Innovative Marketing: The Birth of Beers with Friends

Hello everybody. Welcome to Drink Up Podcast Live. We're actually, uh, it's been a while, uh, Adam, since we've run a happy hour, but we're running a happy hour with our friend, uh, Dana. Is it Hork?

Yes.

Yeah. I want to make sure I pronounce it right. Dana, welcome.

Thank you.

To Drink Up Live podcast. I do need to call out a couple of sponsors before we get started. So actually, thank you, Bev Assets, for the sponsorship. That's my company and Alicia Vargo's company, as well as Adam Smith, Alias Advising, is actually a promotion. And we always call out our friends at Freebird. As long as I have water, I'll be calling out Freebird here. So Jay Williams, you show up on everybody's feed on LinkedIn and somehow you've become an official sponsor of the podcast. But welcome, Dana. It's been a few weeks since we spoke and we get to have Beers with Friends today.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think this is an aptly named show and aptly named for Beers with Friends to come on.

Yeah. It's funny. It's, um, no, it's funny. Before we got started, everyone, I said beer with friends and Dana corrected me. But, uh, again, it's that Harvard education. She probably didn't want me to tell you that because I went to Bowling Green. I had to beg my way in, so I had to throw it out there. I'm sorry. But so, so you're, you're a marketing agency.

Yeah. So we're a creative agency. Um, but I have marketing background. I come from, I come from the, the brand side. I'm a longtime brand side marketer from, from places like Jet.com, Walmart, and Wonder. And yes, now have started a creative agency.

Oh, wow. So, so I guess we'll get into it and certainly want to hear your story. So how in the heck did you come up with the name Beers with Friends?

Well, the most important part is that it's better. Uh, it's better with more than one. So that's how the S got there instead of just Beer with Friends. We'll get to the punchline. We'll start with the punchline, I suppose. Um, but no, Beers with Friends is born from a few things. One, it's born from my experience. brand side where no matter the stage of company I was at or the size of the team or the amount of funding, I think ambitious brand builders always feel constrained by their resources. Entrepreneur in, in fact does. And when you're building a brand, you're effectively a brand entrepreneur. And, you know, the agency model is designed to give marketers that extra capacity to tap into. But unfortunately, the way the model is set up is that the agency of record model is really what everyone in the industry is driving for longer, bigger, slower, larger engagements. But the pace of modern marketing organizations has increased and marketers want agility, want flexibility. They want outside thinking and the best and correct and right brains, not just whomever's available. So, you know, I saw a real opportunity to create an innovative agency model that focused on being fast, being focused. We work on one client at a time and really bringing extra firepower to marketers. So that was one piece of how Beers with Friends was created and, you know, based on my experience brand side. And then the other piece of it is my co-founder, James Wood, is a longtime talented agency-side creative leader. We had actually worked together before. We were agency-client partners at Walmart and Publicis. And we just, we did a lot of great work together and we got together and sort of started pulling the threads of Why was this that way? And, you know, why did that project go the way that it did? And realized we had a shared vision around building a new type of agency model that had kind of this brand marketer ethos at the core. So those were 2 catalysts for Beers with Friends.

So I'm, I'm, I'm going to send us right down the rabbit hole because I'm already fascinated. I've been playing around on the website for the last 20 minutes. First time I've ever seen a A services website. I was going to say marketing, but just a services website of any kind that's so, um, like when I go to, you know, when I go to, uh, shop or I forget, I've forgotten where I clicked now, but it would, you know, select your industry, select your project size, select your, like, how has that been received? Because as I'm clicking it, I'm like, this is super cool, but holy shit, I'm a little turned around. Like, this is just such a novel experience, right?

Yeah, look, I think one of the biggest reasons that brands come to us is because they're looking for fresh thinking and an out-of-the-box perspective. You know, if they, if they had all the answers in-house, they would tap their in-house team, right? But it's impossible to have all that perspective. And sometimes you just want to get out of your own way. And so James and I said very early in our, in our agency that the things that we needed to do, you know, have a website and our email signature and how we set up our Legal docs, we wanted to do it in a way that projected the type of experience you would have working with us. And so a lot of this, and this comes back to beverages actually, we named it Beers with Friends, but the number one thing we hear from clients and prospects is that this is a refreshing experience.

Sure.

And the website brings that to life. I mean, we've literally productized our service offering. We built it on Shopify, which is very rare for a services-based business, let alone a creative agency. And we really leaned into the beverage and beer metaphors. You can go on our site and, you know, shop a beer run. You can look at how we can construct them into 4-packs or 6-packs or 12-packs. And to, you know, to work with us on retail.

You're talking to 2 beverage guys. We're like, oh, this is so cool, man.

Well, right.

Yeah. And so our website was really, was really one of our first proof points of that. And I'll say this too. is that I think one of our biggest value proposition is really creativity within constraints. And when we started, we felt very strongly that, you know, we both have, James and I have very strong track records from previous places, but we didn't want to, you know, pull in all this past work under our Beers with Friends shingle. We were gonna create new work out of this and use that for case studies. But when you're starting, you don't have that. So we had to turn, use our constraints. And think creatively and said, well, if we're just starting and we don't have work, let's make our website feel like our work. It's surprising. It's refreshing. It's unexpected. And that was really what pushed us to, to create a website.

So you show people how you're creative through your website and they're like, oh yeah, I want to work with those people. They're very innovative in what they can do and creative and how they bring the story together. Do you work with any beverage brands?

We have worked with beverage brands. Absolutely. And we work with a lot of CPG brands.

Okay.

So, so that's very much a part of our DNA. I was actually at Expo West earlier in the year and, and met a lot of brands. And, and so yes, we work with beverage brands. I spent a summer, my summer internship at PepsiCo. So I have, I have worked inside a large food and beverage brand. Yeah. And if people wanna check it out, I, I just, the marketer in me can't help it. They can go to bwfagency.com and check out our site.

I'm jealous you got to go to Expo West. Adam got to go to Expo West. You got to go to Expo West. I tried to get on a media pass and they told me no. Yeah. So anyway, maybe next year.

Maybe next year.

So if you're, if you're able, right? Because I'm, again, I'm playing, this is fascinating to me. My wife was a marketer with, she's switching careers. That's why I say was, she's still my wife. She was a marketer with folks like Wells Fargo and 3M. And, you know, to your point, creativity within constraint, banking and, you know, large format manufacturing.

And Sam and I talked about this, by the way, that I know from your client roster, I'm from Minnesota. So, so I know when you say those brands, I know where this is coming from.

Yes. Uh, and so I'm just, I'm, I'm, you know, most of what I know from marketing comes from her and I'm fascinated by the, the site as a whole, but I'm curious if you can talk about it. The Perfect Bar Fit Chiller check. Can you tell that story? Because I'm assuming it's fascinating and I'm trying to wrap my head around it and understand exactly what happened. And I'm, I'm coming up a little bit short. So if you wouldn't mind.

Absolutely. So we were in our earliest days and, you know, our principles were very much at the core. How do we work quickly, you know, bring an outside perspective? And so our client at Perfect Bar, this is actually, I'll show, I have one here. So they came to us with a brief that said, you know, we have this refrigerated bar. Um, and, you know, it has a longer shelf life. It can stay out of the fridge for longer, but our customers really prefer to consume it when it's chilled.

Sure.

But we're, we're looking to capture more of the on-the-go occasion. So you could, you know, throw it in your bag and it still can be chilled to the perfect temperature.

Yeah.

And so we used our Beer Run Sprint model to bring on a package, a food packaging engineer, and actually prototype what would a perfect fit, perfect bar chill pouch look like. Um, and, you know, we had requirements around, you know, it needed to stay at X degrees temperature for X amount of time. And we prototyped different things and, and we figured it out. And certainly the production time and all of that took longer. And we, we often stay on with clients for the execution phases after these.

So what's a sprint model? Is that basically a 90-day deal or something? You say, come on and do something, or how does that work?

We're going to make this into a clip. It's not 90 days, it's 5 days. So, so this end-to-end obviously took longer to manufacture. The ideation piece of our sprints, We pushed ourselves to say, what would be really refreshing? And we said, you know, can we do this in 5 days? And we went out and studied a lot of the best-in-class sprint examples from Google Ventures to Saturday Night Live, which is a sprint that needs to put out a show at 11:35 every Saturday. And we said, okay, let's borrow the ingredients from these places, reconstruct them into what makes sense for brand building and creative outputs and build a sprint model that is designed to tackle all different kinds of challenges, but has the same sort of principles and ingredients.

I mean, what is, what is this? I have to ask, someone's thinking out there. Okay. What does a 5-day engagement cost with you to do a sprint model?

They can come to bwfagency.com, get in touch, give us a brief, and we will let them know.

There you go. I love, I know this, Adam and I were just talking about this about our businesses, right? So we both consult, Right? We're not marketers. Now we help find customers and distribution. We have national feet on the street, but we're like, how do we get people to come play with us? Right? And there's an opportunity. Maybe we should be doing 5-day sprints.

Look, you, you can, I mean, I think, I think it comes down to what your superpowers are, you know, and what the world needs and how those things come together. And by the way, not every project and deliverable is best served by a 5-day sprint. I mean, we've, we actually were talking with someone today about this where they asked us about packaging design. We said, you know, look, which, which is obviously big for beverage brands. And we said, look, you know, I'm not sure yet that doing that through a sprint model is, is in service of, of what's best for the client. Maybe getting an AOR, hammering them for 9 months and, you know, tweaking everything. I think it's great for what's possible. We wanna do something outta the box, like what could we do? But all of the rounds and really the technical specs and all of that. is probably better served through a, a longer time horizon project, and that's totally fine. And, and I think we're very selective with the types of projects and we're certainly selective with the types of clients that we take on. You've really gotta have the right mindset and DNA to wanna work in this process and bring your organization along with you.

So I, I gotta, I gotta call out some things. I'm clicking through the shop all beer runs, right, as we're talking. And my favorites thus far, how do I light this money on fire? Hot shit ideas in a can and need cool shit for the board meeting. Right. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Because the number of times, right, the number of times, specifically, how do I light this money on fire and need cool shit for the board meeting? As the ops guy, I'm like, I literally had a call today. They're like, could we get more, uh, more samples to go out for— Okay. Quick story. You tell me if this resonates, Sam. I know it will with you. So I got asked, hey, can we, can we make sample cans and fill them with water, but so that we can showcase new artwork? Sure. Used to run a pilot facility, still very close with the folks that do. We used to do it all the time, got it set up, did it, sent it to them, told them more times than I could count, you know, 7 times to remember it, told them 8, whatever it was, right? These are samples. They're filled with water. Don't open them. Like, it's tonic water. There's preservatives. It's not— it's gonna be—

Yeah.

I swear to God, one call today, and we're discussing the existing, uh, The stage that we're at in the reformulation process, right? Because while we're doing production, we have all these things going on over here. Over here, we're working on adjusting the formula, right? And one of the sales guys goes, yeah, the recent sample I tasted was just really, you know, it was really flat. It was really, you know, there was nothing to it. There was no body. There was no flavor. And somebody else goes, did you open the can that I gave you? And he goes, yeah, why? And we're all going like, that was water. You tasted water. And he's like, well, that makes sense why it seemed really light. Boys and girls. Really? And then the question was, well, hey, we need more samples for the board meeting, for the whatever. And I was like, we're having production in 12 days. Can you wait 12 days or do we really need to spend several hundred dollars between shipping and everything to get this done? So I just, I need shit for the board meeting. Beautiful.

Yeah.

Uh, so my, my question that comes of that ramble and eye roll is Again, selfishly speaking for myself, but I think this will apply.

Hey, we reversed our roles, by the way. I'm the thinker on this one today.

So, so say I'm a brand that, you know, I see all this stuff on here and I see the case studies and the rundowns. It all sounds great, but like, I'm so green. I don't even know where to begin. Do I just fill out the contact form and go, here's what I'm doing, help?

Yeah. I mean, look, most client projects don't Start immediately with the need. They start with a relationship that we've had with someone.

Sure.

For a period of time, whether it's folks we've worked with in past lives, people we've known socially, what, what have you. So you don't need a burning need to reach out and say, these people seem interesting. We should grab a virtual beer and explore ways to support one another, whether it's now or down the road. So that would be my first answer, which is You don't need a fucking emergency to, to reach out. We, we, we wanna be there. So when you need to bat phone someone, you know, to call us. And by the way, we bought a phone number, 640-BEER-RUN, so that we could say, we are, we're your agency on call. Literally, you can call us.

640-BEER-RUN is your number?

Yes.

That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, you know the, you know the song Beer Run, right?

There's a bar. I know a lot of things Beer Run. There's a bar in New York City called Beer Run.

Okay. Yeah. There's a, there, yeah. B-E-E-R-U.

I'm gonna be going to the sprint to see if she can rework our website.

Yeah. So that's the first thing, but yes, I know. Look, I would say you don't need, you don't need a hot burning mess to reach out. Feel free to reach out just to say hi. You know, 2, I would say what is different about our model is that when there's an active project to pursue, people You know, it requires clients meeting us halfway. So they're able to write a good brief and say, this is, you know, who we want to get to do what, why they aren't doing it now. Like they've thought it through. We're not figuring out what we're doing while we're engaged. We figure it out before, and then you turn us on and we, we, we go and we sprint and, and we're all clear on the deliverable before we get into it. So there's no surprises. So people love it.

So let me, so let me ask some questions about, maybe you answered this earlier, but I guess was this like, hey, I'm just gonna open up beers with friends. How's the journey been? What's been the good, the bad, the ugly, the great? Kind of walk us through that.

I mean, you know, so the, there's lots of, lots of great pieces. So one, I've been entrepreneurial my entire life. So starting anything, whether it's an initiative within a large corporation or your own business, that is not new to me. And I enjoy that energy and, and, and that challenge. So I think that was expected, a great Part of this, I think a second piece is that James and I had worked together before. We had done some great work together. We're both really proud of it. And we had a foundation that was key to building Beers with Friends. And so I think that's been great. You know, I think we've been also very lucky. Another silver lining in all of this is that, you know, James and I have been in this industry a long time, whether it's client side or agency side. Almost all of our clients have been You know, people that know us and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know what we're gonna get with you. We know you're an idea machine. We know you think outside the box. Like, we know you make great work. Let's skip to the part where it's like, what should we do and how should we do it and when should we do it? So we've, we've been very lucky to start with, um, some, some great brands and, and great, great contacts that have been part of, you know, our career.

So is this your first company, second company, third company?

Oh, I have to do the math. No, I've been an entrepreneur before. I mean, so it, just to give one example, actually, in college, if you can remember back in the day when people used physical money, um, you know, I can, of course, I'm the oldest person on this call. But you remember bills and coins, I'm assuming. You know, I'm a, I'm a white space spotter. So, so when I was a college student, I noticed everybody in their dorm rooms had loose change piling up. And when you're moving out at the end of the year, nobody knows what to do with it. So I started a 501 called Change for Change that was about helping college students pool all that money together, building process and infrastructure around learning about local causes, choosing something local to give it to, and helping people get, get rid of their change, you know, and, and really, you know, bring to life the value that, you know, even small change can make a big difference. So, so, you know, I, that was something that I did in college. In, in elementary school, I had, you know, we had a business day as part of the curriculum and My friends and I created a birthday calendar. So if we had just thought about Facebook, who would've known? But we, we sold, sold birthday calendars so that everyone in the grade knew what day everybody else in the grade's birthday was as part of our business project. So I—

Are your parents entrepreneurs, by the way?

Yes. Yes. My parents are, my grandparents are.

Yeah. I, I, I've read that. I've read, I've read in literature or whatever that usually if you come from that type of environment. I'm in the middle of being in that type of environment. You're a product of your parents and grandparents, right?

Yes. No, I mean, my, you know, my grandparents were entrepreneurs, great-grandparents. Like we just have the DNA. My, my cousin, Kobe Wagenfeld, shout out to him. He's an entrepreneur, um, and has a great business. So we're all just building stuff.

Yeah. Because we're all programmed to think the 15th and 30th is a guarantee for employment. And I was, Or safety, right? It's a safety net. The reality is there's a better safety net being an entrepreneur if you're willing to put the time and effort in, because it's not for the faint of heart. I'm assuming like you've had tough times. If you can share, like what's been your toughest time on your journey? Like what have you run into? Maybe it hasn't been, but has there been times where you're like, man, I just need to hang it up and not keep on going?

No, it's, it's ever gotten to that point. I mean, I think with any entrepreneur, you are creating your own momentum. So you have to restart your own engines, right? If you ever have one of those moments. So if anything gets hard, not pushing through it, there's, there's no one to blame but us, right? And, you know, getting back up and saying, okay, we're going to try this, try this again, or try this a different way. But, you know, I just, I view everything as a learning. And, and I think our earliest, I think our clients even today have benefited from us. I think they, they see our vision. They want to be a part of it. They're giving us feedback as we go and, and we're taking it all. And so I think we attract entrepreneurial clients and folks with entrepreneurial mindset because of that. Yeah.

So it's interesting. We always ask a question and you've kind of already answered it, but we always ask, what's the difference between success and failure? And I believe you answered that question, right? Or no?

What did I say? I don't know. Did I answer? Tell me what I said that was so great.

Well, you said you push through, right? You don't hang up the cleats. You keep on going, right? And then your, your clients actually appreciate that because you've had that experience. as an entrepreneur. So you attract entrepreneurs into your business because of that. But I always do ask, what is the difference between success and failure?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, I probably would actually answer that. I actually think if we want to, you know, get a little heady about this, I think, um, I think failure is, is subjective, not objective. And I actually think that the idea that quitting is, is failure is something that isn't always true. So in the case of this business, right? Like, We may try things and it may not work. And we may say that didn't work. It wasn't failure and it's not quitting. It's learning, right? And progress. Similarly, I've had things in my life where, you know, I've, I've held onto this extracurricular activity or, you know, I've committed to something longer than I should have. And actually saying no and stopping is success and victory and saying, this doesn't serve me, or this isn't right for right now. Actually, Change for Change is an example of that. I did that for a long time and And thought about, you know, rebooting it and reimagining it. And I said, you know what? You know, I, um, I want to focus on other priorities. This just isn't a priority for me right now. Put it to the side and I never view it as failure and I never view it as quitting. I view it as it served me for what it was. And I'm so proud of what we did. And that was great for that time. So I'm going to answer your question with yes.

And well, you know, it's funny because that probably puts you on the path to where you're now, because someone told me. It's often not where you don't end where you begin, right? So it's just your learnings put you on different paths and that's my experience. And as long as I've been on the planet here, that everything I've done before I've gotten here today has actually been a learning to get me where I'm at today.

I feel similarly. And, you know, I don't feel like I quit client side and, you know, to go to the agency side, it all just feels like moving forward and building experiences and finding You know, what, where I can have the greatest impact and support this world and the people in it in the best ways right now. And that may be different in 10 years than it is now, but I'm having a great time doing what I'm doing right now.

That is awesome. So what is, what has been the key? Like, like what is like the key learnings you've gotten, like you share with your clients? So they come in on the sprint. Like, how does that work? Are you, do you have like an intake situation? They come in, they talk to you. And then I'm going to back it up with another question, but I'll re-ask it. But is once they come into Sprint, do they stay with you? Do you convert them to like a longer-term agreement with you or how does that work?

Yeah. So a couple of things. I think we're very open with prospective clients about what types of clients make for great clients and where, what types of clients get the most value out of our process. So like I said, clients with an entrepreneurial mindset, clients who are clear on what, what they want to get to. Clients who value focus. I think that's one of the scarcest resources we have this, in this day and age is the ability to focus. And clients that value focus and, you know, find a lot of value in our model. I think clients that realize that they don't know all the answers and are looking for fresh perspective, like those clients get a lot of value out of our, out of our model. And I think, you know, similarly, we've learned through our process that You know, not clients with a complex decision-making structure, you know, with 10 other clients behind the client don't always make great clients for us. And we, we say to them, look, I totally appreciate your org is structured this way. I've, I've worked in organizations like that. Either invite everybody to the party, you know, have them come. That's what we designed this for. They're coming and looking at the Post-it notes, whether you're the most junior person on the team or you're the CEO of the business. You know, we've had clients, we are gathered around a whiteboard, everybody from the CEO on down, and we're all just workshopping it. Those are the best engagements. And if clients want, wanna stage it and, you know, go run it back and get feedback and come back, you know, we just have to have longer engagements. So that's just a little bit about the types of conversations we have with prospects and what makes for a great client. And then for, for recurring engagements, so you're, you've hit the nail on the head, which is, you know, the marketer brain in me is like, okay, well, building a business of one-and-done customers doesn't make for a lot of longevity or predictability. How might we get around that? And what we actually discovered was clients were converting from their first beer run into future beer runs. So, so they might have a recurring need, which is like, wow, we have seasonality in our product. We'd like to bring you on every quarter to come up with a campaign for this product evolution that we have every quarter. Or, hey, we're marching to launch and we have a sequential need to build Our brand over several beer runs. Maybe it's our brand identity, then maybe it's our, uh, communication strategy. Maybe it's the identity for our chatbot. Maybe then it's the visual identity for the chatbot, right? Whatever it is. So we've actually found that first-time beer run clients convert into our 4-packs, 6-packs, 12-packs, and they get benefits from doing that. We're a first-come, first-served agency. Mm-hmm. So we have 52 tables a year, and if we're booked, we're booked. But our pack clients can, can book us in advance and, and schedule their dates in advance.

And, and, you know, people are finding that predictability is I just feel like Bev Asks should be using all this language in our agreements, but, uh, I'm sure you've trademarked it all, whatever. I need to get like agreements that I can use it. But we do like a 90-day deal and it's like 30 to 90 days. We're like, hey, look, this could take 30 days. It could take 90 days. Let's align on the scope of work that we're gonna do. But what's really interesting, um, with my partner, 90% of 'em have been with my partner for 3 years or longer.

Yeah.

Because they just tend to stick around and, and then we move 'em to the next phase, which you have the, the feet on the street, right? Same thing. And they're like, okay, now that you've gotten distribution, now you got customers, you know, meet Adam, he's gonna help you with packaging or whatever. But we just, we always give them something of value along the way and to keep them with us. Right. And we always tell everybody, we wanna grow with you, but like we just did a person today, we're gonna open up Tampa with them. Like, look, we're gonna waive our state fee. We're gonna make it so incredibly easy. Let's just get you going in Tampa. And if Tampa goes, then we'll, when Missouri opens back up after the season, I mean, the season comes back next spring, we'll go Tampa. But to Missouri.

Yep.

And it seems to work that way in terms of timing.

Well, I think we share that point of view and philosophy in that we try not to scope projects until we know what they are, right? So, trying to get the math right and scope an engagement, you know, including, let's go, you know, we're gonna scope you to execute this thing, but we don't even know what the thing is yet. Doesn't make a lot of sense. It's a guessing game to figure out who got the math right. And So we're, you know, we're confident people love working with us and then we'll scope the next engagement. We know what it is.

Yeah. That's interesting. All right. Thinker.

Well, I'm going to go back to the, the Perfect Bar story, but, but really, I mean, this can apply to anything you've done. I'm curious when it comes to the, so you do the 5-day sprint, you come up with the idea, uh, you know, you, you come up with the idea, you put some, some Meat on the bone, if you will, of the idea, right? I guess to put it bluntly, like, did you know a food scientist prior to working on that project? How long did it take you to like, cause it's gotta be like, I'll give you an example, right? The, the, or, or maybe play out the question a little bit further, like to hear you say, hey, we did a 5-day sprint and came up with this idea. Cool. I would've expected that based on just thinking, you know, marketing ideation, creative solutions. Great. The fact that you said like, we stuck around to see it through kind of surprised me. So I guess my question is for whether it's that example or any, whatever one you want to use, like what does sticking around to see it through look like? Because I'm hearing like we brought on the ops people, we brought on the scientists, we brought on the, you know what I mean?

Yeah. I mean, so in, so I think this, this, the pouch case study, um, is, is not necessarily like, we're not an industrial design firm.

Sure.

And so, you know, that was one where we did actually know someone who was a food packaging engineer and it worked out perfectly. And, and I think that was a case where, you know, we had a, we had a vested interest in making sure it came to life correct way. We were learning, we were early, et cetera. I think the way we've evolved the offering since then is to say, clients come to us with a lot of different execution needs. Sometimes they come and say, we know we're going to need your help end to end. We don't have the resources and we're raising our hands for that now. And a lot of times what we find is our clients are coming with great execution partners already. They've got either an internal team that can take a lot of stuff. They've got other vendors and partners and they just wanna, they want the big idea and they want that big thinking and then they'll see it through and, and everything in between. So honestly, I think, I think people are coming for the big, big thinking. And then we just have a conversation with clients to figure out what do you need? We don't let like spending any time on things they don't need. So we love figuring out how to best help them, you know, when there's gaps.

Yeah. It reminds me of, and I ask, and maybe this will, I don't know, maybe this will just be fodder for, for other points to make, but it reminds me of, who were we talking to? It was a gentleman who said he had gotten, it was a, it was an e-commerce conversation and he'd gotten, he was doing some work with a brand and they were working on their conversion online and They put a question at the end of the purchase, right? So you've checked out and they put a question and said, hey, if you have a second, we would love to understand what made you almost not buy. Right. And the overwhelming, I think you said they got 600 responses and 540 of them were the video on the original page was too long. Right.

Hmm.

And so they went back to the brand and said, okay, well, this was the feedback we got. And the brand said, Well, we can't shorten it because every time we've ever tried to shorten it, our conversion rates plummet, our sales plummet. Okay. And so the solution there was, well, do you have the tool on the little video bar to watch it at a faster speed, right? At a faster rate? Can you do 1.25, 1.5, 2 times, right? And they said, no. They put that on the site. And I think they've said conversions jumped like 12% overnight or something. Right.

Yep.

And so again, just that like creativity within constraint. And that's where, you know, 'cause as the ops guy, right, what I always get is, is marketing had this great idea and I get to be the bearer of bad news coming in and going, well, not quite. We can do it. We can't do it tonight. Right. But it can be done. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And I think, look, you know, I think, um, that's why we always encourage people like, let's meet, you know, meet whenever, even before there's a need. We start with the brief and your job is to tell us what you need. And our job is to tell you, you know, how we can get there and what the trade-offs are in getting there. And just one point on feedback, we actually, you know, I'm sharing my, my brand side roots openly here. We actually do a project-based NPS after every client engagement because we really want to know.

Yeah.

And, you know, we just came off a beer run last week and I'm just We got 10s across the board. I kid you not. And you know, the quotes were things like, I'm blown away by the creativity in a hurry. So actionable and ownable and thorough. Wow. Or the perfect combination of strategic and creative strength with outstanding service and execution is gravy. Um, and the last one was running an emerging brand with a lean team that is moving mountains means that efficiency and excellence are paramount. However, having both at the same time is typically a challenge. Working with Beers with Friends gave us both. to the max. So we asked, those are real live quotes from last week.

And somebody—

Do you put those quotes on your website? Do you put those—

We're going to, yeah, we have a lot from our, uh, this one, these haven't gone up yet. We, we, uh, we were just looking at them today, but you know, you've gotta measure, you've gotta measure what matters. And, you know, look, the, the funnel between delivering great work as a creative agency and having it in the world and then business results, like that can take months. Right? It can take months, but we can measure right now how impactful our work was to a brand who's now taking it and running with it. And so we should measure that in addition to the business impact and all the longer-term stuff.

So that, that brings a question to mind and, and it's funny, I have not heard anyone say the word NPS since my days at Best Buy. So thank you for bringing up those memories.

No, no, I mean, it's—

What does NPS stand for, please, for us rookies here?

Oh, sure.

Net Promoter Score.

National Promoter Score?

Net promoter score.

So you're scoring yourself, your clients, give me a score between 1 and 10.

Yeah. So the question is, how likely are you to recommend us to, you know, a friend or family or colleague, depending, you know, depending what business you're in. And the, the theory is that it's the best measure of how, what advocacy around your product or your experience. So, yeah. So if you're, if you're willing to tell other people about it, it's gotta be great cuz that's how a business grows, right? That's how you Um, you know, have virality and, and word of mouth is if people actually wanna talk about, talk about you to others. And so you just measure it with a, a simple question. Normally most businesses do it on a, you know, if you're an e-com business, they'll do it at a particular cadence. Yeah. But in our case, because we're project-based, we just adapted it to a, a project.

Yeah. So we do like, if we do a beer run, right? A sprint.

Yep.

And, and engagement. Hey, can you gimme an NPR, um, national, what do you call it?

Net promoter.

Net promoter score.

Yeah. I would like to get a net promoter score. And by the way, how, uh, how are you gonna, would you, would you recommend Send me to 10 of your friends.

Yeah, well, you, you, how about this? You can NPS me after this, this, um, this recording is done and say, how likely would you recommend someone come on this show? And I can give you a score and I'll say, and then you ask a follow-up question. Say, what's—

okay, we're going to, we're going to do, we're going to do that.

You'd love to, you know, that you'd recommend it. And I'd say they asked great questions, they were thoughtful, they, you know, They were open about when they didn't know things, you know, what have you. Honest.

Thank you. I'm getting real life feedback right here, right now. So this is good.

Well, and I, again, I promise there's a question that comes to the end of this, but I've found the longer I've been in this industry and the longer I've just been, you know, working period, there's, there's always this, or it seemed anyway, I guess in, in, in the early days of me getting into, you know, commercial manufacturing, let's call it. There's always this, this old adage, like, oh, you know, sales and ops are going to be at odds with one another. Marketing and ops are going to be at odds with one another, right? Because again, I've got to be the guy that comes in and delivers bad news. And what I've realized over time is, and shout out to like my buddy, um, Dylan Jones or Adam Callanan from Pentane or any number of brilliant marketing people that I've had the luxury of meeting, uh, with good fortune. Where we, where we connect, where we're kindred spirits, if you're a true marketer and you can tell me if I'm wrong, Dane, or not, is in a fanaticism over the data. Right. Over the information, over, over tracking and logging and figuring out what worked and what didn't, because I spent a lot of time around marketers who were just very ethereal and very, and there's nothing wrong with being creative. Absolutely. The creatives have their place in it, but if you're going to actually get something done, we have to define things. Right. And so the question that comes to that to you is when you talk to, you know, whatever the brand is, big, small, whatever the product type is, Because I've experienced it. I've gotten pushback on, and not in an aggressive way, but just in almost a trepidation of defining things or in tracking things. And so how do you navigate that? Is it a very like, hey, if we can't define what the problem is, we can't help. Is it, hey, we can help you define the problem, but you've got to let us. How do you navigate that conversation?

Well, we've developed our own brief template. We call it the party starter. And one of the key questions is, what does success look like? What's, what's the KPI? We have a second question where we force people to rank order a bunch of preset answers, because I, if you just have an open-ended question, you'll say, I wanna sell more widgets and I want people to love our brand and I wanna gain resonance with consumer segment X, Y, and Z. So we really, so then we ask a second question where we've, we've, we've prefabricated choices that they have to prioritize.

Sure.

Things like hitting my KPI, getting my brand right, you know, breaking through. Um, you know, not piss— not pissing off my team. I don't think that's in there, but yeah. And so we have a pretty clear sense of what success looks like before we kick off a project. So, yep. I feel like we've solved for it in that way.

No, I, I, I love that. And I'll shut up and let Sam talk for a second. But literally I was, I was going through this with, with a brand that, that Sam and I know together and they're good folks, right? I won't, I won't name names for the sake of this being taken incorrectly, but they're good folks. They have a wonderful business. I would, I would support them and promote them to anybody, but That's part of the conversation we've had is, um, you know, I've asked the question of, well, okay, you know, we've, we've said that these 4 things are what we want to work on. How would you prioritize them? Well, they're all a priority. If that's the answer, then none of them are priorities. So you have to rank order them. I'm not saying we can't address them all, but we have to start somewhere, right?

Yeah, no. And actually, James and I have had a lot of conversations about this because as a, as a As a marketer, as someone with a marketer brain and a, and a longtime client, it's easy to wanna do all the things. And choice and doing something and not doing something else is exactly what drives tension and creativity. And that's really hard to buy into because from a business perspective, you wanna sell to everyone, but creatively you've gotta stand for something and not stand for something else and find something with tension. And that is often around, that conversation is often at the core of a lot of our client projects. You know, you, you, if you do every, if you try to do everything well, you, you probably won't do anything well. And so you've really gotta figure out where you wanna lean in and that's, you know, great marketers know where to place their bets.

Interesting. Well, so, so last couple minutes here. Well, we can stay on a little longer cuz I wanna make sure that you convey to everybody, you know, a little bit about your business, but, and we'll do this now actually. So what would you wanna share with everybody here? What What are the like 3 or 4 things you want people to take away from our conversation today about Beers with Friends?

Yeah, I think for, for the segments of folks that, that are listening within your audience, you know, that finding a way to break through and stand out in a crowded shelf or a, you know, crowded aisle or a crowded e-commerce page requires doing things differently, and that requires thinking differently and might also require different types of teams, partners, and ways of working. And anybody that's building something is probably thinking about that from the point of view of their product. And, you know, how are we different? What's our value proposition? But they might not be thinking about how to make decisions globally within their business. To do that differently. And so brands that hire folks like us realize that the traditional way of working or the traditional types of resources might not serve them in their goals. And so I would just encourage folks, you know, whether it's us or other independent agencies or other independent partners that, you know, even outside of marketing, push yourself to think differently, to listen to people who have a point of view and try different things and see what works for you. Um, but if you're, if you've got a vision on your product, pull that out to the rest of your team and find, find innovative ways to work more broadly.

I love that you ended up with, you have a vision for your product, because I always tell people, I call it destination, but your destination will inform your mission because your mission's what you're going to develop in order to get there, right? And then you develop your whats and hows. And from that, you have your objectives, goals, strategies, measures. So it's, you know, it doesn't have to be difficult to build the roadmap, but if you don't know where you're going, you're never going to get there at the end of the day. So I love that.

Absolutely. And I would add to that too, that I think business, business strategy and brand strategy are 2 different things.

Yeah.

And they're related.

Yeah.

But you may have, your business strategy may change. You may change your distribution, you may change your pricing, you may change your positioning in the market, but sort of your, your whys and why you exist and why you get up every day and the values that you want to bring, make transparent to the outside world, those, those should Be consistent across those business ups and downs.

Yeah. That's amazing. Amazing. So how do people find you?

Yes. They can find me on LinkedIn, Dana Horck. Um, they can find Beers with Friends at bwfagency.com.

Okay. And as a matter of fact, it's fun. You can't forget Beers with Friends. No one can at the end of the day. And it's been, it's been a great discussion today. Adam, any final thoughts for you?

Yeah. I mean, I think 2 things, and this is one of them I've said on a on a recent podcast that we were doing, but the quote that always, a couple quotes always come to mind when we're talking about stuff like this is, you know, forget who I was listening to, some celebrity, but they said, you know, Sam, to your point on figuring out, you know, kind of the end goal and working backwards from there is, you know, you hear people say, right? It's probably when I was living in Vegas, I'm going to be famous someday. Well, someday is not a day on the calendar, right? Like August 17th, 2040 is a day on the calendar that you can work backwards from. But if you just, you know, if your target is someday, good luck, right? And the other that comes to mind with, with everything Dana's saying is, um, show my colors here. Ozzy Osbourne obviously recently passed, right? Rest in peace, Ozzy. His guitarist, one of his guitarists, Zakk Wylde, was doing an interview and they said, how did you come up with your sound? Like the sound that you're known for as you played with Ozzy, right? Because he's got a very, if you know his music at all, it's a very distinct sound as compared to some of the other guitarists that were with him. And he said, well, I just sat down and went through what everybody else who had worked with him up to that point had done and went, well, I can't do that. 'Cause he did it and I can't do that 'cause he did it and I can't do that 'cause he did it. And so I got to the point where I could only use a certain musical scale and I had to get creative within that scale. So again, creativity within constraint. And now he's like, that sound is one of the most recognizable. Um, I mean, you could, I could hear that, that, that scale, that tone, that, that music coming out of any bar, restaurant speaker. I mean, it doesn't matter where I'm at. I'm like, that's Zach Wild. I know exactly who it is because of the constraint that he put on himself and the creativity that he came up with in it. So I love the point you made on that, Dana.

Yeah. Well, thank, thank, thank you, Dana. Thank you, Adam. Dana, I'll just give you one more time. Any final closing thoughts from you about Beers with Friends? I always have to, I have a sponsor I got to bring. Uh, you have to, I have to introduce you to Jay. Matter of fact, you probably could do some work with Jay. This Jay Williams, you got to follow Freebird. You'll see what he does on LinkedIn. You're probably like, oh, that's like marketing brilliance. He literally just talks about anything like a stream of thought and everybody in the world loves him on LinkedIn. And then he's tied it into this brand called Freebird, which he saw a white space. Obviously we know who Liquid Death is, right? And he's found a white space with this. And it's like, who names their water after the song Freebird? Because I think about Lynyrd Skynyrd when I think about Freebird, the song, but which is amazing. Uh, and he I guess that's your closing thoughts, and I guess we'll just leave it at that.

Yep. Sounds good. Yeah. Anyway, if this resonated with anyone, feel free to reach out. Happy to connect.

Okay, great. Well, I hope this has been a great show. Thanks everybody for joining us on the happy hour. I hope you're enjoying your favorite beverage wherever you may be. We'll be here live on Saturday, I believe, Adam, with everybody at 9:30 AM Central Standard Time. And we'll let you know who our guest is tomorrow. Hopefully our guests show up and we'll do the— what's that score again we have to get?

Net promoter score. We'll get the net promoter score.

That promoter score, uh, from Dana, anybody that was watching this, you can certainly send in a score 1 to 10. Tell us where we can improve or you would recommend us to come on the show. But thank you everybody. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody.