Mastering Growth Momentum: Unveiling Your Agency’s True North

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch. My guest today is Frank Cowell. He is a speaker, bestselling author and entrepreneur, currently serves as the chief revenue boss at Revenue Ranch. He works regularly with business owners and executives who are looking to grow faster, and he’s also the author of Building Your Digital Utopia, which details the concept he pioneered to help brands create digital experiences that systematically accelerate growth. So Frank, welcome to the show.

Frank (00:40): Hey, Jon, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

John (00:42): So a couple things I want to get in a little bit into your, I love always to hear people’s entrepreneur during like, how’d you get here? Right? But I want to focus on one thing. Revenue Ranch is your company. You’ve given yourself the title Chief Revenue Boss. Does that imply automatically what you think is the most important role for you currently in that business, or is that just what needed to be filled?

Frank (01:06): I think for me, the play on the Revenue Ranch aspects, so Boss is a common term on a ranch, and then revenue tying into the company name. Ultimately it’s my job to create direction for the company, but in this chapter of my life, after having exited an agency, this business is less about growing a massive team of people and more so about working with agency owners as they try to navigate this journey of being an agency owner. So I help guide them on that journey and we put a program together to make that happen. So Chief Revenue Boss is more so just a tie into the company name and that kind of ranch theming.

John (01:49): I guess what I was getting at a little bit is I see a lot of business owners, let’s call them rather than CEOs, who really think revenue and vision and maybe culture are my only real jobs because they’re so down in the weeds doing everything else, and I think it almost feels like a luxury if you get to a point in your business where you can say, look, these are the only three things that I need to focus on because they’re the only three things that matter necessarily to scaling.

Frank (02:18): What’s interesting about the CEO role is the CEO is responsible for what I call true North, and it sounds simple, but it’s a massive decision to make regarding what goes into creating true North. And then, oh, by the way, making sure that the decisions within the company and how you align the team so that they all are inspired by, they’re clear on true North, and they also make decisions about True North. That’s a very big deal, even though it sounds simple on paper. And then ultimately, if we look at the KPIs, if you will, of the other functions in the business, the major functions, those aren’t directly the responsibility of the CEO, but indirectly they are. If you were to go to the shareholders or the board, they don’t really care that there’s a head of marketing responsible for active lead generation that ultimately is going to fall on the CEO’s shoulders as to why the company isn’t growing at a respectable rate. So it’s kind of a yin and yang thing there.

John (03:19): Yeah, no, I actually agree with you. I think that a lot of people, it’s easy to explain the concept and a lot of books do of True North, it’s probably the hardest thing to actually get around to getting right, and I think that’s where people are really struggling. Give us a little bit of a snippet of your journey to how you got here. You talked about owning an agency already, and obviously we know what you’re doing today, but it’s always kind of fun, I think, to go through what molded you to this place.

Frank (03:47): Yeah, so I’ve always been a salesperson at heart ever since I was a kid. I was in love with this idea of product and creating a business and selling things and moving something into a market and satisfying the market. Even as a kid, I would order these products that I was responsible for selling and my parents would be like, what did you just commit to this? Hundreds of dollars of stuff that’s in our house now that you have to go and sell. I was like 12 years old, and so I’ve just always been that way, and if we fast forward, along comes the information superhighway. That’s what we called it back then, the internet, the worldwide web, we called it the Information superhighway, and there was a big theme back then of the information Superhighway is coming. That was the big message out there, and none of us really knew what that was.

(04:38): Well, me being very curious, I started dabbling and trying to figure out what is this thing? And it wasn’t long before I said I could probably sell stuff on this thing, and that’s when I launched my first web page through my America online web space, and I paid some guy 50 bucks to do it. I found him on America online, and at the time, 50 bucks, I had to ask my wife for $50. I said, Hey, is it okay if I spend $50? That was a big deal to me back then. And so she said, sure, I believe in all your crazy wacky ideas. So I got this thing uploaded and I was selling some information products, and then I decided I wanted to change it, and I was like, oh, this guy’s going to want 50 bucks again. And then I thought to myself, Frank Computers and back in junior high, you did a certain amount of programming that you learned, I could probably figure this out.

(05:31): So I cracked open a text editor, and lo and behold, I saw the words on the screen that I wanted to change. I changed it, saved it, uploaded it, and my mind was forever blown. I was like, oh my gosh, the power I now possess. So that led me on a journey to teaching myself how to program. I started programming in flat file databases using a language called Perl. Back then we’re talking, this was the late nineties, by the way, and so when it comes to the internet, I’m an old guy, and so that led me into creating my own content management system, and then I launched a web design shop, and then that eventually morphed into a branding agency and creative agency, and I went through that whole journey, did M&A type stuff, and then last year I exited my agency. So yeah, it kind of was a roundabout way of this sales marketing career that was underpinned by my desire to build things and deliver things to a market.

John (06:29): Yeah, it’s funny, I started my agency over 30 years ago, so yeah, pre-internet as well. But I always tell people the only thing I was sure of is I could hustle work, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of have that bug, and sometimes it could be a weakness, right? We don’t stay focused because we’re able to do that. Talk a little bit about,

Frank (06:48): That’s such a point, John, such a

John (06:49): Great point, and we can come back to that. I want to talk about the book Building Your Digital Utopia. You talked about this idea of creating an experience that systematically accelerate growth. So kind of unpack that idea for us.

Frank (07:01): Well, I’m a systems guy. I’m a frameworks guy. Everything I do, I want to put a system around. I want to put a framework around, I want to put an ABC 1, 2, 3, so much so to where my wife sometimes is like, oh my gosh, there’s a right way to do everything, isn’t there, Frank? Because that’s just how I view everything. There’s a ABC 1 23 when it came to my agency experience and what we were doing for clients, which was essentially inbound marketing, content marketing. I wanted to create a way for our clients to understand the complexity of content marketing. Now to marketers that might be listening, we might think, oh, it’s easy to understand, but we also have to remember the people that buy what we have to offer, let’s say content marketing, it’s not so easy for them to understand and they don’t understand the strategic aspects of it.

(07:46): So I wrote a book that intended to teach the strategic aspects to get a business owner, a business executive, to understand what good inbound slash content marketing looked like. And oh, by the way, the underpinning, the big theme of that was relationships, that we can actually build relationships in a digital format. We have to just take that relationship psychology and apply it to the content. And so once you do that and you overlay that idea of relationship psychology, you now have specific types of content you need at various stages. And it’s not just so, it’s not enough to say, oh, awareness, decision, consideration, that’s not enough to say that we actually have to understand the psychology of meeting the psychological need at that place. And so that’s what we attempted to do was apply that psychology to that process and it works really well because now we can teach people, business executives a strategic understanding of content and digital marketing.

John (08:48): Yeah, 15, 20 years ago we were talking about content is king. You remember everybody was saying that and then it became air, frankly, and I think today we’ve risen it to the strategic level. You don’t talk about content as a blog post or as a content management system. It’s actually how are we going to use it to be the voice of strategy is how we talk about it, because I think it’s become that important, but it’s also, it’s complex. It’s changing, it’s getting harder. There’s so much garbage out there that I think I understand the confusion, right, and I’m sure you see it too. Yeah.

Frank (09:23): I think when, and this is Go ahead,

John (09:25): Finish that point.

Frank (09:27): I was going to say, I think when businesses don’t, I’m going to bring back something I mentioned at the top of the conversation, and we’ll get into it too. When we talk about the number one thing that I think CEOs are responsible for, especially in agencies, but what a lot of businesses lack what’s called a true north. And when you don’t have a true north, it affects everything. So specifically we’re talking about content marketing. Well, guess what? That’s why you’re going to produce a bunch of stuff for SEO and you’re going to produce a bunch of stuff for social and it’s all over the place. And then people wonder why it’s not getting traction. Well, because to get traction with marketing, this was true yesterday, and it’s so true today. To get traction, you need longevity. The problem is if you don’t have a true north, you will constantly be changing directions and you will never have the longevity required to get momentum going. And that’s actually the key word that drives everything I do right now with my clients and my methodology. It’s this idea of momentum. It’s the only magic elixir that ever truly exists in business and in life, and you could actually harness it.

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Frank (11:54): Yeah,

John (11:54): Let’s talk a little bit, I think you call it momentum management even. So let’s talk a little bit about that concept. Again, unpack that a little bit so that, I mean, I think people conceptually can get that, but how do you apply that in a real world, in a business?

Frank (12:10): Yeah, simply put, momentum again is the only magic elixir that really exists. It’s this magical thing that’s infectious that when you start harnessing momentum, everyone gets caught up in it, everyone gets excited, and you have people working together towards a common cause. Without momentum, things start to feel stale and stagnant. And as agencies, we know that is awful in the agency space because our people, which is essentially the product, when they start feeling stale and stagnant and the business isn’t going somewhere, they’re easily distracted by other opportunities. There are many other organizations willing to woo our talent. So we have to create momentum. So how do we do that? The way we do that simply put is by making sure that we obsessively work on the right things in the right order, and disproportionately deploy time, money, and resources against those things. So there’s a few things to define that and get there.

(13:10): I’ve already mentioned true north quite a bit, and I’ll go back to that. It’s really critical that you as the agency leader or any business owner that you e established a true north for the business. Well, the true north, what is it? The true north basically says this is who we’re for. This is what we do in the world. This is the transformation we bring and this is the mission we’re on to get there. It needs to be so sharp, it could metaphorically cut. Meaning when you come across opportunities, it’s either going to cut yes or cut no, and it’s going to be very black and white. The problem with most businesses, they’re not willing to make that sharp of a business strategy decision. So they end up taking some things over here, some things over there, some things right there, and then before you know it, you don’t have the focus.

(13:58): So the true north needs to be something that is razor sharp. Again, I like to tell my clients it should metaphorically cut. If you touch, it cuts you. It’s that sharp. And then your job as the owner is to make sure that all plans align to true North. All people that you hire align to true North, and all the day-to-Day behaviors and decisions align to true North. So that’s number one. We must have a true north, right? So we’re talking about things like vision, mission, values, how you articulate the brand, and then how you define what I call the boulder in the business. And the boulder in the business is the number one strategic imperative that you have to accomplish in the next one to three years. So that’s your true north. So if we start there, if we don’t have that, then gaining momentum is going to be really difficult.

(14:43): And then I can go on to a couple of more points if you want, but yeah, let’s do it. Are we good? Okay, so we’ve got true north. The next thing we need to do is is that we need to uncover the number one blocker towards True North, and we need to analyze that number one blocker on a consistent basis. I like to say in nighty day cycles or quarterly cycles. So what is our number one blocker towards True North? Now, I talk about there being seven core capabilities in every business. One is True. North two is exceptional execution. We’ve got world-class offering systematic sales process, actively generation, empowered work experience, and cash and profit optimization. Those, by the way, align with job titles, but I don’t use the job titles. Those are the seven capabilities. So what you have to do as a business owner is you have to regularly understand of those seven capabilities, which one is our number one blocker to growth.

(15:41): And you as a business owner must know that at any given point in time, and once you define your number one blocker to growth, then what you’re going to do is the third thing is you’re going to chip away at that blocker in nighty day or quarterly cycles. So the plans you come up with aren’t to boil the ocean, aren’t to get rid of that blocker to growth in one plan, your objective is what can we accomplish in this quarter to chip away at it and understand that growth getting to a place of big success is a journey, and it’s about success stacking those little wins quarter after quarter. So what happens when you do that? Well, you gain momentum because not only are you chipping away at the blocker, which frees up and makes your company spend faster, but you’re creating a culture of winning with your team. And when your team feels like winners, they start to get caught up in the excitement and enthusiasm of it. So those are the three things that I would say as know your true north, know your number one blocker to growth, and then in quarterly cycles relentlessly execute, chipping away at it in small chunks, quarter after quarter.

John (16:54): As I listened to you described that one, how often the number one blocker for people is they don’t have a true north, right?

Frank (17:02): It’s interesting enough, John, it’s actually if we put those in the right order, a lot of people might say, well, I don’t need strategy at this point in time or company’s small. It’s like, well, could you spend just a handful of weeks getting together with the few people you have and agree on what the strategy is? We’re not talking about spending months or years on this, but could you get together and just create some clarity around where you folks are going? Because if you can’t do that, you’re going to continue to spin your wheels.

John (17:32): So one of the things I’m seeing in the agency world is, and we’re picking on the agencies it sounds like, because we both serve a lot of agencies, but this is business in general, is just that they see what everybody else is doing out there. It’s like this is how it’s always been done, and I see a whole lot of pressure right now on marketing tactics, price pressure on marketing tactics today, and a lot of agencies going, we are just throwing bodies at stuff, but we’re making less and working more. So I’m curious if you see that same mentality out there, but also what do we need to be doing or how do we need to be looking at things differently if we are going to scale in a world where technology is constantly changing and creating a lot of pressure on price or on profit?

Frank (18:17): Yeah. Again, I’m going to be redundant here, but I go back to true North. I think about there’s two agency relationships in particular that come to mind for me in one relationship. In this one agency I know of, they made the decision to get really sharp on their true north, and they stuck to it and they relentlessly executed against it. The other agency who by the way, was bigger than this other agency has stagnated because they did everything else, but they didn’t have the courage to make the decisions about True North because they had this fear of missing out. So what ends up happening is they’re not magnetic to anyone audience, but because they’re kind of there for many audiences, now, why is this the answer to the thing that you just brought up? The reason it’s the answer is because as tactics shift, and let’s say we have these massive shifts like AI coming in with content, and how does that affect SEO and how does that affect content marketing?

(19:21): These massive shifts coming in. When you own an audience and you own a particular problem, then you are the one that has the voice within that community to start having conversation with them about how they’re going to leverage this technology or if it’s even applicable at all. When you have that kind of intimate knowledge about that audience, it’s okay that you may not have the answer, but you have the audience and you have the conversations there, and you have the relationships to go back to that audience and say, why don’t we do a roundtable? Why don’t we do a forum where we talk about the disruption that’s happening with this new technology? I’m not claiming to have the answers, but I do know your industry and I do know your problems, and I do know what we have to get you to where you’re wanting to go from a strategic standpoint.

(20:11): When you have that kind of intimacy, the tactical problems come and go. As you know, there will be another massive shift in the future, and there will be another one that will always happen. When you have that intimate knowledge of a given market and you understand them better than anyone else, and you’ve put in the work to develop the relationships in that market, you can then go to them and not claim to have the answers. And that’s really the big revelation. You don’t have to have the answers of knowing what to do with the technology, but you do have to have the relationships with an audience that’s greater than your competitors, so that way you can bring that question to that audience and have a round table discussion and start to create insights and ideas about what that industry can do with the new tech.

John (20:59): Such a great way to build such a great way to build trust too, with that audience doing exactly what you described. Well, Frank, we have run out of time somehow. I wanted to get to stepping away from your agency, which I know we could do a whole show on. So maybe we’ll have you back to cover just that one topic, but I’d invite you to invite people to connect with you or where you’d like to connect or find out more about the work you’re doing there at Revenue Range.

Frank (21:23): Yeah, I think the biggest thing I can do for listeners, because we talk so much about momentum and figuring out which area is your number one blocker and what you should do about it, that probably the best thing I could do is direct people to an online tool that I developed where people can go through and answer some questions about their business, and it will help uncover your exact blocker to growth. So if you just go to Growthmomentumroadmap.com Growthmomentumroadmap.com, you’ll have access to a tool where we’ll walk you through exactly what your number one blocker to growth is, and it’ll give you a roadmap on what to do about that.

John (22:01): Yeah, and we’ll have that link in the show notes as well. Well, frankly, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.