Celebrating 40 Episodes - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 41

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be.

Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

Hi everybody, this is Joe Frost. I'm super excited about this, uh, episode we're doing. It is a best-of series. We are celebrating the milestone that I hit of 40 episodes. Wow, 40 episodes, 40 great conversations, and we put together a brief compilation of some of the best, or at least most popular, clips from our episodes. And I wanna share those with you. I hope you enjoy. The first clip I'm gonna share is from Brian Smith, founder of IA Advisors. Brian is an amazing entrepreneur and he's built a just incredible company. He's also an author. And one of his latest books, "The I in Team," is fastly growing on the charts. I highly recommend you checking out Brian, his books. And for a brief understanding of why, I hope you enjoy this clip.

A lot of C-suite people have blinders on. They only see what's in their lane. And in the old days, we could almost do that. But the way that society has grown, the way that we've become a 3-dimensional society where we have to know more, we have to be more in touch. 2 or 3 steps away from ourselves. And that's a big challenge for the C-suite.

The next clip is from my friend Valerie Cobb. Valerie Cobb has a sales process and revenue management practice where she helps organizations beef up those sales. That's what we need, right? Uh, in this clip, she talks about, um, lots of different things, but the one thing I want you to take away is that imagine you're a small company. You can afford $50,000 in spend. How are you going to put it to work? Are you going to share it with sales or invest it in marketing? Those are some of the conversation bits and pieces we dove into as we discussed sales and marketing alignment, something I'm sure you'll love to listen to again. Enjoy.

There are 3 core things that a business has to have. They have to have finance, they have to have operations, and they have to have inbound. They have to have revenue coming in. Right. So imagine a small company, they can afford $50,000, but they're just really throwing $50,000 away because it's going to take them 4 or 5 years. And I have statistically, I have taken statistics talking to people like How long did it take you to ramp that position up? Oh, 4 years. Okay. What did you just do for 4 years? Not only did you lose revenue for those 4 years because it wasn't really great, right? But you also paid somebody $50,000 plus benefits for 4 years. Right. So, so in the fractional marketing world, We do it all the time. We outsource digital, we outsource call, you know, inbound lead generation from cold calling teams and things like that.

All right, in this next clip you're going to hear from my good friend Luke Templin. Luke is the founder and chief financial officer, or fractional CFO. He's the mind behind A2 Advisors, and he's actually our Fractional CMO— I'm sorry, Fractional CFO at Your CMO. I really like talking to Luke. We had— this was a second take of our conversation because the first take, I forgot to hit record. So this might be your second take, another chance to listen to Luke speak about all sorts of things from Starbucks to margins to pricing. I think you'll learn a lot and enjoy.

So one thing we, we put together is, is what I call the triple cheeseburger model, right? So you have, you have 3 prices, essentially. You have one that's no contract, it's the highest possible price. Then you have, here's what a year contract looks like and how much volume you have to purchase from us. You got a mid-range and then a 2-year contract with lower margins. I call it the triple cheeseburger because the triple cheeseburger was created in order to sell the double. So, and if you pay attention, it's all around us. If you look at Starbucks, it's a lot of pricing. I call it gaming, but a large— I don't know what the large option at Starbucks is called, but it's not called a large, something fancy. If you look at the price, Yeah, Binti, there we go. If you look at the price difference between that and medium, there's not a huge difference, and it's really not a huge difference in size either. And so there's, there's a lot of, uh, theory that most people don't put into pricing. Most people think pricing should be some formula, it should be very scientific, but to me it's an art form.

All right, in this next clip you get to hear from one of the OG Fractional Professional Association members, Mark Scrimenti. Mark brings a background in marketing operations and sales to his work as both a fractional integrator for EOS and a fractional operator slash marketer at times. Mark's a brilliant person. I think you'll enjoy listening to this clip again if you haven't listened to it already. This is your first time. Then be prepared to be wowed from Mark Scromenti.

I think everybody pays lip service to, um, you know, being customer focused, you know, and, and everybody says, yeah, we talk to our customers regularly. But I question that, you know. Are you, are you really talking to your customers regularly? And more importantly, are you listening to them? And what are you— what are they telling you? And so, um, and that's something that you need to approach, I think, on a structured basis, not just on an ad hoc basis, but I think it needs to be methodical. And so the reason, I mean, the reason to do this, I think if you listen, if you talk to your customers, you really listen to them, they're going to tell you how to grow your business.

They're going to give you innovation opportunities, opportunities for optimization, Jim Roe brings his 45 years of writing, editing, and doing just about everything you can think about for a company. He's summarized quite a bit of his work over the last several years, and in this clip, shares some of the highlights and uses Tiger Woods as quite a fun metaphor as he teaches us about writing and critical thinking and how important those are today. Enjoy.

I've been doing this for over 45 years, and every day when I'm writing, I'm editing as I go along saying, that doesn't sound right. I could do this better. I focus on the fact that I think a lot of people just take writing and critical thinking for granted. Give them a sort of a metaphor here is Tiger Woods and I both play golf. He's a lot better than I am. He's actually, as we all know, some people consider him the greatest of all time, or certainly up in the top 5 or 10. Yet he's constantly going to the range. He's constantly getting coaching. And if for that skill set you need to continue to do that your whole life, writing and critical thinking is the same kind of thing, and they are inextricably linked. You know, to write is where the rubber meets the road.

Well, that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed the highlights of the last 40 episodes. I look forward to having you listen to the next 40 episodes in person. You can check that out at our website. You can find me at yourcmo.com or at the Fractional Professionals Association website or on LinkedIn at Joseph Frost. I look forward to catching up with all of my listeners, and, uh, please let our guests know you appreciate them, dropping them a little note about what you learned or what stood out from our conversations. Enjoy your day.

And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yourcmo.com, yourcmo.com, spelled wrong on purpose.