Marketing Interview with Gaydon Leavitt

Hugh: Hey, this is Hugh Ballou. My guest today is Gaydon Leavitt. His friends call him G. G, I hope I can call you that. I am your friend, right?

Gaydon: Absolutely.

Hugh: I met G recently, and I was just blown away by the level of his expertise in marketing and the level of the programs he has to offer those of us who are social entrepreneurs. We are working in a vacuum sometimes, and we think everybody ought to clamor to our door. But we really have not developed a marketing strategy to attract those people to the value that we have. G, welcome today.

Gaydon: Thank you for having me.

Hugh: We have a very dedicated group of social entrepreneurs who are changing the world. We don’t have a corporate job by choice because we have a value proposition that is just awesome. But we are stuck. Tell us a little more about your background. Why is it that you are qualified to talk to us about marketing? I know, but give us a little snapshot for people that are listening today.

Gaydon: Marketing is the only thing I have ever done. There’s that. I worked at Ford doing the digital agency movement. This was in 2004-2006; this was before social media if you can imagine. At that time, I was really in charge of building an Internet department, getting CRM up and running. That was back before CRM was common. Everyone knows what a CRM is these days usually.

Hugh: Tell us what that stands for.

Gaydon: Customer Relationship Management software.

Hugh: Is that Ford Motor Company?

Gaydon: Yeah. This was at a regional group of dealerships. I was working for them and basically getting infrastructure in place. The punchline is that I did that for long enough—CRM, website, search engines, all that stuff. I was at the forefront of that. Once I got it set up for them, I knew that everyone else needed it. I started a digital agency. Back then, it wasn’t called a digital agency, but now it is. These days, digital agencies are really commonplace. A lot of companies do websites, search engine optimization, and social media. I was at the forefront of all that. Most people who know my background know that the real driver for what I’m doing is always being on the bleeding edge of the market, the innovation side of the market. When it comes to marketing, I am always looking for where it’s going and try to steal ahead.

Hugh: Let me get this straight. You do things that work in real life. This is not just theory?

Gaydon: Not at all. To give you an idea, I started my company January 1, 2007. It was actually January 2 because the city office wasn’t open January 1. The point is, 2007 was not the greatest year to start a business, it turns out. 2008 rolled in, the recession took its toll, but I grew our company 235% four years in a row. We did 700 client engagements, well over a million dollars. We were having a ball. We were having a good time. What happens was through the middle of a recession and growth, I became one of the top people in my field in the West, as it were, certainly in our state, which is the marketing capital of the universe.

In 2012, I woke up. After having done strategy and digital services for 700 customers, I had really curated a case study. The 700-business case study. I knew what was going on because I was knee-deep in strategic marketing relationships with these 700 businesses. What I did was I compiled the data as it were. I put together the things that I knew were a problem. I knew people were missing. I did what I called root-cause analysis. This goes back to theory of constraints and other things I studied. I did a root-cause analysis to figure out what are the real problems in the SBM or small entrepreneurship space. What are they doing wrong? Who are they hiring? Why are they hiring them? Why are the engagements working? Why are they not working? What happened in 2012 was I wrote a plan to solve those problems. Between then and now, I have stopped those digital services and really dedicated myself to solving the problems I have found.

Hugh: I do a one-day leadership empowerment symposium in one city every month. I am coming to your neighborhood, but I haven’t put it on the schedule yet. But I find there are common things: leader burnout. They are doing way too much. They don’t even have time to think about marketing. Their board is underfunctioning, their staff is not functioning at the level it should, and they are not making the revenue that they need to achieve their vision. You have done this real-life work, which matches with what I’m seeing. We are talking to the leaders of these movements. These people have great ideas. What is the leadership decision? Why shouldn’t someone just hire someone to do marketing and then forget about it? What do leaders need to know about marketing in order to make an intelligent decision about getting someone like you engaged for their enterprise?

Gaydon: The first thing they need to know is that hiring a marketing agency and then turning your back—in other words, outsourcing and allocating your responsibility to grow your organization—doesn’t work. Nine times out of ten, it just does not work. The phrase we like to use is: You cannot outsource what you have given yourself the responsibility to do.

The first question you need to ask is: Who is wearing the CRO or the CMO hat? CRO is Chief Revenue Officer. CMO is Chief Marketing Officer. The point is, somebody has that hat on right this second. Who has that hat? What I am saying in no uncertain terms is if you give that hat to someone who does not work at your company or is dedicated to that function and you give it to an outsource provider… I am not saying you can’t bring in a part-time CMO or CRO that serves that purpose that is technically a 1099. That’s fine; that can work. To hand it to an agency and think they will run the growth of your company the way you want it to is fallacious at best. So who wears the CRO hat?

If that person is defined, the next question is: Do they have the skills to play the role? I like to follow that up with a little bit of philosophy. At the end of the day, Peter Truckers’ quote rings in my ears, and it should ring in everyone’s ears who is listening to this call. “The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. All the rest are costs.” The spirit of what he is trying to say is the purpose of the enterprise is to gain a customer. Marketing’s job is to gain a customer. I use customer loosely. We are talking customer, client, patient, donor, whatever it means. I’ll use customer loosely. The point is that is the purpose of your enterprise. If you have a social enterprise and the purpose of it is not to make a profit, that’s fine. This isn’t capitalism necessarily for you. But you will never change the world with your social entrepreneurship if you can’t make money. You can’t accomplish your mission without the cash, and you can’t get the cash without the marketing.

We say marketing in academic terms. Marketing is the process by which we take what we have to the market. It’s not advertising, it’s not PR, and it’s not sales. It’s the holism of all of that. How are you going to get what you have to the audience you want to have it? The science of that is really the spirit of what I do. It’s your responsibility unless you have given it to somebody else. In that case, we are talking to that person. But the conversation needs to have a place where the buck stops. Somebody is wearing the hat. That’s where I start.

Hugh: You have distinguished a number of different things. For 30 years, I have worked with charities doing my vision of strategic planning, which I call a solution map. Where do you want to be, and how are you going to get there? A traditional component is the same components for normal companies, but it is modified for charities. Part of it is realizing that nonprofit is a tax classification, not a philosophy. The other one is to build into this marketing strategy, which is not an area of my expertise. That is part of why we are talking today. I do have other collaborators in experts and sales and PR. People tend to confuse all of those things. You have distinguished what those are.

You highlighted a really important leadership paradigm. It’s the piece of delegation. People who are leaders think they know about delegation. Here, do this and they forget it. That’s not delegation. There is a mentoring piece that goes with that. There is a championing piece. There is an accountability installation. There is a follow-up piece, which is way different than micro-managing. Whether you are hiring someone internally or externally, I would like to add that I agree with all of that. We still as leaders want to define the outcomes, and then we work with whomever it is for them to tell us what the metrics are and the tactics we are going to use to get there. We as a leader still nurture and approve that. If we are not engaged at any level as a leader, that is a problem. The trick is not to overfunction and to find someone gifted and to be engaged enough so that we can tweak it. Who knows more about our vision than us? Who understands the outcomes more than us? We as leaders are not clear on the outcomes, and we are not clear on how to delegate or manage a process. How do you feel about that?

Gaydon: I totally agree. From the context of marketing, I see the problems that you are talking about but from the marketing angle. That’s the l