Marketing For a New Age - Michael Carter - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 029

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.

Welcome. Today's guest is a lifelong marketer of technology products and services. He's a sought-after conference speaker and a published author, and he's a fractional CMO at Your CMO. Welcome, Michael Carter. How are you?

Good, Joe. How are you?

Good. I'm so glad that, uh, you're on the call today on the podcast. It'll be a fun hour or so together. Yeah, we spent a lot of time together, uh, on, uh, throughout the week as a as a team, but it's always good to get this one-on-one time. So thanks for being here.

Yeah, glad, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Great. So let's just get it started. The, the question I like to ask all the guests is what's an opportunity that you see in the C-suite that maybe other C-suite members see or don't see?

Yeah, well, I think it's the nature of how marketing's changed, and I'm not sure that quite translates to all members of the C-suite. You know, it's now more of a science than an art. There's an ability to track performance and tie dollar investments to outcomes in ways that, you know, 2 decades ago we just didn't enjoy because it was an entirely different game. Even if you were B2B, you were still using, you know, printed publications and there was no way to know who looked at the ads exactly. So I've had a number of roles beyond marketing, but mostly marketing. And I think those other roles taught me the importance of being able to demonstrate the ROI on marketing. And, you know, early on in my career, that was difficult, my marketing career. But as, as marketing has changed, become more digital, and it's, its nature more data-driven, to the degree now that you can market in very discrete, specific, focused areas, which is to me always a key. You know, if you, if you think your product is for everybody in the world, you're probably in trouble. But today you can actually seek out that perfect, most profitable match for your product and speak to them in relevant ways. So I think the specificity, the measurement, the ability to track investments, those are all things I'm not sure Even a lot of CEOs I meet today who are younger than I am don't actually realize what can be done there.

Yeah, I think that's the elusive question, or it's been elusive for a long time, is what's the ROI of your marketing. And certainly with the digital marketing, you can get really clear on what that looks like, but still some of the traditional marketing is hard to monetize or, you know, to track back to the origins. So how do you reconcile that in an engagement where you still need a mix usually of more than just one tactic, and not all the tactics are the same from an ROI standpoint and tracking and metrics standpoint? How do you go about dealing with that issue with clients?

Well, there, you know, there's, there's still, like you say, soft areas, and, and I think, you know, a common soft area through the last 10 years of my career has been conferences, right? I mean, they cost— prior to the pandemic, they cost an enormous amount of money. It was always very difficult to understand any kind of one-to-one out of what came out of that. You send 12 sales guys or 6 or 2 or whatever the number is, you buy some booth space and a sponsorship, and then, you know, $40,000 later, you're not sure what you got for your money or in some cases far more money than that. It's interesting to me in that I do think there's ways around— not around that, but there are ways to get a sense of the value of those. I had one assignment where I was working for a company that had an enormous conference budget, and I worked for a CEO, one of my favorites, who just, you know, he had that CEO instinct that something wasn't right when he saw 15 sales guys be taken out of the field for a week. And, um, but it was very difficult for him to have a rational or a data-driven argument with anyone about that. So basically we just put some measures in place. You couldn't go to the conference unless you had X number of customer prospect meetings. You had to document those. Uh, we took booth, you know, It still didn't necessarily draw the line, but it was indicators. And, you know, what I often tell CEOs that I work with is, if we can't know exactly, for instance, not everybody comes to your website is a customer or a prospect. But if your website's traffic is growing, and all other measures are accounted for, it's probably got something to do with your marketing. And you have other ways to tell what falls out of those landings on your page. Same thing with conferences. You may not know the one for one, but you will get a sense. You can have some guidelines that make you more comfortable than, you know, buying a— buying in the old days, buying a Wall Street Journal ad and not knowing exactly what came of it. Yeah.

So although it's not as easy to measure the ROI of an AdWords click that turns into a sale online, you can still put some common sense measurements and metrics into any activity, whether it be sales or marketing or otherwise. That makes sense. And I think that's important. It still doesn't make it easy to choose which the right tactic or not because at the end of the day, you're kind of making a guess. Is this conference going to pay off or not? Do I spend $40,000 here? Do I spend $40,000 over there? And if there's no direct ROI, it's kind of—

well, and, and, you know, and the other thing is, pandemics had an interesting effect on conferences. It is almost— they're almost in the Renaissance period now. I think it's cabin fever to some degree, but, but I've had clients, some clients I work with, just go crazy to go to conferences now, and they're actually getting you know, what, what seemed to be pretty good traction from them. I think that while we can do a lot of things remotely, the human touch— I mean, people buy from people and people market to people. So that human touch was missing from kind of the normal background noise that we had before the pandemic, and now these conferences are the best way to get a large dose right away and I was at a conference in February and it was actually the largest. It's the first physical conference they had in, well, since before the pandemic. And it was the largest one they ever had by a lot. So it is, not that we expect to commonly be factoring in pandemics, but there are things that happen within markets that impact things. And the tactic, or the option du jour from 2 years ago that wasn't very good may become a little bit more trackable, a little bit more recognizable. So I think, yeah, I, you know, I had actually a CEO say to me the other day something that I thought was— not all of the people I work with say this— he said, you know, marketing's hard. And I thought, marketing is hard. It's not that a lot of the stuff that people associate with marketing, they think that's— if they think it's hard, they typically think that's the hard part. The hard part is all the process and research and work you need to do beforehand. And some of that is the reason it's a little harder to tie things later on. You know, what did I get for my money? I mean, you and I both know that understanding the customer's voice is incredibly hard, and it's often overlooked. I mean, in fairness to businesses, owners. They're trying to pay employees, they've got a product or service that they feel very strongly about and have reason to, they've got some initial customers, that sort of thing. But they've got, you know, these 3 areas that aren't really working and can be as simple as say, say, well, my, my Google AdWords aren't working. Okay, you go out and interview, you know, half dozen customers or do a survey, a customer survey, and you find out almost none of the customers rely on Google, you know. So, so, and until you understand, uh, the way they acquire their information, what barriers they have, they feel they have to satisfy when they're moving towards a decision, you can be doing something that it seems to have no ROI or little ROI or difficult ROI and find out, well, you're not really speaking to your client anyway. So that grunt work that goes on at the beginning, to me, it can't be It can't be underestimated, the value of it. It takes time. I mean, we, you know, the methodology we use at Your CMO of doing an extensive audit at the beginning doesn't, you know, a lot of owners, a lot of CEOs are in a hurry. They want to have an impact right now. If they're talking to us, a lot of times they need to up their game. So that means their game hasn't been entirely satisfying until that time. And so they want to do something different. They want it to feel better, have more impact. Well, I understand, but for a fact, if we don't do this, you know, 4 or 5 week bit of work here, we aren't going to have the impact you want us to have because we won't have the data and the information and the insights you want us to have.

Yeah, it was just yesterday I was at a conference, a 3-hour conference with a bunch of other business owners, and the topic was cash flow. Cash is key. The speaker was an internationally known business guru, grown several companies, but his focus is on cash flow and how to increase your business finances. And the first thing he led with was for the first 30 minutes, it was all about how well do you know your core customer? And he said, and it was like a marketing lecture, It's like, do you know that not just the demographics, but what's the name that you give to your core customer? Bob or John or Corey or Jenny? And what does he do? What are his struggles every day? What's his 8 to 5 look like? And it was like Marketing 101. And that was the first thing the guy said. If you don't know your core customer, none of this other stuff matters. You can't grow your business, you can't grow your cash. You got to know your customer. The next thing he spent the 30 minutes on, once you know your core customers, how uniquely different from your competition? Yeah, to solve your core customer's problem. Yeah, it was like Marketing 101 again, 102 or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, go ahead.

Yeah, and his third point was how are you getting that message in front of your core customers, like the tactics, like my— sounds familiar, sounds all familiar to me, but that's not the way most businesses think about things. And this was a cash flow expert saying, you got to think about this first. Then you can start getting into growing your cash flows because once you know your customer well enough and you know what they need, you can be uniquely different from the competition and you can get in front of them and tell that story. Now you're able to start enhancing your business. I thought that was funny.

That is— well, he's a pretty enlightened finance guy. I'd say, or a cash speaker. The, you know, I worked quite a bit with entrepreneurs in the fintech space. So companies that come up with new innovations that you and I might use, or they might sell to somebody that we use. And, you know, these are pretty smart guys, pretty savvy guys. And a lot of times they start out sort of, you know, bootstrapping their organization and they go to get money from, you know, let's just say, you know, first round, A-round VCs, and they're shocked when the VC wants to know, tell me about your market, uh, tell me who your competitors are, what's your customer like. You know, they— sure, the VC wants to see the spreadsheet, but basically the VC is investing in a company that's— the spreadsheet is mostly fiction at this point anyway. Let's be honest, this is hope. This is pro forma. It's hope. If you can't answer the question— and then he wants to know how many salespeople and what's your marketing budget, you know, how much money of the money I give you are you going to spend on marketing? And I've been in that, you know, car coming back from those with, you know, CEOs when I've just been more of a business advisor. And, you know, why are they so interested? Because if you don't get those elements right, you're going to waste their money. They already have trouble. It's 1 in 10 for them on a good day, and that's when people have a lot of that locked down. But if they don't have any of that locked down, they just— they won't— unless you have a record, they're not going to spend a whole lot of time with you.

Yeah, yeah. The, the, the customer's changed a bit since, uh, you know, the last 20, 30 years.

Yep.

Just as much as the marketing tools and tactics have changed. But the concept of you just— people buy from people, that hasn't changed. Right. I guess when you're online and you're transacting on Amazon, you're probably not buying from people, but at some level you probably were influenced by a person to buy that product or service on Amazon. Yeah, sure. Yeah. The brand has gotten you somehow, some way.

Yeah. People look at the reviews. It's been a big thing in the industry recently about, you know, Chinese companies juicing their reviews online and Amazon's cracking down on that. Why? Because people count on those. I mean, we don't talk to one another as much anymore, but we look on there and hope to find something to hang our hat on since we don't know the person selling it to us. Sometimes it is, you know, half of what Amazon sells is behind— is stuff made by somebody else sold by somebody else that Amazon fulfills. So yeah, I mean, people do buy from people, and relevance is still— the relevance of the offer to what you're looking for is maybe more critical now. I mean, because if I'm talking to you personally, if you sell me something personally and I don't get it, or what you say doesn't make any sense to me, you'll see it on my face. But if you're selling to me, you know, something off a SaaS platform where you're offering me you know, a piece of business software for $2,000 a year or whatever it is, or a piece of personal software for X. If you're not communicating with me, you'll never know it. I just won't be there. I mean, I'll just be gone. I will have moved on to somebody who can tell the story that they— that matters to me. So it, it may be more critical than ever that we understand the, you know, the voice of the customer because we don't have that chance for as much for personal touch or visual reading of who we're trying to speak to.

Yeah, and it doesn't really take that much energy and effort and resources to understand it. It's just you got to slow down for a second and do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of business— like, I work with a lot of business owners and been around a lot of entrepreneurs for a long time. And many of them have started their businesses or founded their businesses and early on they were talking to customers every day. So they really knew the voice of the customer well and because that they just had so many conversations. Well, fast forward 5, 10, 20 years, when's the last time any of those business owners have actually spoken to a customer, even C-suite members actually spoken to a customer and they're still operating off those assumptions they had from years and years ago. So sometimes just a matter of you got to refresh your thoughts, you got to have new conversations, you got to bring in somebody new to the table that's going to have that dialogue for you and report back. And it's just shocking the new insights that you glean and then some of the things you validate that they're still true.

Well, we all, we all have confirmation bias for one thing when it's something that's our baby, right? I have mentor from my corporate time that, you know, became an investor in small businesses. And he said, you know, nobody likes to have you tell them their baby's ugly. So they tend to not want to hear if somebody's— if a customer's telling them— they'll hear it, and you'll hear— they'll hear it a certain way and report back to you, and you'll hear it and say, yeah, I don't actually think that's what the customer meant.

So it—

I think the ear— and that's— I think the marketing person has to be an honest broker in that. I mean, the chief executive, the chief marketing officer anyway, you know, that needs to be— have enough authority and power to stand up to the CEO and, you know, not call bullshit. I mean, after all, he is the CEO. But to be able to say to him, hey, look, man, this is my discipline, and this is what I'm hearing, and you aren't hearing it, and it's understandable, but but you need to. And so it happens also when they get a customer. Now, in, you know, a lot of the software today, whether it's for individuals or businesses, they're sold on subscription basis, right? So you, you pay a year's worth, or you get a break, stay a year, you pay month to month, and you can stop anytime. Well, you have to win that customer every month. Yeah, every month. And, um, most common reason for for terminating a subscription is the product didn't do what they thought it was going to do. Now, sometimes that's because the product didn't do what they thought it was going to do because it wasn't made for them. A lot of times it's because the provider of the product never took the time to educate the customer and tell them how that product solves that problem. And there's a, there's a phrase emerging in the, in the cloud-based platform business called software and a service. It used to be called, as you know, SaaS, software and a service. But, but I've worked with a couple people now, and I think it was one of the people I worked with came up with one of my, one of my phrases, but software and the service. And that is critical in these, in these subscription-based. So you don't have to You don't win them once in the current environment, particularly with technology. You have to win them again and again and again and again. And that's— you miss a beat there and it's immediate.

Yeah, especially when it's— I mean, it's pretty easy nowadays to swap softwares. All of them have— even the big, like Salesforce, like the big CRMs, The up and coming ones, they all have a little widget that will pull all your data and we'll roll it right into the next one. I mean, just down the line, everybody's got an easy way to switch. You gotta earn and keep their trust and show the value month after month after month, which is a good segue to what we do as fractional CMOs. I have this conversation a lot. What's the difference between a fractional professional and a full-time professional? And one of the differences is Fractional's got to show up every month. You know, there's no hiding behind this month because most of those service offerings are month to month. So, one of the values to an employer is, you know, you've got somebody that's delivering every month so that they're on next month as opposed to— you'd expect your full-time people to be delivering every month, but the relationship's a little different, full-time and fractional. Yeah. How have you found that in your experience?

Similar? Yeah, I mean, I've been doing fractional work of a kind for a long, long time. And, you know, I've had gigs that lasted 8 years, but they weren't on autopilot, right? I mean, it was 8 years of showing up and facing every crisis that business faced for 8 years, trying to anticipate some, keep other— stopping others from happening. But I've come to the conclusion that that I think if I were running my company and it was an early-stage company, as most of mine are, or they're small and want to go larger, I would probably fractional a lot of— use a fractional model for a lot of my stuff. And I've seen it. I've seen a buddy here, you know, he started out fractional CMO, fractional HR, fractional lawyer, fractional CPA. When the business grew and that stuff came in, which, you know, meant the fractional people were probably doing what they, they should be doing. And at some point, you know, if you're successful, it grows. But the ability to turn the spigot off and on is, is sometimes a good sell because you tell them, okay, look, if I don't perform, I'm out of here. But it's also a good incentive from, from my side. I never feel— I kind of like it. I mean, I have to, I have to focus. It gives me a really good reason to focus. And to make, to want to make a difference every time. Not that I didn't when I wasn't on staff, but you're right, it's a little different. You know, you become buddies with everybody else in the C-suite and you, you know, you think, okay, I have a bad day today, nobody's gonna, you know, I make one bad report, you know, this quarter, nobody's gonna can me. But if I'm the fractional person, I make a bad report, they start going, I don't know if this is worth it or not. And so it's, it's important.

It's definitely a different level of accountability and expectations really. Which is good. That's why we show up and do the work. And that's why it's a good value for businesses to consider fractional, whether it's marketing or finance or IT or HR or whatever. What are some of the other differences in your experience between full-time work and fractional work?

Well, I tell people I stopped— I've had a very good corporate career, very lucky, and got to do a lot of really interesting stuff, IPOs, and worked abroad and ran, you know, P&Ls and that sort of thing. But the one thing I took away from that is I'm a guy that I— and like you, I'm sure, and a lot of our colleagues at UCMO, I want to make a difference. I don't want to get up and put it on autopilot and say, okay, here we go. We're just, you know, boom, boom, boom. If it runs that well on autopilot, you don't need me. I mean, you don't, because as one of my mentors said, you're not good when you're bored. I'm not good when I'm bored because I'm not happy. So I want to puzzle, you know, I want to puzzle and I want that, I want to be solving that puzzle. At that strategic level for the other disciplines within the business, you know, certainly sales, but also even the CFO. I want him to know, you know, we're solving that problem, we're using that investment wisely. So I like that part of it. I like, I like the intensity of it. I played sports a lot. I always wanted the ball when it was coming down the, down. I didn't always, you know, I didn't always I didn't score, but I always wanted the ball. And that's kind of the personality I think that makes for a good fractional person, is you say, okay, I know what I'm doing and I know the discipline, but I not only know that, I want to make something happen. I'm going to err on the side of action than being passive and just saying, okay, everything looks hunky-dory. And I don't trust hunky-dory usually. Not in business anyway.

Yeah. And you get a little more diversity as a fractional in that action. Yeah, that's right. You're working on more than one problem at a time. Often it's a few different clients that have a few different things going. You get to mix it up a bit. You get to stay in the game as opposed to just kind of sitting through the sitting in the stands watching things going on, which is not a bad thing either sometimes.

No, no, no, it's fine. I mean, it's— I don't— it's just your personality. And you're right, I think the variety is, is good. And, and, you know, I think what's amazing to me is you don't realize how often a piece of something over here from a business completely different than what your client's in over here has a, has a relevance or a connection or causes you to see into it a different way. You know, I, I, I think that that's a value that fractional people bring, particularly those that are, you know, in the, in the right set of shoes and able to think strategically of how problems have analogies and how even though this person is, I don't know, selling, you know, doggy daycare, and this person's selling SaaS hiring platform, SaaS-based hiring platform, there's a similarity between what this person's up against and what this person's up against, and they have a strategic route, and that strategic route can be solved by similar actions on both sides. Different targets, different offering, different service, but still that kind of correlation I like too, because that, you know, that Oftentimes it's not linear thinking. It needs to have a little— it needs to be a little circular in your thinking too.

Yeah, for sure. If you were giving advice to somebody looking to hire a fractional person, what were some of the things you would tell them to look for when making the decision to hire somebody?

Well, I, you know, when I've hired people and I've had posts where I've had to put together a team, you know, culture fits real important even for marketing people. So even if fractional person is not there all the time, they should fit into your team. I mean, they should be a part, as an important part of your team. They should be in those C-level meetings. They, they need to be at the table. They need to have a chair at the table. And for that reason, they have to fit. And, you know, not everybody's a fit. Not every client's a fit. Not every fractional person's a fit. And, uh, you know, it may be that the owner hiring the fractional person really wants to get this problem solved, and it may be the fractional person really wants to work for this person because they, they'd like to do the gig. But if there's no fit, you do yourself a credit for neither one of you to go down that road. So that's the first thing I look for, is this person a fit. And there are, you know, there are, uh, and we use them in our organization. There are assessments and other things you can take that give you insights into people. They're proven, they're scientific, why not use them, right? And, uh, I was talking to a business owner the other day asking her, uh, well, we have a client I referenced earlier who's, uh, who has an applicant tracking software that has some, you know, really cool features and functions in it that are— that help a smaller business hire more A-players and, and track those players, etc. And so I asked her, I said, what— when did you decide you needed to go do something? She said, because I kept hiring people that I had to fire. And she said, and not only was it expensive, it destroyed the psyche of my company. And I thought, man, that's an enlightened observation right there. I mean, the, the idea that It's not, it's not just the money. So maybe too fine a point on that, but, but I think fit is so important and it's never more important than at that highest level where you've got the brain trust of the company working together. I'm a little less fussed about what specifically the person has done. I am interested in their career. I would be interested in, you know, How long have they been doing this? What kind of environments have they done it in? Did they work in my industry? To me, marketing is marketing, and you're not paying a CMO necessarily for subject matter expertise. You are paying them for the subject matter expertise around marketing, but not necessarily around your product. Any good fractional CMO will pick that up pretty quick. If you, if you sold one product or service or marketed one product or service, you sort of get the problem being solved and what the hammer that's being used to hit the nail. It's not as mysterious as often people inside the company think, because inside the company you think, well, we have this very complicated business. Yeah, you do, you do, there's no doubt about it. But I've seen this movie, you know, I've seen this movie twice, three times, a half dozen times. I know how the— I know how the movie ends. And so you need, you need to know that they have that level of experience functioning in a C-level at a C-level, right? That's the most important thing I find is I want to hire a person and plug them in at a level where they'll be successful. If you take too young, too inexperienced, somebody that doesn't know how to say no the right way to a CEO— not, no, I won't ever do that, but I don't think that's the right thing to do. You're the boss. If you want to spend the money that way, I'll spend it the best way I can, but I'm telling you, I don't think that's the right way to spend your money. That's hard. And it's also easier when you're a fractional, I think. When I was on a career track, you know, well, my bosses would tell you I never had any problem telling them what I thought. But for the most part, you're more careful, right? It's not that as fractionals we're not sensitive to the who's the boss. It's that I'm here to help you. My career doesn't depend on you. I want to help you. And I'd like to believe I made a difference. And if I don't tell you the truth, if I don't tell you the facts as I see them for what you pay me for, then what good am I? Again, it should be what everybody on your team does, but we both know from experience that that's not what happens. I had a CEO once that, you know, you've heard of him, skip-level meetings, and he would do skip levels. So he would do not his direct reports, he would meet with the ones, uh, 2 or 3 levels down. And, and, uh, I asked him once, I said, why, why do you call me? I mean, I was a young buck at the time. And, and he goes, because the guys that report to me won't tell me the truth because it'll affect their bonuses. She said— he said, you don't rely on me for your bonus, so you'll tell me the truth. And, uh, and you know, that, that is a problem sometimes in inside of an organization versus outside. It's very hard for people to, uh feel comfortable saying, hey, that part of the baby's a little ugly. So I look for that. I like truth tellers. I tell people that I want, I want to be disagreed with. So when I'm hiring, if I were hiring a fractional person, I'd want to know, okay, do you have trouble disagreeing with me? I mean, can you constructively— not, I don't want you to call me names, but can you constructively disagree with somebody based on your expertise? Well, yeah, I wouldn't be— as far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't be C-level if I could But so that, that's important that I'm assuming the other, because you can, you can kind of verify the other, you know, how much experience and all that. But those kinds of attributes are what I would look for if I were hiring a fractional anything.

Yeah, those are great. I hear fit a lot. It's surprising. It was, it's not as intuitive, but it is so important. If that's not there at the fractional level, just like in a full-time employee level, if it's not there, it's, it can be very, very difficult for all parties. And it's hard to flush that out always, you know, especially in— I wouldn't say project-based work is fractional, but, you know, just this idea that it's not a full-time commitment, it's not as high of a priority for the client to find a fit, and so they're not searching for it. And most fractionals are, you know, they're eager for a gig, so they're gonna not be as, you know, searching for it either, 'cause they know it's just a part-time gig. You know, they got more than one. And I've seen it with our CMOs, I've seen it with other fractionals. When that fit's not there, it's pretty apparent pretty quickly. You know, it doesn't last real long. And that's an expensive lesson for everybody.

—waste of time, waste of money. It's not any fun. I mean, who wants to— you know, it becomes a head-butting contest, not because anybody intended it to be, but it's not a fit in that nobody will give ground. It's not not a fit because nobody will give ground. It's a fit because there just isn't a personality match. I mean, they, they talk about it with pilots, right? You want cockpit synergy. You got to have two guys that kind of like each other up there, you know, pulling the levers and pushing the wheel. Pushing the yoke. And same in business. Yeah, I can see your point. I mean, I think that is true. It— you're thinking, well, so if I don't like them, I'll just, I'll just, you know, we'll just terminate our engagement. Even that's, like you say, expensive. Yeah. And I appreciate that we spend time, you know, within your CMO, we spend time looking at fit. And we do tell people when we think that maybe it's not necessarily the move they make now, they might make it here, but maybe not right now. Maybe something else would be more logical, and we try to help them out with that. And it's not that our CMOs don't want the work. Of course we do. We want, we want to work, make money, and, and help our families. But, but it's, it's really takes years off your life when you get it wrong. And I'm not sure any amount of money is worth taking years off your life, at least when you're my age. It's not.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. One of the topics I like to bring up is leadership and trying to understand— everybody's got a different definition of what a leader's role is. I'm just curious, what do you think the main role of a leader is?

Well, that's— it's a great question. And I think a leader is to me, the model that serves pretty well, has served me pretty well in careers, is the coach model, right? When I've had people on my team and I've tried to be the leader I want to be for them, we got to get stuff done. We want to win the game. This is not a, you know, this is not a nonprofit. So we're, you know, we got to make money. We got to do the right thing. But if you make a mistake, I'm not going to kill you. In fact, I'm going to tell you about the time I made a mistake. And you're going to be free to make mistakes up until a point and learn from them. Because if you don't, you'll never grow. I'll never get anything out of you because you'll be hiding behind your fear. So I think the coach model works real well for me. And, you know, the thing is there's so many different types of coaches. I don't know, there's Bill Self at Kansas is different than Caleb Perry at UK, who's different than, pick one, Dabo Swinney coaching football at Clemson. They're all in— say, they've been down at Alabama. They're all different. They treat their guys differently. Some of them are really right down there with the guys. They're buddies. Some of them are coaches that say, I'm the man, and you'll do it the way I want to do it. As long as it works, you don't— I'm the one that gets fired, so you're going to do it my way. None of that's wrong. It's the fit for the people you have. So when I say coach, I don't think there's a, oh, hey, I'm going to teach you how to shoot a layup in all cases. So I like that model. I think the problem with— the thing that gets overlooked with leadership, and it's a natural byproduct of success for a leader, is communication. I think it gets underestimated just how much people value hearing from leaders in their companies, and they don't very much. And like I said, in a lot of businesses, and like I said, I, I think it's just a byproduct of the CEO gets busy or the, the head of the department gets busy and they got a thousand things to do, and, and like everybody else, they're doing more with less and And then they, they think, well, everybody— I'll send an email, everybody knows that. Well, that, that's not— an email is a, is a memo. It's not communication, it's a memo. So I think that's the thing I have consistently seen that made a difference between the CEOs I worked for that were incredibly effective, and there was a lot of loyalty to them, and people who would, you know, charge the hill for them. Those CEOs communicated a lot. They were accessible. When they said their door was open, it was open. They found a way to make themselves accessible, and that made them authentic, and that made people want to do things for them. The ones that were less successful, they— I mean, this still amazes me. We— I got a gig where I had a company that had 5 brands, and it was a small software company, has 5 brands. And so the CEO comes to me and says, I know we can't afford 5 brands. I said, not unless you're—, you know, Procter Gamble or GE or GM. And so we ended up consolidating his brands, you know, creating one position for the brand, creating the marketing and the messaging under which all the— it was a plot of products which fit in the various industries would fit. And then he said, well, we got to go explain this to everybody at Workforce. And I mean, he said that, not me. I didn't say it to him, he said to me. And going to explain to everybody that Workforce meant getting on an airplane and flying to South Africa, Ireland, Europe. Wow. Melbourne. I mean, we flew, we flew all over the place, and he flew on all those. And the CEO, right? And he was a— he was part of a— it was a small software company, he was publicly traded. Well, pulling a CEO out of a publicly traded company for a couple weeks to globetrot is not an easy thing to do, but he was right. It made a big difference because those brands weren't just abstractions. There were people who worked for those brands and they needed to hear from him and be able to ask him questions about why this was a good idea. And me telling them wouldn't have worked. The two of us telling them had to happen. So I think communication is vital to leadership because it gets people to understand you and to follow you. And that, that, you know, unfortunately in a technologically driven business environment, it can get—

it takes a lot of intention to do that. Yeah, and especially in today's day and age where everything is so hard to sift through the noise, it takes extra attention and intention to make that work. I'm guilty. I know that in my organizations, I don't communicate as much as I would like to, and then when I— there are moments where I realize from people saying to me, oh, so good to have you here explaining that. Like, oh, well, I didn't realize that I hadn't explained it right before. You know, you kind of find out about it after the fact too, and it just hits you like, gosh, I wish I would have been a little more aware of it sooner. But it's all right.

I think everybody's guilty of it. I mean, the only reason you know you're you should do it is that you have enough awareness to know you're not doing it right. So it's, it's just part of why it's so easy today to get, you know, it's probably easier today than it's ever been because businesses are far-flung. Post-pandemic, we're not even all sitting in the same state or country. And, and, and so, you know, special effort has to be made to do it. And then it just gets— it's what it can be way down the list to doing things that pay the bills.

Right. Yeah, this is a tough time for businesses all around from a marketing perspective. I think it's also tough from an employee perspective, and fractional is certainly a way to solve some of those potential hiring problems. How do I retain and hire good people? You know, I saw a graph the other day that showed the largest percentage increase of people resigning is older. It's the top age groups because they're looking for— they're bored or they're able to find something new or different. And I think fractional is what they're looking for, consulting or something like that. After the pandemic, you get a reset and like, what do I really like what I'm doing kind of thing. Yeah, right. So people are leaving, but that means people are available. So I think from a business perspective, it's a great solution when you're looking for leadership. To look fractionally. Right. What are some of the characteristics of a good leader? You know, some of those roles you said are coaching and communication. What are some of the characteristics of a good leader, fractional or otherwise?

Yeah, well, accessibility is not quite like communication, but it can be pretty easy to wall yourself off, particularly in times of crisis, because you're afraid you're going to say something wrong if somebody asks you a question you weren't prepared for. I think it's— it's— I love it when somebody, when a leader says, I was— I, I told you that and I was wrong about it. I mean, I, I— what that does is that creates an environment where your people will serve you better, be more productive, because they're not afraid of making a mistake. Because let's face it, most of us, save people in the medical industry and a few other airplane pilots, etc., we don't work in businesses where one mistake's going to kill him. About, right? Um, I used to— I had a lady that worked for me, uh, perfectionist. I love her, great, great person, very productive, very good at marketing. But she made mistakes, she just fell to pieces. I, I would say, okay, so did anybody die? Nope. Okay, pretty good day then, nobody died, let's just move on, right? But I think a leader being able to say that opens the opens the door for that. The other thing I think is, is adds to authenticness, which I think is important, is saying I don't know. I mean, a lot of us feel like when we're in leadership positions, we have to have all the answers. I, you know, there's no way I have all the answers, even in marketing, because it's a huge field and it's changing every day, and, and there's new tools and new ways of doing things, and, and just abundant lessons to learn at any one point in time. And a leader is just simply not going to know all there is to know. And being able to say that to people— I don't know how many customers I've talked to that said, what I really liked about that company was when they didn't know, they told me they didn't know, and they went and found the answer and came back and told me what it was, right? I mean, even the customers don't expect you to know everything. So That's important. I think demonstrating the same balance, life-work balance that you want your people to have, you have as a leader, you have to demonstrate that. Because your actions speak louder than anything you're going to say to them. And if you're in the office 60 hours a week as a leader, or you work 12 hours a day, they're going to feel like unless they do that, they're at risk. One of the things I heard shortly after we got a little bit more back to normal business was a lot of CEOs were saying, fine, you don't have to come to the office. And one HR person or specialist, leadership specialist at Wharton said, yeah, but if you tell them that you can't be in the office all the time, Right, right. Because that's telling them that they don't have a future with you if you're in the office all the time. So you have to, you know, it's simple. It's kind of like communications. We all know we should do it, and we all know actions speak louder than words. But when you're a leader, it's 10 times that, you know. It's, it's, it's not— I'm not saying leading a company is like being a parent, but do kids ever forget thing you want them— or ever not remember the thing you want them to forget? I mean, the thing you did that you would never want them to do, they'll remember it the first time you tell them not to do that. Well, it's the same with leaders, that the actions you take are what they think they need to be doing as well. And I mean, time and again, studies have shown balance is really, really important. And I think that's some of what's come out of the pandemic, right? Leaders have said, some leaders are going, hey, this is really nice. I got to, I got to be in my office without a bunch of people knocking on my door, and I got to control when I talk to people, when I communicate. This is great. No, no. And they begin to feel a little bit more balanced. Well, I think that, that, you know, it's essential that you give people that, that balance. And now these days, like you were pointing out, Joe, if you don't, they'll go somewhere else and find somebody who will.

Right. Yeah, when we're seeing it and it's happening, so it's, it's, it's today's reality. It's a lifestyle leader or lifestyle businesses, lifestyle leaders, lifestyle employees. If they want to have the balance, it's important. It's a reset, the global reset.

And I don't know that I, why I would care. I mean, When this all started, I happened to be working with a CEO that really didn't like the whole concept of people working remotely, and I handed him a study, but before I handed him the study, I said, well, what's your real pain? I mean, be honest with me. I'm not going to go out and tell the other employees. He said, well, I just don't trust they're working when they're at home. I said, I think that's an understandable impression. I said, read this study by the U.S. Labor Department that shows when they're at work, their actual hours of productivity are a little over 4. So how do you know they're working when they're here? Yeah, yeah, I believe that too. And he, you know, he said, that's a great point, because I, I don't. I said, as a lifelong worker from home— I had an office at that point— but I said, lifelong working from home, I am more productive, I'm more balanced, I'm more chilled, I'm more creative. I'm all those things because I got my dogs here, I got kitchens there. It's my coffee, it's not your coffee. Um, if I want to take— if I want to get out and take a walk, it's in my neighborhood, right? Um, if I want to have lunch with my wife, I don't have to meet her somewhere. I can go into the, you know, out on the back deck and have lunch with her. I mean, it's 1,000% better, um, in the right environment, and you're more productive. So I think, you know, there's just those type of changes now that Yeah, you still get some old-school refusals, and there's some businesses that you can't do that with. I mean, there's just some businesses that have to be in person. I mean, that's just common sense. But for most of us, where we are is where we can be, where we work.

Yep, absolutely. So let's change, uh, subjects a little bit. So what, what do you like to do when you're at home? What do you like to do when you're not at work? Let's put it that way.

What are some hobbies? I live in Memphis, Tennessee, so I'm a— and I'm not a fan of music because I live in Memphis, Tennessee, or a fan of the Blues because I live— I was that way before I came. So I enjoy the Memphis music scene, and if you're a foodie, this is another good place to live. Our kids are grown, have their own families, and we, we— and I think my wife and I both We got to the empty nest part and went, what's the big deal? This is fantastic. My wife never mourned the leaving of the babies. And so we like having each other, you know, in the house to ourselves. We also like them being here. So it's— but it's just different. It's different. It's our space. We are dog people. We rescue dogs. We have a— he's around here somewhere— about a Pyrenees that is our most recent addition. He was rescued from a kill shelter, I don't know, 3 months ago. Macy, a lot now. He weighs about 105 pounds and he's just knocking around here like a champ. So, and we're supposed to be foster parents, but I think he's probably going to be a become our dog because we've just grown so attached to him. He's a character. Um, so we love dogs. We have two. We have, uh, him— that his name is Dax, after a town that's actually in the Pyrenees in France— and then Molly O'Shea, who is our Irish Wolfhound. They're both about the same age. They're both 8. So we have walking around the house about 250 pounds of dog between the two of them. And, uh, But we enjoy their company. I can't imagine, really, that's a big part of my life is the dogs. Um, I ride bicycles, love— I love road biking. Um, um, reading. I mean, I, I, uh, do some writing and other things. So, you know, it's a little mix of things. I'm a little bit of an attention span guy, so I, I stick my nose into a lot of things just to keep myself interested. But, uh, Yeah, so, so we enjoy— we've been in Memphis about 5 years. Really good city. It's called America's largest town because it's kind of got a town atmosphere, but it's, uh, it's about 800,000, 850,000 people, so it's far bigger than a lot of people think. Um, but, uh, yeah, all, all's good. And, and, uh, we didn't get divorced during the pandemic. I don't think we even got close. So we're happy about liking each other enough to make it through that. Um, but, uh, we have two grandkids. Those, we take time to be with them from time to time, and they come here to, uh, to spend, uh, weeks in the summer when they're not in school. Well, one of them does. One of them's still pretty young and actually lives in another country, but one lives in Atlanta, Georgia, so she comes up quite often. And, um, so we love— we like the grandparent gig. I didn't know if I would or not, but, uh, it's fun. So it's really fun. It's like having kids when you have time to have kids. And like when you have kids and you have no time to have kids.

Yeah, I heard it's a different relationship for sure. You said you were, um, well, I mean, I know you were traveling, uh, one of your kids lives overseas.

What was that trip like? It was good. Yeah. So we went, uh, oh boy. Uh, couple of weeks ago. Um, so, um, my daughter lives with her husband who's Danish. And their 3-year-old, our grandson Paxton, in Paris, France. And she's lived there for the last 3-plus years. Before the pandemic, we were over there a lot, then there was a long stretch, and now we're sort of working our way back to being over there more regularly. It was pretty— France is kind of back to normal, and Paris is kind of back to normal. I mean, they have what we have, which is a a nagging set of COVID cases that aren't insignificant, but they don't have the same fatality level. And so it's become for them, I think, a little bit like it's become for us, which is, you know, you're just gonna get the flu. And if you've had your vaccine, you won't have as bad a version of it. But we were there when all of the Parisians were on spring break. So it was really weird. It was really weird. I heard more English on the streets of Paris than I heard French for a 5-day period. But, uh, but lovely city. Great. I love, I love the French people and enjoyed it there. We lived in London for 3 years, so we got a lot of taste of all the countries over there while we were there.

Okay, so you lived overseas for a while. I've never spent any time in Paris. Uh, Very little time in London, but I love traveling and getting to explore new places myself. And so curious, what's your top 2 or 3 things to do in Paris if I get over there anytime soon?

Oh, well, I mean, it's a great walking city like so many of the European cities. You can just cover a lot of ground. The Musée d'Orsay is probably my favorite museum there because it's a little bit more digestible than the Louvre. Food's always great. I like the cafes. It's just the center of life there, and you just go sit down, have, you know, sit outside. The city itself is lovely, and my daughter's lucky enough to live in a very pretty part of it. So being outside there is great. The food's great. The arts are great. So, you know, there— it's in many ways all these large cities are similar. They have their own cultural characteristics, but they all have arts and sports and food and music and, and people that are, you know, unlike you, I like the aspect of meeting people who see the world a little differently than I do. And my wife and I often talk about the fact that when we— that moving abroad probably changed our kids forever because they were exposed to kids from all over the world. I don't see my daughter marrying a Danish guy, right, who happened to go to the same school she did when she was there. I don't see that happening if she— if he had not— she had not lived abroad. So it's, it's great. It's great experience. I— there are very few places I've ever gone that I didn't enjoy.

Some now seem a little too far to go, but, uh, but, uh, I just got back from a trip from, uh, Asia to the Philippines and Singapore, and my flight back was 18 hours.

Oh yeah, yeah, it was insane. I used to go over there quite a bit, um, and I think the, the one that felt the worst for me was Melbourne. Um, I mean, I love Melbourne, but getting there and back is a little— it's the only time as an adult I've said to the stewardess, are we there yet? Or to the flight, are we there yet? Because, because it was, it was a long time over water. But I enjoyed it. It's just, that's a long time in a plane. And by the time you left, I think when I used to go to Singapore, I figured it all up and it took almost 30 hours, you know, to get to the airport, get back, get—

I had to fly to Omaha at the time. So. Yeah.

Well, Omaha.

So I went, my flight got, let's see, I was almost not allowed to get on the plane because my paperwork wasn't in order. You know, with COVID these days, You just never know which country, which form you got to fill out, right? I get on the plane, we load half the plane, and then they come over the loudspeaker and say, we have to deplane because there's a flat tire. So as they were loading people onto the plane, evidently the front tire started to go flat. So then there was a 2-hour delay. So then I had to get rerouted because I was flying through Atlanta and I was going to miss my connection. So then they rerouted me to San Fran. And I had a 10-hour layover in San Fran before the new flight took off to get to Manila. And so when I— and this was by design, but not thinking about it at the time— when I landed in Manila, the plan was to pick me up in Manila and drive me 3 hours to the, you know, resort we were staying at. Yeah, right. So by the time I finally got to where I was supposed to be, and from when I started and the delays, it was 40 hours. It was 40 hours of travel. And I didn't know what country I was in, what time zone I was in, what dreamscape I was in. It was just a mess. And it took a lot out of me. And it takes a lot to take a lot out of me, but yeah.

It does, it does. That's a long time. We've changed our method now. It's not any— the story is not nearly as bad. But when we get to Paris, because we know we're going to encounter this 3-year-old on the other side of the trip, we actually stay at the, at the airport, the Sheraton there at Charles de Gaulle, which is really nice, beautiful hotel. We spend the night there and kind of gather our strength. Then we do the reverse coming back because we will have been with the 3-year-old for a week or more. And spend the night there before you take off the next day. That, that really helps decompress. That's a, that's, we have said, you know, we're going to make a habit of that if we go very far anywhere. It's just before we see anybody or do anything, we're going to go to bed for a few hours. And that's a great idea. Bearings. Yeah, it's hard.

Like, as soon as I landed, I planned to be, I'm just going to go hard and then collapse.

And I, that was a bad idea.

It was a lot of work. Well, this has been a good conversation, Michael. And I know you go by Carter, but for our viewers and our listeners, what's the best way for someone to get a hold of you if they want to reach out and touch base?

Well, I am reachable through yourcmo@yorcmo.com. So that's probably the best, best way to get in touch with me. And I'm like everybody else, I'm pretty attentive to email. Would love to talk to anybody who's interested. And I charge nothing to talk. So happy to just find out what's going on with people. Usually I'll learn as much as they might hopefully learn from me just from conversation.

So that's probably the best route. Good. Well, we'll have that detail in the show notes, but I thank you. And for all of our listeners, thanks for for listening to our stories and our talks. Hope you learned something, and I hope to hear, hear back from all of you soon. Thanks again, Carter.

Yeah, thank you, Joe.

Appreciate it. 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. Your CMO dot com. Spelled wrong on purpose.