RV233 - My Lessons From Scaling to $22 Million

Summary

Podcast Summary: B2B Revenue Vitals - Episode RV233: My Lessons From Scaling to $22 Million

Introduction and Guest Background

In Episode RV233 of the B2B Revenue Vitals podcast, host Brad engages in an insightful conversation with Chris Walker, the founder and CEO of Passetto and Refine Labs. Chris shares his remarkable journey from an engineer and product manager in the medical devices field to becoming a LinkedIn thought leader and building an eight-figure marketing agency. His expertise in leveraging LinkedIn for brand building and demand generation has positioned him as a pivotal figure for SaaS companies aiming for high growth.

Discovering His Superpower

At [03:56], Chris reveals a personal milestone: discovering his professional superpower at the age of 32. He describes these intense periods of heightened intuition, lasting from half an hour to a week, where ideas and strategies flow effortlessly. “It’s almost like somebody’s giving me all the answers to everything. Like a wild level of intuition,” (03:56) Chris explains. This innate ability allows him to rapidly develop business plans and envision his company's future, enabling strategic alignment and optimal positioning within his organizations.

LinkedIn Strategy and Content Creation

Chris delves into his LinkedIn strategy, emphasizing authenticity and strategic posting over chasing vanity metrics. Initially, he focused on text posts to maximize impressions, but discovered that video content built more trust and was harder to plagiarize. “Video is an easier medium to communicate. My messages are nuanced video as a way that I'll build more trust and credibility than writing a text post,” ([11:18]) Chris notes. This shift not only differentiated his content but also safeguarded his unique ideas from being copied.

He practices a time-boxed workflow, dedicating specific times each day for content creation without relying on scheduling tools. “I write the copy in 30 minutes. So it’s time box. So I’m forced to be efficient and get that done,” ([07:17]) Chris shares. This disciplined approach ensures consistent and high-quality content delivery, fostering sustained engagement with his audience.

The Role of Live Events

Transitioning to online live events during the pandemic was a pivotal move for Chris. By shifting from physical events to Zoom formats, he significantly increased attendance and engagement. “[17:48] Chris explains, “Live is nice because I get audience feedback, the audience participates in the content. It also forces me to show up every week.” These live sessions serve as a testing ground for his messages, enabling him to refine his content based on real-time interactions and feedback.

Scaling Challenges and Financial Discipline

As Refine Labs experienced exponential growth—from $600K in 2019 to $22 million in 2022—Chris encountered scaling challenges. Rapid expansion led to thin margins due to the necessity of hiring more staff to meet demand. Reflecting on this, he advises future entrepreneurs: “If I could go back, I would have had a lot more financial discipline around the gross margin profile, forcing us to be more productive and more efficient inside of our delivery model,” ([31:24]) Chris emphasizes the importance of maintaining financial discipline and leveraging automation to sustain scalable growth without compromising profitability.

Messaging Strategy and Business Pivot

Chris discusses the evolution of Refine Labs’ messaging strategy and the subsequent creation of Passetto. Initially, Refine Labs focused on demand generation and marketing measurement, but market conditions in 2022 necessitated a pivot to a broader go-to-market strategy. This led to the separation of Refine Labs and Passetto in January 2024.

Refine Labs now specializes as a premier demand gen agency for mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies, focusing on optimizing advertising returns and integrating creative and media efforts. In contrast, Passetto offers a strategic alignment tool that bridges marketing investments with financial outcomes, aiding executives in making informed, data-driven decisions. “We are building an executive level view that helps you make fast, easy, aligned, smart decisions fast,” ([25:04]) Chris explains.

Impact Beyond Business: Personal Growth and Community Building

Beyond business metrics, LinkedIn has profoundly impacted Chris personally. The platform has been a creative outlet, enhancing his communication skills and boosting his confidence. “Personally, it just given me just a massive creative outlet in terms of the way that I articulate my ideas,” ([33:34]) he states. Furthermore, his content fosters a community where customers share insights internally, driving better retention and expansion opportunities.

Advice to Founders: Embrace Action and Continuous Learning

When advising founders and early-stage CEOs, Chris emphasizes the importance of action over incessant consumption of advice. “What’s stopping you if you haven’t already, why?” ([39:34]) he urges entrepreneurs to start implementing strategies rather than waiting for the perfect moment or accumulating knowledge endlessly. He highlights the value of learning by doing and recognizing when to seek expertise in specific areas, such as finance, to complement their growth.

Future of Social Media and Marketing

Chris predicts that social media will continue to evolve as the primary medium for information and marketing. He underscores the adaptability required to stay relevant with platform shifts, such as the transition to short-form video on LinkedIn. “They’re just not going to disappear and no one’s going to listen to that or watch that content medium ever again,” ([37:23]) Chris asserts, advocating for continuous adaptation and leveraging new content formats to maintain engagement and reach.

Closing Remarks and Final Insights

In wrapping up, Chris shares his strategic approach to building Passetto alongside Refine Labs without over-relying on venture capital. He advocates for bootstrapping and focusing on customer-driven product development to ensure sustainability and autonomy. “There are new paths that people should consider. There’s a new world going on here,” ([43:18]) Chris concludes, highlighting the advantages of financial independence and strategic flexibility in today's dynamic market landscape.

Chris encourages entrepreneurs to think differently about scaling and funding, suggesting that only a small percentage truly need venture capital. “I think that 99% of founders think they need to raise venture capital to get their idea to market. And I think it’s actually the opposite, that 1% of founders should really be raising venture capital,” ([43:07]) he advises, emphasizing alternative growth strategies that prioritize long-term sustainability over immediate capital influx.

Key Takeaways:

• Authentic Content Creation: Focus on quality and strategic value over chasing likes and impressions.
• Consistent Engagement: Utilize live events and a disciplined posting schedule to maintain audience connection.
• Financial Discipline: Maintain gross margins and leverage automation to manage scalable growth effectively.
• Strategic Pivoting: Adapt messaging and business models based on market conditions and internal learnings.
• Personal and Community Growth: Leverage platforms like LinkedIn for personal development and fostering a supportive community.
• Action-Oriented Advice: Encourage founders to implement strategies actively and learn through doing rather than over-consuming advice.
• Future-Proofing Marketing Strategies: Stay adaptable to platform changes and continuously innovate content formats to sustain engagement.

Chris Walker’s journey underscores the critical balance between strategic content creation, disciplined business scaling, and continuous personal growth. His insights provide a roadmap for SaaS companies and entrepreneurs aiming to build sustainable, high-growth businesses in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Transcript

[Brad]

You're listening to Revenue Vitals with Chris Walker. All right, welcome LinkedIn movers and makers. Today we have another prolific LinkedIn thought leader on the pod. He is one of the top founder creators to come out of the second wave of LinkedIn brand builders which happened during the pandemic. He's got a massive following which helped him build an eight figure marketing agency. More recently he's working on a tech enabled go to market strategy consultancy. Let's welcome Chris Walker, the founder and CEO of Passetto and Refine Labs. But before we turn the mic over to Chris, let's take a walk down memory lane. Chris started his career as an engineer and he moved into product management. He was in the medical devices field and managed multimillion dollar product lines. His experience in product management provided him with a strategy first mindset and customer centric approach. He didn't start his first marketing job until seven years into his career and that's when he started learning marketing interest. He would take road trips with salespeople and he realized that the marketing channels didn't match the way customers wanted to learn about new products. During that time he also side hustled with e commerce projects which turned him onto social as a powerful demand creation tool. Five years ago, in 2019, he started Refine Labs. How a lot of us know Chris today, B2B Social Agency. @ first it was just him. He started Investing in his LinkedIn presence early 2020 he began demand Gen Live. Demand Gen Live was an event repurposed as a YouTube video, a podcast. The primary distribution point was LinkedIn. That combination rocketed him to LinkedIn fame. But during that time he left a huge impression on marketers and go to market professionals with concepts like dark social, dark funnel. The idea of demand creation versus demand capture. Measuring marketing efforts via deals that made it beyond discovery that he calls stage two Pipe. The idea that outbound efforts should depend on inbound marketing signals. And he was one of the first creators to go all in on video. Refined Labs took off like a rocket. Today they have almost 50 employees, they do eight figures per year. And what I thought was special about Refine Labs, it wasn't just Chris posting. Their Refine team put on a masterclass on how to use LinkedIn to grow a brand. And many well known go to market executives started there or passed through Refine Labs. MJ Smith, Todd Clauser, Kaylee Edmondson, Sam Kunal, Obey Durrani, Cassidy Shield, and of course Megan Bowen, who's now the CEO of Refine. Chris started Passetto to take on bigger problems. Megan took over the reins. Right now he's focusing on helping SaaS companies with strategic alignment of the go to market function, growing pipeline and revenue and demand. Gen Live became revenue vitals and more recently I believe it's called Unified gtm. And Chris moved on from serving only marketers and chief marketing officers to CEOs, CFOs, Chief Revenue Officers. With 150,000 followers and building two powerhouse businesses, I can't think of a better example of what being LinkedIn famous can do for a founder. Now let's welcome Chris walker to the LinkedIn famous podcast.

[Chris Walker]

Brad, that was a stellar trip down memory lane and made me smile the whole time you were talking about that. Because sometimes even I underappreciate some of the details. Specifically all of the amazing people that have worked at one or both of my companies and have moved on to do amazing things and have been able to accelerate their career and learn a bunch. And that's something that makes me really happy and something that I love to reflect on. I write about it almost every day.

[Brad]

Yeah, it really is amazing. I follow a lot of those people now and they're kind of thought leaders unto themselves. They've influenced a whole generation of marketers when we think about what happened during the pandemic. So question is there anything else in your background that you'd like to double click?

[Chris Walker]

Nope. Perfect. All good.

[Brad]

All right, shifting gears a little bit. I always like to ask our guests, tell us something about yourself that the audience couldn't learn from you from your LinkedIn profile or what you post on LinkedIn.

[Chris Walker]

So about two years ago, and I encourage a lot of people to think about this. So I was 32 at the time that it was the first time that I discovered my superpower as a professional, as a person. And I think that I felt it sometimes earlier in my life, but didn't have like sort of the awareness and the recollection to it. So at 32 and to explain the superpower, 20, 24, it happened to me four times. Sometimes it lasts 30 minutes, sometimes it lasts up to seven days. And during that period of time I just get this. It's almost like somebody's giving me all the answers to everything. Like a wild level of intuition, right? So I can. And it usually comes after a long period of lack of clarity and confusion. And then all of a sudden everything comes really close together. And at that point I can write a business plan in an hour that I hadn't been able to do in three months or I can see the full vision of my company really quickly. It's just a powerful intuition. And that's something that, as I recognize it, allows me to be able to put myself in the right positions and seats inside of the organizations that I'm invested in or involved in or I operate. And I think that everyone has particular superpowers, whether they recognize it or not. And I would encourage people to raise your awareness to that because there's probably something really special about you that many other people don't have. And if you're able to recognize that and lean into it, it can be really powerful and create a lot of clarity around what you should do in your career and your businesses.

[Brad]

I love that and I think it's really interesting. A lot of people struggle early in their career and you don't find that till later in life. And I think even for me, you know, I'm approaching 45, you know, I think my superpower is telling stories and finding the story thread and what's going on within a company. And I didn't find that until the last five, 10 years either. So I think that's really awesome. Shifting gears, let's talk about LinkedIn. Maybe just to start things out. I was checking out your profile the other day and prepped for the interview and I noticed that you took a three week break from posting. Is that your first break in years? You know what's going on there?

[Chris Walker]

My longest break since I really started going on this. Sometimes I would take seven days off as I take a vacation or a break or there's some periods in the annual flow where like it just slows down. Think the Thanksgiving week, sometimes in the period of August where like most of Europe is on vacation and also most of America is on vacation. The way the holidays fell this year with Christmas on a Wednesday and New Year's on a Wednesday, just sort of made a very clean break for a lot of people to take a long extended vacation, which I did myself. And I think it's really important to be able to spend some time to recharge and rethink. And the beautiful thing is that if you take a week off and you come back and post like everything goes back to normal. Like, I'm not encouraging people to take years off. And I think that you get to a point. So for the first like three years in LinkedIn, I posted every day, seven days a week, every single day, didn't take a day off. Right. And I think when you don't have a lot of resources and a lot of audience you do have a lot of time and effort and energy. That being able to take advantage of that and pour all of your energy into it to create some level of an advantage is really important. And then once you get to a level, it starts to become more about your strategy and your cadence and the topics that you're communicating and how effectively you can communicate them. And so volume is still important, but I think that it becomes less important over time as you grow.

[Brad]

It's funny, I saw a debate in a community somewhere recently where people were, you know, I'm going on vacation. What should I do? Should I schedule and just let it go on autopilot, or should I just take the break? And I don't know where things ended up, but did you consider scheduling yourself?

[Chris Walker]

I've never been a scheduler. I'm not even like a prepper. Like, even this morning, someone comments on my post is like, I imagine that you have these posts scheduled out and thought about months in advance. And I was like, actually, no. I wrote the copy for this 20 minutes ago. That's my workflow. I go to the gym, I get back from the gym, and then I have 30 minutes set aside during the days that I post, and I pick a video that's in my log of hundreds of videos that I've been posted, find a video that I feel passionate about, write the copy in 30 minutes. So it's time box. So I'm forced to be efficient and get that done. Write the copy, post, answer the comments with my own thumbs. No AI commenting going on here. And so that's been my workflow for five years, and it's working for me, and I think it would work for others. I know other people prefer to schedule or they need time to think through their message, and so it's important to figure out what works for you.

[Brad]

Yeah, that's awesome. I think there's some value in doing the work every day, right? I don't know if you've ever kind of heard about what Jerry Seinfeld does to write his comedy jokes. He treats it like a job. I mean, obviously what you see on stage is, you know, the good stuff. But he's working 9 to 5, writing jokes, refining jokes and whatnot. So I think there is doing the motion. You know, there's a lot of value in that.

[Chris Walker]

Going to the gym every day. I journal every day. I write, like, content and post on social almost every day, four or five times a week, sometimes seven, depending if you look at all the different channels. But then there's also Value in, in like time boxing for other things. So like I, I record all of my content on Tuesdays and then that's become. And I do all of my internal meetings on Mondays and I try to do most of my sales meetings on Thursdays and I try and think most about my investment strategies on Wednesdays and I try and think about all my business strategies on Friday. And so and though that schedule has allowed me to remove the task switching, I'm a maker, so I'm in a creator inside of my companies. Right. So I'm not on a manager schedule trying to have 1230 minute blocks scheduled in a row. I either need a full day for creativity or I'm gonna pack all my meetings into certain days. And I, I pre, I it does. Task switching doesn't work for creators.

[Brad]

Yeah, context switching is painful. I'm learning that the hard way over the past year and slowly trying to kind of set up those blocks for.

[Chris Walker]

Flow state and setting up themes for each day has been really powerful for me. I've been doing that for about a year now.

[Brad]

Yeah, I think that's basically how you unlock that flow state where the intuition comes, where your superpower flows. Is that fair to say?

[Chris Walker]

I wish I had more control over like when it came and how it came and how frequently it came and how long it lasted. I think that on the path to mastery, I think eventually people say that you could have that thing that happens to me four times a year happen a hundred percent of the time. And so I'm really interested in trying to unlock how that works because would be incredible. But yeah, most of the time my superpower comes on Wednesdays and Fridays and I have no meetings scheduled on those days.

[Brad]

That helps. Let me ask you this, you've been doing this for years. Has anything changed from the beginning to now? What you're describing is the now state, but I'm kind of curious about what the evolution looked like.

[Chris Walker]

I mean, I think in the first few years I spent a lot more time trying to hack the algorithm and do whatever the algorithm wanted and optimize for likes and impressions and what I would call vanity metrics. And what I found is that a lot of those things didn't correlate to my business results. I would get followers that could never buy my product. I would get 3 million views from people that could never buy my stuff. You know what I mean? And it was also sort of soul sucking to try to chase that stuff. And so I made a switch somewhere around 2022 where I made the decision I'm just talking about the things that I want to talk about that I think are important to the people that care, that I think I have a differentiated perspective on that ideally is connected and helps my businesses. And if I get 10,000 impressions instead of a million, like, so be it. And I just took a very different approach starting then. And it's been a really good switch for me. And I think a lot of people continue to optimize for likes and comments and talk about whatever they think is going to get them the most likes. And I think that a lot of people should challenge that perspective about why you're really doing this.

[Brad]

Yeah, I already talked about the clickbait and like the Reho structure a lot of people put a lot of thought into.

[Chris Walker]

Like at the beginning I would post text posts because text posted 10x better from an impression standpoint than videos. And it was really just because the video analytics were wrong. My videos were getting seen just as much as text posts, but the number they put down there required a three second view, not just a scroll by impressions. So the videos were actually doing better and being seen the same. But the analytics were telling me post, text post. At some point I was like, forget this. Video is an easier medium to communicate. My messages are nuanced video as a way that I'll build more trust and credibility than writing a text post. People were copying and pasting my text posts or translating them into German and just literally ripping my stuff off. And so I was like, you're not gonna be able to rip off my videos. Maybe AI could do it now. But a couple years ago, that was one of the core switches for me as a professional and as a content creator that I thought was super beneficial. I'd encourage a lot of people to think deeply about that one.

[Brad]

Yeah, that is a great point. You were, I think, early to video. Everyone's doing it now. You know, it's like the tik tok if occasion of LinkedIn. It is scroll stopping. So where did you see that? Did Facebook or Instagram kind of inspire you a little bit to move to.

[Chris Walker]

The vertical reels concept or just video in general?

[Brad]

Video in general.

[Chris Walker]

It was really because people were plagiarizing my text post. That was why I did it.

[Brad]

Got it. Yeah.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah.

[Brad]

You know what they say, flattery is the best form of mimicry. I'm sorry, flat?

[Chris Walker]

Yeah. Mimicry is the finest form of flattery.

[Brad]

Let me ask you this. I want to me turn back the clock a little bit to the early days of refine. I don't know, like when you first started posting on LinkedIn again, like you kind of led this pandemic wave of it and that was like the second coming of LinkedIn. People were doing it when the feed started around 2016, but it didn't blow up in the same way that it blew up now and then is almost continuing to expand. But 2019, 2020, what motivated you and inspired you to start Investing in early LinkedIn? Prestons did you see someone doing it and saying, I want that?

[Chris Walker]

So with my background, I worked as a marketing manager and marketing director. I started several e commerce companies. My e commerce companies got most of their revenue at the beginning in 2012 to 2015 through Amazon SEO and Google SEO. And then from 2015 to 2019 mostly through Instagram Organic and Facebook and Instagram advertising and Amazon advertising. And so I had seen the power of social like that. And then I took it into a B2B setting at the medical device company I worked at and we were just absolutely crushing the targeting on Facebook ads. In 2017, before Cambridge Analytica, you could do account based, pure account based marketing down to the basically the job title in person, inside of accounts with no tools. I remember going in there and you'd have to write out the companies you want to target. I would type them out, I would find them and then I could pick the job titles of respiratory therapist and emergency medicine physician and ICU intensivists at those exact accounts and we would just have a great incredible distribution strategy right to our target customers. And I was paying 0.3 cents per impression back then. The CPMs were unbelievable. And so I had all this experience of, hey, like, meanwhile, I watched our company have a 10 person outbound SDR team, book a bunch of meetings, get paid $200 per meeting and move all those things, move immediately to close loss, waste our field sales teams a bunch of time. Just a total waste of money and time. And so I just saw that and I was like, okay, like when I started my company, I have no money, I have no following, I have no team. What do I have? I have the knowledge that I built up and I have time. Organic social is free. All I have to do is have my time and I can use my knowledge to do that. And so what people don't realize is that I was active on LinkedIn, posting every day for a year. Before the pandemic started, I had 9,000 followers. When the pandemic started, I'd been posting every day. I built up a workflow. I had done live events In Miami and LA with influencers. I had started my video strategy in September of 2019. And so when that time hit and everybody moved to remote and the wave of people started to consume on LinkedIn and a lot higher volume, I was ready for that. I wasn't starting from zero at that point. I had a workflow, I had a process, I had things that were working, I had people that already listened to me. I tested a lot of things out and then it was just a massive accelerant. And so I think that's really important. I had been doing physical events like I mentioned. Go to Miami, do an event with Josh Braun, do a video interview with Katana while I was there, Go to la, do a influencer collaboration with Justin Welsh back when he was the CRO of Patient Pop. And then the pandemic shut down. I was supposed to do events in Austin and San Francisco and other major cities like that. And obviously you couldn't do that starting in March of 2020. And so we moved that online. So we started doing a zoom format instead, which worked a trillion times better than the physical events. Who would have thought in terms of attendance? And then being able to record the videos and the cost effectiveness and all that stuff had just been worked way better. And then from that day forward, I think, I mean, I've taken a couple of weeks off, whether I was been sick or the holiday schedule or things like that. But almost every Tuesday for the past five years, I've done that live event and recorded at least three podcasts every single week for the past five years. And so I've been incredibly committed to the strategy. I'm not getting lazy. As my profile grows, some people will take their foot off the gas. I continue to lean into the strategies that I have. I try to continue to expand. So it went from just LinkedIn to then LinkedIn and podcast and Zoom to LinkedIn, podcast, Zoom, YouTube to LinkedIn, podcast, Zoom, YouTube, TikTok. And I've just been continuously expanding because all you do is you have a raw form of content, right? This video that we're recording right now in the audio, and then all you have to do is just post produce it to fit the distribution channels that you want to prioritize.

[Brad]

What a machine. Let me ask you this, what is the percentage breakout for people who attend live versus consuming the Netflix, the chill style?

[Chris Walker]

It's got to be 95 to 99% asynchronous consumption. Okay, just think about the numbers like 50 to 100 people average on my live event, 500 maximum from all the times I've been doing it. And one LinkedIn post will get me 50,000 to 500,000 views. My podcast gets listened to 10,000 time per episode in full. The other channels like YouTube and that are being consumed as well. So, like, the Live is nice because I get audience feedback, the audience participates in the content. I can see what's going in the chat. So I think that it's not about the attendance, the numbers. It's actually the strategy around having people live there. It also forces me to show up every week. I don't want to disappoint people if I'm not feeling up for it. 30 minutes before my event, I'm still going to show up. So I want to deliver for those people. And so it's a forcing function to create the content every single week, but to recognize that most people are going to consume asynchronously, which is, by the way, much more difficult to track with traditional methods. But that's basically the numbers that I have.

[Brad]

Yeah, that's really fascinating. I've thought about doing the Live thing, but it becomes a lot more. There's a lot more moving parts. But I think for people listening or doing the calculus in their head, the real value of the Live is to have people there interacting, talking. And I guess you get their email address too, right?

[Chris Walker]

You do get their email address, but I never do anything with it except for promote the next event that's coming up. The biggest thing is because I have the audience live, whether it's 10 people or a thousand people, when I say things and everyone's on the screen, it's a meeting, not a webinar. So I can see people's reactions and I can tell whether what I'm saying is resonating with those people. So it's almost like a testing ground for my information and my message, so that when I go and move it to LinkedIn, I know it works. Otherwise everyone would leave the event, you know what I mean? And so I think it creates a lot more confidence when you go into distribution. Right. We're just recording this, or a lot of people will just do an async recording of their content and they'll talk about whatever and then they go and post it on LinkedIn and they say, oh, it didn't work on LinkedIn. It's hard to tell why, right? Is it because I didn't have the right followers, I didn't post at the right time, I didn't use the right hashtags? Or is it just because My content fucking sucks. My message sucks. Or did I edit it the wrong way? And the distribution sucks and should have been a video, but it was a text post. You have all these different potential root causes of why it's not working. I think the LIVE event helps you eliminate a lot of those options so you can get a lot more clear of if the post didn't work, I can try to figure out why it didn't work and learn from it.

[Brad]

That's great. I guess. Message testing. Do you. And maybe this has changed a little bit that the LIVE component introduces a more community element. Obviously during a pandemic, you know, we were all stuck at home. So people were kind of were looking for that opportunity to get together and interact. You know, today it's different. People don't have time for webinars as much. You know, what do you think the impact of that is today compared to what it was?

[Chris Walker]

Just to clarify, today, people don't have time for bad webinars. People still show up for the good ones that bring a lot of value to them. Let's just be clear about that. So it's not about whether people want to go to them or not. Not. They're just a lot more selective about whether or not they're valuable and how they use their time. And then what was the question on that? Sorry, I got caught on that point for a second.

[Brad]

For the live event, do you think.

[Chris Walker]

It fosters community 100 and people would come to the event and they would listen to it, but inside they're getting a new job. In the chat, there's a hundred people just like them that are trying to do the thing just like them. And so just bringing the people together so that they can interact with each other was a huge element of why a lot of people showed up. And so there's that element. There was an element. You know, a lot of people that joined my company and went on to do amazing things. Like what we were talking about then was new and innovative people fundamentally changed their live and careers based on the things that I was teaching in 2020 and 2021. Something that I'm really proud of. And so people that were able to see that early and then say, I'm going to dedicate this one hour a week and then testing it inside of my company and my job to learn it. And then over a year or two, they're in a totally different spot in their life. Those types of things make me proud. And I think a lot of people about selecting sort of who you're Listening to and what you're learning and thinking about where the puck is going, where it's not, where it is right now, I think are key elements of why people would motivated to come to the event live.

[Brad]

You mentioned your team. I want to talk a little bit about that because I mentioned before you guys did an amazing job kind of just blanketing LinkedIn. When I think about what companies do and the companies do this right, and they have companies kind of connected to different people and it feels like they're all over the place. It's like this blanket effect. How did you engineer that? Was there a system in place or was it more, you know, do you just encourage people to post? And clearly it wasn't everybody that was doing it. But you know, I'm kind of curious, like what it looked like behind the scenes.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah, I think maybe 30 to 50% of the people that worked at my company at any one time were highly active on LinkedIn. And it's not about having a employee engagement strategy or putting together a training during onboarding that shows people how to post, although those things are nice and we did both of those things. The actual thing is, number one, how do you attract talent? Most of the people that joined the company are because they saw what we were doing on LinkedIn and said that's smart. So they're already predisposed to I like this. And then therefore, maybe I want to join this company so I can do it. So that's one big thing. Number two, the leaders in the company do it themselves. Megan, me, Cassidy, the other C level executives that worked at the company and other VPs were all doing it. And therefore the new people that joined also were much more likely to do it. In some companies, people get discouraged from doing it because they think, oh, if you're posting on LinkedIn, you must be trying to get another job or leave our company or start a side hustle or blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Whether they say it or not, it feels discouraged inside of companies and that's a terrible mindset. And it's also a terrible mindset for executives to not do it themselves, then try and tell their managers and directors to do something that they won't do themselves. As leaders, you need to lead if you want this strategy to take hold. And then lastly, we knew how to effectively measure it. We could see it. We had a slack channel that had all of our inbounds, all the deals that closed. It showed self reported attribution. Now you can do a bunch more and you can have your gong calls like every single call that gets recorded right now, the first thing that someone says, I was listening to your podcast, I saw you on LinkedIn. Someone at my company shared this post with me and it's literally super clear what's working and what's not. And so everyone in the company sees CMO Tier one account said they heard about us on our podcast. So they heard about us on LinkedIn over and over and over and over every single day. And that's just a great encouragement for everybody to say, wow, this is really working. And so I think that those three prongs are something that most companies go over. Three on those three, they don't measure it the right way, their leaders don't do it, and they don't attract people on the way in with it. So those are the three main ingredients to success that made it work really well for us. And then lastly, I think it's really important to note, if your business isn't doing well, then no amount of LinkedIn strategy is going to help you. It's not right. Number one, your business has to be doing well. It has to be profitable, sustainable, ideally growing, hiring new talent, developing people, helping customers, getting good testimonials. When all those things are in place, then LinkedIn becomes a massive accelerant.

[Brad]

Great points. I want to double click into one thing. So you mentioned self reported attribution. I talked about all the concepts that you left for marketers. That was one of them. A lot of these concepts we talk about now, it's like, oh, duh. But at the time it was like enlightenment. Right. But yeah, I think those are some great points about doing LinkedIn as a team. It's almost in the DNA. You do it, you lead from the top down. And then proving that it works with good measurement, a lot of people out.

[Chris Walker]

There will shit on self reported attribution and say, what about the biases and this and that and recency bias or blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And the point is that it's not the only thing that you look at. It's one directional point to measure things that you can't measure right now that give you some level of confidence in the fact that whether or not these things are working or not. And so I just like to clarify that point because if you just use self reported attribution, sure, you will have a bias to certain things. Yeah. Need multiple measurement streams that are both tactical and strategic and combined financial data. That's sort of what I'm working on in my company at Pesetto, is just basically Trying to create the structure that allows marketing to do the. That works best for customers and delivers the highest ROI for shareholders in the company and to be measured properly to do all those things, which is not how it works today.

[Brad]

Well, it's great that we have you on LinkedIn all the time telling us how to do it the right way. So I want to shift gears again and I want to talk about messaging strategy. So like I said, with Refine Labs you put on a masterclass, you had a great positioning and story and the enemy was Google Ads. You know the answer was social ads. Then you shift gears to Passetto, you change your positioning completely. Different product and category, different product market and a different impact. What does that process look like and has it been challenging? How is it going when you look.

[Chris Walker]

Really in the details? This is a major entrepreneurial learning and I give a lot of advice about it now, having done it and made the mistakes and learned from it. And so if you look back in history, Refine Labs was the demand gen agency, right? But a lot of what we were promoting at that time was fixing marketing measurement, being more efficient with how you combine marketing and SDRs to create pipeline, delivering higher quality conversions and things like that, that our sales team wins at a greater rate so our sales team becomes more productive. And a lot of the messaging was really a go to market strategy message buried inside of a demand gen agency. And in 2022 we made like an evolution to try to up level that positioning to move to more of a go to market strategy. And maybe it was the wrong time. It actually was timing in my perspective of why it didn't go right. The market was absolutely bottoming out and crashing. I don't think that it was tested properly. I didn't do the necessary due diligence to get there and it was just the wrong environment to run a startup message. So I shifted the messaging. Messaging didn't pan out for timing and other things. That was the revenue R and D framework basically was trying to build two companies in one. And it was a big mistake. In 2023 we started to sort of rebuild that messaging and separate them. We officially sort of separated the companies in January of 2024. And now you have Refine Labs, which is the premier demand gen agency for middle market and enterprise SaaS, companies that need to optimize and get better return on their advertising. So Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Meta, Connected TV. We have a creative agency built into it so we can combine creative and media together. Which is by the way fucking essential to having successful Advertising, especially when you spend a good amount of money. We run ABM campaigns to current customers to improve nrr. We are the best advertising firm for the companies that actually spend a lot of money and take it seriously. So that's what Refine Labs does now. Very clear positioning. And then we've been able to take out that part about measurement and getting finance data involved and things like that. Moving into Passetto Initially, Passetto started as a consultancy. Why? Because we were bootstrapping a product company and so we used a consultancy revenue model to get our customers to pay so we didn't have to raise venture capital. Because I don't want to be involved in that. That was something that we did. And now all of a sudden we have a relatively complete product. We have AI features built into it. And so now we're starting to work on that. Which empowers marketing leaders to be able to look at the entire picture of their budget and communicate a financial story back to the executive team and the board and be able to optimize their investments and have that context when they make investments. Which is something that's totally missing. So everything in marketing measurement right now is ultra tactical, ultra overcomplicated, multi touch attribution, mixed modeling, touchpoint data, UTMs, la la la la la. Includes no finance data. So it's like you get this stuff of oh, we had a touch point, so I guess this worked. But you have no context of how much did we spend to make it happen and is to make that investment. So that's what's missing inside of marketing, which makes them rely on this tactical reporting that forces you into Google Ads and performance marketing and anything else that's commonly accepted in marketing rather than the things that are most innovative that drive the best results and help customers the most. So it has a big position inside of marketing, but it also helps CFOs and CEOs create guardrails and drive strategy to hold their marketing leaders accountable to driving actual results for the business and allows everyone to be aligned on what is the overall performance of marketing. How do we stack up against benchmarks that our company provides to them and then allows them to be very clear about how is our relative performance when we go to the board every quarter. So our board isn't wondering what the happening in marketing. They just showed me 100 slides and I still have no idea whether it's working or not or what we should do and that we're trying to remove all the complications. You can still do the bottoms up complicated reporting be my Guest. And you get incremental benefits from that. But you need an executive level view that helps you make fast, easy, aligned, smart decisions fast. And that's what we're building here.

[Brad]

That's amazing. Having been in house in SaaS companies, I can attest to it being messy and complicated and always having to justify yourself and not even sure which side of marketing is working right. There's a famous saying, 50% of my marketing works. I just don't know which 50%.

[Chris Walker]

That quote was from the 1930s by the way. And the world is a lot different now. And that is not true anymore. So people still use that quote almost 100 years later. Maybe not through one measurement model like your MTA model that you've been using. Maybe not through just utms, but using a combined amount of qualitative and quantitative data that you get from customers and through CRM and marketing automation and in platform data and finance data, you can pretty much clearly triangulate almost every investment and estimate the impact of all of those investments and find the winners and losers pretty simply. And so I just don't buy into that. I like the quote, it's cute. But I don't think the world works that way anymore. And some people hold on to it to justify the things that they do that don't work, but they haven't scrutinized properly.

[Brad]

That is a fair point. So I want to double click on mistakes. So you actually had mentioned the way you first attempted to launch Passetto or what it is today was bad timing and perhaps just building it to trying.

[Chris Walker]

To launch a second company inside of a first company. I found to just be a terrible strategy and that was a learning for me. And I watch a lot of entrepreneurs try the same thing and I try and steer them away from it. Because when you're starting something new, you need the startup mindset. You need to be small and flexible and be able to make mistakes and try things and have them not go right and not have a lot on the line. And in that process when I did, it combined when you make a mistake on messaging, you negatively impact the existing business. And so that was a huge learning for me that I'm trying to shout from the rooftops and educate people about the trade offs on that because a lot of services or agency, you know, professional services or agency businesses are trying so hard to be able to create a product company. And you should. Product companies have much better valuations, a lot more scalable. There's a lot of benefits to building a product company. I just Think that you should take it on the side, create a different LLC or C Corp and build it somewhere else.

[Brad]

Now, in terms of mistakes, maybe dialing back to right now, your whole marketing machine, your LinkedIn is a well oiled machine. You highlighted one mistake with Passetto. What about along the way on your, you know, growing the company through LinkedIn, what other mistakes did you make?

[Chris Walker]

I think that the business was scaling so fast. If you can think that we did 600k in 2019, 2.2 in 2020, 6.8 in 2021 and then 22 million in 2022, you just have this massive ramp curve that we ran the business on really thin margins because you have to hire, especially with services business where the main scalability comes from hiring headcount that does the work for the customers. And I think if I could go back, I would have had a lot more financial discipline around the gross margin profile, forcing us to be more productive and more efficient inside of our delivery model. So rather than just hiring another person, how do we figure out how each person takes on one more customer? How do we use automation and technology to be more efficient so we don't need to keep hiring a person every time we get four more customers? I think that was a huge learning. I think pretty much everyone learned that lesson in 2022. Software companies and founders, right? Even the biggest in the world, you know what I mean? Stripe and Salesforce and Meta and all those companies laid off thousands or tens of thousands of people in the process because the environment changed. And so I think a lot of people were. And as a professional, no one really had that lesson happen except for the great financial crisis in 2007, 2008. And many of the people that are running companies now were either not in the direct line of fire of that crisis or weren't even in the working world during that time. And so it was the first time that many founders and entrepreneurs experienced something like that. And so I think it's been a big learning for everyone.

[Brad]

It's a great lesson. So onto a new question, a new line of question. So we talked a lot about the impact that LinkedIn has had on your businesses. Let's talk about some of the unexpected impacts maybe I guess in your life or even in the business that wasn't just say pipeline revenue and awareness.

[Chris Walker]

Totally. Okay, so let me see where I want to start. At the beginning you think, oh, like I'm going to do LinkedIn so I can get leads and create pipeline revenue and grow my business, right? So that's like the primary reason that most people get started. I found a very interesting effect happening recently where my customers are listening to the content and sharing the content internally, which is driving better retention, expansion opportunities, multi threading all the stuff on the customer side which by the way, if you're above like 20 to 50 million in revenue, that customer retention and expansion ends up becoming your main driver to growth, not new logo pipeline. So that was one huge learning. I think personally it just given me just a massive creative outlet in terms of the way that I articulate my ideas, the way that I'm able to communicate, the methods of how I explain things, to be able to teach concepts to people. So I think there's just been a big personal growth factor. I mean I've done speaking gigs with thousands of people live now that I couldn't imagine five years ago that I would have ever done. I think from an opportunity perspective, I've presented with opportunities in terms of being an investor in companies or companies giving me, you know, revenue shares or profit shares that I would have never been exposed to had I not done this. I think that there's just this massive element of personal growth that comes not only from the content, but from building business and going through hardships and a lot of things in life. We're just like my level of like confidence and security, some people will say it as arrogance. I really am not arrogant. I just have confidence and speak properly and post my ideas on channels. But my level of confidence and security and self worth has been like through the roof as of recently. I think a lot of that is a testament to some of the LinkedIn but also a lot of the stuff that I've been able to do in my business, my personal life as well and the things that I've experienced. And so when you think about this as a business leader or an entrepreneur, where do you think the world is going from here? We're not going backwards. You're not looking for your TV spot. So if you're spending time trying to think about how do I speak at that conference that happens every year, or how do I get a TV spot or how do I get my PR news release to get picked up by some plays. Everything is changing in terms of media. Where people get information is on social media and then to type of the person or what information they want, they'll go to a certain channel. Social media has become also search engines. A lot of searches happen on TikTok and Instagram Reels and even LinkedIn a lot more than they might happen on Google. And so where do you think the world is going? And so if you're going to be in the game for five years or 10 years, it's still a land grab. Social media like is still largely unpenetrated. People think, oh, I'm too late for social media. While they go and do SEO, you're not too late for social media. The amount of penetration is still incredibly low. And all that's going to happen is it's going to keep going. And if something happens, like we have the TikTok closing down potentially on January 19, but by the way, I just don't think people will allow. I think it'll get purchased or that rule law will change. I don't know super in the details, but I just don't think people will allow it. Let's say Tick tock disappeared on January 19th. What's going to happen? All those people that used to use Tick Tock are going to go somewhere else for the same thing. So that attention is just going to shift to Instagram, YouTube, Shorts or a new platform is going to pop up that is a TikTok copycat based in the U.S. either way, your skills at creating short form vertical video content through a native editor will play it no matter what in the future. They're just not going to disappear and no one's going to listen to that or watch that content medium ever again. And so we're trying to encourage people to think about. A lot of people like to look at the past and say, how did HubSpot build their company? HubSpot had a majority of the growth of their company before 2010. How did Salesforce build their company? Oh, they did the predictable revenue model in 2007. What was the world like in 2007? 17 or 18 years ago, it was very different. And so instead of looking at the past about how companies did it a long time ago, look at the people that are being successful right now and look at what they're doing.

[Brad]

I think that's great. And I want to Double click the two things that you mentioned. So the impact of LinkedIn is not necessarily the growth, but it's the growth mindset, right? The learning and the working it out. And I guess like you're growing, you're becoming smarter, you're challenging yourself and it gives you more confidence and I think that's fantastic. I think also in that response, there's message there for everybody. It's not too late, right? I think people kind of see what's happening on LinkedIn. You know, it looks like the gold rush, but it's happening. Should I go out there and stake my claim? And I think it sounds like the.

[Chris Walker]

Answer is yes, I think so. And platforms have shifts, right? There were a bunch of people that did really well on Instagram feed posts, and then Instagram shifted and they moved to story format and they incentivized people that moved to the story format. And different people grew up and got famous when they moved to stories. And then recently or a couple years back, now it's not so recent, they introduced the reels feature. And then the algorithm prioritizes the reels feature as a new method of consumption. And new people that started to use reels became the people that were most seen and were able to grow there. And so it's not just about am I late on the platform, but platforms evolve as well and the content mediums inside of them. And so right now LinkedIn is trying to make a shift to vertical short form video. Are they doing a great job of it? From my perspective, technically and understanding social networks, great. No, I don't think they're doing a great job of it. They haven't proven that they can move and get people to adopt new features outside of a pure feed post, but they're trying. And if they're able to be successful, it creates a whole new medium. And consumption that you're able to create on that creates the same advantage that I had in 2019 when I was posting text posts that got 3 million views on a Saturday because no one else posted. That same type of advantage can exist on a platform even when you're later when a platform shift happens.

[Brad]

It's a great point. The platform's always changing and there's all these features that no one ever uses. I want to wrap things up. I know you probably have something else to do and a couple more questions to round out the pod. You are probably advising a lot of founders and early stage CEOs. You know, when people come to you saying, hey, I want to follow in your footsteps, what's the first thing that you tell them?

[Chris Walker]

What's stopping you if you haven't already, why? Right? Adam Robinson shamelessly says, all I did was just copy exactly what Chris Walker was doing on LinkedIn. For my own business, you don't need me to give you advice on how to do that, just do it. And so when people ask me for advice on that, the real thing is, if you wanted to do it, you would have done it already. All the information's out there. It's not hard to copy or to build your own style. And so I generally, like, don't give advice on that. And people ask me to speak on that type of stuff. Right. I don't speak on it much anymore because you can go and listen to episode 131 or 132 or 232 or all the different episodes of my podcast or the YouTube videos, the LinkedIn content. The strategy on LinkedIn is well documented and incredibly simple. And so what's stopping you? Go and do it right now.

[Brad]

All right? Just do it. You mentioned Adam Robinson. I'm kind of curious. Who are you following and learning from and who do you think is crushing it on LinkedIn? Might be two different groups of people.

[Chris Walker]

I think that crushing it on LinkedIn is hard to quantify. I think there's a lot of people that get a lot of likes and look like they're quantifying and in the background their business is failing or they don't make any money or they're an influencer that get paid $1000 per post and, like, aren't making any money. And so I don't like to think about who's crushing it on LinkedIn or not, because what crushing it means to me is different than what you can see from what happens on LinkedIn and the engagement around that. I've been spending a lot of time, like, I want this to come off as professional and not arrogant as possible. And just so people understand this, at some point in your professional life, the only way that you will learn most things is by doing them yourself. You have reached a point where you have all this base of knowledge and there's no more time of consuming somebody else's advice. And you get most of the learnings from doing it yourself. And then if I have to make an important decision, I will consult advisors and people that are experts and I will go and ask them a couple of questions. But I'm not listening to their podcast every week. I'm not obsessing about when they post on LinkedIn. And so at some point you just reach a level of understanding and mastery that you have to go and just pave the way yourself. I will say a couple of things though, because I'm spending a lot of time trying to understand finance better. And so I've been following David Spitz and Ben Murray, who are two finance level people. And it's interesting just to see how those people think what they talk about. They have some great data around that stuff. And so I think it's more about identifying what am I trying to learn right now, and who is that person that I can learn it from? And so for some people, that might be me. For other people, it might, you know, I've got everything I needed out of Chris Walker. Right. There's people that I listened to in 2017 that changed my life. I watched their content for years, but I got what I needed from them, and I don't listen to it anymore. And so I think that's also a really important recognition to know when you've extracted everything that you need from somebody's wisdom and experience. I hope that people keep following me. I think that I evolve and I have new things to share, and I genuinely hope that. But I'm also not upset if somebody moves on and goes to that next level where they're all they're learning happens on their own. I'm proud that that happened.

[Brad]

I love that point. I think, you know, probably I'm guilty of doing the same, being out there, consuming. Maybe not just you, Dave Gearhart. At some point, you got to get out there, do the reps, and if you fall, scrape your knees, you know, you pick yourself back up and you figure it out and keep on going.

[Chris Walker]

Christopher Columbus didn't have a map. You know what I mean? I'm not promoting a lot of people have bad things to say about Christopher Columbus. I'm not like saying that. But people that are paving new ground, there's no map for it. And so recognizing if and when you're doing that, that you need to stop looking for the answer and start walking down the trail and seeing what happens.

[Brad]

That's deep. All right, Well, I think also a good point to wrap up the episode. And before we wrap, is there anything going on at Passetto or even Refined Labs that you want to share with the audience?

[Chris Walker]

I think that this method of how I got to where I am outside of the social stuff. So now we're just talking business strategy, something I want to talk more about, because literally I said this in 2019 about this is my plan. We're going to build a services business that allows us to collect data and customer insights and understand customer problems more deeply than anybody else. We're going to create cash flow from those businesses that allows us to then build a product company. And we have amazing customer insights. We know exactly what the problem is. We know exactly what the problem is going to be. We know what product we need to build, and we're going to build the right product that solves customer problems, and we're not going to have to raise venture capital or money in order to do so. I'm five or six years into that strategy and journey and it's going amazing. I think that many entrepreneurs should take that as a potential path for them. Rather than you have an idea, you don't have any revenue and you go and try and raise a $2 million seed. I just think there's a better way to do it. And financially it's worked out really well for me. And professionally and personally, it's worked out really well for me. And I think that when you take that approach, it makes you be smart and strategic and actually solve customer problems rather than allowing venture capital money to mask the problems inside of your business or the Mrs. That you make on strategy that you don't see because you have an excess of money that you can just spend and waste. And so I'm not over here on venture capital. Many of my customers raised venture capital at one point. It was a long time ago for many of them because I work with lower and upper middle market companies. So I'm not shitting on venture capital. But I am saying that I think that there are new paths that people should consider. There's a new world going on here. You can build your product so much faster now that AI is out here. And AI Dev, you don't need two years to launch your MVP anymore, and you don't need to burn $2 million to get there with no revenue. And I think just the world has changed. As a founder, I think you have a lot more options and a lot more autonomy. And I think that many people haven't recognized this shift in the market and still think the only thing I can do is just go and raise a seed round and get on the VC train. I just think that 99% of founders think they need to raise venture capital to get their idea to market. And I think it's actually the opposite, that 1% of founders should really be raising venture capital. And I don't think that's bad for venture capitalists either because I think that we have a lot of vcs that have unrealized losses on the balance sheet. They've made a lot of terrible investments that were overvalued in 2020, 2021 and parts of 2022. It's going to take them five or seven years to clear the fund and their investors are going to find out that they lost a bunch of money and didn't get their return. It happens in real estate too. You get a lot of losers that win for a little while. All the bottom of the market VC will clear out, the best ones will stay and they'll invest in the best companies and it'll be a much better model and we'll see a lot more private equity and public equity rather than venture capital, which is in, from my perspective, a lot better for as an asset class for shareholders as well.

[Brad]

So having been inside the venture capital machine, I got lucky on a couple of exits and others I didn't to treacherous path. And when I left my last company to do this, I told, you know, the CEO I was working for. I hope you get rich slow and don't raise money. So I wish the same for you.

[Chris Walker]

When did you have your exes, if you don't mind me asking?

[Brad]

2012. 2020. But right at the very beginning of the pandemic.

[Chris Walker]

Got it.

[Brad]

You know, obviously I wasn't high up in the food chain, but I, you know, got to keep on working.

[Chris Walker]

Yeah, I just like to, I like to ask and clarify because most of the people that say I had a good exit, whether they had stock options or they were a founder, the exit happened pre2019, which means that the raise probably happened pre2014, which was 10 years ago. And so I think the game has fundamentally changed and we can't look back at what people did 10 years ago and made them successful and think that we might be able to replicate it now. I think we need to think differently and so like challenging and also like learning about how that happened because sometimes people are like, yeah, it just happened to me last year. We raised in 2019 and all of a sudden we had a five year path and we exited it and we didn't have too much on the cap table and Amazing. I just think it's a lot more rare these days and companies are dramatically overvalued, which just makes the preferred returns higher, makes the timeline to liquidity events much longer, makes the percentage rate for success much lower. And so raising at 100x revenue value for a seed or a series A doesn't help you. It actually just makes the journey a lot fucking harder.

[Brad]

So it makes the hole deeper in the hamster wheel. Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Walker]

You just dug yourself a bigger hole out of the gate.

[Brad]

All right, well, to wrap things up, I wish that you grow slow and methodically and everybody go follow Chris on LinkedIn if you're not already. Is there anywhere else that you want?

[Chris Walker]

You know, I've been posting a lot more. Like a lot of the stuff we talked about today, I've been posting a lot more on Instagram. There's a lot like motivational and shows other parts of my life want to follow me there? It's Chris Walker 171 on Instagram @ Tik Tok. I do similar things, but I don't post as many stories on Tik Tok.

[Brad]

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being generous with your time and insights. And until next time, let's stay connected.

[Chris Walker]

Awesome. Hope you have a great 2025. To Brad you and to everyone listening to the podcast, let's have a great year.

[Brad]

It.