This serial entrepreneur build his business from zero to 500 employees in less than a year

Hello, welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Should I say guten Tag? Today we're going to meet Tim Ringel, who's a German entrepreneur who's currently in Canada, and he's the CEO of a company called Meet the People that serves large companies like Ford and Moët Hennessy. And he's built a company from nothing to over 500 people in less than a year. Tim, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Thank you for having me.

It's my pleasure because you're a serial entrepreneur. We're going to talk about programmatic advertising. We're going to talk about how you've managed to build multiple businesses yourself and how you're helping people to use programmatic advertising for their own brand. So Tim, introduce yourself as CEO of Meet the People and let's talk about, you know, how you're helping your clients and yourselves to get noticed.

Absolutely. Again, thank you, Jim, for having me. So as you said, my name is Tim Ringel. I was born in Germany. Built my first business there when I was 21 years old. I was lucky enough to sell it after 12 years. That brought me to Paris where I ran another business and built it. And after selling that, I went to New York and that's now 6 years ago. So I live in New York with my family and I'm building businesses. I'm a serial entrepreneur. This is the 5th business I'm building in the advertising space. And besides the advertising space, I'm also a very active investor in venture capital, specifically late stage and early stage startups.

What credentials you've got, Tim, and it's fantastic. And it's my pleasure to have you on. And let's just talk about, you know, as an entrepreneur, when you started that first business, going all the way back, what was the number one challenge in terms of getting noticed? I know there's multiple challenges in starting a business, but getting noticed, getting that first client, how did you do that? Because that's really often the hardest thing to do is to get the first client, isn't it?

Absolutely. It is the toughest, especially when you don't really know Like I started my business knowing nothing about business, right? I mean, being 21, still in college, working a job as an IT administrator in a large bank because I knew computers really well and I was a coder actually, not by trade because it wasn't a trade at the time, but I was a coder by heart. Got my first PC when I was 11 and therefore I had to lock myself away to learn coding and teach myself coding. So the business partner and I, when we started the business, we were both more on the coding side, less on the extroverted part. How do I win the client side? We had no idea how to do that. So it was a hustle. I had to do cold calling. I had to send letters. At that time, there was no LinkedIn in 1999, 1998. So you really had to work really hard to convince people that you are an upcoming innovative company that can help them solve something. What was most successful for me at that time was in the beginning to send people a letter stating the obvious that their Making mistakes somewhere on their website and stuff, and then calling them afterwards and really asking my way up from the reception desk to the chief marketing officer, right? So that the other thing is I found my way into publications by having disruptive, let's say, thesis around the industry and what's gonna change and how the internet is gonna change how people sell products online, right? Because I built a digital advertising agency in 1999.

Yeah. So you were early, say 1999. It's easy to forget now that back then the internet really wasn't even operating. I think, you know, Google is only 1995 that came out. Tim, do you think that there's still a role for print, sort of a direct approach, writing a letter? Because, you know, you built multimillion dollar businesses in programmatic advertising and you're saying actually you use the humble print letter to get your first clients.

Yeah. I mean, primarily because at that time. There was no LinkedIn, right? LinkedIn is kind of the biggest sales tool in the world right now, networking tool and sales tool, and works really well. But if you have a few thousand followers on LinkedIn, I don't know how it is for you, but I get tens and hundreds of inquiries every day on LinkedIn. It's quite terrible. It's a lot of spam. So I think something that is authentic and different is going to resonate really well, especially when you're an upcoming company, because it shows that you care. Especially when it comes from you as a founder, it shows you care. You really care about that first client. You really care about that first win. Really care about creating an individual solution depending on what your company does, right? But it is the hardest to win the first client and a lot of people rely on LinkedIn, but I think the personal touch and authentic touch is going to go a really long way.

So Tim, you're in the business now with over 500 people and servicing clients like Ford and Moët Hennessy. Of really servicing large-scale clients? And how are you managing that personal touch when you've got such a large scale? That's a central challenge, isn't it, for many people?

Yeah, that goes back to our model, really. Like, the largest organization I have ran was 3,000 people in 69 offices around the world, right? So that was the largest organization I helped creating and created. So the scale for me is something that as a CEO, as a founder, you can't know everybody anymore. So it's really difficult to lead this authenticity down into your organization so they are authentic as well, right? So why am I saying this? Because the, the 3,000 people business I ran was one brand globally, right? And it came out of multiple acquisitions and organic growth and all this kind of stuff. What we are doing now is kind of a replication of that, but we keep each of the brands we acquire independent within the structure. We own them outright. But each of them have their own DNA, their own authentic approach, how to talk to clients. And we don't have, let's say me as CEO on top, and I'm the only CEO in the business. Each of these lines of business have their own leadership team that then can talk to clients as CEOs, as a part of the company, part of the equity structure, part of the story. And that creates authenticity towards clients and the personnel.

Okay. So is it the case that you think that when you get to a certain scale, it's almost impossible to keep personal authenticity, that you need to keep breaking it down into these almost smaller units so it can still be human-centric, you know, people-centric?

Well, it depends what kind of clients you go for, right? I mean, if a very large company talks to a very large company like ours, when we are like 1,500 people, let's just say, right? Then you anyways don't need that personal touch. You need it on the top. You don't need it necessarily anymore throughout those organizations because they're both corporates, right? They are very professional procurement structure process to make a difference when you're smaller and when you're hustling and when you're building, like then the personal touch is important. So I would say it's not necessarily the scale your business as such. It's about what kind of clients you want to work for and where do you want to grow with them? Even in a large assignment, a personal touch still goes a long way with a VP of marketing, SVP of marketing, whatever that is, right? That personal relationship is still very, very important. So I think even today we have 500 people, hopefully in 18 months we have 1,000 people, right? Depending on what's going to happen macroeconomically. But even then, I do have the ambition that we have multiple brands, that we have multiple leaders within the business that win business and talk to clients with a very personal touch. Yes.

Tim, you've raised this issue of growth, you know, gone from 0 to 500 in 12 months. Which is astounding in terms of people and talent acquisition. Do you want to share with us how you're binding everybody, although they're in their own brands, how are you binding them within the bigger Meet the People vision? Because that's also important. Otherwise you just got disparate units. And in a way, that's maybe why some of the traditional holding companies have kind of fallen by the wayside, isn't it? They've just become corporate.

Yeah, that's exactly the trick, right? I mean, How do you create a culture? While in our case, we have multiple brands. So each of the brands have their own culture because we technically, the growth hack I'm using, and it's actually a simple growth hack to get to scale, is I'm buying these companies. So I'm acquiring them and then giving them a larger platform to operate on, including infrastructure that we give them, like financial infrastructure, HR infrastructure, blah, blah, blah. DNA of the business stays the same. So they have their own culture and that is really important because One of our businesses is 40 years old. So going there and saying, well, I'm Tim Ringel and I have these brilliant ideas how you should work, that doesn't work because some of the people have been in the business for 25, 30 years. So it's very important they keep their DNA, but we help them to work together on client opportunities. And that's where our vision comes in. And how I used that as a growth hack when I was much smaller, and we talked about it when we were preparing for the session. When you're a small company, sort of make this relatable also for young entrepreneurs. You have really 2 options. You can either build a very, very clear vision for your team that people can rally behind, or you can create an enemy, as I describe it. And I don't mean this in a bad way, but I mean creating the enemy is picking a competitor that you want to beat on winning business, on being better, whatever. That's all subjective ultimately, right? Besides the client win, the winning business from them or something, the rest is subjective, but it helps people to kind of rally behind something that might be really blurry. If you're a young company, you know where you want to go, but as an entrepreneur, you can't really exactly describe the vision of what it's going to be. Like when Google started, nobody really knew what they were trying to do. And it was difficult for Larry and Sergey to explain that their slogan was, don't be evil. I mean, come on. How do you rally behind that? I get it. It's emotional, but what is that? What does that mean? It was much easier to say, we don't want advertising on Google. We want to beat AltaVista, Infoseek. We've got to be different. That works really well. That's a growth hack that helped me create culture and rally people. And then at some point you have to, you know, step into like, what's the bigger mission and vision?

Yeah, I think it's a really brilliant way of helping new people to come and join and see how you're going to build the brand and what kind of clients you're going for as well. In terms of the proposition now for Meet the People, when it comes to getting your business noticed. You've got clients who you've presumably got to attract, but you've also, sounds as though you've got a deal flow to attract. You've got new potential investee companies to attract. Tim, do you want to just tell us how you're managing that part? Because actually they're 2 slightly different narratives, aren't they, to the market?

Oh, totally. So actually in my role as CEO and founder of Meet the People, I have the luxury that our companies operate Semi-independently, right? So they have their own book of business. They do their own marketing strategy, how to win business and how to go after certain pieces of business. My job is much more besides talking to potential clients. Of course I do that and open my black book trying to use the relationships I have that I've built over 25 years in the industry. But the majority of my job is actually talk to founders of companies. That's actually the majority of my job because that deal flow of Bringing new potential companies into our group solves 2 things. It solves talent growth, it solves client growth, it solves actually 3 things, and it allows me to offer more services, right? Because I try to not bring companies in to meet the people that has the same services I already have. I try to add new services for a fully integrated marketing strategy and structure. That's my main job, like finding cool companies, great entrepreneurs, great chemistry. So I travel a lot. I meet a lot of people. And we go really deep. Some of these founders I've met 12, 14 times before we actually decide we're going to make a proposal to acquire the company and have them part of Meet the People.

Right. So that's a different role altogether than the one that traditionally entrepreneurs play when they're building, is yours is actually bringing in talent. What about, Tim, in terms of the investment you've mentioned about Meet the People is buying companies?

That's right.

In the role that you've got. You presumably also got investment in the company. So can you maybe just share a little bit about the investor relations work and how you communicate the mission that you've got? Because saying we're going to defeat this company is probably not what the VC or the investor wants to hear, right? They're like, yeah, that's fine. But who do you want to be? Not who do you not want to be? How are you managing that one, Tim?

So this is a very good question, Jim, because I always describe it like this when I talk to startups, no matter which industry, like you have to Everybody needs money. Everybody needs capital when you build a business. So, uh, again, my advice as a serial entrepreneur is if you don't need capital, that's the best business you can build because it's going to be 100% yours. You have full control. You don't have to report to anyone but yourself. It also means you're pretty much alone and isolated from the world. But if you need capital, there's really 3 different sources of capital. Let's say 4 different sources of capital. One is business angel capital, very emotional money, network related, very emotional, small tickets. that ideally give you strategic advantage. They're great advisors. They're seasoned entrepreneurs who help you to get, I would say, the MVP into market, the minimum viable product into market, right? So these people are very emotional. They invest not into only the idea. They don't invest into a great business plan. They invest into the entrepreneur, right? So that money comes with a lot of managing emotions and managing relationships. The family office money is the second kind of tier. Where family office money is similar, but much bigger ticket, much bigger longevity. Like a family office usually invests with a 10-year horizon plus. Sometimes they don't even want their money back. They live on dividends. Depends on what business you're building. And these are professional structures, but the person you ultimately talk to is the patriarch, right? The person who is ideally, and that's still their return expectations are not 100x. They want sustainable business models that support entrepreneurs at scale, but that's not the first kind of capital you raise. The third bucket is really venture capital. And here it's all about the story, right? It's in early stage, it's smaller tickets, let's say half a million dollars. And then in later stage, it can be hundreds of millions of dollars. Venture capital has an expectation of your vision needs to allow 100x, and that's why they buy into the entrepreneur combined with the vision. So venture capital really only works for certain business models that can actually return 100x. So you have to have a moonshot vision that can really disrupt an industry so much or create a new product that can offer this return because private equity money is deployed. No fund deploys it into 5 companies. They deploy into 20, 30 companies and don't have, they know the fail ratio is 90% and 3 companies have to make the entire return, right? And therefore, if they don't offer 100x, they're never gonna make their return on investment slash their MOIC. And then the last bucket, and then I'm gonna shut up about it. Is private equity money. It's very different. They all look the same in terms of the cash looks the same, but it tastes and smells different because the expectations are different. Private equity money does not necessarily care so much about the vision. They care much more about, is there an established industry that you're disrupting? Because if the industry already worked anyways and you can do it better, you don't really need to reinvent the wheel completely. It's not you're creating a new category. You're basically disrupting an industry where the vision is a little less important than the financial potential return. And private equity does not expect 100x, they expect a 4 or 5x, but therefore you have to be positive on EBITDA. So VC, you don't need to be positive on EBITDA. It's like, how do you get to Mars? Right? And private equity would say like, well, let's build that rocket ship instead of going to Mars. Let's do the infrastructure instead. Right? Very different expectations on returns. So in our case, I raised capital from private equity because I know that a service business with intangible assets, and that sounds very clinical, but this is people. I don't have machines. I have people, walking assets, as we say, right? That is not a 100x return business. That's the reality. I hope that explains it a little.

Yeah. So the messaging, and so from a communications point of view, the investor relations pitch is very different as well. Tim, You're a programmatic advertising whiz expert. We've just got a couple of minutes left. So I will ask you just like, what would be a top tip you'd give for people, for unnoticed entrepreneurs about programmatic advertising? Because the view is that it's getting harder and harder on Facebook to buy ads that succeed. LinkedIn. What would you give some advice from your, you know?

There's 2 most important pieces from my perspective. Like everybody has a tendency wanting to be on social, but social is Difficult organically because the feed is, you know, very, very algorithmic, as you know, and difficult to beat, especially on the new platforms, TikTok and all. Million views doesn't get you any sales. That's super weird. So I would focus on the organic channels first. Like my thesis always is, if you can't make it work on search, AKA Google, on an ROI that you need for your business, for your MVP to be successful, you will never make it on social. Because the social ROI is always worse than the search ROI. Why? Because search has intent data. Social has network data, social data, right? So it's different when you create a completely new product category that nobody looks for. I presume 90% of these businesses out there, somebody's looking for that product you're building or you're creating or the service you're creating. So if you can't acquire traffic through organic search or paid search, and you can do this with Paid search you can do with $100 a day or even a month, right? You have to just educate yourself. So if you can't make the ROI work on search, you're never gonna make it work on social, on display, on video, on YouTube, or any other channel. So do search first and do it really well. That's number one. The second one is don't try to acquire your customer twice. Start immediately with a loyalty program, especially when you're consumer-facing, when you're D2C, direct-to-consumer, right? Otherwise, you're gonna pay ransom to the big tech platforms every time you want to reacquire that customer, even though you already know that customer, they already purchased something. So combination of search first and loyalty or rewards or something that allows you to communicate with the existing consumers again, to reactivate them through promotions, email marketing, whatever is free channels technically. So that's very important. If you can't get that right, I always tell the startups, don't come to me with a social strategy until you have nailed that. If you have nailed that, social is the next scale, is the next scale channel.

Wonderful. So search, and then once you found people, keep them loyal. So Tim, if there's a number one tip, notwithstanding what you just said about the technical stuff, if there's a number one tip, as you, as an entrepreneur, what would you say the number one piece of advice you'd give to other people who want to get noticed, to unnoticed entrepreneurs? What would you say really has worked for you? Most of all?

Well, number one is be yourself in terms of like, if you have to change who you are, you're not gonna enjoy the journey. Like you have to be yourself. The second one is it's on you. It's on nobody else. Like saying, oh, they didn't do this and this didn't, it's your fault. You are the founder. You are the entrepreneur. If you don't, if you don't work hard, if you don't do it yourself in the beginning, nobody's gonna do it, right? And I have learned, and I didn't value that. early on that network, authenticity, helping people is how you build relationships and how your network is going to work, right? Not burning bridges for the sake of making your point. Like these are basic behavioral things that help becoming more successful because you're going to meet people again. You can meet them 3, 4 times in your life and they're going to come back for more when your business is bigger or when you start another business. So everybody says that. I, what I don't like is when people say like, follow your passion. Yes, it's technically true, but it doesn't mean it's easy because you love it, right? Like it's a hustle. You have to get up every morning. You're the first one in the office. You're the last one to leave and you have to work really, really hard or whatever on Zoom, not in the office physically anymore. And if you don't do it, your people are not going to follow.

Leadership, authenticity. And, you know, Tim, thank you. You've built multiple businesses. I'm really grateful for you coming on. We could have dived into programmatic advertising length. I know, but if you want to find out more about you, Tim Ringel, where can they do that?

Well, definitely on LinkedIn. Just find me on LinkedIn, Tim Ringel. There's not many out there. And I kind of own the space on that. Otherwise you can Google me. I also kind of own that space in my name. And then on Instagram as well, I have a public Instagram that you can follow.

Tim Ringel, CEO and founder of Meet the People, currently in Canada and Toronto, but have offices. And I think you live in New York. Thank you so much for joining me on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur today.

Thank you, Jim. Appreciate it.

So thanks everyone for listening to Tim and I have a chat about getting noticed. And we've ventured a little bit into how to communicate with your teams and how to communicate with funding as well. Because I think those are also very, very important communities and audiences. So if you've enjoyed this, do please review this, but also share it with somebody that you think may find Tim's wisdom of value too. And until we meet again, I do pray that you keep on communicating.