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In this podcast series, Grant Gregorian and I interviewed guests on their journeys as consultants. We discussed all that it means to be a great martech consultant from setting up their business or joining an agency and how to find new clients and keep their existing clients happy. I hope you enjoy the interview. Today's guest, we have Julie James from Austin, Texas, and Grant is also on the call as well. Hello to both of you.

Hello, hello. Hi.

So Julie, thanks for joining us. You are a multiple-time Marketo champion and extraordinaire, definitely world famous, I would say. You have done the, you have done the trifecta, I believe. You've done in-house and consulting and freelancing, and we just kind of love to hear your journey of how consulting kind of came into your world.

Okay. Yeah, and thanks for having me, and I'm hopefully gonna hopefully give you some good ideas and tips of kind of what I've done and where I've gone and how I've got there. So I moved over to Austin 4 years ago to become a professor, to teach kind of marketing full-time, and part of that was teaching Marketo. And I was working in Marketo kind of client side first off, and when I came to Austin to start teaching, I realized very quickly how much I missed Marketo, which I never thought I would miss a platform. I didn't think that that was actually possible, to miss a platform that you play around in.

It's sad.

Yeah, I know, it's a bit sad really. But yeah, I was in the— I missed working in the platform. And so I started reaching out to a couple of people I knew to see, like, did anyone need any help with their Marketo work that they were doing? And I thought, well, I'm I'm gonna try and do consulting, try and set up my own business. And basically first started by putting a post out on the community. I put on Marketo community, like looking to get into freelancing. Does anyone need any help with anything? And it kind of snowballed fairly quickly from there, 'cause I didn't actually realize how many companies are out there that actually want to have a freelancer or a consultant who isn't in a large agency. So from there, picked up my first client who I have been working with for, Kind of nearly 3 years now.

Wow, that's a long relationship. That's great.

It's a long, yeah. And it's actually been interesting. A lot of the clients I've had have been long-term clients. There's been the odd kind of couple that have come in and then disappeared and then come back kind of a year later and said, oh, they need help. And we've had some clients who have been long-term clients with us a few hours a week here and there. And so, yeah, so first off, kind of, I didn't really know all the laws and regulations, obviously being in the US. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna do some working, And everyone was teaching me about these 1099s, which I didn't know what they were. I was like, this is interesting. I've got to figure out this whole process. So started off just doing 1099s, obviously did my first tax return, had help doing my first tax return because I didn't really know what this thing was.

Mm-hmm.

And it wasn't until kind of about a year later that I was like, I actually really need to set up my own consulting firm now. I'd started to get a few more clients on board and was like, now I really need to have this as a business versus just something that I'm doing for kind of a little bit of spare cash here and there and for fun. So I found a company actually based in Austin who helped with the setup of organizations and LLCs, and they helped me register the business. They helped with all the paperwork that I needed to do. They helped me with all my accountancy stuff. And kind of that was, I think that was a point where in which it kind of started to get a little bit crazy. I was getting reached out to maybe 2 or 3 times a week for people that were looking for consultants whether it be a consultant or whether it be a freelancer. Obviously wasn't able to do everything because sometimes it got a little bit, there was sometimes, I'm sure you know, it's like there's sometimes too many requests or it might just be, we have a project and we only want a freelancer, but we want you for 30 hours a week. And it's just not possible. It's like, you may wanna get someone full-time for that job.

Yeah.

I don't think there's, I'm not quite sure this is where you need a consultant. And so over the last kind of 3 years since I've been running the firm, 3, yeah, yeah, just over, just under 3 years now. Um, I've probably been in 25 different instances. I've had probably 20-ish different clients because some clients had multiple instances. Um, and it was probably the best thing I ever did because even though I was teaching full-time, I was also able to kind of get, keep my hand in, kind of finger in the pie and keep playing around in Marketo, learning new things. And prior to that point, I'd only been in 2 or 3 instances in previous roles. So Going into a lot of instances very quickly really helped me learn how different every company works, because not every company is the same. There are best practices, but best practice for each business is so different.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and I think that was one thing that helped with when I was working with a lot of clients, they'd be like, well, we had a big agency and they told us this best practice doesn't quite work for us. So we maybe need to do a bit more customized, a bit more personalized. And I definitely think that helped because I was able to actually look at their individual instances. Because having a couple of clients versus the larger agencies that have hundreds of clients is— I was able to help from previous experience and then looking actually how their systems, how they needed to work, what they needed to change. Um, definitely I think made a difference.

Yeah. So Julie, I have so many questions. Um, okay, one of them— yeah, um, one of them is like, you're a professor. I mean, like, that's kind of I would say unusual for people who are doing Marchetto work. I mean, we all fall into it in different ways, but professor is an unusual route. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, does being a professor help? How does that, you think, make you approach Marchetto maybe differently, or how does that make your work better?

So I, I was a Marchetto person before I was a professor. So, I actually started, so, when I started my PhD, I was learning about marketing automation. I discovered this thing called Marketo whilst doing my PhD and kind of thought it was a really cool tool. And I love the idea of this thing called marketing automation. So, as I was just finishing out my PhD, I got my first job in a marketing operations role.

And to be clear, the PhD is in like marketing. It's not like something else.

Yeah, it's in marketing. I actually talk all about how using marketing tools and technologies help a business go to market more successfully.

Amazing.

That's my entire thesis.

So, I mean, that's one of the things that I've lamented in the past to friends and family is how out of touch, I would say, my experience has been with business schools and kind of marketing programs that kind of teach you Coca-Cola versus Pepsi branding or whatever. Now I'm totally generalizing and badmouthing them, but there is no like actual hands-on thing. So I'm first of all super happy to hear that you had an applied PhD program in marketing. It had to do with Marketo and marketing automation. That's amazing.

Yeah. And I was really lucky because in the UK, PhDs are slightly different. You talk with your supervisor about a topic and then they just go, go do it. So it wasn't as structured as the US, but I was actually a marketing manager in a firm, and I was actually using that company as my case study company. So everything I was applying, I was then studying and analyzing and seeing what worked, what didn't work, which tools had made a difference, which tools hadn't. And then kind of it got to a stage where I was like, I probably should do something with this PhD because I did it because it was a challenge and was lucky enough to get a role in Austin teaching Marketo and Salesforce and web development and kind of Adobe Creative Cloud and customer relationship management theory, which was a lot of fun. I don't do it full-time now. I still teach an adjunct. I'm still an adjunct professor. So I teach a master's course in digital marketing analytics. But I focus on the courses I teach are, I do one that's a 7-week course, and it's Salesforce and Marketo and coding and Google Analytics all in one 7-week course, because it's the tools and tech that I wish I knew when I was in uni.

Wow.

So when you're, when you're like approaching your clients, you're like, I'm literally the professor who teaches the next generation.

Yeah, it definitely helps. And having students who've come back to me, and I had one student who was like, my Salesforce course I do, so customer relationship management course, told me that it was the best course he'd ever done in the whole of his degree because he's now applying that in real life. Like, he's in a Salesforce role.

Amazing.

That made it all worth it because you want students to go back and have that experience and have the knowledge so that when they're graduating, they're not just graduating with theories that they're never going to use. It's graduating with actual applied knowledge. And we do, on the master's course, the students actually go through the university, the Marketo university training, and it's very accelerated. They're doing that in 7 weeks.

Amazing.

But they go through all that training and they actually come out the other end, like students have gone into Marketo-specific roles, they've gone into MOPS roles, they've gone into CRM and Salesforce-type roles. So it definitely helps. To have that knowledge and to have that experience when it comes into kind of consulting, because not everyone just wants you to go and build. Sometimes it's about teaching and training and getting people to understand how the technology is working. And I think doing that, I was doing it full-time and now doing it part-time, it— I think it helps. It helps because you understand how to be able to teach and speak to different audiences and the different levels that they may have.

Well, that actually is the perfect kind of segue. My next question was, as you kind of start consulting and, you know, you put your thing on the community and you start asking who needs help, which I think is exactly what Grant did as well, um, you kind of put your flag out there. Did it come natural to you to just like jump in and be like, okay, I'm the Marketo expert. Like, you know, I'm going to meet with my clients. Uh, and how did you kind of find, you know, everyone has like their own rhythm and personality with clients. I know for me, you know, it took a little while to kind of get comfortable in that zone of people looking to you as the expert.

I was definitely nervous the first time I ever had my first client call and someone gave me a login to their instance because I was like, okay, so apparently I'm the expert, but now I have to actually prove that I do know what I'm talking about.

Right.

And you have to learn their business model and like all— yeah, that's a lot.

But actually, even before you go on, like, first of all, what a great moment to realize when other people feel this way, like, um, that you really shouldn't— like, even if you're a professor, you still feel this way. Do you know what I mean?

Like, even if you're like—

like, that feeling does not go away even if you have a PhD. So you don't— anyway, go keep going.

No, yeah, and I was gonna say, like, it never goes away. Even now, like, I've just recently started a new role where I'm kind of back client side again, and even now I'll go into, like, Marketo, and I was doing a kind of an instance audit, and I kind of had my consultant head on, but doing, like, a full instance audit to have a look at what was happening. And even now, I'll give feedback and go, but is that okay? Am I saying the right thing? And I use all the Slack groups that we have out there and ask questions. And I always feel sometimes like I'm asking these questions that I should know because I've been doing it for so long. But there's still that, you still question yourself. I still question myself every single day. Have I Have I set this campaign up correctly? Have I, um, is the lead scoring working? And I'm doing a load of GDPR compliance work right now, and I'm like, am I doing this right? Does this checkbox do what it should be doing? Um, but I think it definitely, it definitely helps when someone comes to you and asks you questions, because I think it helped, helped in my confidence a lot. Um, of someone like reaching out to me and saying, I've seen your post on Community, really like some help with our instance. And that was definitely a massive, massive confidence boost, even if the first time I logged into the instance, I was like, do I really know what I'm doing? But having the confidence that you know the tool, you know the technology, you can go on a call and talk about how it's working or how it's not working, or what changes you can make, or what recommendations you have, even if you're not the most confident person, just having a recommendation for something, The people have come to you for a reason. Like, any client has come to me because they're stuck with something or something they don't have the expertise in-house to do.

Mm-hmm.

And that's the one thing I always used to tell myself when I was teaching, because standing up in front of a load of 18, 19-year-olds and talking about marketing was probably one of the most nerve-wracking things I've ever done. And it wasn't until my mum just turned around and said, you have to remember that you know more than they do. Even if you're only a chapter ahead of what you're teaching, you still know more than the students do. You still know more than your clients do most of the time. Not saying it's all of the time, but that was that little— they've obviously come to ask me questions for a reason, or I'm here to teach for a reason. Um, that definitely helped with the confidence side of things, but I still get nervous every day. Stand up and doing a presentation or doing a Champ office hours, it's still nerve-wracking.

And, and I think that That's a feeling that probably doesn't go away, but also it's what the reason people hire consultants is because they themselves have that feeling, kind of like, I'm not sure how this is supposed to be run. And I feel like part of being a consultant is to, to give kind of validation to whatever decision-making they're making, to kind of bless it with your, oh yeah, I'm a consultant and I said it's okay to do it this way. This is the way to do it. It does provide a lot of value just if you do nothing else but just kind of give, you know, validate specific approaches or how you set things up. Because a lot of times people really second-guess themselves even when they shouldn't be. Like, it's really not— it could be really straightforward.

I've always said that there are a gazillion ways to do one thing in any marketing automation platform. So sometimes people just need the permission, just take a direction, take a step in a direction of what your naming convention is going to be or how you want to organize it. And it might not be the step I was going to take, but at least it's a step and, you know, you can build upon it from there.

Yeah.

A lot of people, like you said, need a little help.

And I wanted to ask you, you mentioned you had lots of clients, you know, um, lots of people who were interested. How do you— I mean, you have a full-time job and you're also consulting and you're on your own. How in the world are you managing your contracts, your time? How do you not run, you know, just overwhelm yourself with work?

I think I'm one of these weird people who likes working a lot. Like, I like playing in Marketo And I think I'm also lucky enough that my husband works late. So in the evenings, when I finish my normal day's work, I think nothing of logging into a client instance after 6 o'clock, because I know that he's not going to be home. It's either that or I'm going to sit at home and watch TV. So I would rather be doing something and playing around in an instance and seeing what I can do versus kind of chilling out in front of a TV.

It's amazing how much the time can fly when you're in Markano. 3 hours can go by so fast.

I did that the other day. I was going through a set of data for some invalid email, invalid reasons, and I was going through it in Excel. And next thing I know, I look up and my husband's walking through the door. It's 9 o'clock at night. And I was like, oh, when did that happen? Everything's dark around me. All the lights are off. My cat's looking at me because it wants feeding.

They're just in the zone.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, tracking-wise, I use a tool called Toggl. For any of like the hourly tracking. So every time I go in and do some work, as I kind of go into Toggl, just hit— it's just a play button and a stop button to record the hours I'm doing. I use Xero, which is an accounting software, to do all the invoicing. And then lots of notes. So like OneNote or notepads to be able to kind of track all the different clients I'm working on, or if there's anything, any big tasks that I have. The other thing that I've just recently started using, and this might sound a little odd, is there's a thing that I now have that sits over my laptop keyboard, because I have a separate keyboard. And it's basically like a whiteboard, but it's called FluidStance. It's like a sloped whiteboard, is probably the best way to put it. It's metal. And so you get a little pen that you can write notes on it. And I use that to track anything, any kind of big projects that I have that I'm working on, just to remind me, like, oh, don't forget to log into so-and-so's instance, or don't forget to go and do this job. Because then when it's done, I just wipe it off the whiteboard and then I just move on to the next thing. So I, I love organization. So lists and to-do lists and tasks are definitely the way in which I keep track of what I'm working on and working with.

Have you found, you know, doing these kind of nights and weekends and keeping your full-time job has been pretty smooth? And are— it's actually a 2-part question because I'm also curious, are you doing it, are you charging like Do you do hourly rates or kind of retainer project-based? There's a variety of ways that I know agencies do it.

Yeah, I always do hourly rates. The one thing I never feel comfortable doing is I couldn't do a retainer if there wasn't like the work there. So I could never do— if someone says, oh, here's a 5-hour retainer and they're only giving me an hour's work a week, I don't feel comfortable with that. I think that's just me personally. I'd rather only charge them for the hour that I use versus having a retainer. And I get why larger organizations and big agencies have that because they have to pay the salaries of multiple hundreds of people versus when it's just me. I'd rather just be able to bill out at 15-minute intervals if I need to. But yeah, that's the way that I tend to do it. I just think it's easier.

Mm-hmm.

And I can keep track of it because I have, like I said, I have all my clients set up in Toggl. So I literally just hit like, it's got like a little thing that says, what are you working on? So I put the project and then pick the client and hit the play button. And it just records that in 15-minute intervals. And that means that when I'm billing, I just have to go in and get my weekly or monthly reports, depends on which client it is. Some clients are weekly, some clients are monthly. And then I can actually then break it down by day if I need to. I've got records of everything I'm working on, especially if like a client said, can you show me if you're billing for 100 hours worth of work, I wanna see what you did in those 100 hours. And I can literally just print a report off of all the projects that I'd worked on.

Nice.

And then it shows the timeframes and the times and the days and all that kind of stuff. So it's a pretty good tool. Now that you've been doing it for a few years, do you just kind of naturally have a sense of how many clients you can take on at one time? You know, you could have a bunch of people kind of in your Rolodex, but they're like, well, we don't have any work right now.

But then all of a sudden it seems like it's either feast or famine in that world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely— I know that I can do— I mean, I don't really do more than kind of 10 hours, maybe 15 hours a week. And most weeks that's kind of 2 or 3 clients, but some weeks they've like said there's been that client that you maybe have not heard from for 6 months and suddenly they have this techy question.

Popped up.

They're not sure how to answer yet. And I'm like, oh, gotta do an hour here. So yeah, I know that I try and keep it in my head of like hours. So if I speak to anyone potentially new, I'll be like, so I have this many hours spare a week on top of, I know what I'm already working with. So if you want me to do the work and I've only got 2 hours a week, then that's great. If you need more than that, then I'll also refer them to to other people, other freelancers that may have more time, or to an agency if they need someone for a bigger project.

Nice.

That makes sense. Now, Julie, in terms of advice for anybody kind of early in their career, would you say— because I've heard it kind of both ways in terms of starting out. Some people say that you should start out in a consulting role, maybe like in an agency, because you'll see so many different instances, you'll see how other consultants handle things and kind of have a really broad view of whether it's Marketo or marketing automation. And other people say, no, no, no, that's a mistake. What you should do is start in-house at some company as an analyst or a specialist, because then maybe your view will be broader for the overall, but it will be much deeper and you'll understand the the different stakeholders within a company, and you'll understand whatever the problems are even deeper. And then you'll be able— you'll even be a better consultant later because you'll be able to empathize with them. Where do you lie in the debate?

It's definitely an interesting one because I started client-side. So I started in just one instance. My first couple of roles I've been doing marketo was just in a single instance. Going, going into then going into multiple instances, it was a little unnerving because I'd only worked in 2 instances. But I also know, I think the ramp-up in an agency is so quick that you have, you can maybe specialize in a higher level versus, like I said, doing, doing the one instance. I could work on nurtures and scoring and tokens and start learning about APIs and kind of get really hands-on and deep into one instance because. a lot of the skills are going to carry across multiple instances. And I would have— I'm glad I got that experience in those couple of instances before I started consulting, because I knew Marketo like in and out, backwards. Well, not 100% backwards, but like I'd spent so much time, like all day, every day, 40 hours a week in one instance, I knew how it worked. So when I went into another instance, I already knew what to look for. I knew what the operational programs I should look at. I knew what areas or integrations I should be looking at to make sure they're working. See, I— it's definitely a toss-up between the two, but I think I preferred having that one client-side experience, or 2 client-side experiences, because like I said, I got more hands-on and in-depth in a single instance, and I could get more technical focus versus agency where you're very much in so many different instances, but maybe doing the same thing time and time again with your campaign ops or kind of technical ops or architecture. You know those instances, you don't get hands-on everywhere.

Yeah, that makes sense. And the last question I have for you is, would you recommend other folks follow the path and get like a higher degree in marketing or, you know, a PhD in marketo? Like if that— if they could make, you know, create their own, would you say that that was helpful for you or? It was like I never even considered it. I didn't even know it was a thing.

It was definitely, it was really interesting because I think I'd worked in marketing for so long, I'd just gone in and just done marketing. Like, I've worked in marketing for 20, nearly 20 years now, which still scares me when I say it. But I think then having that focus on one particular company and researching what, 'cause I had the time to be able to research what wasn't working, was and wasn't working. I was able to look at the different tools and technologies that were out there and Not a lot of normal marketing managers get the time to do that because they just have to get the job done. It was definitely a challenge. I mean, it was probably 80 hours a week for nearly 3 years trying to work and PhD at the same time and trying to obviously research as well as working as well as making sure stuff is happening. So it was hard, but it's definitely— I've learned a lot from it. And looking at that, looking at what works in the company, because again, not every company is the same. I had this little marketing model of these kind of these 3 I's that I created. And I now kind of in the back of my head apply that when I go into companies.

Mm-hmm.

Have you got a good— do you know who your customer audience is or what they're saying about you? Or do you know what technologies you have and how are they all integrated? Or is there actually someone doing this human interfacing side of things? Like, is it what the sales team do? What conversations are they having? I kind of tend to think in that mindset versus just Marketo. It's not like— it's a great tool and I spend all my time in it, but I also think about how it interacts across the entire company. So that definitely— I don't think I ever would have had that without the PhD because I would have always just been Marketo, Marketo, Marketo, not cared about everyone else. Whereas now I've looked at everyone else and spent the time to study it. It's definitely, definitely helped.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, Julie, this was a pleasure. Pleasure to talk to you. You've given me so much great advice and ideas. So, yes, thanks for being on our podcast.

Awesome. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you.

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