The Achieve Podcast - Debra Andrews (Marketri)
In this episode of the Achieve Podcast, host Taylor Baker interviews Debra (Deborah) Andrews, founder of Marketree, a remote marketing agency serving middle‑market companies. Andrews explains how Marketree was created 22 years ago to address the outdated model of hiring one or two generalist marketers, instead offering a full‑service outsourced team. She describes the current organization—16 full‑time staff plus subcontractors—and emphasizes the importance of strong foundational processes such as timely invoicing, time tracking, and regular client communication. The biggest operational challenge she identifies is capacity and resource planning, which directly impacts gross margin and employee burnout. Marketree’s client acquisition relies heavily on referrals, LinkedIn networking, speaking engagements, PR, and increasingly on AI‑driven search (ChatGPT, Claude). The firm’s AI journey began with an internal AI council and roadmap, later hiring a Director of AI Innovation, Brady Lewis. Under his guidance they built named AI agents, most notably “Connie,” a content‑generation agent that eliminated a $10,000‑per‑month external copywriter expense while maintaining quality. Andrews stresses a human‑in‑the‑loop approach, upskilling staff, and using AI for tactical work so people can focus on uniquely human tasks. Looking ahead, she aims to help more companies shift marketing from a cost center to a revenue‑generating engine and is launching an AI consulting division. Key lessons include the need to prioritize people before clients, improve resource planning, and balance investments in talent versus technology. The immediate constraint she wants to solve in the next 90 days is the resourcing‑planning puzzle, leveraging operational data in Teamwork and AI to better predict hiring needs.
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Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited to be joined today by Deborah Andrews, the founder at Marketree, and you can find them at marketree.com. Now, Deborah, give us the backstory, cuz you've been in the space helping a lot of businesses for a while. How did you get here and who are you currently serving?
Oh, nice to meet you and thank you so much for having me on Achieve. I'm really happy to be here. Uh, I started Marketree 22 years ago, uh, really to fulfill a need in the middle market where the model was to hire one or two marketers and expect them to be able to do all things marketing. Even 22 years ago, it was challenging to do that. Now you look at marketing today and it's a discipline of specialties and the middle market model still prevails. However, they still bring on one or two marketers and expect them to be able to do everything from strategy and planning to event planning to social media, SEO. I could go on and on. And so Marketree was really formed to solve that need, to give middle market companies access to an outsourced marketing team that can do everything from strategy to execution to analytics.
I love that. Now, right now with the organization, how big is your team?
Yeah, we have 16 full-time people on staff. We're a remote company, and then we have some dedicated subs that give us some scale on a project basis. So if our clients say you need a website development project or a big rebrand, we don't keep creative or web development talent in-house. We have those on a subcontractor basis. All of our employees are experienced marketers that are AI curious and digitally bent. And have a lot of strategic acumen and so are pretty, um, skillful in working along lots of different clients and their growth plans.
That's awesome. Now, what would you say, looking back over the years, what has molded the way you think about running the organization?
That's a great question. Um, I think from the very beginning, even when we were much, much smaller, even just a few employees, or um, even thinking back further when I didn't have employees, I, I always thought about running it as a structured business. So, um, as an entrepreneur, I really had to lean into aspects of the business that I didn't necessarily like, but I kept a regular cadence, like always invoicing on time, always tracking my time to know where I was spending it, um, making sure that I was communicating with clients on at least a weekly basis, if not more. And so just making sure that I was kind of building strong foundations for the business that Obviously, as the business has scaled and gotten bigger, there's a lot more processes that we've layered in, but it's been a lot easier to do the scaling and growing having had the strong foundation. So today, same thing, even though, you know, we use a bigger financial technology stack like Harvest and Bill and everything to do all of that, we bill on time. We all track our time to really know how we spend our time and how efficient we are. We build best practices. We have very clear cadence around client communications. So some of the tried and true things that I had in place from the very beginning when I didn't have employees, to a few employees, to now 16, we've just continued to build upon that over time.
That's awesome. Now, as you guys try to grow and expand, what have been the biggest bottlenecks or obstacles that keep showing up?
The biggest bottleneck is when I talk to my team about all the time is planning. It's, it's resourcing and capacity planning. You know, a professional services business, you know, your product is your people. And they're also— it's also your most expensive line item on your income statement. So the kind of the secret sauce to the business is planning to make sure you always have a little bit of capacity in your business, but you don't want to have too much because that weights down your gross profit margin. So you planning enough, planning enough for, say, in case, you know, a client has to not work with you anymore for whatever reason, plan in case you land two newbie clients like within a week or two. So that's the biggest obstacle in the business. It's also the biggest opportunity is like having systems around how you do that. And obviously we have lots of systems, how we capacity plan and resource at Marketree. And also just to add to all that said, one of the biggest threats to our business is burnout. Um, when people in the business get too many accounts or you haven't planned well enough and I'd love to say we've never been through those periods, but I would be lying. We definitely have. And so I've learned from definitely mistakes over time, and we've gotten better about that. But that's, that's the biggest challenge for us.
That makes a lot of sense. And learning to regulate that through the different seasons of life and the seasons of the company. Wow. Now, when it comes to your messaging and your outreach, your marketing systems, what's been working well and where do you fill the gaps and frustrations?
So we are a marketing company, so we consult with other companies on their marketing. But I can't say we've always spent a lot of time on our own marketing, to be perfectly honest. We've gotten a lot more serious about it over the last couple of years. So what I can share is that we do get a lot of our business through referral. I would say probably good, less than half of our business we get through referral, client referrals, just people that know us, network through LinkedIn, LinkedIn Community. And the other part we get through various organizations that we're in partnership with, speaking engagements that we do. We have a pretty robust public relations program where we get articles and placements. But the biggest thing that we get as far as I would say our business outside of referrals is artificial intelligence now is getting referrals from ChatGPT or Claude or whatever frontier model someone's using to search for providers, because I think we're very specific about who we serve, what we do. There are competitors out there, certainly, but, but lots of different shapes and sizes. And so what we're finding are people are, are actually able to search for exactly what they want. And when they do find us, we happen to be a really good fit because we are different and we're kind of niche-oriented and we have certain vertical markets that we focus on. So, um, yeah, I would say AI search is, is up there for us.
That makes a lot of sense, and that's a big shout out and kudos to you guys. If 50% is from referrals, you're obviously taking care of your clients really well.
Thank you. Yes, we do. I love our clients. We're all about them.
That's awesome. And now, speaking on the AI and automation, because there's so much talk around it, where have you guys found ways internally to use it, and where do you still see opportunity on the table?
Mm. So, well, we definitely started our AI journey a few years ago knowing that it was going to be a big step change in marketing. So we, we began with an AI council and built our AI roadmap and leaned heavily actually on the AI, uh, show and Paul Reitzer and Mike Caput. Shout out to them for the education along the way as far as like how to really build like a strategic plan around AI. Through doing that, we start to put in place best practices for everything we do, leveraging AI, leveraging different prompts and different frontier models and tools and technologies and talk about them. But then last summer, we realized that we were kind of at the limit as far as where we could go. We knew we couldn't go past where we were moving into agentic automations and workflows and really scale our organization. So we hired a director of AI innovation last summer. His name is Brady Lewis, and he has really helped us see the full possibility of what AI can do. So just some things that we've done over the past year since Brady has joined is built a content agent. Her name is Connie. We give names to all these agents, and she gives us the ability to scale content generation content marketing, but not at the expense of authenticity and creating original content pieces. So there's a lot of human pieces around the use of Connie to make sure that we're at the perfect intersection of what should be human and what can be scaled through automation. And so, you know, a year ago, well, a little over a year ago, we were spending probably in excess of $10,000 a month on external copywriters because we didn't have them on the team. Dedicated subset of work with a while, and today we don't have any. And so that just gives you— that's one element of change in our business. I can tell you that the content we generate today is as good or better than what we generated a year ago, just from, you know, carefully creating something that really built upon our best practices, our point of view about what content marketing should have. And so that's been a, a big change for us. And, and now we're carefully building out other aspects of our work in sort of a similar fashion with agents that are specialized in certain areas of marketing, all connecting it within one ecosystem.
That makes sense. And I love that combination you're pulling together. Like there's still a human element, the realness, authenticity, maximizing AI.
Yes, exactly right. I think that's the hardest part is really knowing like what that intersection is and making sure that you are keeping a human in the loop. And, you know, as this is going on, it's certainly like changing the way some of our positions here at Marketree work. And that's requiring us to educate and upskill our employees so that they're using the technology in the right ways and that they're sort of leveling up in different areas such as creativity, strategic planning, things like that, getting ready for the era where AI starts to handle a lot more tactical work and, and we can do what's Uniquely Human, which is drawn on our experience working with clients over 22 years.
Yep. And no way I can replace that expertise.
No way.
That's so— that's, that's a, that's a narrow road to navigate, and that's awesome to see people doing that effectively. Now, Deb, when you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?
Oh my gosh, honestly You know, after 22 years, sometimes I still feel like we're the best kept secret around. I look forward to working with lots of new companies and helping them transform their marketing function into a growth engine. You know, in the middle market, sometimes marketing is still viewed as a cost center, you know, one that helps sales be more effective or keeps the brand visible and the brand consistent. But it might not be necessarily viewed as a revenue generator. And that's really what— that's our sweet spot. We like to help companies move their marketing from what might be a cost center to a revenue generation and profit center for the firm. And so I look forward to working with many more companies. Honestly, that's what keeps it really fun for me and for our employees. We'd love to see different businesses and we'd love to get embedded with them and help them realize success. Success. So that's one. And the other is obviously the use of AI technology. I'm— we're super curious here about technologies and how to leverage them, really not only to help our own organization, but we want to help our clients and future clients scale through AI automation as well. And so we are launching a whole new division of AI consulting to do just that.
That's awesome. And, and I love that, that concept you just articulated so well, like moving from a cost center to like, this is a not just keeping the brand loyal and aware, but bringing in new, like this is a revenue generator.
Yes. Where like I kind of view it offense defense. Defense, I don't know if that's the best word, but that's for your own internal operations. How do you bring efficiencies? How do you, gain margin through the use of AI technology, not at the expense of quality. The offensive is the new products, new products that you can launch, new service lines through the use of AI technology. So I think the last 18 months we've been more focused on the defense and now we're, we're leveling up and starting to see the offense with this, with this product launch. And we're really excited about it.
I love that. That's exciting to see. Now, when you look at your own journey, the mistakes, the wins, what lessons stand out to you? What do you wish you understood sooner?
Oh goodness, there's been so many, honestly. I mean, 22 years, you can't imagine like how many lessons learned. Um, I would definitely say that an early lesson for me was I, I always thought that the focus should be all about the clients, and there's nothing wrong with that. It should be all about the clients, but, um, you can't be all about the clients until you're all about your people. And for me, I've always been like very focused on, on the goal and the achievement and making sure that we're staying on track with clients. And you know, when I mentioned earlier about sometimes capacity might get ahead where people had too much on their plates, I think those are the points where we had stumbling blocks at Marketree where perhaps we'd lost really good people because we didn't hire fast enough or have the right resourcing resources in place. And so if I look back, it would have been focusing more on resource and capacity planning, ensuring that the people at Marketree were having a great experience. And because anything— our people are the products, our clients love our people. And if you're having people problems, then you're going to have client problems. And so That was definitely, you know, a lesson learned for me. And, um, I hope since course corrected, but you'd have to ask my people that, but we work really hard.
I'm sure they're all raving fans that way. And I, I love that concept. Anybody you're working with is your client, your people, your team, your, your family, your end client, anybody who uses your service products.
Yes, absolutely. And they want our people to be happy. So, um, but I think we're in a good spot now.
That's good, that's good. I'm glad you take care of your people well. Now, Deb, if you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve over the next 90 days, what would it be?
One constraint, I would say— I'm going to go back to the same thing. It's, it's resourcing and planning. We have You know, it's, it's challenging when you're building a pipeline and you have lots of potential clients in the pipeline at various stages. Some even have contracts, but they're not signed. And then you have your people. Like, when do you know when to go out and hire new people, right? So that is— that's always been the puzzle, that will continue to be the puzzle. I'm leaning on AI, to be honest with you, to help with some of the answers to that through— we have lots of operational data in our operating system called Teamwork that I can put into AI and it helps us figure out, you know, when we should be doing things. So that probably is our biggest constraint is like making sure that we're pacing properly in the business, like we have enough people. And, and the reason why it's so tricky now is because we're heavily investing in AI as well. So we're heavily investing in technology in you know, our Director of Innovation and things that he wants to do in building out our ecosystem. So we have to balance that with the investment of people. And so balancing those investments are probably— I wouldn't say it's a constraint, I would say it's a puzzle that we need to figure out and, and constantly be monitoring to make sure that we have the right balance of investment in each place.
That makes a lot of sense, and I can see that And it's an ever-moving ebb and flow target.
Yes, ever moving, right? Because you have a pipeline and all of a sudden within one week you could have a couple clients come in. Um, and then you— and when they do, I will tell you, typically when they make a decision, they're very anxious to get started within a week. Like, they don't want to say, okay, next month. They're like, no, let's set the meeting, let's get going. So it's always that balance of projecting ahead and knowing just the the right amount.
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Like, I decided yes, so I want it done yesterday.
Let's go! And you don't want to tell them no, you don't want to squash their excitement.
Yep, I can see that. Well, Deb, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing. Any final words for our listeners, other leaders, entrepreneurs?
Um, good luck. And you know, it's definitely an interesting time to be an entrepreneur, to be in business. Lean towards AI. Don't be afraid of it. Be AI forward. Draw on all the resources out there. Most of them are free, um, because I did. And I wish them the best of luck. I hope this has been helpful.
That's awesome. I'm sure it's been so helpful. And again, for those who enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, a colleague. Reach out to Deb and the team, Marketree. It's M-A-R-K-E-T-R-I.com. Reach out, see how they can help you and your organization. And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And so reach out and we will see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.
