The Art of Building a Successful Marketing Ops Consultancy with Lauren A. and Sydney M.

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by the MoPros. I am your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by co-host Naomi Liu. The big white noise.

Hello. That was kind of awkward. That was very awkward, Michael.

You know, I'm trying to— I'm making—

I wasn't sure if you were going to say anything.

You just like awkward pause and I'm like, okay, I guess it's like—

You're just going to leave me hanging there. That's okay. Yeah, that's fine. I'm used to it. Well, let's get into it. So today, uh, you know, with the current economic environment, there are more people who are considering or have already started doing freelance or solopreneur businesses. to either fill in the gap or to, to, to just really be a new initiative for them. We thought it would be good to have some real talk about what it takes to get started in freelancing and marketing ops. I think of this as, you know, I just had a conversation with Jessica Cao a few weeks ago that is sort of the other side of that if you're hiring freelancers or consultants or agencies. So consider this the other side of that coin. So joining us to discuss this are Lauren Aquilino and Sydney Mulligan, the co-founders of ME Collective. Lauren is currently the CEO of Amy Collective. She has over 10 years of B2B marketing, customer relationship management, and email marketing, both in-house and as a consultant. Sydney is currently the COO of Amy Collective. She also has many years of marketing and marketing operations experience, both in-house and as a consultant. Both of these women have been Marketo Champs, and Sydney was in the inaugural Fearless 50 class with Marketo. Lauren and Sydney, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us.

All right.

I like how you said we're currently in these roles. Like we might fire each other. We might fire each other any moment.

I also am wondering like, how long do I get to say like over 10 years? Like I'm really excited to get to 10 years of marketing experience. And then like, do I ever have to update that with how long it's been? Or we just always say over 10 years?

I don't know.

It's always over 10.

Right.

It's never like over 20.

I mean, I'm not over 20, but it's never going to be over 20.

Right. I'm way over 10. I'm probably over 20. So I don't know. I try not to talk about it. You get to a point where you don't want to talk about it anymore.

Like our collective experience. Like we have 100 years of experience on this call right now.

Yeah. Near 100 years of experience on this call alone. There you go. Well, that's good. All right, well, so let's, let's kind of jump into it and just start with the basics. Uh, you know, I think there's, there's important steps that someone should take if they want to get to start as a freelancer. So Lauren, maybe you can kick us off here and talk about like, what are just some of the basics someone should be thinking about if they're looking at starting out as a freelancer?

Basics are not basic at all. Honestly, it seems like really, you kind of mentioned this, Michael, but it seems like everybody's doing it right now. Like everybody's kind of like, oh, I'm on my own, or I'm starting off on my own.

That's true.

Obviously, like the, the economy is kind of tumultuous right now. Um, it is not that I don't think anybody can do it, 'cause I certainly think anyone can do what they put their minds to, but I do think that setting the expectations of what it takes to be a freelancer is important. Because you really are starting your own business. Like, it's not just, I'm going to be a consultant or I'm going to work, you know, on contract from time to time. But you've got to make sure that you're running your sales calls or your, you know, meetings with your accountant and your taxes, whether you need to file for an LLC. And obviously, like, all of the rules are different in Canada and America and Portugal or wherever it is that you live. So there's a lot to take into consideration as far as running a business. But I think before you can even jump into that is thinking about, what do I really want out of my life right now? And is that something that I can do and that aligns with my values? And Um, the reason I say that is because I don't, you know, know how much we'll get into this today, but there is a big difference between freelance consulting or contracting or working in-house or at an in-house agency. Um, and so I definitely would say that if you, listener, are looking into freelancing, I would, um, if you want to do it safely, try to moonlight outside of the position that you are kind of in right now. To see if you even like it before quitting your job and moving to Costa Rica.

Yeah, I would also say moonlighting is a good way. I think before you start freelancing, it's really smart to build yourself a little pile of fuck you money, like a little nest egg. And moonlighting is a good way to do that if you can swing it and your employer allows it or you, you know, whatever. But you never want to be in a situation where you're stuck with a shitty client, and you have to keep working with them. Because you have to financially, you need a little pile of money that you can tell a client to just go away, that nothing is worth your peace, that if they aren't paying you or things aren't going well, you can still take care of yourself.

I think it's interesting that you bring up that, like, what is it you want from a lifestyle? Because I think a lot of people have a perception about Oh, freelancing means all this, you know, more control over what you do and you don't do, which is— there's elements of that, I suspect, but there are also economic factors that go into it as well. So what, I mean, what do you think of, what are some of the economics of being a freelancer that someone who wants to do this needs to understand? I know, Lauren, you maybe brought up a point like be on your sales calls, right? And that's one thing that I learned when I started looking at doing this is that like the amount of time that you have to allocate to not just doing the work is pretty substantial.

I mean, the first thing that I ended up outsourcing as a freelancer was finance because I was spending hours a week chasing down late invoices, like literal hours. And so even before like Sydney and I decided, we can talk more about it later, but decided to kind of like pair up. Finance was the first thing that I was like, oh my gosh, I need help. Number one, because it's not my forte. I don't do that. I'm not a finance consultant. I'm not a bookkeeper. But number two, the amount of time it was taking was bananas. And then like you said, sales calls or finance structure. What we're seeing so much is that freelancers are really not charging enough based on The amount of time it takes to run your business. It's not just the amount of hours you're spending with your clients. It's the whole thing that you need to get paid for.

Yeah. And I, I will just say that I've noticed a few people that I've talked to lately, I would say in the last like 6 to 12 months that are starting out as freelancers, almost all of them have accidentally taken on a really Not ideal client situation as one of their first clients because they didn't know any better and they didn't know how to advocate for themselves. But, uh, a, a bad client becomes a very expensive client for you. Um, and when I say a bad client, I mean, it's not just like how the client treats you and your working relationship. It can also be how steady is the work that they give you. If you're in a relationship with a client where you are billing them at the end of the month for however many hours they used, and you're kind of on the hook for an unlimited amount of time, it might be zero. It might be 100, that's really, really hard for you to plan how and when you can take other freelance clients around that.

Yeah.

I'm curious how much time you allocate towards like actually doing the work and client relationship development and like making sure there's like the postmortems and things like that. And just thinking about all of that as opposed to just kind of, okay, let me do the work, hand it off here, it's done. Like what does that kind of split look like to you?

It's a very interesting question because I think before we started recording, you mentioned that you've never consulted before, like never been in an agency, you've never been a freelancer, which is great. I've always been in-house. Yeah, this is a really good thing to talk about because I would say like billable time with a client is probably 50% actually hands-on keys doing work, and it's at least 50% what we like to call Marketing ops therapy.

Like we're like post-care, during care, pre-care, all of the care.

Yes. Yes. It is much more like stakeholder management and like emotional care of your stakeholders and change management and all of those types of more relationship-oriented things that we would consider like consulting soft skills than the hard skills. A lot of people think that they are ready to step out and be a freelancer because they're really technically very good at their job, and that is wonderful, but that is Not the majority of this job. The soft skills are much harder to learn. You can teach almost anyone the technical skills, but the soft skills are a real challenge.

Yeah. And I think Naomi too, it depends like how many clients somebody decides to take on because, um, uh, uh, Helene Abegg, one of our, um, one of the freelancers that works with us on a couple clients, she had mentioned this thing like perfectly when someone had asked a question similar to what Sydney was saying, which is like, Help. I have a client that like wants basically me to be on call. And Helene said, you have to think that every client you have, whether it's 1 hour a week or 25 hours a week, has a minimum emotional investment in it. You're going to have a point person. You're going to have an email that needs to go out every week summarizing your work for the week. Like just because someone is a small client versus a larger client does not necessarily mean like. They're going to take less time to manage the non-billable side of things.

Yeah, I think it's in the same vein of like the, you know how you always hear it's cheaper to retain a customer than to get a new one? It is much less resource intensive for you as a consultant to have fewer larger clients than it is to have a lot of really small clients. Like 25 billable hours a week is very different with one client billing, you're billing 25 hours for versus 5 clients you're billing 5 hours a week for. That's way, way, way more work. So even like person to person, your bandwidth will change, like how many hours you will bill will change. It's not just this many hours a week, it's how many clients can you take on.

So interesting, because when I, I know when I talked to somebody not too long ago, I heard something like 50% of the time would be doing work with the clients and 50% would be selling. Right, you know, looking for the next bit of work. But that didn't even count in the administrative stuff. So I guess it's like 150% of your time goes into this.

Is that what we're hearing?

You do have to manage how much time you can actually bill. And I do think that's why it's important that people don't like undercharge because like I said, if you're doing per billable hour, then it needs to cover for everything. But if you think even like in a traditional agency, I think of this example, I don't think that I'm, you know, saying anything that people don't know by saying that traditional agencies can be difficult to work for, that when you're an employee of those agencies, you are expected to bill a certain amount of hours with a client per week if you are a billable person. And so let's just say for math's sake that like you have to bill 37 hours a week out of your 40 that you're allotted. Um, for full-time salary, like, it's my best guess. Um, and from some experience that like you are actually working way more than 40 hours and you're not even the person running the business. You're just managing your own inbox and your own clients.

Yeah.

Um, so I would say like multiply that by 1,000, uh, bill as few hours as possible, make as much money as possible, uh, have as few clients as possible. Have a huge referral network. So you're not, you're not actually selling as often as you think you'll need to. And just, you know, make big, make big assumptions about how long things will take. Assume more.

Don't underestimate what those things are is what you're saying.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's funny because when I started my career in like IT management consulting and when I was running projects and having to handle a lot of the billing stuff and, you know, going through people's hours that they tracked, which is another thing that people are probably not used to, right? Tracking their hours down to 15-minute increments or whatever it is that you use. That I always, we had this saying as people who were managing accounts was like, charge all your time, but don't go over budget, right? So I was often cutting hours that were otherwise billable that we would To, in terms of what we would actually charge clients because we had to sort of play that game. Now this is at one of the big, big consulting companies.

So, oh, fine. They can eat it. Who cares?

Room for, yeah, there was room for that to be trimmed, if you will. So anyway, uh, all this, all this resonates as consistent. I think the, yeah, I mean, I, I mean, I said it, I think only somewhat in jest that it's 150% of your time if you're going to do this. Right. But. It's probably greater than 100%. It's not a 40-hour-a-week thing unless you are really, really good and you get some great clients, right?

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about freelancing is that it can be whatever you want. Yeah. It doesn't, you know, I wouldn't say that, oh, if you're gonna become a freelancer, then you're gonna be working 60 hours a week. Like that was certainly my impression of freelancing before I joined Lauren and started Emmy Collective was, you know, it seems interesting. I know that I could certainly make more money, but I know that I will be working way more than I really want to be working and I just can't Sure. Like I need the security of being in-house. I was at an agency for a long time. I really enjoyed it. Um, I went back in-house for a little while and there were a lot of things that I really liked, like benefits. Benefits are nice. Um, paid time off, also something that is nice. Yeah, great. Uh, all things you don't have when you're a freelancer. But the, the point is really that you can make this whatever you want it to be. If you are someone that only wants to work 25 hours a week, And only work 25 hours a week. You're gonna make less money, but maybe it's because you are doing something else, or maybe you are like doing some childcare that you'd otherwise have to pay for, whatever it may be. Um, I think that's the real thing that is appealing about freelancing to a lot of people is that it's, it's very flexible.

Yeah. Wait, so let's, let's talk about the origin story of Emmy Collective. So the two of you started that not, not that long ago, right? Within the last, what, 2 years or so? So how did that come about? How does it work?

What a great question. Well, Lauren and I are a beautiful combination of really smart and sort of impulsive. And we knew each other only sort of through Kimmy Corrigan, who is another really wonderful marketing ops person out there. Kimmy was one of my clients a long time ago, and Kimmy was Lauren's boss a long time ago, right? She was your boss?

No.

Never? No.

You just worked with her?

No, we were coworkers and then, uh, when we split ways, we just stayed in touch and just kept in touch.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, but then I was her boss.

I'm just kidding. That, that's not true either.

We were connected through Kimmy is the punchline. Okay. We like followed each other on Instagram because we both knew Kimmy and we were both Marketo champs together at one point in time, though we never really knew each other because, uh, I was always at Atumos and she was always at Revenue Pulse. So we were like sworn enemies. For a long time. Yeah. Number one competitors.

Yeah.

Yeah. And Lauren had been freelancing. Do you wanna talk about that?

Yeah. So the way Revenue Pulse was working in the early days was we were contract only at the time, which was really great cuz I had, I had like 2 really little kids at the time. They were like 2 and new or something. And so I actually did not want to do 40 hours, although maybe I did it at first. My goal was to work less, make the same amount of money, and spend more time with my kids. And so Revenue Pulse grew as they should. Congratulations to them. But eventually it turned out that their business model changed such that they started hiring primarily employees. And at the same time, like COVID happened and my kids were trying to like log into computers at the age of 4 and do school and like Doesn't really work. And so I became a homeschool consultant instead. That was such a fun time. So I left Revenue Pulse actually to homeschool my kids for a year. And during that time, I did have a friend who asked if I wanted to do a little bit of work, 5 hours a week, 10 hours a week of part-time consulting. I was like, sure, it could be good to talk to adults again. So I started doing that. But pretty quickly, they wanted more work. They wanted 20 hours a week. And that really was just not something that I was willing to do at the time, given that I was teaching 3 kids how to read. So, I actually just asked a friend who was in marketing if she wanted some of the work. And she was like, yeah, cool. And that really was the start. Of Emmy, because all of a sudden it was the two of us on one client, um, rather than just, just myself as a freelancer. And honestly, that's like a problem that you have is like, now I need to manage. I have more work than I want, or I have work that I actually don't know how to do. Like I'm asking questions like, I don't know, like they gave me this thing and I guess I'll just figure it out cuz I don't really have a team, you know? Like I guess—

Yeah.

I'll Google it. Yeah.

Yeah.

And at the same time, I was at Atumos for a while and then I left and went back in-house. Um, I just like wanted to take a break from consulting. I had another baby and then while I was on maternity leave, I got laid off and it was not ideal. Um, but it was like a vintage 2022 layoff, like before all the layoffs were happening. I got laid off, which was nice.

She was laid off before it was cool.

Yeah, there were like still lots of jobs, so that was good. And I started putting some feelers out there and Lauren reached out to me and was like, oh, I have this idea. And I basically was like, go away, I can't do this. And she wouldn't go away. She wouldn't leave me alone. And we went on what we now call co-founder speed dating, where I said, if you actually want to do something together, then perhaps we should meet in person. For the first time in our lives, I will come visit you in Ohio and bring my newborn with me. And she said, no, Ohio sucks. Let's go to Florida. So we went to Siesta Key.

And Ohio does not suck, but it was like March, April, not really May.

Yeah, it was winter.

Ohio does suck then. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's it.

That's it.

But you're not like a traditional agency though, right? Were you?

No, we don't call ourselves a travel agency. How does it all work? Basically, we, we went to, we went to CS50 and we were just thinking of all of the things that we loved about consulting and all the things that we hated about consulting. Like, what were the parts of it that made it really, really not fun? And we knew that with my network and Lauren's network combined, like, we had some overlap, but honestly, not, not as much overlap as you would think, that we could make something that was really cool. Lauren was always very interested in doing this for freelancers, and I was always very much not, uh, because I had never been a freelancer. I was not interested in being a freelancer. Um, so we talked a lot about the reasons I didn't like freelancing, and we try to solve for at least some of those with ME. We can't solve for everything, but a lot of the, like, I'm spending so much time doing things I'm not getting paid for. Uh, you know, if I run into a client problem, like, I'm just really on my own to figure that out. Or, Uh, I have, you know, work come up that I, I can't take, or it's like outside of the boundaries that I've set for myself of how many billables I want to do. Um, that's why we built Emmy Collective. It was, uh, a way for us to kind of pool resources, both time, energy, effort, uh, finances, uh, finance accounting people, all of that into one to make freelancing a little bit easier and more accessible for everyone. So we don't call ourselves an agency. We're like, we call ourselves an agency-ish. We're somewhere between a more traditional agency and working directly with a freelancer. So all of our consultants are freelancers, but our client relationships are with Emmy Collective as a group, which means that when work comes into us, we will assign one or more consultants to it. And functionally, day to day, their relationship with the client is really no different than if it was work they were taking outside of Emmy Collective. But because the client relationship is with all of us, that means if that consultant is going on vacation and needs someone to cover for them, or they run into some sort of problem that they just need someone to brainstorm with them, or even the client is like, oh, I need someone that can do HubSpot admin support and like get my campaigns out the door. And oh, by the way, do you know someone that can make me a new email template? We can provide all of those things for them under the same umbrella, which makes it a little easier for them too. Um, and you know, when you're on your own, often you are working on your own. It is a little unusual to get to work on a team with other consultants when you are independent. Um, so I think our consultants really enjoy that too, getting to work on these little fractional teams that we build for our clients.

Yeah, I think that's my favorite thing, like beyond just being a network and a resource for freelancers, are like these power teams that we get to create in some projects. We had, um, one of our members. had like an ex-company that they worked for come to them and ask them to do like a Marketo to Marketo migration, like ask them specifically, like, will you do this? And they were like, yes, I will, but I'm going to need like 7 other people on this massive project. So let's like go through Emmy and build a real team that, you know, can get this project completed for you. So that I think has been like the most fun. That I like having, things that I think like I couldn't, we couldn't really have like dreamed up, like what, what this could turn into.

So, Naomi, I thought you looked like you might have a question there.

Well, not so much a question, but just a comment from something that Cindy had said. She's like, well, you know, when you're working on client problems, sometimes you're the only one, you know, there's no other resources to fall back on or to talk to. I'm like, well, one could argue you could, you have an entire marketing ops Slack community that you could fall back on.

That's so true. And honestly, that's a lot, a lot of people rely on that, which is wonderful. Uh, but you are really asking for people's free labor for something that you are gonna turn around and get paid for, which you can do here and there for a long time. But it is, it's tough to do habitually.

Totally. And I, when I say that, I do mean things like, I, I often find that if I have a question or a problem that I'm dealing with, usually somebody else has had that already. So you can just search the community. Yeah. See if it's there. Otherwise, if you post that question and there is A response. It's often not like, wow, this is this one situation that nobody ever has ever had. Someone else probably has something very similar, and it's kind of building onto that resource of information for people as well. So that's how I see it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I will say one other just mild rebuttal is when you are also in the business of selling yourself to the people who are in that Slack community. It is a little maybe more vulnerable than you always want to appear to ask questions. Only because I will say, I will speak for only myself when I say I've certainly felt this way, both when I was at an agency and now at Emmy. Asking a question in a community like that sometimes puts me in the position of like, oh no, what if one of my prospects looks at this and says, I thought they were an expert, why do they have questions? Which of course is a huge fallacy of reasoning, right?

Sure.

Like everyone has questions. Of course. But as these communities get bigger and bigger, like there are more and more very senior people in them, which is wonderful, but they may not have the context of, hey, everyone has questions sometimes. Um, so it is nice to be able to work with other people who are one, like on your side, and two, will also get paid to help you with a client problem, which is really nice.

Yeah, that's great.

For sure. That's a great point too.

Um, yep.

But just kind of like piggybacking off of the, the, you know, growing as a community and the questions, I think in general, you know, the marketing ops community grows with the people as we kind of mature and get education ourselves and just mindshare and whatnot, but totally understand like the vulnerability comment. And I think that's an important point to make for sure.

Yeah, I could see that. I mean, I've, I've, it's interesting that you, if you've, have you ex— now I'm curious, Sydney, I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit. Have you experienced a time where that has happened where somebody's called you out on that? Like, Thought you were the expert kind of thing.

And not that anyone has told me, but I don't know. I mean, I've certainly experienced close lost opportunities before.

Yeah.

I mean, I can't, I, I don't, I can't remember a time where I was reading stuff in the Slack community and I'm like, shouldn't this person know it? Like that just has never crossed my mind. Right.

But if you were already paying her a lot of money to know it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Also, yeah, that's also true. Like sometimes your clients are in there too and like when you run into a problem for a client, and then you have to go into the Slack community and ask the question, there certainly could be the impression of like, well, couldn't I have just done that myself? They're going to ask these people to tell them the answer for free.

My guess, though, is those things, though, even though they may have occurred somewhere else and it's not necessarily a new problem, it doesn't mean that that person has experienced that particular one. I mean, to me, I go back to Yeah, I was— I think some of these communities really started with some of the vendors having really robust and active communities themselves. So Marketo had one, Eloqua had one. And I remember like there were always people going in there and asking questions, even some that seemed to be basic or— and then some people did get shamed. Like sometimes there would already be a thread about something and people were calling them out like, hey, did you already do a search? Right.

I mean, but how would you have felt if you logged into the Marketo community one day and you saw that your ProServe consultant posted the question that was the question you just asked them? Not ideal. Not ideal.

I would show up.

The better way for consultants to use these types of communities, and I feel like we've talked about this before, is like answering questions. for others is beneficial to really building your personal brand. So especially if you're a freelancer and you're like, well, I need assistance and I know this person's name because they are always giving of their time and knowledge, you know, in the communities. Um, that's the way that I see that, like consultants and freelancers who, um, you know, want to use community in a great Of course, number one, just to be a part of community, which we all want to do. But number two, to like promote yourself a little bit or build your, build your network and your own personal brand.

So Sydney, to answer your question, right, how would I have felt about that? I, you know, I, I can't remember ever being in that position, so I don't know. And I didn't—

Yeah, because they don't do that.

Well, but I, I, I think about how I probably would act is first I would, if, if they didn't talk to me about it first, I probably would have Then called them, hey, before you go do that, because if someone figures out who it is, maybe it's their proprietary stuff, whatever. But if I hadn't also thought about it, I'd probably want to learn, like, you know, tell me more about why you went there. Like, who would you go to in this community? So I mean, maybe that's just me. Like, I would, I would want to take a lesson from it, not necessarily, you know, beat them over the head with it. At least that's how I would like to think I would handle it. How would I really handle it? It probably all depends on how that person handled it too.

You know, I think the real truth is that most clients would be just fine. They wouldn't care. But I just want— I just experienced enough not great clients out there that I'm just always scared, you know? Oh yeah.

Well, those are, those are clients, people hiring freelancers and consultants who underestimate what their level of involvement needs to be, probably.

Right.

I think that's probably one of the lessons that came from the conversation that Jessica and I had is like, just hiring a freelancer doesn't mean your job is done. Right. There's still—

Correct.

Things that you have to do. And I mean, I, I don't know if I'm infamous for this, but if you talk to people who I've hired as consultants or freelancers, I tell them a lot of the times, like, part of your job is to hold me accountable, right? When you need something from me and I'm not providing it, you get to call me out. Yeah, I just, because I know me.

So yeah, I mean, I think that is a great example of the like soft skills consulting stuff that is easy to underestimate the value and importance of when you're thinking about heading out on your own. Like, it's easy to kind of back yourself into a corner like, oh, well, no one's, no one's given me anything to do. Like, I don't know what I should be doing. So I'm just doing nothing. But that's, that's not it, right? Like, you have to reach out, you have to Do your own audit, figure out, like, find out what the problem is that needs to be solved because there's always something.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, so that's fascinating. I think it's an interesting model that I've not seen a lot of, definitely not in this space. I've heard of maybe one other in a very different one. But so, um, what is your take on the current state of the market? Like, is there— I know we've got a lot of people who are either have moved into this kind of world or are considering it, you know, what's the— what are you finding is the appetite out there for hiring people like that? And are there specific niches that are stronger rather than weaker? I mean, you mentioned a lot of people with technical experience are doing this, but what about like strategy projects where someone's helping like re— like rethink an organization or something like that?

Yeah. So, in terms of the market for freelancers, like, I'll say we have 57 active consultants at Emmy Collective and a waiting list to be a consultant at Emmy Collective that's twice as long. There's 1 million billion people who want to be a freelancer right now, which is great. It is, I think, definitely a function of the job market. There is You know, plenty of work. There's plenty of work out there. Just you know the same reason there's plenty of people available to become a freelancer because of all the layoffs. There's also plenty of work to be done. A lot of companies that have to reduce headcount obviously still have work to be done, and it's much easier for them to secure budget to get a contractor or consultant than it is to get an additional headcount. It also just looks like a little bit less of a business risk to the company to take on a contractor or consultant than it does to take on a full-time headcount, which is great. I was actually talking to one of our consultants not too long ago about this. Like, you know, the market is great for consulting work right now. There's a lot of consulting work out there. But I'm seeing the job market start to rebound a little bit. Some of the consulting work is drying up a little bit. And I was like, man, like, what's going to happen when this really dries up? And I think what's going to happen is all the people who did not hire a consultant for the last couple of years are going to realize that all of their stuff is falling apart. And those people will be hiring consultants to come in and fix it. So there's It can be a little feast or famine at times on work that's available, but there's always work out there to be had. And we have always been very pro-abundance mindset. There's enough work for everybody. Like, let's share and collaborate as much as possible.

Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I'm glad to hear on the one side that you're seeing signs of improvement on the hiring side. I know there's a lot of people who will probably take that as a positive sign. So that's interesting. It's interesting that you bring up that point about that there's less liability by hiring freelancers and consultants. I think that's, I think one of the things, and I do some coaching and mentoring of people, especially who are new to managing a budget or managing teams. And one of the things I talk about is like, I'm not, I wouldn't be considered creative in the way that most people think of it, right? I'm not gonna, I'm not an artsy kind of creative person, but I'm really good at juggling resources, especially financial ones. And I've always been really good about knowing like, if I've got some money in my, in my budget that is not allocated to something and I can't move it to headcount, which has a whole different set of financial concerns about it. And I can use that to bring in somebody, uh, even temporarily to work on a project. I figure I've done that many times where I figured out how to do that. And I think if you're a freelancer and you don't know how the hiring managers think about managing their budgets, you need to go figure that out.

Absolutely. Yeah, it is much easier, less overhead. Yeah.

The secret is that they don't consider freelancers human beings. I'm just kidding. Consider us more of a tech and services line item than a headcount, and they are 2 totally separate budgets.

Yeah, however you got to get those checks to clear is great. Michael, you said something earlier that I want to make sure I go back and address too about what types of work we see are like the most in demand. I will say that most of the work, and this is certainly a function of the way we position ourselves, I would not say that I hesitate to speak for the entire job market, but most of the work that we see coming in is for technical services. I need a HubSpot admin, I need a Marketo admin, I need a Salesforce admin. Wonderful. I do get a fair amount of consultants that come in and do not want to do technical, like hands-on keys type work, are more interested in like, oh, I would like to help you. I would like to discuss your marketing tech strategy with you. I'd like to talk to you about how to build your marketing operations team. We do not see a lot of work like that come in. Very often, like the easier work to outsource is the technical work. It is like a little more finite. It is easier to understand when you're trying to get a budget approved of like, I need a Marketo admin to help me build this thing. That's easier to talk about. It can come across a little fluffy and be like, yeah, I was just bringing in a consultant.

I bet Naomi could go could speak to this too. I know from my standpoint, when I've looked at that, there's— it's a much more tangible ask to say, I need to bring a resource to do X, Y, and Z.

Exactly.

You know, this percentage of their time every day, every week for this period of time. And as long as it's something that we can go point to, like emails got out the door, we cleaned up our database, whatever those things are. Whereas the strategy piece, As important as it is, and I'd like, I'd follow that thought.

It is very important.

That's where I would probably lean towards, but I've, what I've found is if I've talked to people about doing that, like as a side thing, right, that there's not much of that. And it's—

No, I think often like organizations want that type of strategic direction, like the call should be coming from inside the house, you know, like they don't necessarily inherently trust that someone from the outside is going to give them proper strategic direction where it's much easier to trust like, okay, we have this platform, this person's an expert in it, fine, like they can build whatever they need to build. But a lot of the strategic stuff is super specific to the business. And even when it is a little bit more focused on marketing ops, because you're selling it as like, this is strategic advisory about how we're going to do this thing for our business, the people that have to sign the checks on it are just like, no, we have advisors, we have a board, we have whoever.

Well, and I do think it's a function of budgets potentially now in the climate as well. It's like, we need to survive this cycle. Let's talk about it next year. And I, you know, Sydney, you kind of hinted at this. It's not that I don't necessarily think that marketing ops could, you know, benefit from that type of consulting, like a tech stack assessment or build or something like that. But if the people signing the checks don't necessarily have the, like, belief in that department or that function, then they're certainly not going to be like, here, yes, like Take all the money you need to make this the best function possible for our business.

Yeah, so the way I would think about so I agree with all that right and I've been in the spot where I think it would be useful. What I think is missed a lot of times by the senior executives who don't fully understand all this stuff—they probably don't understand marketing in general because—and this is not a knock against these other executives—it's just they don't have the experience, and so it's easy to. to point fingers. What I think is underestimated, and this probably applies to other functional areas beyond marketing, is that you either don't have the skillset that you need to do that kind of strategic thinking and work, or more importantly, you don't have time within the team. And so that's where I think the benefit of bringing in somebody, even if it's temporarily, maybe even think of something like a chief of staff You know, for the CMO who's going to help do this sort of strategic project planning kind of thing might, might be a good use of that money and generate a lot of leverage from that. All that being said, I think it's a really hard sell internally as well.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's hard. It's valuable. But the job market being what it is right now, Marketing ops has always kind of been at the bottom of the stack anyway, which is unfortunate. Most companies are just trying to get by with like one marketing ops headcount just to keep the ship afloat or even zero marketing ops headcount and maybe this one consultant 10 hours a week can keep the ship afloat. It's just, it's tough right now.

Yeah. Naomi, have you had experience with any of this kind of stuff? Have you, have you brought in freelancers much at all? Or do you know?

Actually, not at all. The only time that I've been here at EFI, it's the only time we had an external vendor was when we did our Marketo implementation. And then we brought in a partner to help us with that. But even then, it was more so just getting us initially ramped up. And then towards the end of the engagement, it was kind of double-checking our homework, right? So like we would do the work and then they'd come in, help validate and be kind of that like sounding board or resource to guide us in best practices and whatnot after we had kind of gotten the hang of things before we actually did the full cutover and went live. But aside from that, I've never had to, either because there has been the resources on the team to do so, or I've hired and stacked the team in a way that, you know, like everyone on the team can do, you know, there's like a 50% overlap, let's say, and then everyone on the team has their own specialty. So, There's a web developer, email developer, graphic designer, data ops person, that kind of thing. So they would, you know, I would never have to go out, outsource any of that. Um, but more resources are always great. That's not to say that I won't do that.

Oh my gosh. Yes, totally. I mean, Sydney and I, well, and Sydney and I always say about headcount specifically, like even if it's to our detriment, if a client gets headcount, we're like, you should take the headcount.

You should always take the headcount. Never say no to headcount.

And there have been instances instances where there have been situations where not necessarily I've had to make cases, not necessarily for people, but maybe for certain, I call them like micro tools because it's a small plugin or something that I only need for a certain period of time, or it's just something that has like a limited shelf life. And I find that if you can prove to shift budget a little bit, like I'm gonna reduce the number of seats in this because it's not being properly utilized as much as something else. And then we can take this $10K and put it towards this. That sometimes can help too, because then it's just a lateral. There's no like impact to budget. You're just kind of shifting funds around and that can possibly be a strategy for bringing in like freelance or consultants as well. If there is the additional need to flex throughout the fiscal year.

Yeah. I've also definitely done that for clients before too, like come in and been like, why are you paying for this? You need to cancel this contract. Let's talk about how to get your Marketo database down because this is a bunch of garbage. Let me fight with support for you. Let me tell you why you don't need to buy a third webinar platform. You know, there's inherent value even in like actual budget savings and having an expert around to advise you that way, whether it's someone that's in-house or it's a consultant.

Completely. Yeah, I agree.

So I want to shift gears a little bit, and I think we've hinted at this So 2 things that I don't know if they necessarily go together, but for some reason they're coming together in my head right now. But one is the difference between sort of moonlighting, doing something on the side versus sort of going all in on freelancing. You know, I'd like to get your perspectives on how do you think, how would you advise people to be thinking about when to make that transition if they're thinking about it? And if there's any particular things about moonlighting, like I know one person who does moonlighting who I think is undercharging, but is totally happy with like the work that she's getting and is usually busy as much as she wants to be. But the other is, and I can't remember who mentioned it, right? But like building that personal brand. Are there any tips you've got for if you're going to be doing this? Like how do you start establishing yourself, whether it's in communities or online or whatever?

I would say first of all, like you should work on establishing your personal brand well before you quit your full-time job. Like the it will take a long time, a lot of investment into building your personal brand before you see any return on clients coming in from that. So yes, like being active on LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn is really annoying sometimes, it's important. Being active in the Slack communities is really important. And again, it's not about like. Hello, I'm Sydney. Please come buy my services. It's about demonstrating your value as an expert by answering people's questions, by being an active part of the group. When you're doing this really well, you never need to say, "Hello, I'm Sydney. Please come buy my services." They know. They know you're smart, and they know how to find you. But yes, the personal brand you need to start well before you quit your full-time job. And you know, moonlighting is kind of an optional step in this. It is nice. It's a little bit of like a risk mitigation to start moonlighting. Not everyone can, like not everyone's life supports doing any extra work outside of their full-time job. Not everyone's employer is cool with them moonlighting. Like it just, it totally depends. But if you can, then moonlighting is great. Do it for a few months, save up some money, determine what that threshold is of like, okay, I just need to get one more client or two more clients and then I'll feel good about quitting my full-time job. Like that's a, that's a way many people start.

Yeah, yeah. One thing that, um, uh, I was gonna name a name, but I'm not going to because I don't know if they'd want me to share.

Yeah, don't do that.

But one thing that early, uh, in my freelancing life that was shared with me was, um, not so much like by client or by hour or even by work, but start to manage your time by the amount of money that you're making and the amount of money that you need to make or that you want to make. In order to maintain the lifestyle that you want to maintain. Otherwise, if you don't really have like a focus on that, it can easily get out of hand with boundaries. If you feel like, oh, you need one more client, but it's way more or way less than you want to be taking. And then this person, you know, showed me that their own layouts, like when they have enough money per month or per quarter, they're, they're done like staffing themselves and they can kind of like take a break there. Um, and I thought that was really just empowering to be like, all right, I have enough. Because I think the tendency for a freelancer is to think like that there— Sydney already mentioned that there's, you know, highs and lows, feast or famine, but that it's always gonna be famine. Like you're never gonna have enough or you never are gonna feel secure in the amount of work that you have. Um, and I'm sure it happens, but like I haven't seen it in the 7 years that I've been freelancing. Um, that I haven't been able to get myself to, you know, the income that I've wanted based on the own, my own work that I've been doing.

That's good. That's a good point to like know what you really want out of it. That's, I think that's probably something not everybody's thought about. All right. One, one more question, I think, and then we're gonna probably have to wrap it up here. But, uh, the, you mentioned the importance of soft skills multiple times through this. What, what are some of the most important soft skills you think people should be Preparing for, especially if it's something that they might not have ever thought about?

The story I always like to tell— you should be funny. That's a requirement if you want to work with us. You have to be funny. I'm just kidding. I'm not really kidding. But the story I always like to tell related to this is when I just started consulting at Attumos, I had never consulted before. I was still very early in my career. I was on one client, thankfully with someone else who was more experienced than me and I was on a call, like our weekly check-in, and they were like, okay, Sydney, what are you working on this week? And I was just like, I don't really have anything going on. So, you know, just let me know if you need anything. Should never do that. Don't do that. But it's, you know, you, every single day that you are a consultant, whether you are at an agency or you are freelancing, you are selling yourself. It is Not just, you know, talking about the value that you're providing, but it is providing the value and making it clear what value you are providing. I think that is super important. It is easy to just kind of float along and be like, well, everyone seems happy and I seem happy, so I'm sure this is fine. No, like you need to be communicating every week. This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm planning to do. This is what I'm blocked on. This is what I need from you.

Yeah.

You need to make it very easy for them to work with you so they will want to keep working with you.

Yeah. I mean, consultants are a lot of money, right? And I think that people, budget owners are very aware of how much they spend on this, you know, on this time. So even like in meetings, please be self-aware, um, of like how much time you're talking about nonsense. Not that small talk isn't good, because of course you want to build that relationship, but I've been on calls with consultants where it's like 9 minutes into the call and they're still talking about like what they did over the weekend. So time is valuable. Time's very valuable. And they're paying you for your time.

So it's— I have an interesting— I have a— I don't know if this is a funny story or not, but early in my career I did consulting too, but it was like a very different domain. It was IT type stuff and I did stuff with financial systems. So we had a client that I, where I was the lead on, it was, we were embedded with the accounting team because we were implementing an accounting system and some reporting. And I had a guy on my team who, I was still pretty young then, but he was younger than me and he would go out and party and he did his, his work was fine. But I think what he did, he came in and he started talking about it fairly loudly around all the accountants who wrote all the checks. And I had to pull him aside one time and I, and I said, and I said, look, I don't care if you go out. I don't care if you talk about, like, talk about it to me, but you can't talk about it like that here. These are people like, they see how much they're paying us and you cannot do that. And it's just, that's the kind of self-awareness you get, you have to have, I think is what you're saying. Um, yeah, I think we've touched on other things like knowing your value and negotiating and stuff like that. So this has been fantastic. Um, And, you know, I would love for, if people want to catch up with you, Lauren, Sydney, if they want to learn more about what y'all are up to, Emmy Collective, whatever, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Slide into my DMs, man. We are both in, we're both in the Slack community.

Don't say bro though, okay?

We're both in the Slack community. We are both on LinkedIn. Please find us there. And you can also go to our website, which is emmeco.com. And see all of our stuff there. And you'll find our podcast there if you are interested in torturing yourself in that way.

Yeah.

Yep.

Okay. All good. Well, thank you again. Uh, thank you to Naomi who had to drop a little bit early. So, uh, appreciate her being on and sharing her insight as well. And thanks to all of our audience out there for continuing to support us. We look forward to sharing more of this with you in the future. Bye everyone.

Bye, thank you.