertical or several of those that you kind of specialize in or is it across the board, within that kind of revenue range, up to 75 million. But privately held companies?

No, we really have a sweet spot in manufacturing and technology, and especially where those two things align. You know, technology for manufacturing companies. We have a big strength in manufacturing. And one of the things we like is we like the products that are challenging to sell, that might be perceived as a commodity where people really need help differentiating them. And that happens a lot in manufacturing and technology. Everybody starts to look the same. And so that's really been our sweet spot and our specialty.

Awesome. That's cool to hear. So kind of in that vein, one of the questions we like to ask is just about our recent success story. Can you describe a client win that you guys have had and kind of what those, what the details look like?

Yeah. It's funny, in thinking about this gray, prior to our conversation, my recent client success story actually starts back in 2006. Strangely, we had a client that we were working with that does conferencing software and solutions. And they were a client for almost four years. And although you mentioned the services that we position in inbound and websites and really the way we position the company is as an outsourced marketing department. So for our clients, we are their marketing department. If they have someone in house that might have a marketing administrator, marketing coordinator. So we come in and do the whole strategy and all of the implementation. And so as an, as the marketing department for this particular client, we were working with them for about four years, as I was saying, and it started becoming obvious that the way they wanted to and what their needs were, they really needed to have someone in house. And so we approached them, we explained that we thought this was the right transition time not to be outsourcing their marketing, but instead to bring someone in house. We helped them write the job posting and identify some candidates for the position. They brought all of their marketing in house, I want to say in 2011. And. And then in December of 2015, I received a phone call. They were ready to take their marketing to the next level. Their in house person had left and they decided they were in a position to outsource everything again. And so they came back to us was that four years after we worked with them for almost four years, they had four years with marketing in house. And then they came back to us. And over the course of 2016, as we were working with them, we had. There were a lot of changes. They acquired another company. We had a shift in our primary contact within the organization. A new person came on board and that's always kind of risky because people often want to bring their own people with them. And then they had an internal. They had a marketing coordinator on staff and that person left. And rather than bringing that back in house, they've actually increased our retainer over time. Over the course of 2015, we, we doubled their traffic and doubled their, excuse me, 2016 doubled their traffic and doubled their leads. They had a 500% increase in Twitter followers. They're. They have more leads and are closing more business than they're able to keep up with right now. And, and I think that's because their retainer has increased, is 50% higher than it was when they started back with us in December of 2015 because they just keep gaining confidence and excitement and don't want to bring it in house. And they continue to outsource more to us.

Right.

Wow, that's awesome.

Yeah. So that's been a great. To me, that's the best kind of success story where definitely it has to be about the numbers, but it really has to be about the people and the confidence that our team has built for this company and that the results they've been able to deliver are all, you know, leading to just continuing to grow that relationship.

Right.

Well, that kind of prompts a couple follow up questions on that, which is more about how you guys position and price and deliver services as an outsourced, like basically the outsourced marketing department arm for a company who's in that situation. Are these, I guess, how do you deal with hey, we want to, especially in the retainer space. They come and they say, hey, we want to do something different this month. And obviously you're probably working through that strategically with them, but there are changes that they want to make. Are your retainers a long term retainer and then there's add ons or does that amount get recalculated every month? How does that relationship and the details there work when you're kind of serving as the entire outsourced marketing organization and they have new ideas or new requirements that they want done on a monthly basis?

The truthful answer is it works differently for each client. One of our core values is flexibility. So if we have a client who says, look, this is the amount of money I can allocate to my marketing for this time period, I just can't go outside of those parameters and a new idea comes up or something new happens. What we'll do is we'll take a look at that budget or take a look at that month and make determinations. Of what we can pull out in order to replace the new work or the new ideas. So we'll do plans in 90 day increments and you know, in every, and most of those are kind of campaign driven and every 90 days we're re looking at that, looking at new opportunities, looking at new ideas to bring to the table. And it might be, you know, there, I'd say there are core things that don't change, you know, once we commit to a volume of blogging that will typically stay unless something dramatic needs to happen. If we've committed to a monthly newsletter that's typically going to stay where you end up seeing the flexibility is are we going to do another offer or are we really going to take all of those resources in promoting the six or seven offers we already have and really pushing those as opposed to creating new content? So we have other clients where what has been planned as their monthly retainer, the work that's been planned, they don't want to lose that work and lose that kind of stream of activity and so they'll add on to the retainer for new things that they want done. So it does vary. It's really about working with the client and understanding one of the things we don't ever want to do is fit our client into a package that suits us and makes our life easier, but doesn't really suit them and puts them in a structure that isn't really going to move the business forward.

Right?

Yeah. Well, that's helpful to know how it works and I think that that is just very interesting to hear how every different agency works and things that work well for them. Obviously with the rise of Agile and Scrum, there are more and more agencies who are going to kind of the points based system. And you're not necessarily describing the points, the pointspace system, but there's flexibility there to adjust on an ongoing basis. You're not locked into here's the way it's going to be for 12 months because you're 90 day, almost like 90 day campaigns or campaigns embedded within that. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. And we're not a huge fan of the points based system. I think people tend to back into what the value of each point is. What we've actually done instead is we've created a pricing configurator and we went through everything that we offer to a client. We understood what it would take to actually deliver that in terms of hours, we understood what it would take to deliver that in terms of the level of resource, how senior they needed to be and the value that the client was getting from a particular deliverable. And we went through and we priced every one of our services and now we have a pricing configurator where we can go in very quickly and say, I need. It's a little bit like a menu. Since other agencies are listening. I don't really describe it this way to clients, but I can go in and say I need three Personas, I need five workflows, I need six offers, I need 24 blog posts. And configure what the package will look like for whatever time period I'm doing it for. Every one of our account managers can do this. If the client says, you know what, what could we do if we wanted to do this great new idea, what could we take out? It's simply a click of a button to see how we can get the budget align. Obviously we're doing that knowing there are certain things we'll never take out because we need it tied to the business goals. But we found that that's been. So it's value based pricing, not hourly, not points. It's value based pricing. But the configurator has made that easier for us.

Right.

So I have two very specific follow up questions where I'm essentially asking you to give away your secret sauce here. So feel free to say, you know, I'm comfortable sharing this, not comfortable sharing this, but I'm going to ask them anyways because this is what everyone's thinking right now. One is around just the format of the configurator. This is probably less secret sauce, but is that a tool that you guys have built? Is that a spreadsheet or is it just a document? How does that work?

It is an incredibly complex Excel spreadsheet with macros and dependencies and things I don't understand. And we found a person and I'm not even sure where the person exists or lives. That was just like an Excel Master and they built it out for us.

That's awesome. And then number two, and this is. I'm just going to ask for one example. Obviously everybody would love to know what are the whole details? Because this comes up all the time in our conversations with agencies at Do Inbound. But as an example, like building out a Persona, what does it cost to add one Persona? And there might be scaling factors where three Personas is not just one Persona times three. But are you comfortable sharing any information on that?

The cost of building a Persona?

Right.

Yeah. So we have Personas set at 750.

Okay.

Per person and it's just one of those things that I think it's one of those things that as you look at the different services you offer, there are services that are more for, yes, Personas are helpful for the client, but they're almost more for us as an agency and getting the client's agreement of who their customers are and making sure everybody's on the same page. So that's why when you look at some things, you need to take into account, how long will it take me? But also, what's the true value to the customer for this?

Well, I think especially in a situation that you guys are in where you are the marketing department, the outsourced marketing department, there's not necessarily an in house team. Personas are still going to be helpful to the organization, still going to be helpful to the sales team. But like you said, a lot of that value is for you, who is going to be producing all that content and handling the marketing. So I think that makes a lot of sense. So let's go kind of away from that process and success story to the flip side. And that is around an area for improvement. When you look at an agency that's 15 years old, you've got between employees and contractors, 26 people on the team, what in 2017 here, what's high up on the priority list for improvement at the agency?

A couple things. One is streamlining and efficiency is the big buzzwords for us this year. Really making sure things like the pricing configurator templates, really making sure that we have everything as streamlined and simple as possible so that our people can be efficient, that they're not out there doing, you know, we've been doing this for the last couple of years, but kind of putting the icing on the cake of streamlining and efficiency is a big focus for 2017. And part of that is driven by, yes, you know, quality of life and service delivery quality. But it's also driven by numbers. And so one of the other areas that we're very focused on is revenue per employee. And really looking at some of those numbers in terms of our billable employees and where we should be at from a revenue perspective, what we should be generating, what each employee should also be contributing. Those are the big focuses for at least the first half of 2017.

Right.

In terms of the. So revenue for employee is something we've heard from multiple agencies as one of the ratios or key numbers they're looking at. Is there a target that you guys are looking for?

You know, we're using some of the targets that drew McClellan from AMI or David Baker from recourses use, which is about 150,000 per employee.

Right.

It's been interesting. I've had a couple conversations with agency owners. One who I spoke with here recently said, like, we're shooting for 125 and we just can't seem to get to that point. And it's starting to walk through and figure out like, how do we get there? As you try and figure out how to hit the numbers that you want to hit, are there any key takeaways or things that you guys have realized so far in terms of trying to get to those efficiency numbers?

So we had a lot of learnings about this. We're very transparent within our organization. We share our numbers with our employees on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis. We talk to them about these numbers. And a couple of things that we have figured out. One is it's great to be trans. And this is a little bit not answering the question, but I think it's important as people start thinking about numbers. I think it's great to be transparent. I think that it really helps people understand where the business is at and feel committed to it. But you can't be transparent without giving education on what these numbers mean and why they're important. And so when you start talking about efficiency, people start panicking that they're, you know, that they're not billing enough or how many billable hours do I have? And it actually ended up being this a rub within the company. So we just ask our, we ask everyone to track time. We ask them to track all of their time. I think that's the key thing when you're looking at efficiency because. And we need to understand if you're spending seven more hours with a client because everything, you know, we all say whether it's points or value based pricing, eventually things come back to an hour, you know, hours and hourly rates. But if somebody's spending seven additional hours with a client that can't be billed, doesn't fit within the retainer, that's obviously an inefficiency. But it's. It may not really be in the long run because it may be providing service that makes the retainer double in three months time. So in looking at these numbers, I do think the critical piece is time tracking because you have to know what your starting basis is and what you're working with. And then you have to make sure you measure it every single, some metrics monthly, some metrics quarterly, but every single month. And we have a Whole dashboard of our numbers that our accountant at the end of each month goes in and populates a dashboard so we can track over time where improvements are and kind of see where the patterns are of where something might be starting to get out of whack.

Yeah, well, I think just that takeaway alone is. That is one of the key points here is if you're not looking at the time spent, if efficiency is about what did we get done in what period of time, you can't just ignore it. It's kind of in vogue to say we don't worry about hours. Hours isn't. And especially with the rise of points based pricing, hours are not what we measure by. But ultimately we are humans, we are time bound. If you're not measuring by hours, you're kind of missing half of the efficiency equation. So you kind of need to look at that to figure out where do we. Even if you're not billing by hours, how are we going to improve where the areas of weakness right now?

Right. Because if you run your numbers, you know, you can back into your numbers and say, okay, what size agency should I be? If it's 150,000 per employee and you can run your numbers. But then when you see that there's a gap between what you're actually producing and what you should be able to produce, you have to have data to help you figure out where that gap is. You can't just tell people, work harder, work longer. You know, you need to help them in some way. And numbers tell a story. They tell a story for marketing and they tell a story for a business.

Yep, absolutely. Well, let's. One of the things that I love asking people for help from, and you've kind of already hit on this Excel sheet that you guys have, but kind of in that vein of tools that you're using, are there any favorite tools that you have or that you guys use at the agency that maybe are not like HubSpot Slack? Those are kind of obvious ones. Now if those are where you live in your life, that's fine to share. But any lesser known tools that you guys use and love.

We really don't have any lesser known tools. I will tell you the tool that is probably central, you know, leaving out obviously the tools that support inbound marketing. But the tools that are central to the existence of a virtual agency are communication tools, but they're not lesser known. Skype and Zoom are our best friends. Those have been really important communication tools. You can, you know, we'll see, we'll see. Skype chats going on and we purposely left it in Skype, not putting it in Slack because it would just reduces the noise when you start looking at some of the other places. And there are Skype shenanigans going on every day, I'm sure, but it's how the team stays together. So not really lesser known, but the focus on communication tools has really been important for us.

That's awesome. With Zoom, is that primarily used in client calls? Are you doing like marketing webinars or is it kind of what's the scope there?

All of those. So we've done webinars, we've used Zoom to deliver webinars. It's the primary tool for client meetings. More often for internal brainstorming, we'll use Skype. But if we have the entire team on and we're working on something, then Zoom just supports that process a little bit better.

Right, awesome. Well, I've got one more question for you. This has not, it's not completely unrelated to the agency, but it's a much, much more personal question that's about kind of what makes you operate efficiently and that is how do you get your day started? Well, to be efficient, managing a 26 person team. And yeah, it's basically like, are there any habits? This is kind of a combination question between what is a realistic morning look like for you and what does the ideal morning look like for you in terms of starting your day off the right way?

I start my day off with CrossFit because that's what keeps me sane. But then when it comes back in the office, I actually adopted, I'm not sure if you're familiar with bullet journals. Yeah, so I adopted that process about a year ago using a bullet journal and combined with some of the conversation that's in the book Traction about rocks. And those two things have been, are really what set up not just my day, but my entire week and month and quarter for success. Because between the bullet journal and having very clear rocks that were that I'm focused on, I'm able to come in, sit down at my desk and I immediately know what things to focus on, what the priorities are. And I don't start my day with email. I start my day with something big. What's that book? Eat three Frogs. So I start my day with something big that needs to get moved off before really moving into the other email, which is such a time sink.

Yep, absolutely.

But I'm a huge Bullet Journal fan. If somebody hasn't looked into that takes a little while to find your own process with it, but it's been life changing in terms of my organization.

Right.

Yeah. I don't think that we've had anyone mention. We've definitely had people talk about journaling things like the Freedom Journal. I don't think that anyone has brought up specifically bullet journaling and what that looks like. So that's cool to hear. And there's a ton of resources online. I know. Is there a specific journal that you use for that? Because more of a system than a specific. And I don't do it myself, but it's more of a system than a specific journal.

Right?

Yeah. The gentleman who kind of created it did then create a physical journal that's all set up for you to use. I like things that I can fold in half. This was a hardbound journal. So I have a notebook that looks a little different than an everyday taking notes notebook and I've set it up myself in that.

That is awesome. Well Susan, we really appreciate you coming on, sharing your story, some of what is working really well for you guys right now and also some of the areas that you're looking to improve. So that was super helpful. I appreciate you coming on. If folks have follow up questions or would want to get in touch or follow you guys and what you're doing at pmg, where's the best place for them to do that?

Well, certainly can hop on our website and see all of our social media channels if you want to connect that way. Or send me an email directly@susanrecisionmarketinggroup.com awesome.

Well, thanks for coming on, Susan. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. I had fun.