Upskilling Your Clients and Building a Culture of Experimentation with David Arnoux

Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Grejsar, and with me on the call today is David Arnoux, CEO of Growth Tribe. David, how are you doing today?

I'm awesome. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, super good to have you here on the show today. Really excited for the conversation. And first I wanted to ask you for the watchers and listeners to get to know you better. Uh, what is the most fun thing you've done this year thus far?

Fun?

Yes. Let's start with fun before you get into business.

Okay, okay, okay. We're talking like professionally or it can also be personally.

Personally is fine too. Pick. Whichever.

I'm renovating a monastery. Why? I don't know if that's fun, but let's say it's the most fun and engaging thing that I've been. That I've been doing.

You gotta give us more detail about that. What do you mean you're renovating a monastery?

So I actually, I. I bought a place in France, a little bit in the middle of nature, although it's close to close to cities. And then there's a whole monastic part to the place, so that part's being renovated. I'm not doing it myself manually because I don't have the time running the business, but I have a team that's sort of doing that renovation. I don't know if I call it fun, actually. Let's just say it's engaging. And it's a completely different learning curve than the digital world.

Like a fulfilling side project. I can see that. So what is the most surprising thing that you learned about renovating a monastery?

It's just great to dive into a learning curve of something that you don't know or understand at all. It really challenges you. Rather than trying to, you know, perfect the extra 5, 6% of the field that you're already in, going for something completely new. Understanding the foundations of stones, of types of soil, of types of walls, of irrigation, of protecting a house from water, et cetera, et cetera. It really expands your cognitive bandwidth and the mental analogies you start making even within the within business. So it's just great to start learning something from scratch again. And funnily enough, I feel like it's actually helping me in my job. There was this famous. There's a really nice book by Epstein, I think it's David Epstein called Range. And I think it's called. The subtitle is Specialists, Generalists thrive in a specialist world, in a specialized world. And he starts the Book off by saying that almost every single Nobel Prize winner on the planet were extremely broad mindset people who also had a second or a third or a fourth passion, whether they were doing an instrument or a specific sport or they were interested in physics, but they were also interested in chemistry and in biology. And it's expanding the cognitive bandwidth.

That.

Is actually so powerful because you take problems from different angles that you wouldn't have thought of. And the basis of creativity is usually weak ties in a network. And typically if you focus too much on specialization, then you're really focusing on the area where you're strong in that network. So you're being sort of creative within this small local maxima. But once you start looking at different fields, then you start creating these ties. And that's where real creativity comes from. Linking this idea to this idea. And for those of you who are only listening, I'm showing sort of a network with my fingers and two areas that are really far apart and separate.

I just had that in the back of my mind that the listeners are losing out on the finger and hand gestures you were doing there. And what an excellent thought. Yes, I can absolutely relate to that. I'm so glad I asked the question on my end. It's music. I decided to start learning bass when I was like 26 and previously I loved to listen to music. But learning to play, there's so much depth in it from music theory through technique, both the physical things you need to do with your body with your fingers, as well as like all the additional knowledge you need to gain and kind of the additional appreciation you gain for, for the music that's around you. I can absolutely relate. And hey now, now I think I have something in common with Nobel Prize winners where they have these secondary tertiary.

For that paper to be that paper to be published. But and it's crazy, right? Because, you know, there's this notion that it's so important to get the foundations right in any field that you're, that you're sort of working in. And the more I've on something that I don't understand at all, like, you know, I, I, I don't know where I heard this one, but it was this idea that the most successful people in the world, they choose sort of education over entertainment. But I also think that they understand basic principles of certain fields. And I think if you don't get the foundations right on a house, your house is going to have big problems right down the line. I think the same thing for organizations and same thing for people in Their careers and for agencies and for the clients that you work with. And we see again and again that the world's moving so fast that we tend to skip the foundations and jump for the tools right away or the cool, nifty, shiny new object, shiny new tactic. And so I guess it's the same thing with playing the bass as well. You need to get those foundations right and be a classic artist before you start to be a deconstructionist and a crazy pop artist or something like that.

Yeah, that makes total sense. I have one last question about the monastery. Sorry, out of my own curiosity. Like, what's the timeline on a project like this before we move on? Like, how long do you. Do you think this will take until they finish?

Like completely finished? Never. You're never done with buildings. But let's say it's a ten year timeline, something like that.

Okay.

About ten years.

Just curious.

Yeah, because it's not. I spend about 78 or 80 hours per week on my. On my business on Growth Tribe. So I would say that with the time that I can allocate to it, it's. It's a project we've taken with my wife. And it's like a ten year timeline, but to get to a point where it's livable, you're looking at two years.

Okay. Okay. Well, thank you for the additional context. Okay. I was not expecting to hear about that, but that's what makes these conversations so fascinating. And I love that I asked the question, pat myself on the back for that one. All right, you mentioned Growth Tribe. You mentioned your main business will be getting closer to that. Now, first, I wanted to hit you with the traditional agency journey question. And interesting to hear about that from your perspective because you don't necessarily run an agency. But still, I wanted to ask you, David, what is your number one tip.

For agency operators, for people operating an agency? Well, it's funny because we used to be Growth Tribe before we were educational platform, we were actually running consulting services. So in a sense we were, we were, we were organized as an agency. I would say that it's pretty. Maybe something pretty obvious. It's really about this notion of delivering measurable results. I think it's pretty obvious. Clients, they don't just want ideas, they want outcomes. And then the more data you use to show impact and build trust, the more successful you can be. And impact doesn't always have to be in the numbers. I sometimes find that emotional impact is even more impactful than rational impact. Winning by Design has a very nice blueprint on this. It's looking at impact from a rational or emotional point of view. And it's kind of like an onion where both are linked. But it's pretty obvious what I'm going to say to just be their growth partner, not just a service provider. There's a fantastic also book that I would recommend because when we were running as an agency or as a consulting firm, we really, really struggled with resource integration. Really, really difficult in terms of hiring. And do you build people up or do you buy them or do you use freelancers? Do you use your current team? How do you make sure people don't go and run their own gig, et cetera, et cetera. And there's this book called that I wish I read three years earlier that's called Managing the Professional Service Firm. I don't know if that one's well known in the agency world and gave me such a deep understanding of this resourcing aspect. And also how to manage your P and L and how to manage your ebitda and you know, how to. How to build connections with your customers, build connections with your team. And so I think so that's maybe two tips. First one is focus on delivering measurable results, whether it's from a qualitative point of view or quantitative, looking also at that emotional impact that you have, not just the rational impact. And then just cool little tip is spend a weekend reading Managing the Professional Service Firm. For me, that was really the foundation of running a service firm or a consultancy organization.

Okay, okay, that's awesome. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper for a second into the emotional impact that you mentioned. Could you talk, you know, to the tactics of like, is emotional impact something that can be measured? If it can't be measured, then how do you kind of gauge it in some, some other way? And how do you. Are there any tactics that kind of increase the emotional impact of, of your service that you know of?

It's a tough one, I would say. I don't know of any tactics, but again, really obvious things like staying extremely. Just really understanding the customer, the five whys, and really understanding the reasons behind what they're saying is important. So you know the mom test, right, or the five whys? Uh, typically when you're running a customer interview or doing a discovery call or trying to uncover the needs and the pains of a customer, rather than trying to cram your solution down their throat, the idea is to ask why multiple times so that you start uncovering the layer of the basic human needs that they have and in the end I would say let's keep this really simple. So if you ask why one time, you'll understand that they need to reach target and they'll give you just what the, with their, with their monthly pain or need is right that they need to hit by the end of the month. I need that promotion, I need to get better results, need to increase leads, need to optimize workflows, blah blah blah. Then you ask why a second time you uncover why they need to do that. And typically it's really simple. It's either about cost or revenue. It's to optimize cost, bottom line, or to grow the top line, optimize revenue. When it gets interesting is when you start asking it a third time. The third why or the fourth why, third why? You'll see that it's down to convenience. I think humans are driven by convenience. Convenience decides almost everything we do. It seems to make our decisions for us and it trumps what time we imagine and what our true preferences are. Like somebody prefers to brew their coffee, of course, but going to the, the corner coffee place is much more convenient. Easy, easy is better. Easy is best. So that's sort of the third one. Then if you start to go four or five, you start to go into much more personal, much more real, much more core reasons that decide are our decisions. It's to get a promotion, to have a happier life, to make sure that they can pay for their kids education, to make sure that they can sleep at night, put money on the side for retirement. And then the fifth why it's about personal fulfillment, et cetera, et cetera. And then you start to dive into the psychographics of the people that you're trying to sell to or talking to. Introvert, extrovert, assertive, non assertive, open, closed, et cetera, et cetera. So that, that, that emotional impact requires you to almost be a psychologist and to understand that person on a deep level and what makes them tick. And if you can understand their personal context and what makes them tick, then you can cater everything in how you try to approach them and deliver impact to what actually matters for them. Now where it becomes more difficult is when you're dealing with the decision making unit and not just one person because then you have multiple people to, to work with.

Yeah.

So I would say again, I don't have that quick fast trick, but it's really about how you conduct discovery analysis and asking more than telling a lot about listening and asking the right questions and peeling the onion to go to those deeper Layers of why?

Yeah, yeah, I feel that, I feel that. Nice deep dive. I really like that. And I think to comment on this, we've tackled this on the show a few times, this question of five whys. And a lot of agencies or businesses that do consulting for agencies have figured this out. And a lot of the messaging, you can tell that they're in the fourth or fifth why, because they don't talk about make your agency make more money, but it's like gain freedom, be able to finally step away, get your free time back, stop grinding at your agency. You know, a lot of that is in there because when you ask the additional whys, it's not just about the agency making more money, it's about the agency making more money without my direct involvement. That's often like a strong motivator, you know, for agency owners. So, David, next, what I wanted to ask you about is, well, a little bit of context about you because we covered, you know, a couple of interesting topics already. But to contextualize the rest of the conversation and what we'll drill into next, could you tell our watchers and listeners a little bit more about you, a little bit more about Growth Tribe and what you do, who you serve and how? Yeah.

So me in the context of just sort of from a business point of view, the only thing that's maybe kind of interesting is just built and run multiple, multiple companies in multiple domains. Kind of a lifelong learner. I'm obsessed with learning. It's, I love it. My favorite hobby is, you know, reading podcasts, learning stuff. And started actually a consulting firm about eight or nine years ago around growth marketing. So I actually kind of brought growth hacking, what it was called back in the days, to Europe when it was already kind of taking off in the States and started Europe's first growth marketing academy back in, I think it was eight years ago, nine years ago. But at the, at the beginning it was consulting. So we were, I was going into organizations and I was building an experiment driven approach to how they get results. And with a mix of ux, a mix of marketing, mix of data analytics and a mix of tech and tech and code. And so started this as a consulting firm. Long story short, what I saw was that the consulting work we were doing, the clients could do it themselves. And when we would train up like a few interns or a few team members to do what we were doing, the results that we were giving would be embedded within the DNA of the business. So that when we would, when we were doing a consulting gig, when I would call back the client. Six months later, what we had been implementing had sort of dissipated and left with the, the people who were involved with that specific project or with us. However, when we trained people up so in a, in a day of eight hours, when we would spend three, four hours training people up to do what we were doing, the impact was much more long term. And again embedding, we started to embed these processes, these ways of working within the, the DNA of the organization. So then when I would call back six months later, yeah, we're still doing it. It's fantastic. We've set up a team, we've even created a new department within the organization and so created an educational company. Then eight years ago and then eight years later, we're one of the leading edtech educational providers in Europe. And what we do is we basically bridge digital skills gaps within organizations so we allow teams and companies to have more impact by building up on key capabilities within teams and organizations. At the moment, what's really hot, really working well is everything around of course Genai, but embedding that gen AI within new processes and new workflows inside org's mostly larger organizations. So what we like to say is that we deliver impact at scale through capabilities, through skill building. Now sometimes that sounds a bit boring because it's like geez, training, it's compliance training, training is boring, etc. Etc. But what sets us a little bit apart is that every single client we've had has had positive ROI on key KPIs that they have. So if you check out our website, some of the use cases are there like 100% increase in loans, increase in leads, increase in cost, reduction in cost per acquisition, operational efficiency. And what we try to always do is make sure that the learnings that we give, they're applyable like one hour later. So whatever you do when you take a growth tribe learning path is that it's very actionable. You have tools, worksheets, playbooks that you can apply right away. And that's why clients keep coming back again and again and again. And the second thing we do that's a bit different is we mix live elements with a library of learning. So what we usually say is that we kick your team off with live. So like we do a team workshop where we assess where some of the biggest flaws or biggest gaps are according to a certain strategy that you have. Then we send everybody to do a little bit of homework and learn a little bit and then we get together again and we try to apply the Learnings together and just the results have been absolutely amazing on, I would say 95% of clients that we've been, that we've been working with.

So awesome.

That's kind of it in a nutshell.

Yeah, yeah. Great that you expanded on this. And just one additional detail I wanted to get here. Can you speak to the scale of growth tribe right now? Like how many team members or what's your reach, etc.

Yeah, of course. So we are currently, we have 35,000 alumni. So that's people that we've trained or that have been impacted by our learnings. About a thousand. I think we're at a thousand clients.

Or.

A thousand companies that we've trained. And then the team size, you know, it goes up and down depending on how we're resourcing, how we're resourcing projects. But we're like for 50% organization.

Okay, okay, gotcha. Thank you for that additional detail. So now there's a lot to drill into. From what you talked about. Let me start with this. I'm wondering what you would say. You said you're focused on digital skills gaps, right? So I think, you know, if I'm running an agency, I'm wondering kind of where the gaps are on my team. What should I be training my team on? I have a feeling Gen AI is going to be part of it. I'm hoping there's something more, something more specific to discuss here, but like from your perspective, kind of you're in the weeds of it. Like what are the skills that are the most missing the most? And are organizations aware that they're missing them? Or is it that there's something that they don't even know that they need?

Almost every single organization knows it and sees it because everything moves so fast that it's impossible to be on top of everything. I think agencies are or they have to be, they're pretty advanced compared to some of the clients that we work with. Because it's your job to stay on top of all of the latest changes in any specific but organization, sorry, 100% know it. The, the answer to what should a company focus on is really, unfortunately is it depends. And that's why we run diagnostics. So it's a little bit like a doctor will run a diagnostic before prescribing a certain medicine. But there's three areas that we have decided to focus on that we see that there's gaps all the time and that's really on the data and AI part. There's brave new world, fantastic possibilities and capabilities there, but almost none of them are being leveraged, whether it's at the individual level or the team level, because it's just so hard to push these things into, into production. And the, the best way to put things into production is to actually start with the capabilities of the team members. So if you had like a mass, lowest pyramid of where to start. We tend to start with the tools and the consultants and the processes and the strategy change, but we forget to upgrade the brains of our team members. And typically when you start upgrading the brains of your team members, that's where everything starts to become a lot easier because like I said, they have a bigger cognitive bandwidth. So we focus on three main areas. The first one is growth and marketing. Everything that's customer facing, really customer facing. There's a bit of product in there, there's a bit of marketing, there's a bit of rapid experimentation, there's a bit of customer success, everything's really customer facing. We also focus on data and AI which you can basically nowadays sprinkle a little bit everywhere. And then the third one is we focus on just general business skills and innovation. And it's pretty broad. You know, it could be like gen for managers, prompt engineering, a leader's guide to setting expectations and scoping first use cases. You know, like mental models. We have a really, really large and deep library that we adapt based on the needs of the customer. So typically we tailor a path based on business goals. The team learns at their own pace and then we help the, we help those teams, those teams implement. So it's hard to say what I would say across the board would be applicable everywhere, especially if you're comparing an agency to a client, so to the actual end user. What we do see however is that from an agency hook point of view, the agencies we work with where they're selling their services, but they also upsell some of the learning on the side. With us as a partner, they're much more successful in their projects. Not the first project, but typically the upsell or the cross sell afterwards because the client starts to talk the lingo and understands what you're doing better and buys into the tools more and the processes and they start working like the agency works. And then it's possible to sell a second project or to scale a lot faster on the agency side. So we get along quite well with some consulting firms where basically they come in, they do that pilot project, they sell us as an add on and then after that add on has been sold. So the skills training for the team then we see that those teams or those clients, they actually start buying more from the agency, for pretty obvious reasons, is that we've started embedding that way of working and that way of thinking, that digital experimentation, data driven use this tool's way of thinking into the DNA of the business. So then they're like, oh, let's buy more from that agency because we can't do everything ourselves.

Okay, I need to urgently dump this down for myself to make sure that I'm understanding correctly. So we're talking about, let's say a marketing agency takes on a client in whatever space they're, I don't know, in the pharmaceutical space or whichever. Initially, it's marketing services. But as the partnership develops.