E045: Onboarding: How To Get The Best Out of Your New Hire from Day One

Summary

Episode E045: Onboarding – How To Get The Best Out of Your New Hire from Day One

Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Release Date: February 4, 2025
Podcast: Marketing Operators

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Introduction

In Episode E045 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker delve into the intricacies of onboarding new hires to maximize their potential from day one. This episode marks the second part of a two-part series focused on hiring, transitioning from identifying when to hire and structuring organizational charts to effectively integrating new team members into the company.

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Recap of Part One

Before diving into onboarding strategies, the hosts briefly touch upon topics from the previous episode, which covered:

• When to Hire: Recognizing the signs that your organization needs to expand its team.
• Org Chart Design: Structuring both horizontally and vertically to accommodate growth and evolving roles.
• Role Evolution: Understanding how roles may change as the company scales, ensuring that employees continue to contribute effectively at different stages of growth.

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Transition to Onboarding

Connor sets the stage for the current episode by emphasizing the importance of moving beyond the hiring process to ensure that new employees are empowered to succeed. The discussion aims to provide actionable insights on how to seamlessly integrate new hires into the organization, fostering productivity and alignment with company goals.

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Key Topics Discussed

1. Aligning Job Descriptions with Actual Roles

• Connor's Observation:
  "I in my head am always distinguishing between the job description and the actual job... sometimes that doesn't always happen." [00:00]

• Challenges Identified:
  Managers may struggle to translate a job description into the day-to-day responsibilities, leading to friction and misalignment between expectations and actual performance.

• Solutions Proposed:

  • Concrete Onboarding:
    Managers should invest time upfront to clearly define and communicate the role's responsibilities beyond the job description.
  • Collaborative Role Definition:
    Engaging new hires in discussions about their roles can help clarify expectations and integrate their unique skills into the company's objectives.

2. Initial Momentum for New Hires

• Importance of Early Engagement:
  Getting new employees involved in key projects and workflows as soon as possible helps them contribute meaningfully and understand their impact within the team.

• Cody’s Approach:
  "We put more time and energy into the org chart, workflows, and general objectives of the role... it's almost like minimum viable responsibilities." [22:44]

• Ridge’s Experience with Agentio:
  Ridge discusses using Agentio to automate YouTube creator sponsorships, highlighting the importance of setting clear expectations and allowing new hires to audit and propose strategies based on their expertise.
  "We are doing a lot on Instagram, just kind of some influencer stuff. But then we're also doing a lot of YouTube... Agentio automates it." [02:59]
  "Our first video went live yesterday. We spent $4,300 on it... I'm 60% confident it'll work for us." [08:25]

3. Balancing Guidance and Autonomy

• Avoiding Prescriptive Management:
  Leaders should provide context and high-level objectives without micromanaging the specific tactics, allowing new hires to leverage their expertise.
  "You should be fostering a sense of collaboration... let them come up with their own thoughts through their audit." [41:44]

• Empowering New Hires:
  New employees should be encouraged to pitch their ideas and strategies, ensuring that their initiatives align with the company’s vision while benefiting from their unique insights.

• Connor’s Strategy:
  "We use quarterly key results and initiative setting... everyone agrees on that as the source of truth." [64:06]

4. Structured Onboarding Processes

• Documented Resources:
  Utilizing comprehensive documents and recorded resources (e.g., Loom videos) to guide new hires through company processes and cultural norms.
  "We have a lot of looms. We have a lot of Notion docs to review." [34:10]

• Scheduled Interactions:
  Setting up meetings with key team members and stakeholders to help new hires build relationships and understand their roles within the broader team.

• Cody’s Example:
  "We have our go-to-market reviews and top-down updates where new hires can understand our strategy." [31:30]

5. Performance Management and Goal Setting

• Setting Clear KPIs:
  Defining measurable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to objectively evaluate new hires’ performance and their contributions to the company.
  "We’re looking at the company and how we do goals and KPIs and making more objective." [65:55]

• Regular Check-ins:
  Implementing weekly stand-ups and marketing meetings to keep everyone aligned and provide opportunities for feedback and recalibration.
  "We have a weekly marketing meeting where everyone shares what they're working on." [65:55]

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Notable Quotes

• Cody Plofker on Automating Creator Sponsorships with Agentio:
  "Agentio automates it so like I wouldn't have known how to do it, you know, with our current team and whatnot." [02:59]

• Ridge on Building Trust and Relationships:
  "I don’t want you to come in here feeling like you have to prove anything. I hired you because I trust you." [27:27]

• Connor on Collaborative Goal Setting:
  "Everyone on my team's like kind of not... their focus for the quarter... everyone's very much marching in the same direction when we do it that way." [52:06]

• Cody on Avoiding Prescriptive Strategies:
  "Let's identify the known unknowns and let them drill in there early on to really... start there." [50:14]

• Ridge on the Importance of Context:
  "Here is the context and like the business outcome. Give them the what." [52:06]

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Insights and Best Practices

1. Clear Communication:
   Ensure that the transition from the job description to actual day-to-day responsibilities is seamless through detailed onboarding and continuous communication.

2. Structured Onboarding:
   Use comprehensive documentation and scheduled interactions to help new hires understand company processes, culture, and their specific roles.

3. Empowerment Through Autonomy:
   Allow new hires the autonomy to propose strategies and solutions, fostering ownership and leveraging their expertise for organizational growth.

4. Collaborative Goal Setting:
   Engage new hires in the goal-setting process, ensuring their initiatives align with company objectives while incorporating their unique perspectives.

5. Regular Performance Reviews:
   Implement consistent check-ins and reviews to assess progress, provide feedback, and adjust goals as necessary, ensuring alignment and addressing any challenges early on.

6. Balancing Guidance and Freedom:
   Strike a balance between providing direction and allowing creative freedom, preventing micromanagement while ensuring that new hires are aligned with the company’s vision.

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Conclusions

Effective onboarding is pivotal in transforming new hires into productive and engaged team members. By clearly defining roles, fostering collaboration, and providing structured yet flexible onboarding processes, organizations can ensure that new employees are not only integrated smoothly but also empowered to contribute meaningfully from day one. The insights shared by Connor, Cody, and Ridge highlight the importance of clear communication, structured resources, collaborative goal setting, and regular performance management in achieving successful onboarding outcomes.

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Final Thoughts

This episode underscores that onboarding is more than just a series of tasks; it's about embedding new hires into the company culture, aligning their goals with organizational objectives, and empowering them to leverage their unique skills for mutual growth. As highlighted by the hosts, investing time and resources into a well-thought-out onboarding process can yield significant returns in employee satisfaction, performance, and overall company success.

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Thank You to Our Sponsors:
Motion, Prescient, Rich Panel, and House.
For exclusive offers and more information, visit their respective websites mentioned throughout the episode.

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If you enjoyed this summary, consider subscribing to Marketing Operators for more in-depth discussions on marketing strategies and operational excellence.

Transcript

[Connor]

All right, we are back for another episode of the Marketing Operators. I heard that Connor McDonald's in Vegas right now and that they're about to double Ridge's 2024 EBITDA on the craps table. So Connor might be, he might be on a beach in somewhere warm after this, after this week he's about to spend in Vegas.

[Cody]

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 motions. 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'd 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. 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 DTC&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.

[Connor]

Before we get into it, we have a. We have part two of two on hiring. Today there's a new a New channel that I guess not necessarily a new channel but new way to go about a channel, new marketplace for a. An existing performance marketing channel called a Gentio. Cody is early in the game on a Gentio. We're going to spend a little bit of time talking about this what its USP is what your. What Cody's initial experiences. So yeah Cody, I wanted to kick it your way and just give us the Download on what AgentIO is and if you're bullish or bearish on it.

[Ridge]

Yeah, so we've talked about it a few times past, past episodes, but I'm pumped on it. It's essentially a way to automate YouTube. You know, creator sponsorships we have never done. We up until now we've done like almost no paid influencer. So we are starting, it's just, it's a big initiative for us this year, help us reach some new audiences. So we are doing a lot on Instagram, just kind of some, some influencer stuff. But then we're also doing a lot of YouTube and I know this is something that Ridge has done a ton of so definitely have have learned from Connor over the years. But agentio automates it so like I wouldn't have known how to do it, you know, like with our current team and whatnot. So the really cool thing, they have like a lot of cool AI stuff where it kind of just like makes it look almost like you're setting up a meta campaign but you set up your budget and all that kind of stuff and it recommends creators. I don't know how much of this is like AI driven, how much of it is like manual in the back end. I think it's some combo of both and so you can see all of their stats and platform. You can see what like the CPM would be and you can adjust your CPM that you want to bid and it just kind of limits a lot of the back and forth. I would have to, you know, have a whole team just manually going, going and messaging people and negotiating back and forth. You get to see all of the ads people have done, who has performed for other brands, who, who hasn't. There's a lot of cool data. You can see if they're like in the top 10% of engagement rate or an added view through rate. So a lot of really cool stuff. It's using a lot of like AI and LLMs to be able to like say like hey, based on your other creators that have performed well, this is, you know, this person is similar or this person is similar to this creator. So it's really just trying to automate it, bringing a lot of AI to that like manual research outreach process. And then it makes it really easy just all within the app to be like, all right, bid, bid submitted. I want to spend 50k this month so I'm going to submit 150k worth of bids because not all of them will be accepted. People accept or you don't. You can just do everything through the app. So it just really automates this very manual process of YouTube creator partnerships. It's not, it's very possible. A lot of teams like Ridge and a lot of other really successful brands do it and have done it for years without it. But I thought it was just a cool, helpful tool and the team has been great. Every. Everybody I've talked to that works with them really likes their team to be able to kind of automate it. So there's a little bit more like it automates utms, it automates code usage so like just tries to speed it up. There's a little bit more like advice that they give that I think has been really helpful for us launching. I got it from a few other brands as well, but I'm pumped. So our first video went live yesterday. We have, we're going to go 50k a month over 3 months was kind of the recommended minimum and it's probably one of those things where you don't really know on day one how this channel is going to perform. Let's say that budget is probably split amongst 10, 12 creators per month of all different sizes, probably from like 700 per video all the way up to probably like 15k per video. So bunch of different ones. But yeah, our first, first one went live yesterday. Pumped about it. It's funny because I, I refreshed my dashboard probably as much as I do on like Black Friday. I'm just like whenever you launch a new channel, I'm super excited about this. I would say I'm 60% bullish. I think this could work for us. The only downside would be like in beauty you pay pretty high CPMs. At first I wasn't sure how we were going to track this. After a day I already feel pretty good about it. Like we're looking at code usage so but yeah, I'm like 60% confident if it'll work or not. We are looking at so like utms via North Beam and Shopify, but utms code usage and then post purchase, you know, survey data and we actually got them integrated into prescient. Our Mmm. And so that there's like a beta where you'd be the second client using it. So that is something that I'm excited about. We don't like to discount so we're doing a GWP for ours. We after sell actually like built us a custom beta thing that actually allows a code to do a gwp. So here's where we're at so far. The video went live about 24 hours ago. Uh, we spent 4300 on it. All right. That was per this video we have as of this morning, five UTM purchases. So not a lot. We have 23 codes used. So I am surprised at that discrepancy. I thought it would be like a 2 to 1, but 23 codes used $100 AOV. So that's like 2,300. So we're like a 0.55 roas on like a code usage. And then if we look at post purchase survey. So we have two things in there. If one of the questions how did you hear about us is YouTube creator. If they say YouTube creator, we ask them which creator. We're probably at eight purchases there based on this creator. And then also you have to factor in Connor. I have a lot of questions for you guys at Ridge. But like let's say half the people took your survey. Do you double that or not? But, but and then we also ask influencer because some people will say creator, some people will say influencer. If then we say which, which influencer. So if you add those two up, we're probably at like 16 in there. So 16 and post purchase. And that's not like doubling it up because not everybody's going to take it. 23 codes and what I don't know and kind of want your opinion but like I feel like a 0.5 after a day pretty much 24 hours is pretty good because I think we'll get a lot of long tail. And so maybe after 14 days or 30 days this might go to like a positive payback. But that's where. And I'm, I'm super pumped about it.

[Connor]

Do you what is. So it sounds like you're looking at it as a performance channel. So which makes sense. What is winning look like? Like you're obviously backing into like a discount code base like CPA and then like return on ad spend. Are you then going to say like okay, our return on ad spend on this channel is like based on the discount code was like a 1x. We're going to go and look at like north beam at like maybe another top of like, like paid Facebook or something and say all right, well paid Facebook's at a 0.75 XL 30. This at a 1X. Like this is marginally more efficient. Thus we should scale it. Like is that the type of thinking that's going into it or, or how are you like what does winning look like?

[Ridge]

Yeah, I'm hoping this is a little bit newer audience higher funnel more like a YouTuber TV for us. So a can we feed new reach new signals into meta? Hopefully that's one number two, you know, so yeah, like, like I would have expected like we run YouTube at like a 0.4 on a one day click in north beam because it's new audiences more new versus like meta is like way better than that. So I'd probably like consider it there from a starting point.

[Connor]

Yeah, look at you look at paid YouTube one day click Roas is like the. Is like the number one control metric.

[Ridge]

You'Re comparing at least same channel. I don't know if like programmatic ads versus creator partnerships is you know, biasing more to new versus not. It also might depend but that's like the main thing. Not like a number but like how are we reaching new audiences and obviously taking advantage of, you know, how strong people relate to creators. It was really interesting because so this woman yesterday did a video, an organic review of us like two years ago, did not like it. Tried it again when we offered a sponsor. She liked it, but there are people in the comments like hey, I wrote it off two years ago. I wasn't interested. Now I'm super interested. It's like it is wild. And Ridge, you got. You guys know this. It is wild how much people just trust their favorite creators.

[Cody]

They're influenced. Yeah, highly, highly influential.

[Ridge]

That's why they call it that.

[Cody]

Yeah. You know, I'll say one what was. Do you know the CPM that you paid for the spot?

[Ridge]

About 50.

[Cody]

Yeah, that's like what I've heard and that's why I'm super curious to see how it, how it shakes out for you guys. But like beauty, health, just like crazy. 30, 40, 50, like I've heard much higher. I mean our typical CPMs like under 15 from YouTube.

[Ridge]

What are your meta CPMs though? 10 and okay.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ridge]

So we're at like a 30 meta CPM if that. Yeah, right.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. No, it's all, it's all relative. So I guess that's. Yeah. Ends up being like basically the same premium that we see, you know, for what it's worth. We track like a 0.4 to 0.5 is what we consider winning within North Beam from YouTube creators. I've, I've, I don't do much triangulating with codes anymore. I always worry they leak and like we've sponsored so many creators for so long, it just ends up being like a really blurry metric. We'll look at kind of expansions and contractions in like YouTube as a response in our post purchase survey. So those are the two that I like. And then the last thing that I'll say is like I just think the impressions are so much more impactful than like even a, like a pre roll YouTube ad that you're running out of Google Ads is obviously great and you guys see like a really high incrementality factor on that. You're serving a lot of impressions like that. That all makes total sense. But the people who are like oh, they hear from a creator, they really respect that Jones Road is good. Like that really sticks with you. So I think, yeah, I hope you guys figure it out. And we tend to just be generous with the measurement of that because I think we're, we're creating a lot of longer term value. Like I said, really, really memorable impressions.

[Ridge]

So you, yeah, you think of it more as a macro. Over this quarter this is what we spent. Here's maybe some, some type of revenue and then there's probably a pretty substantial halo effect that is not measured. Is that kind of fair?

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. And even, even the fact that like we talked about it over the weekend because you were asking how we like amortize costs over time. And I mean some of these, many of these YouTube videos will get views forever. Like so it's really hard to like actually attribute costs. We are, we are pretty conservative. I told you over the weekend like we book all the costs basically on the day the video goes live. Sometimes we'll spread it out over like two or three or four days but we're never like amortizing it over 30 days or something. And then yeah, we just get that, that long tail benefit of the views over time.

[Ridge]

That, that's what I heard. That's what I've heard. And yeah, I think I'll caveat this with saying like I think it's also a portfolio strategy. It's like you might, everybody I've talked to, it's like you might, if you do 10 videos you might get like two or three that tank a few that do okay and then like two that crush it and carry it for the whole thing. So I'll caveat with that. But like, that's why I feel pretty good that like after today we'll probably be at like a0506 on like code Redemption, maybe even. Maybe even better. So I think we'll break even in the first week and then I think it'll kind of be like pure profit stacked over that. And my guess is at day 30, like we might be at like a one and a half on a code redemption basis, which I'd be like, I'd kill for that. Like, I think that would be great. That's my goal. I will update, but that's my expectation of the channel.

[Connor]

Do you. How do you feel about like we, we. Everything we do in a discount code leaks immediately. What. How are they. A, is that a problem for you? And B, if it is, are they doing like any sort of unique discount code per person type deal to. To make that less of a problem or what are your. What's going on with the. Are you worried about that? Is there anything agentio is doing to solve that problem?

[Ridge]

Not that I know of. I'm not super worried because we're doing gift with purchase codes. I feel like that's a lot less attractive than a true discount code. Anything we do with a discount code basis, it's a. It's just a strict usage limit. So that's probably what I would do and just cap it and monitor it and maybe go up as we do it or maybe have them switch it out. But I'll cross that when we get to it. I think gift with purchase, I'm not as worried about it.

[Connor]

Yeah, well, that's. That's interesting. The mechanics of that are because like, if you like, if you have like a 15 off code, you know, honey or Capital One shopping or whoever can just straight up inject that to any cart. But if you have a gift with purchase discount code, you still have to actually like. Like, if you're doing the miracle bomb and then the gift is on a very specific product, they still have to add that product to cart, right?

[Ridge]

No. Or does it not get automatically applied above the threshold?

[Connor]

Got it.

[Ridge]

So there's a code or. Well, I guess, yeah. Either has to be a code or they have to come on that UTM link. So I guess it could. I just feel like it's less exciting for people to kind of go find it and less motivating to go with a, you know, a gift with purchase versus like everyone's going to try to get the free discount code, right?

[Connor]

Yeah, well and that's why you have like the, the UTMS as well, right? If you're like hey we have 190 discount code usages but only 25, you know, UTM last clickbase and like the traffic number like you should be able to cross reference and be like all right, some something's up here.

[Ridge]

Yeah, for sure.

[Connor]

Nice. Sweet. All right, well that's fun. I'm excited to follow up in a few weeks and see how that, that video is maturing for you guys.

[Ridge]

I will update you. Yeah, well we'll have a bunch of.

[Cody]

Them so you know what I wanted to say before we move on is the custom or not custom but like being early to the integration with prescient and having after so custom build a feature for you to launch this new channel Agencia. You're really, you're really on the cutting edge here Cody.

[Ridge]

It's just a very custom build out trying it's. I appreciate all of our partners, I'm having to be sponsors appreciate them but yeah, definitely helping build, build some stuff for us.

[Connor]

Amazing.

[Ridge]

So we switched software 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 work. We cut our costs 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. 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, of commerce and AI tech. It's you know, 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, 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, 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, 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 could 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]

All right, well, let's get into the bulk of this one. This is episode two of two on hiring. The previous episode we talked more about how to know when to hire and just our thoughts on on the different scenarios that can lead you to wanting to make an internal hire. We also talked a lot about org chart design and how to structure the org both horizontally and vertically in a way that makes sense and, and really interesting how that changes over time and how people's roles change over time and how, you know, someone might have been the person to take you from, you know, 1 to 5, but maybe it's not the person to take you from from 5 to 8 and so on. So we are now going to transition into episode two of two on hiring, which is more so related to. All right, you have, you have made the hire. Now how do you get the most out of these people? How do you empower them to really come into your org and succeed? All right, before we get into episode two of two on hiring, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion, Prescient, Rich Panel and House. All right, let's get into it. So I wanted to jump off with something that I've noticed over time. I'm curious if you guys have had the similar experience. I in my head am always distinguishing between the job description in the actual job and I have seen friction here with a new hire when the person that's managing them isn't able to make that that distinction. So the job description, right, like this is an objective readout of like the roles and responsibilities that someone might be doing or will be doing if you hire them and then you get into the actual job and as the manager, like especially when someone is starting new, like it's up to you as the person that that person reports into and the person that has the vision for where this part of the organs to go to like actually get in the weeds a little bit on the actual work upfront to get that initial momentum going. And I found that sometimes that that doesn't always happen. So you look like a jd. A JD might read write briefs to produce paid media ad creative if you're hiring for a creative strategist. But then once that person starts, you need to actually like get into the, the initial momentum with them on what that actually means. So it's like, hey, here's the ads we want to produce, here's the team you have to produce these things, here's the budget you might have. And I found that if you're a manager hiring for a role that like you don't necessarily know all the nuance of like what that role entails when it comes to the day to day, that there can be some friction about like what? Like yes, you might know that you want that person to do something like theoretically, but if you don't have like a good enough like concrete grasp of how that comes together, I think things can go wrong early on. Do you guys ever, have you ever had that experience or seen that or like there's just some misalignment between like the actual job description and the manager's ability to actually like get like understand what that job actually entails and how to do it and like when to do it. Is that something you guys have noticed at all? Connor, you want to, you want to kick it off?

[Cody]

Yeah, I think we've gotten significantly better at this over the last two years. But the issue years ago would be like, you know, we have, we, we bring on a director and we have like broad a general sense of like what I want to happen with that team. But then, but then that person getting to actual traction is like is, is hard or it's not happening fast enough or they're unable to do it. Whereas yeah, so that, that's definitely happened to happen more years ago and you end up just kind of like spinning your tires and being unhappy with the quality of work or you're not producing all that much more than you were without this person. Like those were some of the issues we ran into previously. Now I think it's like we put more time and energy into the org chart. You know, the workflows and like the general objectives of this role. So you almost get like minimum viable responsibilities where I know this person's going to come in and like these are the things they for sure are going to be able to handle and are teed up to handle and then growth in that role and further traction is for them to develop. And if they're going to be successful then like that's where we see kind of, that's where we see their role develop. And I think some of those things are like undefined. Like we brought on a creative director and I was like I want to increase our content funnel. We need to be producing more content. We need to be improving like design co and we want to improve design cohesiveness. Those are the objective goals. We had a couple of meetings attached to that, a couple of dashboards attached to that and then that's, that's minimum viable responsibility. And then they have done a great job of like expanding on that idea in ways that I wouldn't have anticipated. So that's how it, that's how it looks for us currently.

[Connor]

Cody, how about you? Have you ever noticed any friction between like the, what the job description reads and actually getting that person to do the day to day work?

[Ridge]

I think usually yeah, I mean I think usually that comes from just like the, the leader or hiring manager not being super clear on what the role is needed. And it's, I think that's a normal thing. I mean success I think comes from being really clear about what's needed and being able to communicate those expectations. But I think yeah, like I've totally hired people and I'm like that wasn't exactly what we needed at the time. Obviously it's just something you learn from experience. But I think that's it. What about you?

[Connor]

Yeah, I think you know, for the most part, I mean all of our like, I don't mean within growth. Our marketers are, you know, they have been hands on keyboard. If they're not still they have been. So that hasn't really been an issue. And I think the expectation of, I think, I think this expectation to me is absolutely critical. Or I think people go wrong is they have the job description, maybe they outline some like key projects or key results and then they kind of just like hand it off to the person that is hired and they're like expect that thing just to come to life and that just doesn't happen. Actually hiring someone's more work up front, it's less work once that person gets up to speed. So I think you have to take that 1080, 10 principle into hiring, or at least I do, where like we just hired a CRO lead. I spent like a lot, I spent actually an enhanced amount of time on CRO in the first 30 days of hiring that person because I wanted to get them up to speed. I wanted to get them downloaded on everything. I wanted them to understand where I think the opportunity was without skewing their view on what the opportunity was, which I think we'll get into a little bit later. But that hasn't been a problem because I have that expectation. And anytime the team comes to me and says, hey, I'm like so stretched at bandwidth, I need A, I need a hire to take on a B and C, I say, great, let's go make that business case. But just, you know, like, I think it is going to be more work for you in the first 30 days until that person gets up to speed. So I think as long as you have that approach going into it, it's, it's okay and it usually works out. But I just think a lot of people are like, oh, from day one this person's gonna take all this work off my plate or provide all this value in this way or really attack this project we're not currently attacking. So as long as you're not going into it with that approach, I think you're, you're generally going to be in a good spot. But have you guys seen that too, where people aren't necessarily, they don't have that expectation. That's actually a little bit more work to get this person momentum.

[Cody]

Totally. And that's what's so, that's what's so painful. Sometimes you're like, oh, I gotta, I gotta hire this person to save me time. And then the first 45 days, it actually requires way more time.

[Ridge]

Right, right. People who haven't done it before, right?

[Connor]

Totally, totally. And that's like I'm, we're thinking about some influencer manager hires right now. And on, on paper it's like, man, you know, we really want them to oversee like a few key things. It's not that complicated. But then you think about, like you talked about agentia earlier, Cody, and about the communication that is the biggest time, consumer most time consuming, consuming part of influencer marketing, whether you're doing product seeding or brand ambassador deals or ad sourcing, is just like so much negotiating and communication happening between every individual creator. And if there's a manager involved, it's even more communication. So yeah, I think it's just about setting those expectations. And, you know, we're able to see, like, two, three steps ahead now when it comes to that and be like, all right, we're only asking to take on these two core competencies, but actually, let's actually break it down and outline exactly what that means and how much time that's going to take. So I think we're getting better at it over time. We've never had any horror stories where, like, we fired someone within the first two months of. Of hiring them. That's never happened. But I think it's certainly something you get better. You get better at over time. But I think that's. That's a good segue. I wanted to talk about how do you get the initial momentum from a new hire? So whenever we hire someone, my goal is to kind of get them into our quarterly key result and initiative, like, pace. Like, that's ultimately what everyone does at our. Org is you have. You have key results and initiatives on a quarterly sprint, quarterly basis that you are like, that's your North Star. Like, those are the things you're working towards. Those are the projects you're working on. So my goal is always to think about how can I get this person into that workflow as soon as possible? Because if they're in that workflow, then that means that they are, you know, producing value for our company. So there's obviously that middle ground between, all right, day one and, you know, however many days it takes them to get into that workflow. What does. What does that look like for you, Cody, when you make a new hire? How are you getting them up to speed as quickly as possible?

[Ridge]

It's a good question. So I think in general, expectation setting is probably the biggest thing. I think the biggest part of, again, all of this is just learning where I've been wrong in the past. But it's just, hey, here are the expectations. This is the expectations for the role. This is what. Because there's so much. When you're getting onboarded into a new role, you've got everything thrown at you. New systems, new culture, new commute, new new ways of doing things right, like new team members. And so there's so much. So, a, you just have to repeat stuff over and over and over is what I've learned. But B, you have to, like, really, like, strip the signal from the noise and just be like, this is what's important. This is your expectation. Here is how I will evaluate whether you're doing a good job in your role. You know, both in a, like, long Term like when you're onboarded and then also like, I don't know if you guys do a 30, 60, 90, but that's something that we will do. So what will our, Our director of HR will set up all the meetings ahead of time that they need to have with everybody, you know, in their first few weeks. But just here's your 30, 60, 90. Here's what I expect you to get done in the first 30 days. 60, 90, I would say 90 to me is like onboarding is done. I feel like your question was about, like, what do you do to get them up to speed as quickly as possible? I think it's hard, especially in a startup, because you need, you need them to get up to speed as quickly as possible. But I think you also have to go slow. And if you ask people to jump in too quickly, they're probably not going to have enough of the context and the backstory and the culture of the company that they might, you know, it might not go as smoothly. So when possible, I try to go as slow as possible and kind of take the pressure off and I'll just tell people, hey, like, I don't want you coming in here. I don't want you, you know, feeling like you have to prove anything. I, I hired you because I trust you and I know you're going to be great, but I'd rather you kind of just sit back, build relationships, build trust and do a big audit and then like, when you're ready, we'll attack it. I think for most roles that's great. We just hired this new creative strategist and like, she's kind of taking her time, which I want her to do in the, in the background. I'm like, I can't, like, we need ads right now. I can't wait to get her in. So there's some stuff you kind of have to take people aside and be like, hey, like this stuff publicly facing with the rest of the team. Like, I don't want you coming in hot, go slow. But like, in the meantime, you and I are going to work on stuff and like, we're going to have to throw you in some, some stuff. So I think it depends, but just being very clear about those expectations would be short answer for it 100%.

[Connor]

Yeah. Connor, how about you? What's your approach?

[Cody]

Well, actually, I have a question for Cody. Do you guys do. I imagine you do something like this, but like, maybe you have an example of the performance, creative person, do they spend time like you guys work in person? So like are there meetings, are there one on one setup? So they're meeting the whole team. Are they working with remote employees? Like, how do you do that? Like more general, like, hey, just get acquainted with everyone.

[Ridge]

Yeah, for sure. So that's what our director of people sets up. So whoever the hiring manager is, if it's me and they're reporting to, she'll just be like, hey, like what's the order of priority? Who should they be chatting with?

[Cody]

Right.

[Ridge]

And some of them are just very general. Just hey, I'm just getting to know you. A lot of times, like because we're in person, people just go out to get coffee for their 30 minute meeting. So some of it is, yeah, like, like our director, senior director, creative strategy, she met with director of growth, you know, multiple times. We had a departing creative strategist, so obviously met with her to get, you know, offboarded. Our like marketing ops person that kind of just project management. Right. Met with them. And part of it is just, hey, getting to know you. Like, part of it's just getting to know people, building relationships. Part of it is learning who does what, what people's roles are. And then some people, like our director of E. Com who joined or director of retention, I specifically asked them, I was like, hey, any tips that you have, you did a great job getting up to speed. You did a great, right? You kind of just went through it. It's fresh in your mind. Like, please give her any tips that you have when you meet about fitting into the culture here. Anything that you've learned and onboarding. So it's kind of a mix of very specific, like, hey, meeting with the director of growth. Here's exactly how we do media buying. Here's our creative process. Currently some of it is, is, you know, more general onboarding tips and some of it is just, hey, I'm going to meet with our CEO and I just have to get to know you.

[Cody]

Right?

[Ridge]

And that's probably over the course, like the first month. A lot of that happens in the first month.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah.

[Ridge]

You guys do something similar remote or not as much?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, we do it remote, which is fun, which is funny. Like one on ones remotely. You just like you jump on Google Meets or whatever. But yeah, that, that's a key piece. And I think there's this just kind of like it's less pointed, right? Like it's less. All of those conversations can have an aspect of like, okay, well how are we going to work together? What do you need from me? Like what, what, what can I Utilize from your team, et cetera, et cetera. But like really it's just like hey, let's create, especially in a remote environment, let's just create touch points with people so you feel a part of the culture. So that feels like very, yeah non pointed when it, when it becomes more like directional. Like how are we getting someone acquainted with the role and responsibilities? This is kind of the point that I just hit on talking about like minimum viable responsibilities. But we brought on a new designer who's largely going to handle E Com design and he came on in October or something. And actually there's two things. There's one that I talk about all the time. I have two key meetings a week. Marketing, all hands and we have our go to market review. We have like top down updates. We review performance, go to market, bottoms up. Like let's all talk about the thing that we're just about to launch. So they get involved with those and that's a great way to be like look, you pay attention in these meetings for a couple weeks, you'll understand where we're at from a business perspective. You'll hear from all the channel leaders on the go to market calls to understand our strategy launching these new things. So that is like a very general way to get acquainted with marketing. In case of E. Comm. I think there's three pieces. There is basically what Slack channels are important to you and which I also think is interesting in a remote environment. We've come across the scenario where people are like overwhelmed almost. I don't think, I don't think our Slack etiquette is great frankly. Too many channels, too many messages, like people will just kind of get lost. So it's like hey, these are the three or four or five channels that are like essential for you. Stay up to date, make sure you understand what people are saying here, what meetings are important to you. So when are we doing like E Com creative reviews and then notion is where are we tracking all of our tasks? Where are you seeing the briefs? So between those three things you should be able to like quickly get traction in the role that we want you to be in. And that exists whether or not there was someone in that role previously. And I found that to be really helpful. And then, and then you can begin. If someone's succeeding in the role, they're quickly picking up momentum from there.

[Ridge]

Do you have any of that stuff like recorded? Because I feel like we do that. We'll have a person take those them through those things every time. But like theoretically like our project Management. Somebody can just do a loom and have it be done once and just give that to everybody that gets on.

[Cody]

Board as we have a lot of. I haven't, I haven't done the onboarding in a, in a long time. But yeah, we have a lot of looms. We have a lot of notion docs to like review. We have a, I forget. Oh, it's like a channel directory. Do you understand what all the key channels are and what's being discussed there? I still think it's a scent. Like I still think it's always worth talking through. Like it's definitely not like automated.

[Ridge]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Completely at least is it?

[Connor]

It's interesting that and like we've developed this over time and I don't even see it now because like we'll have, here's like the growth team onboarding but also like the first two days like you're, I'm not even talking to you because you're with HR and you're like running through the, the HR pantry which you know, they have their kind of list of resources that everything you need to know. Like here's our policies, here's our org chart, here's this, this and that Same thing with pmo. Like we hired a, a director of PMO last year and I think we have two or three full time hires under her now. And we like, what is pmo? Project management organization. We totally like ripped our project management system down and built it back up. So now we use ClickUp and they have their own onboarding process as well with like all right, here's, here's how we assign tasks. Here's like how you have your dashboard set up to know like what's required of you and what's not required of you. And that's all outside of growth team. So it's been cool to see those things come together over time. And then it sounds like we all do something fairly similar. I, I've started making these like download documents where it's just like, hey, if you like understand all the information on this, you're going to be in a really, really good spot and that should really be your focus. So like we basically organize it by people to meet like broken out by team and then we'll go into like area focus. So we just hired the CRO lead and I. This is one of those things where it was like a joint committee like myself or head of website, some agency partners, some freelance partners really driving CRO forward. So it's like here's the, here's like the Area of focus testing wise. Like here's where I think we have opportunity. It's like here product category flow and breadcrumbs aren't that great. I think we could improve there. Hey, we have all these opportunities on the product pages. I think we could like update our accordion information. I think we could add a technology section improvement like stuff like that. So we have like the actual strategic download, the operational download. So I'm like saying hey here's how you and I will work together. Here's like some operation based things that we need to get better at, right? Like we need to figure out like what's the workflow between you because CRO is on growth team but like webs on a different team. So like what's that workflow going to be between you and design and dev? Then I'm going through resources like here's what we have for development resources, copy resources, design resources, production resources. Go through tooling. We use convert.com intelligence repo all you know, edge match clarity for you know here's the tooling stack and then I'm like here's the focus from day one. So like go through this, you know, read through these things and then I'll generally have like a, a final deliverable that is pre them going indoor just always on quarterly like key result initiative setting. So for this role it was like hey, your final thing to do is create a roadmap, right? Like you now have my download, you're going to do your own audit like separate from my download. You're like final deliverable. Here is you create a roadmap and like what the opportunity is and we can actually take that and build that into our evergreen quarterly goal setting exercise. Like there is always like one final thing that this person's trying to get to which is kind of like to me the signal of all right, you're ready to get into some, some final workflow here to actually start producing for us in our, in our always on the same way that every member of our growth team is. But before like we didn't do this like consolidated document and they were just like trying to grab these things from, from all these different places. And I found that just spending like an hour or two hours putting together like a really robust document is really, really helpful. It can like it seems, it seems like a no dub but you know these things become so natural to you in your role after you get familiar with the company that it's nice just to put it down in a single sheet and give it, give it all of them in the same place. If you want to hit next level growth, you need to move away from correlation based measurement and move towards causality. There is no better way to test your channels. Your levels of diminishing return certain tactics within a channel than using a geo based incrementality testing tool. And that's exactly what House is. That is exactly why all three of us use House. House is a self serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional test and control experiments to measure incrementality and identify points of diminishing returns. House is really the. It's the most controlled, the most scientifically sound way to do any sort of marketing testing and experimentation. These things are very, very hard to set up on your own. It's rigorous. If you have one little variable messed up all of a sudden, your data is not trustworthy. That's why House is such a valu. All you need to do is go into your ad ad accounts and add exclusion or exclusion list, run the data or run the test. And not only do they set up the test for you, but they also help you interpret all the results. So they're handling experimentation, design and experiment analysis and also even going as far as helping you make sense of what to do based on that data. And we at hexclad have gotten some insane insights this year from all of our household out tests. So our core strategy this year has been doing channel level holdouts to really see which channels are driving the best and most efficient cost per incremental order. So we've tested YouTube, Meta, Google, PMax, TikTok. We're now testing AppLovin. We are getting a sense of which channels are driving the most incrementally efficient first time orders right now. And the amount of insights that come from that information is insane. It helps us inform where we develop creative. It helps us inform where we scale up budgets in certain channels and bring certain budgets down. Plus we are now able to use our incrementality results and actually plug it right into Prescient. So not only are we getting causal data, that is actual data that we can trust to make decisions off of, but now the media mix models and the probabilistic data from Prescient is even more accurate because they're using actual data to inform their models and the readouts that they're giving us. House is an essential addition to your measurement stack. Go to house IO forward/formators that is spelled h a u s IO operators to start your incrementality practice today. But I wanted to Transition into the last thing I just said and ask your guys opinion. I think it's when you're hiring someone to take on, especially when you're, they're like overseeing a part of the business that maybe you were overseeing, at least in some part, I think the last thing you want to do is like force your thoughts onto them. Like, I don't want to go to this new CRO hire and like force what I see as the big opportunity down their throat. It's like, no, I, like, we need to go focus on like new accordion section information. Like I want them to come up with their own thoughts through their audit and then I want to meet, talk about it and compare and contrast. Have you guys, what are your thoughts on that? Like you hire someone to do something you have a lot of opinions and thoughts on, on what should be done, but you like, you want to lean on their unique creativity and zone of genius and not force your thoughts down their throat. Like, do you agree with that? Is, is there, do you have any tactics or like strategies to like find that balance or how do you approach that?

[Cody]

I think one, I think, I think, I mean, depending on the role. But there you should be fostering a sense of like collaboration. So there, there's, there's striking a balance between like, hey, look, I'm pretty sure I've been, I've been here eight years or I've been here four and a half years. Like, I'm pretty sure this should be the focus. But you definitely don't want to get into the mode of like being prescriptive. That's not what you hired them to do, especially if they are, you know, director or senior director level. So that's at least how I've approached it. I brought up the creative direction or the creative director role earlier where I was like, look, these are kind of, these are directionally where I think we could immediately benefit, but then really leaving like 40, 50, 60% of like the objectives for them to help define. Because ultimately, especially with creative direction, I'm like, from the very beginning, I do not know how to do this role better than you. We hired you for your expertise, so like let's kind of build the roadmap together. So it's about striking that balance. And then I think it comes down to like, I think a big piece of that can also be just setting general objectives. Like, not like, hey, you need to do 1, 2, 3 things. It is like, hey, we need to achieve this. Now let's talk about what do we think are the ways to get us there. That can be collaborative. You can end up pushing through what you think is the best way to reach the ultimate objective. But I think that's helpful also. Like keeping people oriented around the higher level thing you want to achieve, right?

[Connor]

Yes. So. So in my example it's like, hey, we need to improve our product breadcrumbs. There's 20 ways we could do that. We could, we could adjust the navigation, we could adjust the way we use filters on the collection page. We could even add some like category sections on the homepage. Like I don't. That's why we hired you. Right? To decide how do we go and improve our product breadcrumb flow? What do you have any specific examples? Connor, with your.

[Cody]

But even, even that, I mean that almost sounds, well, I guess when you say breadcrumbs, do you mean like site hierarchy? Because breadcrumb sounds a little like a little specific. It's like, hey, we want to improve the way that people can navigate our site.

[Connor]

Yeah, I guess I would. Yes. That's probably not because breadcrumbs is the actual, like how do you like backspace, forward, space. Right. From different. Yeah. So I would say yes, site hierarchy would probably be a better up, like more general direction. That's not too specific to the tactic.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. That's a great one.

[Ridge]

I don't want to improve our site hierarchy, but you could even start with the problem. Like it's clear that we need to improve as our, as our product line grows. We need to improve, you know, the site's functionality or we need like almost phrase it more on the user. Like we need to help users find these things better. Right. Kind of give them the problem and then let them come to you with a solution.

[Connor]

Yes. Like our product categories are not discoverable enough, period. Like how do we, how do we, how do we solve that? And then you. That's what you're pushing on to your new hire to go and figure out, right?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah.

[Connor]

I wanted to ask you an example. Like if you have an example, Connor, with this new hire you just made like some of the bigger picture objective or like high level pieces that you're like. Because you said this person's mainly for ecom designs, like web experience or is this a different.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, the designer is kind of like manager level. So it's not like, like super strategic. It is more like they are. They more have a system that we just needed additional bandwidth for. So they are plugging in and like better executing there. The. The creative director and the VP of Marketing are going to be better examples of things where I'm laying out high level objectives and then we're collaboratively identifying the focuses from there. And yeah, the best example for the creative director would be like, we want to improve the content pipeline. We want to be producing more creative that's more valuable across all of our different channels. What are the ways to do that? Making studio more efficient with one bringing in external partners. And I forget we had like a couple more there. But like that was a very collaborative process. And another example is like actually had two goals, right? Improving the content pipeline to improving design cohesion. No, thank you. Sorry. No, that's okay. It's housekeeping.

[Ridge]

No, that was saying, Connor, are you ready to go to the craps table?

[Cody]

I had two goals, right? Improve content pipeline, like content production and then like improve basically design cohesiveness. And ultimately like the creative director came in and said, I need to spend more time in the short term on content production and almost creating that order of operations. And like, we sign off, we sign off on that together. Let's, let's build out the content production system. Once that system is built and can maintain itself to some degree, we have more time and energy to spend with the design team. So that's an example of like what my goals were and how they were kind of like refined as this person on Bert onboarded over the first 60 days.

[Connor]

Yeah. Cody, do you have any additional thoughts on, on how to approach that?

[Ridge]

Yeah, a. I, I totally agree. I'll just give an example because I just hired the new creative strategist. But I, I totally agree with Connor. I mean, ideally you're doing this as part of the recruitment process, especially for these more senior roles where like, you can take your time and like, you know, Connor or I might hire a person because we have this vision for where we, what the problems are and kind of where we want our team to go in. And we want to be very clear about that during the recruitment process of, you know, if it's streamlining things or doing things like that, like you want to make sure those visions align because you don't want the person to come in and thinking it's going to go one way and you don't have the same, you know, vision. So especially senior roles, like, I'm a little bit more like conversational, conversational about, about the recruitment process and just like making sure that those goals are aligned and overall agree with everything he said. It's very collaborative. What I do is, I think part of my onboarding because I'M not doing at this point, the X's and O's. I'm not showing them even how we do paid social or how we, you know, our, our content calendar or our project management stuff. Right. Other people are doing it. So really mine is a little bit more on the vision and then the backstory because I've been here from the beginning. Hey, this is what our creative strategy has been from beginning of the launch, beginning of the brand until now. Here are the different inflection points where I think we struggled or crack something. You know, here's where we've been, here is where I think we should go, or here's where I think we need to go. Just like as much context, you know, giving them as much context as possible and certainly giving them some ideas and then they work on kind of an audit at a senior level role. So like this happened for our director of E Comm, where showed her everything we've tested on our site and things like that. And then over time she dove into the data and maybe at the three week point point, you know, she gave me an audit which is like a potential roadmap. These are all the things I think we could test. This is users aren't finding this and then kind of her and I just aligning on the priorities of them. Right. This is, hey, I think we should do this one first. Like, I'm very, very collaborative. Maybe a little bit more founder mode. So I'm not going to just be like, yes, do it all like. But I think you should give them a direction. So like tomorrow. We hired our, the creative strategist two and a half weeks ago. So tomorrow will be, you know, start of our third week. I can't wait. I'm not patient. She's kind of sitting me down and kind of giving me like her audit, audit and proposal, kind of. So it's like, hey, here is where things are currently at. Here's what I think is doing well. Here's what I think is not. Here's what I think we need to do. Here's what resources I would need, you know, and so it might be, you know, and again, she's very expensive. She's a senior director. She's, she's been at one of the biggest agencies everybody knows. So like she knows what she's doing. I'm not gonna sit a coordinator down and be like, hey, give me an audit of everything you think we should do. So it's very level and role dependent. But yeah, so I will just give her feedback on it. Hey, this is what I love. Totally agree with this. Part of the reason I don't want somebody doing this too soon, as Connor alluded to, is like, there's so much context. Like I don't want somebody coming in on first. They'd be like, have you tested this? And maybe we've tested this like eight times over the years. So I don't want them doing it too soon. But yeah, so they'll kind of do that. Best case scenario, I sign off, I'm like, I love this. What resources do you need? Granted, you know, but usually it's, it's, it's pretty good. And then I'm just like, hey, totally agree with that, that component maybe I agree with you. It's biting off a little bit more than we can right now. Let's put a pause on it. Let's, let's go a little bit longer term. But this is what we're going to get started on, you know, immediately. This is what I can give you. Like, this is what support I can give you for it. So hopefully I'll let you guys know how it goes. But that's, I think the plan for some of these senior level roles is kind of that 1080, 10 very collaborative approach, I think.

[Cody]

I think you make a really good point around like, especially as someone who's been there from the very beginning, just like instilling that knowledge of like what has worked, what hasn't. What also comes to mind for me is like I mentioned, I think in the last episode we hired the customer experience director, me just saying where I knew the blind spots were, right, like known unknowns. I'm like, look, CX started reporting into me midway through last year. I'm like, I do not know about like this part of the team. So like this is where you should focus. If we want to talk about tools and some of the decisions made there and like historical processes, this is where I can provide insight. But like let's identify the known unknowns and let them drill in there early on to like really if there are inefficiencies or, or things to improve, then we kind of start there. So I, I found that to be helpful as well as just like making that distinction.

[Ridge]

Yeah, I, I like that as well. I think that's great. And you can't, you know, we're hopefully at the size where like we're all hiring subject, subject matter experts. So I think everyone has to be willing to say like, honestly, I don't know, like, I want you to tell me, like this is what I think, but, like, you know, to, to be humble enough if you're hiring director of CX or creative strategy, like I want you to tell me, but I do think, like, obviously you have to be collaborative and you're hiring these people because you, you want a director or, you know, you want somebody who knows what they're doing and is it going to lead this thing, but you also have to make sure it aligns with your vision. I don't think you can just like, hire somebody like, hey, tell me what to do. For example, you might hire a director of cx and you really want to reduce your CX headcount and implement AI, you know, and I think if you didn't tell them that and you were just like, hey, tell me what you think we should do with our department. They're like, all right, great. I need, I need to hire 20 people. You're like, well, that's not what we're trying to do. So I do think you have to give them, like, the context and like, the business outcome. And give them like, the what. Maybe they give you the how, but you got to at least give them, like, what their initiative is.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

I think something I'm, I'm gleaning from your process and, and I think we do the same is you, you need to give them all the context, but then you're giving them the opportunity to pitch you. Like, you're not, you're not pitching them and having them say, yes, no, they're pitching you as their manager. And then you're saying, yep, agree with this. Nope, don't agree with that. Have some thoughts on this, which I think is the perfect, that is the perfect balance, I think, in terms of like, hiring a subject matter expert to level up a part of the org and like, having you weigh in with your, you know, unique level of experience that only you have. And really, it's no different for our. We treat our quarterly key result and initiative planning the same way. Where, you know, I'm giving the team context in, like, where I think the approach should be headed into the quarter. But then they're basically coming to me and saying, hey, here are all the key initiatives and the key results that I think we should be focused on and that I and my team should be held accountable for. And then it's the same thing. I'm giving them feedback. I'm saying, all right, agree with these eight, but don't agree with number nine. Think you're missing two that we should add in. And then it just like it empowers your team to really guide that strategy forward, which I think is really, really useful. And then we do that every quarter. So every, every quarter, like the. Everyone on my team's like kind of not, you know, pitching me basically kind of their focus for the quarter. And it's worked out pretty well. It's, you know, everyone's very much marching in the same direction when we do it that way.

[Ridge]

I like the, I like the term pitch, like pitch because they are, they are pitching us on it. And I also think it's same thing. We're like, and this is not even an onboarding thing, but just a general management thing. Like I'm also pitching them on things like I'm not going to tell my director of CX like what software they have to like when, when we were using Gorgeous when she came on and this was about the time I was starting to look into Rich panel. But I'm not going to tell her like, hey, I, we're switching to this. Like, I need you to switch. But I was like, hey, this thing looks great. My friends at Ridge just switch like check it out. And she had done a demo before and I was like, hey, I think it would help for these reasons, better AI, better cost, stuff like that. But I'm not, But can you take a demo? I'll ask her to take a demo, but same thing. So I think you kind of have to pitch each other both ways. And I think what Connor said, it's just gotta be collaborative. I think as a leader you just have to give them the expectations and like what their goal is, whether that's like very specific KPIs or not. You gotta give them the right resources. But yeah, you gotta let them kind of tell you how they're gonna get there. 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, 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. It's really played a really big role in us scaling and having the confidence to, to increase our spend in things like TV, both 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 prescient AI.com/operators to book a demo and see for yourself.

[Cody]

Here I've got a, I've got a, a tweet draft that's related to this. We could workshop it right now. Is ready.

[Connor]

This is called, this is called operators live. Live tweeting.

[Ridge]

Go through.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, because Cody, what you just said I think is really, and I see this happening within Ridge at different times and it has to happen other places. But this idea that you're pitching them, like what you're saying there is like you don't want to be prescriptive, you don't just want to tell them what to do and for them to do it like one. I think there's value in like them truly believing that whatever, you know, whatever it is you're doing, switching to Rich panel is helping them achieve their goal. Like you want them to be bought in, but then also you don't want them to like feel as if they are succeeding in their job if they're just doing the things that you tell them to do. So what I have here is this is really half baked. The secret, the secret slow death of an organization is when a manager just wants to be listened to. An employee that wants to do what they're told and an employee that just wants to do what they're told. Both parties think they're doing a good job, but there's no new ideas. Et Cetera, et cetera. You can understand the downsides of that half baked tweet. But like I think that happens constantly. You have managers that want to be prescriptive or even you could have executives that just want to be prescriptive and then directors who just want to told, who just want to do what they're told. And that just feels like really detrimental because like I said, it can be, it can give the appearance of good work. Both people are basically doing what they want. But like nobody's actually bought into the ultimate objectives. Nobody's held to like the results of the business. So you guys think I'm onto something there?

[Connor]

I absolutely do. And I think, I think if you have a director that and one of the notes I had here was like director head versus manager coordinator and how you handle each. Because I think in your scenario, Connor, where that director level just wants to be told what to do, they're not really a director at that point, a manager coordinator, I think, because I think there are certain, there are certain times where you really do need to hire someone to come in and just like do the thing that's already established, which is generally more of like a manager coordinator level role. So for example, like we have, we've really developed our, our paid media creative flywheel and process around that and we hired like I've said this in the past episodes, like me, Cam London really laid that foundation in 2020-2023. Then we hired this director role to come in and like really focus on it, level it up, continue to scale it. So now we're hiring for more creative strategists and they're going to be manager coordinator level. I don't need them to come in necessarily and like innovate in this area as much as I need them to come in and like help us with our output. Like I need them to plug into the existing and not that they won't have the ability to be like, hey, I think we should improve it here or there or, or by this way they will, but less of that compared to like hey, director of Pay Media Creative, here's what we got now here's the outcomes I'm looking for. Like we need to do more volume at higher quality. Like go innovate and do with that what you will to achieve those things. So I think it, I think it's a different approach with it. Whether it's like a director head versus a manager coordinator and like what the needs are for the business 100%.

[Cody]

And I, and I guess in my example I, I totally agree. Like at some point somebody just has to be doing work that, that like someone else has laid out. But it can become more den detrimental, especially as it moves up the organization. I do think there are examples of not even someone not necessarily being a like director quality. Like it's not as if they necessarily can't lay out strategy, but they are coached in a way or like they are given direction in a way where they feel success in their role is just doing what they're told. And like accepting that prescriptive, you know, strategy I think is like, it's just a really slippery slope.

[Ridge]

Yeah, I think at a lower level it should be prescriptive as people get above that level. But yeah, no, I think it's doing it all the time. I, I have a two and a half year old toddler. I can't prescribe anything. She picks what she wants to wear. You know, I mean, I can't say this is what you're wearing today. I have to be very thoughtful and persuasive about how I position things. Almost nothing I ask is, do you want to do this? It's which one of these do you want? You know, pretty much everything. But I think it's the same thing at work as well. Like I might think that this is what we want to do, like for example, especially with our network and stuff. Right. We'll see a lot of things. We'll get access to, you know, different softwares, agencies, stuff like that. But I'm not just going to bring somebody in and be like, we're going with them. I'm going to, you know, like a genti. I was like, hey, I saw this, let's hop on a demo. What do you think? Talked about it with my director growth, you know, we were like, I don't know. Right now it seems interesting. Let's hold off. Like we came to that decision together. You know, if I felt strongly we should do it, like I'll, I'll push back. But I also have to say it's his department. Like if he doesn't want to, like, that's fine. But there are certainly things where like I think are best and maybe they just, maybe I'm wrong, but maybe I, I just need to get them to come around to it and kind of have it be their own idea. So I just have to try to guide them. But ultimately I got to let them decide. As long as, you know, I don't think they're exactly off. But then if you're not trusting your directors to make Those decisions, like, there's a bigger problem.

[Connor]

Yeah. It also slows you down in a healthy way. Like if, if, if your approach is that like if, if you, Cody, are, have an idea about what to do in and paid media creative and you're like, you know what? I'm going to go pitch this to this person and like try to get their buy in and vice versa. Like they have to pitch you if they have an idea. Like, I think it slows you down in a healthy way. It's healthy to have that, that dialogue into like basically strawman ideas because I think it's so easy to like get an idea and want to act on it right away. And if you just slow down and like, like you build in these sort of like processes, like I have to, I have to pitch and get buy in. They have to pitch and get buy in. A, it slows you down and, and maybe would like stop you from acting on something too soon that you shouldn't act on. But B, it probably helps you if you do ultimately decide to go forward with the project. If anything, you're just going to be going about it in a, in a more detail oriented way. It's like, all right, not only are we going to go attack Agent Agentio right now, but we also just uncovered like three different strategic points that we would not have covered if I, if I would have just like forced this on their throat versus versus me pitching them and like having them actually like poke holes in it. So you're actually probably going about it in a more calculated way. So I think that's, that's pretty, that's a really healthy thing and a really healthy culture to. To have in an organization.

[Ridge]

Yeah, yeah, you got to have that culture, hopefully. Hopefully, you know, where you can kind of attack ideas and not everyone's going to be the same. Look, I know certain directors. I have to be a little bit more intelligent about it and you know, I can't push things as hard and I have to go a little bit slower. Yeah, yeah, agreed.

[Connor]

So the last, the last piece I have here is, I'm curious now, like once someone is. Sorry, CRO lead. We hired him at the end of September, I would say about halfway through the quarter. He really kind of got into like the evergreen workflow of like, here's the projects I want you focused on. Here are some key results for you to hit. Like, his were basically like hit rate and in the CRO test, like a percentage of tests that had a positive impact on whatever metric that we were going after. Improving, which is typically revenue per user conversion rate. So now he's in the evergreen workflow of our. What we, what we use is like our quarterly key results and initiative setting. What are you like with your design director or your director, Paid Media Creative? Like, what are you ultimately trying to get them into? Like, do you guys have like a, a standard process for how you set expectations on the key projects they're working on and like the, the key results that they're held accountable to? Yeah, like, I like having a single source of truth that I can come back to where it's like one single Google sheet with everyone on the growth team in it. Like, here's everything. If you look at this Google sheet, you will know exactly what everyone's focused on. Because I think some people do it in an like, not that you have to do it that way. I know some people just prefer to talk and like they know the four things. But I like having it written down in a single spot. That's just how my brain works.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, it's way better to write it down. I'm not the best at writing it down. There's really two places where that information lives. I have a like 2025, like key channel initiatives doc where I'm just like, I've got each team there and I've like. And I put it together like over the holidays when I was just like thinking through everything and like, okay, writing it down. Some of those will become. I'll give you a couple of examples. So I've got that, which is mostly just for me. And then I'll, I'll put that into like one on one documents that I have with all direct reports. So at the top, Creative director has our 3690 plan and then it'll become our just like ongoing kind of key projects and initiatives. I also, in the case of the partnerships which I mentioned, we parted ways with the director and we're kind of reorgang that team. I just did everybody's. I basically redid their job descriptions, but with the focus on 2025, this is what I expect to see from both managers. And then they're bringing that to life with the overseas staff that report into them. So it's an example of like, yeah, I totally agree. It's better to get it written down. It can kind of live in a couple different places depending on the team member or, you know, the meeting cadence with certain people. So that's how, that's how we've done it. And then the last thing that I'll say that I've struggled with and is really a big part of the VP of marketing role is so much of our time has been. So much of our time has been going to our go to market launches. Like, we have a fully ramped product development team. We've got weekly launches basically. So how do we balance like the ongoing responsibilities of doing that better and better over time, as well as identifying like areas of opportunity outside of that, whether from a process standpoint or a performance standpoint, like, how are we balancing all of those things together? So that's what I've been working through with the team as well.

[Connor]

Cody, how about you? How are you? How are you outlining those expectations?

[Ridge]

Yeah, so one thing we're trying to figure out just across the org is like KPI's goals. It's not something we've really done a ton of. We've really just had company goals and I think just like even tying it to. I think we want to do a better job of like just overall performance management and tying it to compensation, making those conversations easier at the end of the year. And I think being more fair and equitable with compensation would be better because right now it's like it's really just based on how the company does. But I don't think that's fair to the top performers. Like, there's not a big enough split in bonus between the top performers and bottom. So we want to get a little bit more, but I think to do that you have to be objective. So overall we're looking at the company and how we do goals and KPIs and making more objective, but also not trying to make it too corporate and you know, like, we're still a startup, so we are doing a similar kind of. We're calling it Big Rocks but to. To what Rich does for Cornerstone. So like, that's kind of easy. If somebody has one that aligns. Like, that's really easy to be like, hey, we need to improve our creative diversity. Like, that's our big goal. That's kind of like our objective. Here's our key results. Where they don't have it, it's harder. So I, I would say we're in the process of really doing that and trying to figure it out and getting a little bit more objective with, you know, director, Director of E. Comm. Here are the number of tests I want you to do per month and things like that. Right. Right now it's just, we just, we want to test more, but it's not as objective and pinpointed. And then you know, we have a weekly marketing meeting where everyone shares what they're working on on their channel, how they're doing against their goals, what plan, what support you know, is needed, why they think they're below if they are. And then I do a weekly standup with almost everybody that reports. To me that's just same thing. Here's what I'm working on. Here's what the past week was. If I'm below, this is why here's what support I need. And then that's kind of where we will reprioritize things if needed. Like hey, here's what I'm working on. Which three do you want me to work on? Stuff like that.

[Connor]

Yep. Yeah, I, I like that. I think everyone you have, it's one of those things where just something's better than nothing. You don't have to have it super dialed in but like when you have nothing. I think some people like goal setting is one of those things where you can just go down such a rabbit hole with like the actual like operations and tactics to do it. It's like it doesn't have to be any, any more complicated than just things written in a Google document that everyone agrees on as the source of truth. Like even that is better than you know, there's people out there, there are like, you know, I'm not saying you shouldn't do the complicated, more convoluted stuff if that works for you. But like for us it's, you know, we're similar to you Connor, where at the beginning of the year, end of the last year, beginning of this year, I'll make a big document by channel that has all the key like projects that I think should be the focus for the year. Everyone agrees on that. Once that happens then that naturally turns into the quarterly key results and initiatives which are basically just the sub component parts of those bigger year long projects. And like that's it. And not that we don't adjust it, we, we do but like we keep coming back to that is our source of truth to make sure that we are actually pacing on, you know, on, on track with what we said at the beginning of the year. And I'm going to hit you guys up about your, your, your weekly stand ups because that's something that we were doing and then got away from them because we got busy. And I want to come back to it because I think that's a nice like I think it's a nice thing to do at the beginning of the week to make sure that everyone's prioritized on the right stuff. And I think there's a lot of value for like cross departmental teams knowing what the other team's working on. I think other otherwise, especially in a remote setting, you know, I think it's too easy for like paid media to lose, not understand what retention's working on, not understand what influencer is working on. And like I think when you hear those other people say what they're working on, you can kind of connect the dots to the bigger picture a lot easier. And to do it in a regular way, I think is, is just net a good thing. Even if you as the leader are like this is redundant information for me. I don't need this. But I think the team does. So we're trying to, we're trying to get back into that. So I might ask you about your, your setups for those calls for sure. All right, that is a wrap on part two of the two part hiring series on the marketing operators. Really interesting episode. I think me, Cody and Connor all have, you know, slightly different ways of achieving the same thing. So, you know, take what you want, leave what you want. Thank you to the sponsors. Motion Pressure Rich panel in house. As always, if you're liking the show, please make sure to like subscribe. Leave a comment with your question share with us other marketers. We're trying to get this thing in the hands with as many E commerce and just overall marketing strategists and button pushers as possible.