E044: Hiring: How To Build and Structure Your Team For Success

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary: Marketing Operators E044 – Hiring: How To Build and Structure Your Team For Success

Episode Information

• Title: Marketing Operators
• Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
• Episode: E044: Hiring: How To Build and Structure Your Team For Success
• Release Date: January 28, 2025

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1. Introduction and Casual Banter

The episode kicks off with the hosts engaging in light-hearted conversation about the current weather conditions in Denver and Las Vegas, holiday strategies, and company retreats. This segment establishes a relaxed atmosphere and sets the stage for deeper discussions.

Notable Quote:

• Cody [00:00]: "It's like negative five degrees out in Denver. So there's only one thing to do in that cold, which is to sit inside an office and work on E-commerce businesses."

2. Transition to Core Topic: Hiring and Team Structure

After the initial banter, the conversation shifts towards the primary focus of the episode—hiring strategies and structuring marketing teams for optimal success.

3. Hiring Strategies: Growth vs. Time Efficiency

The hosts delve into the fundamental reasons behind hiring—whether to drive business growth or to buy back time from key leaders. They discuss how hiring the right talent can both expand the company's capabilities and free up executives to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives.

Key Points:

• Buying Back Time: Delegating tasks allows leaders to concentrate on strategic growth.
• Driving Growth: Hiring specialized roles can directly contribute to the company's expansion and revenue.

Notable Quote:

• Sean [22:53]: "You have to do that versus just continuing to action, action, action... It’s so important to slow down and look back."

4. Organizational Structure and Reorganization

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing how organizational structures evolve as companies grow. The hosts share their experiences with reorganization, emphasizing the importance of creating hierarchical layers to enhance cross-team collaboration and efficiency.

Key Points:

• Initial Flat Structures: Early-stage companies often have flat structures with direct reporting lines, which can become unwieldy as the team expands.
• Introducing Hierarchical Layers: Adding roles like VP of Marketing or Creative Director helps manage larger teams and fosters better collaboration across different marketing channels.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Structured hierarchies facilitate comprehensive campaign planning and execution across multiple touchpoints.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor [29:07]: "All these different teams are going deep across all these different channels... more hierarchy and better utilize those resources to achieve different financial goals."
• Cody [31:43]: "You're probably saying, okay, like VP of marketing, you're now going to take on these three direct reports which is going to give more focus and more, you know, just a detail orientation to those people."

5. Centralization vs. Decentralization of Creative Teams

The discussion highlights the benefits of centralizing creative resources to ensure consistency and efficiency across various marketing channels. Centralization aids in maintaining a unified brand aesthetic and facilitates knowledge sharing among team members.

Key Points:

• Centralized Creative Teams: Centralization leads to a common language and standardized processes, enhancing the quality and consistency of creative outputs.
• Fragmented Teams: Decentralized creative teams may struggle with consistency and cross-team collaboration.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor [34:24]: "Designers are centralized so they should be speaking a common language and learning from one another."
• Cody [36:17]: "It’s like a little agency. So that's what we're kind of figuring out right now is how will those like, dotted lines work in, in practice."

6. Evolving Organizational Needs and Scalability

As businesses scale, their organizational needs become more complex, necessitating continuous adjustments to team structures. The hosts discuss strategies for identifying when it's time to hire for specialization or to restructure existing teams to better meet evolving business objectives.

Key Points:

• Identifying Gaps: Recognizing areas within the organization that lack dedicated leadership or resources.
• Specialization: Hiring specialized roles (e.g., Director of International Marketing) to focus on specific business dimensions.
• Scalability: Ensuring the organizational structure can support future growth without becoming inefficient.

Notable Quotes:

• Sean [37:47]: "Like your director of E. Comm, well, we will get a UX designer. Right now it's not."
• Connor [40:33]: "The maturity of the business... it only gets to the point where it needs to become more intricate or nuanced... you actually need like bodies in those positions to manage."

7. Handling Personnel Changes: Hiring and Firing

The conversation transitions into the delicate topic of personnel changes, including hiring replacements and executing layoffs. The hosts share their approaches to ensuring smooth transitions and maintaining team morale during such changes.

Key Points:

• Proactive Hiring: Hiring strong teams before making leadership changes to ensure continuity.
• Cultural Fit: Emphasizing the importance of cultural alignment during hiring to maintain team cohesion.
• Managing Layoffs: Approaching layoffs thoughtfully to minimize disruption and provide clear reasons for organizational changes.

Notable Quotes:

• Cody [62:13]: "I would struggle with firing that person and not having like a plan to backload them because I don't want to have stagnantness in a certain part of the org."
• Sean [66:24]: "We do it amicably and we're happy to be generous and do a transition, you know, but it’s just, you know, not longer on the same trajectory."

8. Desired Traits in Candidates: Curiosity and Business Acumen

A critical aspect of effective hiring is identifying candidates who possess both the curiosity and business acumen necessary to drive growth. The hosts discuss how such traits are indicators of a candidate's potential productivity and alignment with the company's growth objectives.

Key Points:

• Curiosity: Candidates who show genuine interest in understanding and auditing the business are more likely to contribute meaningfully.
• Business Acumen: Understanding metrics like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and P&L (Profit and Loss) demonstrates a candidate’s readiness to engage with the company's strategic goals.
• Cultural Passion: Ensuring that candidates are as passionate about the business as the existing team to foster a cohesive and motivated workforce.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor [66:55]: "They just seem like killers and then there's other people who just seem like, don’t seem all that interested in that."
• Cody [68:37]: "They have to be interested... they have to have the curiosity to understand exactly what's happening with the entire business."

9. Strategies for Effective Hiring Processes

The hosts share practical strategies for conducting effective hiring processes that ensure both skill fit and cultural fit. Transparency about company expectations and actively gauging a candidate’s enthusiasm and alignment with business goals are emphasized.

Key Points:

• Transparency: Clearly communicating company culture and expectations during the interview process.
• Behavioral Indicators: Observing body language and responses to gauge genuine interest and cultural alignment.
• Questioning Techniques: Asking candidates about their excitement and perceived challenges to assess their readiness and fit.

Notable Quotes:

• Sean [70:45]: "I usually do the final round and just be really transparent about what your expectations and culture are. And like, just watch their body language."
• Cody [71:54]: "All my questions are about how they work cross-functionally because that role is so cross-functional between performance marketing and brand."

10. Continuous Organizational Assessment and Adaptation

The episode concludes with the hosts stressing the importance of regularly assessing and adapting organizational structures to meet the evolving needs of the business. Continuous evaluation ensures that the team remains efficient and aligned with strategic objectives.

Key Points:

• Regular Reassessment: Periodically reviewing team structures to identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement.
• Adaptability: Being willing to restructure and adapt as the business grows and market conditions change.
• Long-Term Planning: Anticipating future needs and preparing the organizational structure accordingly to support sustained growth.

Notable Quotes:

• Cody [57:08]: "It's so hard to slow down and look backwards... but it's so helpful to just slow down, look back and save yourself a bunch of headaches."
• Sean [72:46]: "It's something that you should be doing all the time, especially if you're a fast-growing startup with evolving needs."

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Conclusion

Episode E044 of Marketing Operators offers invaluable insights into building and structuring a marketing team for success. The hosts provide practical advice on when and why to hire, how to design and adapt organizational structures, and the importance of cultural fit and business acumen in candidates. Through shared experiences and thoughtful discussions, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of effective hiring strategies and team management in the dynamic landscape of marketing operations.

Upcoming in Episode E045: The conversation wraps up with a teaser for the next segment, focusing on maximizing the productivity and integration of new hires within the team.

Notable Quote:

• Cody [72:46]: "Tune in next week for episode two of two on hiring, where we're going to specifically focus on getting the most out of your new hire and giving them clarity, getting them into production mode."

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Key Takeaways:

• Strategic Hiring: Align hiring practices with business growth and time efficiency objectives.
• Organizational Flexibility: Continually reassess and adapt team structures to maintain efficiency.
• Cultural and Business Fit: Prioritize candidates who demonstrate curiosity and a deep understanding of business metrics.
• Centralization Benefits: Centralized creative teams enhance consistency and cross-team collaboration.
• Effective Management: Implement hierarchical layers to manage larger teams and foster strategic oversight.

By integrating these strategies, marketing leaders can build resilient, efficient, and growth-oriented teams poised for success in the competitive landscape of E-commerce and digital marketing.

Transcript

[Cody]

All right boys, here we are on the, on the morning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's, it's like negative five degrees out in Denver. So there's only one thing to do and it's that cold, which is to sit inside an office and work on E commerce businesses. So I'm, I'm. The company's off, but, but I'm happy to be here. Are you guys. Is your company's off today? Are you guys. Are you giving that as a holiday for everyone? For the employees of Ridge and Jones Road, we to.

[Connor]

To describe my background here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We've got our company retreat this week. That' um, so it's actually like a travel day for most employees. A lot of people got in last night. The rest of the company gets in today. So it's like a weird hybrid of, of work related but not like hands on keyboard activities.

[Cody]

Nice. How about you, Cody?

[Sean]

We got snow. We got like 6 inches of snow yesterday. So I just been shoveling all weekend. Feels like I like stupidly decided to get ahead of it and so shoveled when we had like an inch down. And of course as by the time I was done I was like such a, such a terrible idea. But now we're, we're off. But you know, never off in E commerce land, right?

[Cody]

Yeah, exactly. Is that normal where you live? You're in. That's got to be. You guys get snowfall a lot, right?

[Sean]

We get snow. Last few years, global warming. I guess we haven't gotten as much, but. But yeah, got it. Got a little bit of it.

[Cody]

Also Connor, you reminded me that because you, you joined the hexcloud holiday party, I have to join the Ridge Vegas retreat. So actually while you guys are chatting, I'll be looking up United flights out to Vegas tonight so I can be there right when the crap start. The crap starts getting thrown and it's warm.

[Connor]

I was, I was walking around last night, it was like 45 degrees. So it's basically toasty over here in Vegas.

[Cody]

Dang. That's.

[Sean]

What do you do, like a 50k gambling stipend per person?

[Connor]

No, not for a person. But we, we do give people cash to do whatever they want with and plenty of people gamble. I, I haven't talked about it on the podcast. This was brief anecdote. Two years ago, our first year in Vegas, we all come out and no joke and we have a really like, we have a really great crew. Very laid. Not a bunch of Vegas goers, not, not big partiers. I have never seen a group of people get so lucky gambling to collectively three nights in a row. No joke. Nobody walked away having lost. I think as a company. I think as a company, we left up, like, 22, $23,000. It was. It was.

[Cody]

Wow.

[Connor]

And then last year, we gave it all back. So.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Wait, what comes all back to. Oh, I see. I, like. I was like, oh, they donated their winnings to a. To a local charity in Vegas. No, no, no. We just. Or the year after, you actually give, like, a spreadsheet where everyone, like, at the end of the trip puts what they were plus minus. So you can do, like, an aggregate. How do we do as a company, this.

[Connor]

I mean, honestly. Yeah, I joke. We're probably still up. It's really hard to give back that many winnings from the first year. It was. It was unreal. And people hadn't gambled before, so, like, we want it playing craps too. So, like, everybody's winning together is basically how that game works. It was. It was unreal. And people were like, dude, you should have told me to play this earlier. This is so easy. I just put the chips down, and then they give me more chips back. Like, it was like, the most. We were just a group of novices, and we just walked away up big. So we'll. We'll see how this year pencils out.

[Sean]

I just want to know you versus Sean. This year, I feel like you guys would have very different styles. I feel like you'd be much more methodical about it. Sean would just be all in on everything.

[Cody]

Sean's like, I'm hitting on 17. Screw it. Like, I just have. I have a. I have a feel right now. I know it's going to be a four.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I. I'll. I'll.

[Cody]

I'll.

[Connor]

I'll report back after a couple days.

[Cody]

You know, now that we're. Now that you're. You're, like, explaining some specific scenarios, I feel like playing craps in Vegas has to be the ultimate team bonding experience. I mean, how could it not if you just have, like, 15 people on the same company around the same craps table? The table gets hot. Like, that's. That's good. That's good vibes right there.

[Connor]

So, as you know, we all use motion, and they have been shipping a ton of cool new stuff. We wanted to talk through some of it. Classically, the first new feature I want to talk about is something that we were already doing manually, internally, and that's basically Been a lot of Motion's roadmap is like figuring out what are creative strategists and the best brands doing manually in spreadsheets and in figment, things like that, and how can they automate it and improve it. And a great new example of that is Creative Highlights. It's a weekly creative leaderboard, kind of like a Billboard Top 10 chart of what's working in your ad accounts. We've been doing this historically, we'd say every week we'd send it out to the whole team. This is what's working. These are the ads that are new to working and these are the ads that have were previous winners and are continuing to work. So the fact that this is automated is really nice. As a pro tip, we start a lot of meetings this way. So if you're ahead of growth growth, you don't need to prep. You can just immediately pull in Creative Highlights to understand what's best performing. Some of the other new features that I've been excited about, there's a LinkedIn ads integration. So for the B2B marketers listening, you can check that out. And lastly, we've been looking at winning combinations. This is an advanced feature that lets you more easily extract big insights from all your creative testing variables. And there is a related new feature called naming conventions, which one of my favorite things we haven't dug in here, but obviously this is, this is in my wheelhouse. It automatically groups ads in comparative reports and just helps you get those bigger insights with way less manual effort. So if you're ready to learn how the best D2C and E commerce brands use Motion to ship winning meta, TikTok and YouTube ads. Book a demo today or create a free account motion app.com and remember, if you mentioned marketing operators, podcast emotion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month.

[Cody]

All right, before we get into it today, we want to thank our sponsors, Motion, Prescient Rich Panel and North Beam. Okay, we got a. We got a good episode today. I think it's timely. I think. I know, I don't know about you guys, but you know, Q back into Q4 rolls around, Q1 rolls around, and we immediately go into what we call like work in progress org chart mode where we're basically, you know, mapping out, you know, specifically first half, but really all year hiring before we do that. So I think it's timely because I think everyone's kind of in that headspace as they get into the new year. Before we do that, I noticed that all these E comm Tech companies, they all apparently are working on new user interface updates and then they publish them in January. But I think Cody and Connor, there's a few things that you guys aren't seeing yet in these updates that, that I think you guys want to make an announcement to some of the E Comm tech companies about, about what you really want to see in all these new UI updates. So floor is yours right now. Now's the time.

[Connor]

We're putting people on notice. Cody and I talked about it in the 2025 predictions episode a couple weeks ago. What we need is default calendar adjusted reporting. Simple. I'm talking to Shopify analytics team, I'm talking to North Beam, I'm talking to Triple Whale. That is what we're looking for. I'll give you a perfect example. This past weekend I am going to tweet today about it so people will have seen this live on the timeline. But if I look at this past weekend of performance, if you just comp year over year, that's the 18th and 19th versus the 18th and 19th. Last year we were up like 50 or something if we adjust for the weekend. So now all of a sudden we're comparing ourselves to the 20th and 21st. We're only up like 20. It's this massive difference in performance that you have to account for in your reporting. No analytics tools do it by default, so need to get it done. I'm manifesting it. Actually I was manifesting it earlier. Now, now I'm more on the verge of making demands. But that is my, that's my ask.

[Cody]

Cody, you agree that's what you want.

[Sean]

I actually, I don't feel that strongly. I just want it for Connor. I'm just like, just for him. I want it.

[Connor]

Okay, let me, let me ask you guys this briefly and then we've got a jam packed episode to get into. Do you guys look at calendar weeks and do you look Sunday to Saturday or Monday to Sunday?

[Cody]

I'm usually looking. I usually come in and do my performance reports or like my deep dive every Monday morning. So like I'm coming in looking, how are you pacing year over year both in terms of revenue, mer, cac, you know, the big metrics. And then how are we pacing to forecast revenue mer? And then I'll go deeper on like hey, if, if I notice something, I like deeper into the channel level stuff. So I'm mainly looking like Saturday to Sunday is the, is the big seven day window and then I'll get more granular as is. But that's like generally My, my starting point just because Monday morning performance dive is like my. It's like so just what I do always if I'm like working on a Sunday, I might do it on a Sunday instead. I don't think it makes that big of a difference. It's just how it's kind of worked into my workflow.

[Sean]

Might be a little bit of hot take. I don't really look, I don't really do weekly that much. We used to be on this whole, this whole 4, 4, 5 so it had to be very meticulous of like what, what your week is looking like. I really look at monthly pacing so I'll look at like a previous seven. I don't do that much year over year because hopefully that's just, that's factored in the cops. I mean I do look but not like really religiously. So I'm really looking just against forecast for the month and how we're pacing and just kind of laser focused on that. And obviously I'll look at last seven occasionally I'll look at you know, last seven year over year or something like that or month to date year over year. But I'm really mostly looking at you know, how we're pacing month to date against forecast.

[Cody]

Yeah, we used to waste so much time. I remember at like back in the, when I, and this is like 2020 to 2022 when I was at the agency where people like doing all sorts of like three days or less like day trading type tactics. We wasted so much time looking at like L3 multiple times per week and like trying to game the system in some way, shape or form. But I, I agree with you Cody. I've. The, the deeper I've gotten into this game, the more I'm focusing on, on larger windows of time. What about you? What do you, what do you do, Connor?

[Connor]

I, I also like, I mean I like weeks and then I like standardizing the weeks or like I mean again for me I'm looking this morning I was looking at this past weekend. I want to compare it exactly to the same weekend last year which is a different set of dates. So yeah, we're, we're super in alignment around larger periods of time but obviously we're you know, three fourths of the way through January or so or two thirds of the way through January. Month to date is like it becomes too broad. It's like okay, yeah we're crushing month to date but actually this weekend was kind of soft. So like you have like I'm trying to balance like how Are we looking at shorter term time frames? Because I think that's a better indicator of current performance as well as like the immediate future performance. And then we can wait that it gets month to date. So yeah, anyway, yeah, but I'll look.

[Sean]

At my today but then I'll be like hey, last three days we're you know, 7% below forecast or something like that.

[Connor]

Yeah, yes, yes. And those last three days have to be standardized for day of week. That's my, that's what I feel strongly about.

[Cody]

I found that, I found that sometimes looking at two granular windows you can like, you can, it's, it's almost you stop working on like you look month to day, maybe things are fine or maybe a little below goal and then you look L7 or L3 and you're like you're, you're you know, compared to the entire month or maybe lower like as a percentage. And then I've seen teams go into like reactive mode where they're like okay, like we need to get new statics with like a big bold offer on it and like we're gonna do all these like short term tactics and in the meantime you're actually shooting yourself in the foot because you have these bigger picture projects that you've outlined as being the most important to keep driving your growth. Then you stop working on those things because like no, we need to like instead of like continuing to make progress on this big like YouTube ad sprint, which is like very brand oriented, you know, brand building, performance marketing ads, you're like oh, I'm going to go do all these like five direct response things to try to like make this last three days look better. Which I think is it's just too short term of thinking. I like I think you have to resist the urge to do that at times. And there's a time and a place for that as well. Like in Q4 it's like Q4 offers not hitting. We got to pivot quickly. But Q1's not the time to, to stop working on your like projects that are going to move the needle big picture for these like short term fixes.

[Connor]

Totally. One thing we talk about our marketing operators all the time is measurement. How am I as the CMO of Ridge logging in and understanding what our performance was yesterday and last week and last month compared to different time periods. Our go to solution for that is North Beam, a multi touch attribution tool that we rely on every single day. We really like it for two reasons. One, it is a standard form of measurement across all Channels. We know deterministically that if someone clicks through, we're tracking a North Beam, that that user is measured in the exact same way between Meta and Snap and Tikt and YouTube partnerships if we're clicking through from there, or TV if we're clicking through from there. So we get this foundational layer that we know is measured in the exact same way over long periods of time. So I have full confidence that we know that we are comparing things accurately and honestly. The second thing I like about northbeam is its data management tools. We tag incessantly. I talk about naming conventions all the time and northbeam is where we benefit greatly from that. Every day I can log in and divide my spend and sort it across different dimensions. So I know exactly how much we're spending across categories, across different demos, across different offers or asset types. It's our go to tool. If you want to hear more about North Beam, make sure to visit North Beam IO and make sure to tell them that the marketing operator sent you.

[Cody]

So we're talking about hiring today. I don't know about you guys, but we are always, always, always hiring. Our team was brand new. Our growth team, our marketing team in general is brand new internally in the beginning of 2023. So this is. We're really only going into our third full year as a, as an internal team. And I think we have. I think it'd be fun, maybe just do a quick headcount on, on growth team. I think we're at like 15. We're in between 15 and 18 right now on the growth team, and that's across paid retention, CRO, influencer, affiliate SEO, community. I think that's everything on growth teams. Yeah. So we're about 15 to 18, which is up from zero, starting, you know, at the last day of 2022. What are, what are your guys headcounts right now? Just, just within growth marketing. Cody, you want to.

[Sean]

It's interesting because some of those I wouldn't, I wouldn't have thought would have be on the growth team. My guess is a lot of those at most arts wouldn't be like community SEO. A few of them, yeah.

[Cody]

It's a little. There's. There's a few that are a little like this. You could, you could argue either way.

[Sean]

Mm.

[Connor]

What, what, what are you not including in that? Like, when you say growth team, is that the distinction? Like, no designers?

[Cody]

No, I'm including. We. We have our. We have brand right now and we're. We might switch as we do have brand designers and, and Growth marketing designer, distinctly situated under each team. So I actually am including like designers and like with. Not that we have a ton, but we have a handful of designers, video editors that are technically under the growth team right now.

[Sean]

Do you, do you consider retention growth for you guys or not?

[Cody]

Yep. Retention growth. Yeah.

[Sean]

So we got, you know, I'm CEO, I consider myself part of the growth team. That's where I probably spend, you know, more of my time. But at least I try to. So we have a director of growth. We just brought on a brand new senior director of creative strategy. So she joined like two weeks ago. We have a associate growth manager. We have a software kind of director, growth associate manager kind of, you know, running ads. We have a lot of freelancers, like a lot of freelance editors. We're doing a lot more overseas just get bandwidth. So a lot of all of our like editors on that do ads are freelance right now. And then we've got a director of E. Comm. I don't. I guess you can pot it under growth. It's not like technically growth here, but director of E. Com. Director of retention as well for us. Like that's our growth team. And then yeah, a lot of obviously freelancers and agencies, but I'd say pretty, pretty lean.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so. I mean what is that, like 6, 7ish?

[Sean]

Yeah. If you count like growth, it's two people or three. I guess if you count the creative strategist.

[Cody]

Yeah. And are those people in your org? Because I think I'm curious, I'm curious. What are those people often managing a lot of external resources or at least, at least one. Like whether it's an agency or a freelancer.

[Sean]

Yeah. So like our creative strategist, you know, a lot of editors, a lot of.

[Cody]

Freelance editors, but they're driving forward your agenda like as the leader and the owner of that channel. They're driving for the strategy and the agenda that you guys have. And then utilizing agencies, freelancers.

[Sean]

Yeah. And they're, they're 40 hour freelancers that just you know, are overseas. So they're, they're pretty full.

[Cody]

Right.

[Sean]

But, but the remote. And then you know, for, for paid media, we run everything in house except for TV and Google. So we're growth team is managing those two.

[Cody]

Nice. Okay.

[Sean]

And then retention, you know, I don't put retention deck technically on the growth team, but retention usually works with like our internal creative team, which is on our creative team.

[Cody]

Where do you, where does retention sit? Is that its own? Is it its own thing? Does it does it not have any higher overarching?

[Sean]

I. They all report to me. So they're kind of all stacked laterally. So we have like brand and growth. So technically like our brand is like influencer, social copy, project management. Like that's all under one person whose brand and so all the brand rolls up into them all growth rolls up and reports to me. So that's you know, growth, creative strategy, E common retention, all report to me and data as well.

[Cody]

Got it, got it. Okay. Connor, how about you? What's the, what's the rich growth marketing headcount looking like these days?

[Connor]

Yeah, I don't have the growth number off the top of my head here. I run a marketing all hands call and there's like 25 people on that. So it's like that's a good rough number. And then what we include within that is really marketing directors. So you look at like retention, acquisition, E Com, performance, creative. We have partnership managers currently and then we have our creative director who sits on top of designers, our photographer, copywriting, etc. Etc. So that's, that's like the easy distinction. And in total it's like 25 people US based.

[Cody]

Got it. And you've been, you've been at Ridge for what, seven, six years? Seven years. What year is this?

[Connor]

Yeah, I think it's like eight.

[Cody]

Eight. What about you Cody? At, at Jones Road, how long have you been in, in your like growth marketing now CEO leadership role?

[Sean]

I mean different roles. I've been CEO for officially two months so that I've been you know, chief marketing revenue officer for, for a few years, CMO for a few years. But I've been here since the beginning so about four and a half years.

[Cody]

Four and a half. Got it, Got it. Yeah. I asked because I feel that the longer the leader of a company's been there, the deeper and deeper they have internal employees versus external resources. And I see that same trend happening with hexclad, which is probably a good segue into the first kind of question I have here which maybe comes off as like a no duck question, but I actually think when you sit and dig down into like the reasons you hire there's a, there's a lot of nuance to like why you hire. I think, I think Taylor Holiday said that the you, you hire when the value the new hire can produce, which is hopefully quantifiable in revenue is greater than what you're going to pay to, to, to hire that person. Right. So if you're hiring a, you know, a Creative Strategist at $100,000 per year, $150,000 per year. Like can that person produce, you know, at least that amount of value? Hopefully more. Which I think is like, you know, I think it's an interesting like framework to look at it through. But I'm curious if you guys have any off the top of your head like reasons you're hiring right now. Like the reasons that I've kind of identified are a, you're not doing something you know you should be doing. Be a bunch of people are handling one task or one focus. So you have like, you know, it's by committee of like three or four people giving some of their time to it, but not all of it. See, which I think Cody, you were at this, this place this year as you made a bunch of these director hires. Like you feel like you're probably just handling too much and you need to like offload that. And then there's the, there's the always fun kind of agency versus internal conversation is, is an interesting one to go down. So I'm curious like maybe Cody, I'll start with you. Since you've been making a bunch of these director hires, like do you feel like one of these reasons you're hiring for more than another? Is it a mixture of, of both that is causing you to hire? Like what's been your thought process and like I think for me hiring is, it's like one of those things that you, it's instinctive like you know, to do it but then you can also ration rationalize it with one of these reasons. So Cody, what's your, what's kind of been your rationalization for some of these hires that you're bringing on recently?

[Sean]

Yeah, I think our a like bootstrap brand, we try to have the discipline of keeping you know, payroll under a certain percentage. So everything is kind of constrained by that. I also want to talk about like org chart design a little bit later because like one of the things that happens in a fast growing startup is you have to reorg. I don't know if you guys have had to, but I think that would be interesting to chat about because we've had to do it several times in like different departments every year. Like marketing is in I think a pretty good spot now because we did it like a year ago. But like our finance team, we have to reorg our retail team. But yeah, I think just have the discipline of, of you know, your, your cap and how much you'll spend on, on payroll as a percent of revenue for your Business. I could throw out a number for other businesses, but it's all going to depend based on what you have in house, whatnot. I think a, you're, you're either hiring to grow your business or to buy back your time. I think buying back your time is, hey, I'm doing too much of this, right? I'm the founder, I'm the CEO and I'm spending time doing things that could be delegated which would allow me to spend more of my time on higher leverage activities that could bring more, more value to the business. You know, so if you're a founder or a CMO or CEO and you're, you know, putting data into a spreadsheet, you can hire somebody low level to do that, create a SOP and now you get 10 hours of your time back and now you can go make more ads or you can go do partnerships or, or test out a new channel, things like that. So I think that's like the buyback your time and you want to start with the lowest level which is like, you know, I shouldn't be doing anything in my emails, I shouldn't be doing anything. Super manual. That could just be an sop, right? That's a lot easier to delegate and cheaper than getting a 200k year, you know, director of growth or something like that, who is a much more strategic thing when maybe that's what you should have been spending your time doing anyways. So I think that I would just look at the org and just look at, you know, where you're spending your time and then be like, what do we, what especially this is more of a scale thing like what do we want to invest in? You have to have full humility to know like I am not the best at everything. Right? Like we're going to hire a VP of retail right now because that's a strategic bet. We're trying to double our retail business this year and you know, in a few years have it be 10x of what it currently is. Right? Like that's not my background, that's not my expertise, that's not where I should be spending my time. But that's a strategic investment to say we should hire people here and this is how it'll be measured. Like this is the outcome. Same way we would, you know, we have to budget ROI for, you know, the actual store build outs. It's the same thing where we're thinking about headcount. So those are to me the two principles is, is, you know, buying back your time and what's an Investment to grow the future state of your business.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think you hit on something. Like you hit on something that I've recognized when we're hiring too, is that often, like, it's either me or by committee, we're kind of laying this, like, foundation that is like, pretty good. And the whole point, like, if, if you hire the right person, you should come in and three months, six months, 12 months later, see that thing that you laid a foundation for just totally like orders of magnitude improve. Like, that's how I felt about our creative strategy. And you know, from 2023 going into 2024, it was like, it was very by committee. It was like myself, Cam, who's our. Now our head of advertising in London, who is our. A senior growth manager. Like, very much all of us owning certain parts of creative strategy and working to get assets produced and launching them in the account. It worked like we did. We did pretty good. But then we said, you know what? We first off, none of us are spending all of our time doing this. It's arguably the most important part of our, like, growth marketing to drive, you know, the revenue goals that we have. And we think we go hire someone pretty senior that can just take the foundation we've laid and totally level it up. And then we'll also not get bogged down by all the kind of the, the admin type stuff of creative strategy. It's like, all right, if we hire someone full time, they can level up the system that we've built and then we can kind of come in and still make sure that our, our ads that we think should get produced are getting produced, but we won't have to go through all the, you know, the nitty gritty of writing the script now and doing all the back and forth with the editors. Like, now that's the creative strategist role. So it's, it's allowing our input to be more valuable and someone else to come in and focus on it, you know, eight hours a day, every day, and really level up the program. Um, which is kind of what you're saying. I think Cody, in, in, in some respects is like, there's certain things you shouldn't be doing and it's going to get better if you don't do it, because you're not going to give it all your time ever, but someone else will.

[Sean]

Yeah, it's. It's hard. Yeah. I think creative strategy is a, is a perfect example because a lot of brands have probably been there where they get to a size and like, hey, we need A full time. But before that it's just like media buyers growth, you know, marketers pitching in. But it's, it's very hard when you're not, you know, solely focused on it. And then we can bring in work. One person like this is your KPI, this is, that should theoretically, if they're good and they have the right direction and resources, should grow the business, you know, pretty substantially.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah. Connor, how about you? What's your. What what's your kind of been your, your take on knowing when to hire recently for Ridge? Or is it. Or is it multiple scenarios?

[Connor]

Yeah, I, Cody had the best answer, I think. Growing the business or buying back your time. What I've found is we have examples of like a little bit of both. Right. Like we're hiring a VP of marketing right now and they're going to sit over a lot of our like owned channels and one that is going to save me quite a bit of time, but also them being able to go deeper on it. Like if I spend 30% of my time on what this person will do, all of a sudden they're spending a hundred percent. So I'm getting back time and with that 100 and maybe deeper expertise, we're actually growing the business. So I think it's often like a hybrid solution. The other one for us is like, and I know we're going to talk a bit more about org charts and things, but we're either the two other ways that we're thinking about hiring right now is like we have gaps in the org chart, things that someone needs to own outright and we don't have anybody to own it outright currently. Or we're like adding hierarchy to the org. So like what I laid out earlier is we're also likely too flat right now. Creative director just came on in August and then VP of marketing coming on over the next couple of weeks. Like those are, those are new layers within the org that I think is really valuable. So that's the other way that we think about it right now.

[Cody]

Yeah. Nice.

[Sean]

It's been really cool to see prescient this year just emerge as one of the leading, you know, trusting solutions for brands to measure their media mix. You know, now more than ever, you know, triangulation, having no source of truth. But really it's best practice to have multiple methods to be able to figure out, you know, what is performing. And one of the things that we love in our toolbox is prescient. But it's been really cool to see a lot of brands onboarding with them and having a lot of success. Onboarding is super quick. It's the quickest I've ever seen from an mmm. It's been great for our upper funnel channels. Things like TV and YouTube has really given us confidence and it's very hard to validate and test tv, so they have great integrations. We use Tatari for all our TV buying and so it's the best way that we're able to understand how our upper funnel channels are working. We're not on Amazon, but if you're on Amazon, you can get really cool halo sales impacts of Amazon as well as retail channels. So it's awesome. You can forecast revenue and acquisition costs across all your channels, optimize your media mix to improve your profitability. They've always got new channels coming, which is. Which is really cool. It's really played a really big role in us scaling and having the confidence to increase our spend in things like TV, both linear and streaming, and YouTube as well. We wouldn't be able to do it without them. So there's a reason why Prescient is trusted by Jones Road Beauty, Hexclad, Holo, Socks, Coterie and over a hundred more. And so if you want to be like one of us, like Jones Road, like, like Connor from hexcloud, check out Prescient, which I highly recommend. You should go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo and see for yourself. Connor, say more about what you're saying. I think it's interesting. Are you saying part of the hiring you do is to kind of build that org and as you add people, it's probably naturally going to get added horizontally. Maybe you add another director and they report to you and then eventually get five, six of them and then you're like, hey, this is too much for one person to handle.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally, totally. Well, here, look, I'll even go back really far. When we started building out, Ridge, Sean and I, Sean's our CEO, worked at an agency previously called Hawk Media. And their whole model was this like a la carte channel marketing channel that you could hire. A brand could show up and they'd be like, I want, you know, email, I want paid and I want design or whatever. So you had these like little teams that someone could just select a la cart. And I think that informed our initial like org structure at Ridge Point, being it was incredibly like channel focused. There wasn't actually a lot of like hierarchy or structure to that. It was like literally a la carte. So, like, if you looked at the org chart 6 months ago I just had a bunch of different teams under me. We had director levels, we have managers below them or associates under them. But it's like a big wide marketing and creative team and then they all just report into me. So now what we're trying to do is just create more of that hierarchy. Creative director is an example of that. VP of marketing is an example of that. And I think one way that we'll immediately benefit from that and I think is kind of a shortcoming of what we do currently is just better cross team collaboration. All these different teams are going deep across all these different channels and I think we're doing incredibly good work. But like functionally how do we better when we go to launch a campaign or just like on an ongoing organic basis, like how are we telling a comprehensive story across multiple touch points? That requires, that requires cross team collaboration, which I think is much harder when I am the only like central piece between all these teams. And that a little bit more organization and hierarchy will help lead to that like cross channel cohesion a little bit more.

[Cody]

You could probably, I think you could probably say the same thing about like hiring a special, like a subject matter expert to like focus all their time on an area that was previously split up. Like that's going to totally level up that focus. But you could probably say the same thing about, because you're basically talking about hiring a marketing leader to take on some of the direct reports that you currently have. Because you probably can't give, you know, six to eight direct reports the amount of attention and level of detail that they, that they want and, and, and need. Whereas now you're saying, okay, like VP of marketing, you're now going to take on these three direct reports which is going to give more focus and more, you know, just a detail orientation to those people. And then you're going to, you know, continue to work more closely with the other three. Like that's gonna, that's going to level up the whole org because you're going to give more focus to less people now, which is probably generally a good thing.

[Connor]

Right. And that's, that's, that's me getting back, you know, let's call it 30 of my time. And then with someone using 100 of their time to accomplish that, everybody beneath them is getting better strategy and feedback and things like that.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

And then, and then the other one is like way simpler where it's just like there's a gap in the org chart, like we need to hire an organic social person. There Isn't someone right now who like owns Instagram and Twitter. So that's like a lot clearer cut. There are just functions that need to get done that someone should own and we need to hire for that.

[Cody]

Shereen. I was talking to Shereen about this a lot recently in the back end of last year, because I, I was thinking through, like, how am I going to take on more international oversight? Because I can't have 10 direct reports or even 8 direct reports. Even 6 is a lot. And her answer was super, super simple. It's exactly you're talking about. She just calls it a layer of insulation, basically. So if, if you're going to take on, you know, an additional component of the business, and that means that you have five additional direct reports coming into you. Well, chances are that's not practical. You need to probably have someone in between you and those people, which is what you're doing.

[Connor]

Right.

[Cody]

Connor, you're saying, all right, instead of me being the manager directly of these four people, I'm going to hire a layer of insulation, a person, a senior person that you can then like collaborate on the vision with and like align on the vision with and the strategy and then they can go and kind of be, you know, elbows deep and all the things there's. And you're still functionally doing what you need to do as the CMO of the company. But now instead of going through four people, you're going through a single person. And I thought that was a nice way to think about it. Just like layers of insulation is, is probably what you need to add when you have too many people reporting into you.

[Connor]

Totally. You know, the other one on that, International is actually a really interesting one because international effectively requires all the same channels. Right. And, and I don't think, I mean, I don't know how you guys are building it out, but in international Director wouldn't have another email team, another paid team. Like, so you have to figure out, like, how do you utilize these teams across more dimensions? So I always think about that higher. That layer of insulation is almost like they're working across the org. The org in my mind is like built up. We have all these channels that complete these functions. They do creative, they produce emails, etc, and then you have these, like, international is the most obvious one. But you could argue like, like for us we're talking about more wholesale marketing. Like who's a person interfacing with Best Buy and then utilizing our organic team and our email team and making sure they understand the objectives that we need to accomplish for Best buyer, things like that. So you have these, like, you have these like cross sections of the business that they need to be managed in a different way.

[Sean]

Yeah, you don't want, you don't want. Brian Chesky talks about it a lot, but like, I think it's like divisions versus teams. You don't want divisions. Like, then it's like a separate company with a different culture and things like that. Like, same thing for us, for, for retail, for our own retail. We need marketing support. So we might have one person on the retail team, but there's dotted lines and they have to work with our creative team, our marketing team. You know, they're responsible for the KPI of that. You know, the, the, the graphic designer is not going to be responsible for that. For that even. They're not on their team, but they still need to have the autonomy and the resources to be able to get what they need, even if those designers and marketing team members are not solely on their team.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Cody]

Yeah. That's a. So you guys. All. Because we're not building like, we have a single growth team and that growth team is servicing every market. It gets a little, it gets a little like, like we're hiring some creative strategists right now and they're going to be specifically focused on some international markets that person's still going to live under. So our director of paid media creative, they report in a Cam. Cam's our head of advertising, so he's overseeing all things paid media. And in those teams. So this international creative strategist, they're still going to report into our director of paid media creative. But this is where those, this is where I think dotted lines make a lot more sense. Because if you're the, the, let's say you're the UK Creative strategist and you're going to report into our director of paid media creative, you still have an, you still really need to be also reporting into the, the growth leader for that market because they know what that market needs and doesn't need in a, in a more detailed way than our director, paid Media Creative, does, who's really just focused on the actual production of ads and ideating these ads. So that's what we're kind of figuring out right now is how will those like, dotted lines work in, in practice? Like, do you have, do you have any scenarios like that where you maybe have like a, a growth leader over, like the growth manager of a market and you kind of have dotted lines between that person and like the, maybe the director of a certain Channel does that. Is that something you guys have figured out at all?

[Connor]

I would not say we have it figured out. I'll lay out what we have. We under our director of paid social, the people that are taking the most responsibility in teams in terms of growth across different dimensions of the business. So like international is a good one and we should use that as the example. But I've also talked a lot about categories, right. And for both of those examples we have financial projections so we know how much revenue we want to do, how much we want to spend, what that efficiency needs to be and the people that are driving growth the most, like the people who are having the largest impact on that are currently like the growth managers or the paid, the paid media marketers underneath our director of paid social. So they're saying oh hey, we are over performing in the UK so we're going to scale up or we're underperforming. So I'm going to go to the creative team and produce more ads. You're doing things like that. Now they, they report into the director of paid social which sounds similar to what you do, but ultimately, and this is not a short term goal of mine, but I'd really like to have a director of international that would be outside of that reporting directly into me and then they would basically own the financial projections. We have dashboards built out to understand how we're pacing towards those across whatever that dimension is. And then they would be working with the media team, the creative team, the email team, the E Comm team to make sure we're hitting those. So I'd almost like to break it out and formalize it a little bit further. That feels like the long term outcome. But yeah, maybe a Q3 problem in.

[Sean]

Like a startup like you, you, if you're a giant company, you can probably. It's almost like in a startup you have, it gets a little bit messy. You have like letters and numbers, right? And like international is like the letters, right? They're like an A and a B and a C. But you, you only have one international person. You don't have like the channel, you don't have a meta person for international YouTube. And you also, I know you guys split things out by product. You might have a creative strategist who's on rings and that you don't have the budget to have a separate international creative strategist. And it's so your, your, your letters are the international. But you might have to go, you know, the paid person for international might have to go to a creative Rings creative strategist and say I need more creative for rings. Even though that's like a completely different way of looking at the business and kind of slicing it. Like it's just how it has to.

[Connor]

Work in a startup 100 and, and even like, I mean we sell rings internationally, right? So we definitely don't have the budget for a creative strategist to do the uk. So yeah, it's about like. And where I think we're at right now is we have all the resources we need from a channel perspective and then we just need more layers of like we could use more layers of management and better utilize those resources to achieve our different financial goals.

[Sean]

And it's evolving. Like an org chart is not a static thing. It's depending on, you know, the growth of a business and the objectives. Like you might have in a year from now we all might have, you know, like we don't have anyone for international right now. We might have a head of international and maybe that would be our first hire because right now it's just growth team doing it. You know, other people looking at it, but maybe you would have that. But you're not going to stack them with the whole thing. Like kind of like you're saying the first hire might just be ahead of international but then there's really no other resources underneath them, you know, or same thing like we hired our first director of E Commerce. Well, we will get a UX designer. Right now it's not. So it's either agency or they're working with people underneath them, you know, and then as we hire up, we make a UX designer, you know, under her that is separate from the rest of our creative team. So I think it's just like this evolving thing where like you do add to it based on where you think you need the resources and hopefully where you're trying to grow.

[Connor]

And the one thing I would add on top of that is I think there's a big question of like the maturity of the business. Like I don't think for international, I don't think, I don't think we're probably at the point where we could use a someone like owning the growth of, of our international markets. But we didn't need that two years ago. Right. Like at some point it almost feels, I think sometimes these different dimensions, especially when they're in a more nascent stage, it's like, yeah, that could just be a dashboard. As long as leadership can understand, hey, these are our goals, this is how we're pacing. You can delegate that out and make sure you're dedicating some amount of resources to growth there. And it only gets to the point where it needs to become more intricate or nuanced or it needs a unique strategy or you need more localization where you actually need like, like bodies in those positions to manage.

[Sean]

Yeah, yeah. 100 that's, that's what I mean by like the evolving thing. Like we didn't have a director of E commerce until a year ago and it was me and some people on our project management team and like marketing coordinators overseeing it and we did stuff but we probably weren't investing as much as we could. But it's very much like a minimum viable product and then you know, as we grow and the business has new needs and we're going international so we needed just like more bandwidth or we wanted to do more testing then we needed somebody like full time looking at it.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Cody]

It's interesting whether there's a brand, especially a DTC E Comm marketing brand like Ridge or hexcladder Jones Road Beauty. You could slap an agency as the name over a lot of our orgs and it would probably work because a lot of these things it kind of is like an agency like you have a single growth function that's servicing the US and the UK and the EU and Australia and Japan and all these markets and you know we really are just building marketing organizations which is interesting. You know I don't think if you were to actually dig into like the day to day marketing operations of like Ridge Hatch, Cutter Jones Road versus now granted like a big agency, a common thread like they're servicing a lot more clients than, than we are. But I think if you were to like to dig down into like the single like unit of daily marketing operations. I wonder. I think a lot of it would be very similar. We're just, you know, we're both marketing organizations. There's a difference of you know, they have a bunch of different brand clients and in house at the, at the brand you have a bunch of different agencies or sorry a bunch of different markets and you're kind of servicing both of them in a similar way.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah. I think about our design team that way. Like our design team is basically a services business within Ridge and they have to service email ads wholesale, Amazon and whatever one off projects. And it's like those are, those briefs are coming in from all different parts of the organization and all different stakeholders and they need to be producing those and that.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Looking like a little agency.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean]

I Think creative is an interesting one because, like, so I was talking to our director people about it the other day. And so we've got, you know, video editors under our creative strategist and the growth team, we're actually moving a static ad designer under there. So we'll have pretty much all ad stuff taken care of by our growth team. Not. Not the creative team like a creative pod. And we're hiring like a US designer, probably, you know, remote. We're going to put them directly under the directory, E Comm. So then she was like, well, like, why don't you do the same thing with retention and have a creative like a designer under retention email? I was like, it's a really good point. Like, then it's like, you don't want to get too fragmented and taking it away from like the actual creative team. But I was like, that's a pretty good point. My, my justification was like, the needs of the channels are different and it's less specialized and it's much more like branded. So I need like the creative director more involved there versus, like, like, for ads. I need like, speed and just like it's a different language of paid social. But it, but it, but it was at least an interesting question. It's like, it's a little bit arbitrary where I feel like you guys are much more centralized. You're much more like, you have a lot more of your. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your resources for ads on your creative team.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, We've become more central over time too. We made this transition like probably a year ago where the designers were all broken out across teams and we technically had like an email designer reporting into our email director. And then we centralized more of the design resources. So they're all speaking and they should be speaking a common language and they should be learning from one another. And when you go to launch a campaign, like, all those things should look the same. So whether they're centralized from an organization standpoint or there's some sort of function where they're just communicating in a centralized way. Like they have a design sync across teams. I think is. Is really valuable. Our paid team is, is more broken out because I agree with you that that is like a different language. Like, there's, there's many different focuses. But yeah, otherwise we've. We have like a tight pocket of designers.

[Cody]

Ours is a little, ours is a little bit of both right now. Like, we. Like that example you gave Connor where like, our, our email designer does report into our, like our senior manager of of retention right now. But in practice it's very cross functional. Like they have a standing meeting with our head of content who's overseeing all of the creative and giving feedback on it. So you know, we've, we've, we're not making any moves here now, but we're just kind of doing some straw manning of what it would look like to have a centralized creative team that would report into like a design director that would report into our like a brand leader, like our content probably. And then basically we would brief the team with requirements and like, hey, here's all the technical requirements of this email or this ad or whatever it is. And then it's up to them to design like the most on brand aesthetic version of that. So we're, we're toy. We're kind of chewing on that idea. It's like, it's a big shift. But it, you know, from talking to people like you and like talk with Connor from Caraway and Shereen, like they all, and they all have these like centralized teams. So it will be interesting to see if we move that direction in the next, the next few months. So it's still tbd. Do we want to. Yeah.

[Sean]

Can I say one more thing on like or chart before we actually talk onboarding? Well, part of, and because this relates to hiring stuff, let me know. This is what we're going through a lot right now, but let me know if you guys have done this. We're like as a business grows, right, the, the, the structure and the people that you need grows and let's say you have like a director in a department and you realize what you really need is like a VP or like a senior director or something like that. Or like maybe it's a different director. It's just not them. And it grows and you kind of need a reorg. But you realize like if you were to bring in that vp, you don't really need that director. Like you almost need somebody, you almost need more junior under them. They're almost like not senior enough, not experienced enough, but also like not junior enough if you hire the person. And so sometimes you just have to kind of like blow up the whole department or that little division and like reorgan. Have you guys had to do that or seen that at all?

[Cody]

So you're so let me just make sure I'm understanding. So you, you hire like a director level and they're, they're maybe not like as experienced in the sense that you're still too hands on are you, you feel you still have to be too hands on with them to like guide the strategy. So you want to hire someone more senior so like you don't have to hold their hand as much. But then at that point you don't need that director. You really need someone that's more of a doer to like work with the VP kind of.

[Sean]

And it's not. Maybe they weren't a bad hire. Maybe they were a great hire for two years or three years.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Sean]

And then the business is just growing. Like this is. If you took like a retail for example, when we had three stores or four stores. What you know, somebody could be the lead of it or finance, you could take the same thing. Right. As you have 10 stores, you know, and want to get to 20. That same person isn't going to be. But they might be overcompensated and overqualified to be like the number two once you get a strong lead above them.

[Connor]

So I don't have a great answer for you, but I'll talk through what my experience has been. One I mentioned earlier, we're like, we're super flat. So we haven't had a lot of examples of bringing in a VP and then the a director being kind of too, too senior or, or whatever. What I've been trying to be more conscious of is not hiring two bottoms up. We've also exact same problem as we've been like, okay, we need doers or we need directors and we're like building New York bottoms up. And then you'll layer in a VP and you make might create these issues where the VP says I don't need this senior director underneath me. Like yeah, I need managers. Um, so like right now we had to restructure our partnership team last year and right now it's as lean as it's ever been. And I'm very deliberately want to bring in the VP of marketing before making other personnel decisions on the partnership team trying to avoid that exact example. I knew this director wasn't as the director that we parted ways with wasn't, you know, a strong enough leader to be able to direct the department like in and of itself. So we'll bring in the VP of marketing and then we'll decide from there how the rest of that team should be structured. Uh, so that's me trying to avoid that problem, I guess.

[Sean]

And that person had no but it sounds like same exact scenario that we're in where. Because that person, that partnership person had been there for a few years. Right?

[Connor]

Right.

[Sean]

Yeah. And I. It's not like to Me, it's not like a bad thing. It's just like the reality. It's like, hey, you were great. Like, I appreciate everything you did to get us to this point. We had a great run. Like, it's just not exactly what we need for the future, just based on like, the org needs.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Sean]

And we've even had people that have come to us and said that, like, hey, I realize, like, this isn't exactly it. Like, I don't, I don't see my place and I don't think I can get you to the next level. Like, that's the easier way to do it, but it doesn't always go that way. But yeah, so we're doing that. We're kind of. We've done it in some orgs, but like in, in some teams. But that's what we're doing a lot right now. And that's like a pretty big focus right now just to get the team and the leadership and the structure that we need.

[Connor]

Go ahead, Connor.

[Cody]

Oh, I was, I was gonna ask Cody about any. If you have any examples you could share where like, you had someone in maybe a manager, director role. You think they did a good job to like level up the org or whatever they were focused on when they were there. And then either they said it or you said it. For whatever reason, either you or they did not think that they were the person to take it from the place it was at after their, you know, so they've been there, let's say two years. They got, they, they improved that part of the or. But then they're like, I don't think I'm the person. Or you said, I don't think they're the person to get it to the next level. Like, do you have any examples of.

[Sean]

Yeah, like our, our ops person from the beginning, right. We, you. We launched. We're, you know, 20 million in the first year or so. But literally took us from. He probably came when we were like 5, 10 million. But, you know, at that. And he's like head of Ops. This is why I don't love head of titles. I know yours is, but for like a startup, I don't love it because. Because then it's like sometimes you need to bring in ahead of. And the business can grow quicker than that person because some people, they grow and they go from, you know, director of growth. And as a business grows, they just take on more and more and they can do it, but I think that's rare. So, you know, at 50 million, 75 million, we're like, all right, like, things are starting to break. We don't want to lose this guy. Like, we like him, but it's clear he can't do the whole job. And you also have to think about not just what do we need right now, but like, what's going to be our org chart for two years. And so we brought in a senior director of, you know, supply chain. And so he oversees all of ops. Ops. And so now this guy underneath him is no longer head of ops. He's like director of logistics now. And so he does all of our, all of our logistics. He's got one component and section of operations, and he does a very good job of that. And, and he's the type of guy, he's very humble because a lot of people are not going to be. He's probably the only guy that we have brought in a boss and he stayed. A lot of people don't like that. They, they, that caps their career growth. And I totally get it, but he's super humble. He's like, hey, I just, I like working here. I still see my growth because I, you got to show them they can still grow. But I think that was one example. We had a manager on cx and she thought she should be director. And it was just clear the team wasn't managed properly. She didn't have the skills. We brought in a director. We, we were not parting with her. We thought that she could be very good on their director. Still had growth. She was a manager, so she still had room, room to grow, we thought. But she, she gave her notice on the day the, you know, the director started. So that's happened, you know, and sometimes as well. So, yeah, that's a, that's a few of it. I think most people aren't going to love it because they're going to, they're going to kind of see the writing on the wall. But some people are maybe going to be like, hey, I, I still see my place here and I see this as a learning opportunity. Like I can learn from this person and, and be mentored by them.

[Cody]

Well, I love what, I love what the. So, because, correct me if I'm wrong, but that guy went from like head of Ops, he actually went down a level, right, because he went from head to director. But the. All right, so that person basically helped you guys get go from like whatever 20 million to 75. You realize that they probably weren't, they didn't have the experience to handle going from 75 to 150. So you hired some of that you thought could. What I love about the, the humilia, the humility of the original person is that by staying and learning from someone that does have that experience, that person's probably gonna build a skill set that does qualify them to handle the operations of a, of a 75 million dollar plus brand. So that's a brilliant move by that person to like be like, no, I'm gonna, I don't care that I'm technically going down a level. Like I'm gonna learn from this person which is net positive for their upward mobility at Jones Road. And like, I mean, I don't think anyone here expects, you know, I don't expect the growth team to be here for the rest of their lives. Like everyone's gonna have a, a path after Hex Cloud or after Jones Road. Like that person is setting themselves up way better by, by learning from someone that knows how to do something they don't do. So I love that from that.

[Sean]

Yeah, but that's like, I think that's rare. Like that's the first, that's the only person who has stayed and had the humility. I think most people are going to see it as a, you know, you kind, kind of. And even if it's not meant that way, like I, I understand it's probably going to happen and probably better to, you know, do what Connor did and do what we're doing the rest of our work, which is like, hey, I appreciate everything. Like, let's hopefully we can do this amicably and we're happy to be generous and do a transition, you know, but it's just, you know, no longer on the same trajectory. So we switched CX softwares right before Black Friday. Normally wouldn't be the best decision, but we were looking at Rich Panel and it was just so much better than what we were using. Our contract was up and honestly it was. I'm so happy we did. It was the first time ever that we made it through Black Friday and holiday period with no ticket backlog. And I really owe that to Rich Panel. First of all, it's cheaper, it's, it's way less. We cut our cost compared to what we were paying before by 50%. It's the first AI platform I've seen that's really built with AI in mind and we're not even fully maximizing what we can do with AI yet. So I can't wait to see how much more efficient we can be. But it's really the first one I've seen that's Built in this new era of commerce and AI tech. It's already being used by over 2,000 brands like us, like Ridge as well. One thing that's been really cool, we were able to leverage a lot of their automations and routing. So our average response time went way down when we switched them. Our efficiency with AI went way up. We also just implemented their like their self serve help desk reduced our tickets by 30% without affecting anything. We're able to take care of 60% of those interactions without actually having to route them to a person. So obviously there's financial components to that that have been really helpful. The team is great. I see our team going back and forth with the rich panel team all the time in Slack. They all, they want feedback, they want feature requests. You're just not going to get that from some of the old legacy players. So it's going to be cheaper. You're going to have better use of AI that everyone's trying to catch up on. The UX is way better, the tagging is better, it has the best analytics suite of any of the tools I've used. So we're super happy. So if your help desk costs are too high, if you're not thrilled with your outdated software that is, you know, you feel like is robbing you, I highly recommend you switch to Rich panel. You can reduce cost, reduce ticket volume by 30% and honestly that's pretty conservative. Highly recommend you get a demo and see for yourself. Go to richpanel.com to check it out.

[Connor]

Before we move off the topic of org charts, one thing that I found extremely helpful actually I'll give two examples. One, we brought in a new customer experience director in August and one thing that she did, and this is going to sound like really obvious, this is kind of a painfully obvious lesson for me to have learned. But one of the things she did that was the most beneficial and I think for customer experience in particular is she just, she laid out where the org chart currently sits, who reports into who, who manages what and then she is. And then she redid it and that's kind of what Cody's talking about with the reorg. But I'd never seen it done at like a much at a lower level. This is just a single team that she relays out, resets responsibilities and it was really helpful. Like we basically created too much hierarchy within the customer experience department. We had too many people managing people, managing, you know, overseas staff. So it was like how do we reorg flatter organization? More people on the ground answering tickets Essentially was just like massive value unlock that this woman came in and kind of implemented immediately. So it was a significant win. We're doing the same thing with partnerships. Much smaller or far fewer people compared to customer experience. But we have two managers now and I was like, hey guys, I want you two to work together to lay out responsibilities and the overseas staff that sit underneath you, who reports into who and what do they do and that becomes a it forces. In this case now like we're talking about managers and a senior manager relatively low on the org chart. Thinking through, well, how exactly should my team be structured? And I've just found it to be a really beneficial way to talk through any sort of like inefficiencies that teams might have.

[Sean]

I just want to like stress. It's like you should be doing it all the time. Especially if you're like fast growing startup and have different like evolving needs and stuff like that and you want to put more resources into something else. Like yeah, I think it's a totally normal thing to be doing all the time.

[Cody]

And it's one of the, it's, it's truly one of those like slow down. I think it's so, so hard. I don't know about you guys but like we're always like working on the next project, the next deliverable and like in a leadership role you have to slow down and look backwards a lot. And it like, I don't know, it's like sometimes it hurts me because I'm like, oh, like I want to go work on this project. And that's probably my agency days like not having shaken that habit yet. But it's so, so helpful to just slow down, look back and save yourself a bunch of headaches as opposed to just like continuing to action, action, action. You know, I was talking with the, the COO of Huckberry. I don't know. Are you guys familiar with that brand, Huckberry? They're one of my, they're an awesome brand. Andy and Richard, awesome founders and they're like one of the original like, like content to commerce models. Like they're, they're a content brand first and then they became this like amazing product retailer, like the one stop shop for, you know, men, not just fashion but like, you know, I bought like my ruck pack and like weights on there. You can buy like a sauna on there. It's insane. But one thing I really liked was I was talking to their COO and he was basically, his role was basically to go identify with the CEO where they were Falling short. So like as an example, let's say they're like, you know, I don't think our create our paid media creative production flywheels as strong as it needs to be. So what they would actually do is they would reorg for like six months to a year or however long it would take. And that COO would actually go in to that part of the business and like build a system, build a flywheel. And the people responsible would actually report into him for however long it took him to do that. And then after they got something set up that they felt was solving that problem, they would then reorg again. It's like, okay, now we're going to reorg again to someone else who's going to actually like keep this going and improve on it over time. And then the CEO would go and like, you know, you know, identify the next target area. And obviously like he, they have their own kind of like always on responsibility as cfo. Coo. They were constantly like reorgang to this guy and then away from this guy so he could go in and like improve a part of their business. Which I thought was a very interesting model. This guy was basically just kind of identifying all the problem areas, improving on it over time. Which I thought that was pretty badass that he would just go in and like it didn't matter. Yeah, didn't matter. If it was paid creative retention supply chain. It could have been anything. And, and so I thought that was cool. Like soup. And they're a big org, right? Like, that's a pretty scrappy, you know, flexible thing for, you know, a nine figure brand to be doing.

[Sean]

Feels like an Elon thing.

[Connor]

An Elon thing. I was thinking the Wolf from Pulp Fiction, you know, the, the fixer guy where they've got, you know, they find themselves in the predicament, they call in the wolf. That's, that's what the COO sounds like, dude.

[Cody]

100%. I, it's. I need to, I need to rewatch Pulp Fiction now with, with this use case in mind.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah. With ecom. Org structures in mind.

[Cody]

Yes, exactly.

[Connor]

So, so I, I like that I, I had a conversation years ago, but it's always stuck with me. And this guy was like head of, head of growth at. I think it was Grove Co, the cleaning supply company. But they similarly, you get these people like in, in your example, you have this person with like a very operational mindset who can approach different problems across the organization and still better process and then someone else can actually maintain that over time. And at Grove, the way that it was described to me was they had that, but from a growth perspective they had this tiny like growth oriented team that would actually move department to department. So it'd be the same. I guess it's kind of like what a head of growth is. But it sounded like a little tactical SEAL Team 6 that drops in on whatever to help build out those processes and take a more growth oriented mindset. And I think from what I understood they like, they also touched a lot of different parts of the organization which I thought was really cool.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like the. Some people just have that like strategic tactical mind where whether it's paid media or influencer or retention, they can kind of like do the download on it and understand what needs to happen and then help that team build that and then have someone else continue to run it in like an always on way is kind of kind of what that Grove team sounds like.

[Connor]

Yeah. And those are the people that care about naming conventions.

[Cody]

Yes, they are. So what we're finding is that Connor McDonald was just talking about himself.

[Sean]

Can I ask. I guess we're talking about hiring. What, what about, what about firing? Like do you guys ever feel like. Because this is, I feel like a challenge in a startup. Especially in startup where it's like you, you know, everyone says fire fast, higher, slow. Do you ever feel like there's somebody who's not performing, you want to part with them but you. It's challenging unless it gets really bad because you just don't have somebody. Like if you have one retention person or you have one partnerships person or something like that. That is just hard. Is that something where you try to have like a backup? Is that where it's like you'll only do it if it's, if it's kind of bad enough or you just bite the bullet and you're like, hey, either this thing just doesn't get done or we bring in some freelance support or have somebody else in the org do it. Like how do you guys think about that?

[Connor]

I think it's like a super, super case by case basis. There was, there was an example last year where what I actually ended up doing was I knew that we had to. To move the direct. I, I had a feeling we'd have to move the director at some point. So we actually hired onto the. This is kind of contradictory to what I said earlier, but we hired onto the team earlier. We had more turnover beneath them, hired a stronger team than when we ultimately parted ways with the director, the team was actually just in a much stronger spot. Like my concern was that I'd have to too closely directly manage the, the employees beneath the director. So kind of did the inverse. And so far it's been a nice transition.

[Sean]

That makes sense. Totally makes sense.

[Cody]

So you had someone ready to go.

[Connor]

They didn't become like these people didn't necessarily become director. But I just knew that me working directly with them would be way more beneficial.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah.

[Connor]

And then we could mean we could continue to maintain the function of that team. So there is no like, there's no issue with like continuity.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean]

You could at least maintain. You might not grow and do new stuff.

[Cody]

Yeah. I'm thinking our, in our scenarios when we've had to fire or, or people have left for the most part, I think we've always had someone that's already been on the team come in and like take on their role. Like a good example is we had a, we had an influencer manager in 2023 that you know, you know, and we, we gave him a great opportunity. Like we very explicitly outlined like the projects that he needed to be completing. And it wasn't even key result oriented. It was all like key initiative project based. And he just continued to not do it. And we're like, listen, we're gonna. He was, he was like a manager level but was leading the that team at the time. So we, we ended up firing him and then we brought in someone that was already in our team to be like director of influencer role. And then we hired underneath her to like fill out the kind of like influencer operations. And that was the same with like our director of retention left at the end of last year and we had a senior manager under him that you know, had been there for over a year. Really, really talented individual. So he just stepped into that, that you know, retention leadership role. And we had just hired a retention manager. So we were basically at like net zero in terms of just like retention strategist. But yeah, I think, I think it's hard, Cody, to like, I don't know, sometimes even like a low performer is better than not having someone at all doing that function. So we haven't had that scenari, but I would, I would struggle with firing that person and not having like a plan to backload them because I don't want to all of a sudden just have like 100%, you know, stagnantness in a certain part of the org for a month or three or however long it takes to. And then you're rushing to find the right person and like that could probably lead to some problems. So dude, that, that's always it.

[Sean]

I mean our, our director of finance G. I guess it's like mutual. It's like one of those things that's, that's mutual. Like we, we've kind of been in the standstill for a while. We're like, we've both known we needed something else. We needed like a VP and we just kind of like hadn't you know, been able to kind of pull the trigger because we just like needed somebody in that role and, and what we're going to do now because you know we kind of were like hey, like she came to us. I was like this is no longer working. Like we're going to bring in some fractional help.

[Cody]

Nice.

[Sean]

You know, temporarily. I think that's kind of our plan is like where you can kind of go some freelance fractional, temporary stuff. There have been roles where we have recruited in the background. We have a really good in house recruiter so like we can do stuff quietly without you know, having to post a job and hopefully it lines up that way. And then you kind of like you know, get them in, get him out at the same time, you know, if you can. But I think then that at least if you know you have the role backfilled, it gives you a little bit more confidence just like to properly performance manage, manage the person. It just sucks to be in that position where you're like I can't really give the person this feedback because it's clear they're not doing well but I need them.

[Connor]

I have a point on hiring I'd love your guys perspective on. So we've been hiring a bunch. I, I've mentioned the creative director, CX director. We, we hired a lot this VP of marketing role that we currently have out. One thing that I found like super kind of refreshing is there's a certain type of candidate and I've, I've interacted with him across all those different roles. So it's like any part of the org, CX creative, you know, marketing, growth, whatever. But these, these candidates that come in and like deeply care about the kind of like the, the growth prospects of the business. Like some people go, want to go super deep on like well what's cac? Are you profitable? Like what's the channel strategy? What's the company strategy? What's the pro like how are you expanding markets? And I, these people just seem like killers and then there's other people who just Seem like, don't seem all that interested in that. Like they would theoretically join a brand that they don't think has great growth prospects or at least they don't feel strongly that they should be like auditing those. So have you guys experienced that at all? I, I don't remember. And it's probably because we've been hiring more senior people, director level or VP level and you end up hitting these people that like just understand business and the success of it at a much deeper level. But I found that really, really refreshing. I think it's a great signal for whether that person will be productive in their role.

[Cody]

Oh yeah, especially in cross functional role. Like we're hiring like, like this design director that we're, we're prospecting for right now. All my questions are about how they work cross functionally because that role is like so cross functional between performance marketing and brand. And I'm that I'm 100 looking for that, for them to ask me a bunch of questions about how we run our Facebook ad account, what our targets are, why we do or don't scale something, why we do or don't decide to produce something. Like if they don't ask me that that's a red flag because if they're not interested in that, how are they going to effectively work with our paid media team, our retention team? All these channels are so reliant on this design director and the team that's going to be under them. So they, they have to be interested. I don't, I don't. I mean that's why our head of content has become so effective in the last two years. Like he comes from a, a non performance marketing company. He worked at a media company, Conde Nast, like doing you know, long form YouTube for bon appetit. But he has learned so much about performance marketing and has been able to take his, his, his unique zone of genius which is a content producer and apply it to what he's learned about digital marketing. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta have the, the curiosity to, to understand exactly what's happening with the entire business. You just couldn't do your job as well if you're not you know, in the know on that stuff.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Cody]

What do you think? What do you think Cody?

[Sean]

Yeah, I, I also wonder if like where I've seen that in the past is when people have like realize that the business not doing well really impacts their career and their role as well.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Right. And if they've been to like one of these like DTC funded startups that's you know, not doing well, like, that's extremely challenging on them and they get promised these things and it doesn't materialize. So I do think there, there's some healthy skepticism that I've seen. Like our director retention I think was like that and she's great and like, she wanted to know a lot more about the, you know, the growth of our company. Just like the overall viability, you know, do you have plenty of cash? Are you profitable? Because, like, am I gonna have a stable job if I'm being told I'm getting somebody on my team, am I going to be able to get them? So, yeah, I think that's really important. I'm always so thrown off when, when I ask if people have questions and they have like nothing or like one or two questions and it's like, what perks do you have? What do you guys give lunch to employees? How is parking?

[Cody]

What's your pto? Yeah, what's your PTO policy? Right. How can I work as little as possible for you?

[Connor]

And that's why I love the people on the other side of the spectrum who are like, yeah, hardcore auditing the business. They're like, yeah, what's the P and L Like, let me, I can't share.

[Sean]

That, but thank you for asking.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, I, I think there's a, I, I, it's interesting to try to see if like, I look at like, I think we all got into this because we were all like naturally interested and curious and like Internet, like Internet driven businesses. Like, at least I know that's how I got into this stuff like in, when I was in my undergrad days and at Madison. And don't get me wrong, it's work, it's hard stuff, but it's also a hobby of mine. Like this is fun to like, like do digital marketing and grow business and be so directly attached to like top line revenue and efficiency. And if you don't have that and if you're just like clocking in at 9 and, and clocking out at 5 and like it's, I try to also like get a sense of how like how much excitement they have because if you're not gonna, if you don't like share the excitement that you know, 80% of the team has, chances are you're probably A, not going to produce up to like our, our level, our standard and B, you're just not gonna vibe with, with the team. So do you guys have any, do you think that that comes through naturally or do you have any tricks to maybe like Gauge how much of like a hobby this is for someone.

[Sean]

What, what, what we do. Because that's one thing I've, I have learned. I've never worked anywhere else, so I don't know. Like, like this is all I know is just how businesses work. But I realize that's not true for everywhere. Like we are very much a startup lean bootstrap company. So like I don't want people working there till, you know, till, till midnight. Like we leave at 5:00, but if I have a slack after it or if there's something on the weekend, especially if you're on the growth team, like you've got to be available. I found the best way is just to say it and just be really transparent about it. So usually in the interview process I'm the last round and that's what I do is just, it's just how can I be as honest as possible? Hey, these are the expectations, you know, this is how, this is how we do things. It's very fast paced. Expect you to be available at times. Whatever it is, like, just be very honest about what your expectations and culture are. And like, just watch their body language. And some people get very taken aback and they're like, that's not for me. And some people like you just want them to not flinch at all. Like whatever your expectations of your culture are, make it sound worse than it is. And that's what I found. The people that don't flinch and like they hear that and they're like excited, like those are your best hires.

[Cody]

A hundred percent. I like, I like that approach. Cody, you're like, just, just tell them, tell them how hard it is and see how they react.

[Connor]

Tell them it's harder.

[Sean]

No, no, we, we do. I, I'm not saying we've, we are perfect and have made perfect hires, but at least culturally we've made the right hires. Not everybody has, you know, the, the, the skill set and performance based. But before that I think we made some pretty poor cultural hires. Like we had one person who we worked with freelance before, so we assumed he was great, you know, because we knew him before, so we didn't really screen all that stuff. He turned out to be like a giant diva that we just didn't really screen properly. But since we've done this, you know, like I'll, I'll ask people in the final round, like, what are you most excited about working here? And what do you think is going to be the most challenging thing? And, and I remember somebody for like a brand role I asked them that and they're like, yeah, they told me. And I'm like, all right, that's great. Do you mind if I tell you a few more things I think are going to be challenging and, like, literally just laying it on and I'm like, this is going to be tough. This is how we do things. That. That's not always the easiest. Like, do you still want to work here? But, yeah, it's been really helpful.

[Cody]

Nice. I like that. All right, that is a wrap. On episode one of two on hiring, we went over how to know when to hire. We went over org chart design, how this changes over time. Thank you to the sponsors, Motion, Prescient Rich panel and North Beam. If this was an interesting episode to you, make sure you tune in next week for episode two of two on hiring, where we're going to specifically focus on getting the most out of your new hire and giving them clarity, getting them into production mode. Once you've made that higher, once they've actually started, you know, working.