Smart Scaling: B2B Growth Secrets

Speaker 1: [Music] the biggest lesson to learn in the early days is failure is not truly failure and having the mindset to really shift to this is a positive thing I'm able to fail faster and grow exponentially from this and not getting stuck in that moment I'm Melanie bar welcome back to the Sheil it podcast your go-to place to empower you to live the life and business that you crave I'm here to talk about everything from Having the courage to make life and career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation I'm here to celebrate your wins and navigate through your challenges I live in the city now but I grew up in a town of a thousand people I've navigated major life leaps a senior level corporate career worked in professional sports and now as a successful entrepreneur who loves business technology family and making meaningful connections with you and the Sheil it Community I also love a good workout and dose of selfcare magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so turn up the audio open your favorite Notes app grab your favorite drink and here we go welcome to the Sheila podcast thank you for joining us Chanelle how did your company Market vep come to life and you were determined to solve a problem from day one what was it Mar Fe came about because I had a business that I started when I was 18 and I had that business for 15 years and I came to this point in my life where I really did a lot of self-reflection and I determined that I was so unhappy and I said something has to change I had employees and full thriving business and I was determined that why I was so unhappy was that I had employees which is commical now considering how culture focused of an organization we are so I became a consultant and I was sure that was all I wanted to do was help people and just work for myself in my bubble and within a year we had grown and grown to a point where I had a coach and he said you either stop taking on new clients or hire somebody and we went ahead and hired the first one and the rest is history but it's why we focus so much on company culture and happiness is really at the root of all of the things the decisions that we make as an organization and then as far as what we actually do we function like a full service traditional agency so we're a HubSpot Diamond partner we're a two-time Inc 5000 fastest growing company a nety award winner so we do things like social content lead gen strategies we do content ebooks sales collaterals CRM build outs Integrations and migrations and really help Implement a tech stack so that operationally there is as much automation as possible that people aren't having to do those manual tasks anymore all of those things are so needed and have you always had an interest in marketing and I'm curious about how you transition to building your team and what that was like why did you not want them before and then now you're really passionate about growing your team the first business was really transient so this personal training business where we would go into schools and homes and run either one-on-one coaching or we would run these several hundred person boot camps on site and it just is nature is a transient business I learned a lot about people and hiring for Value fit and that was the biggest lesson that I learned from that and so when we hire now we have a full- built value system we have all of these questions that we ask throughout the process to really make sure that person is a fit both ways we don't want somebody to get here and be like these people are silly and goofy and I'm much more serious of a person and I don't feel comfortable and so being transparent around what that looks like and then in the early days I was so unsure that I was like convinced that this first employee hiring one person was not going to work I was convinced that my business coach was going to be wrong so we got a co-working space and it was the world's smallest office it was a closet I look at the pictures now and it's like we sat elbow to elbow and this girl she came in every day and was so happy and as time went on we added on more of those co-working spaces at one point we had five of those offices and then right before Co great timing we built out a brand new beautiful office space and that ended up being shut down 10 months after into covid because we' hired all over the country at that point and isn't it fun to look back at the pictures to see how far you've come I know it's so fun to see people that were there in the early days and just how much life like that we've celebrated marriages and kids and a really great life experience many leaders focus on sales or marketing you specialize in Bridging the Gap how do you do this between the two teams so we want them to become best friends it's not always the easiest thing but it goes back to a lot of transparency so we do workshops with them to help align what those goals are there have been conversations that I can think of where we talk about persona and the sales team will give a completely different listing of what that ideal customer profile is compared to marketing and so really making sure that it's documented that there is a smooth flow process and handoff from the mql to the SQL and like where people should Touch where they shouldn't touch in that automation or manual Outreach making sure that everybody has Buy in all the way up to leadership because when you don't have that there ends up being these silos where data just exists and then there's surprises that come up later oh Joe ended up leaving the company but he had a list on his desktop that wasn't shared with anybody else and so we really want to make sure that it's a team sport and that everybody is on the same page you've built an award-winning company in a space that isn't traditionally associated with Innovation what belief about marketing did you have to challenge in order to see success the human component has been by far the biggest piece that has led to the awards and the success and the growth and those things they're wonderful and they're nice and they have been on my bucket list like we had a vision wall in some of my old pictures in the old office and the awards we look back at the dates of those and they were always there but at the core it's really the human piece that is what has made everything better without that I don't think that it would be as powerful to have gone and just checked off the Box we do tons of company culture things that's really intertwined so we have a high five board where they nominate each other all month long and then at the end of the month somebody on the team is musically inclined and they sing a song about this person with a harmonica or a ukulele we do swag boxes that go out it's a environment where people can really be themselves when we go to trade shows we do tons of events while we're there to team build so I think the human piece has been the biggest shift yeah team is everything I love my team and it's so helpful when you really enjoy working with the people that you're working with every day and share with us more about this Vision W I believe in Vision Walls Vision boards when you look back and you think about it it's incredible what actually happens and how your brain will look at something and figure out a way to make it happen not maybe exactly but usually pretty close yes I agree I've had lots of them so I have had the one in the office where the whole team actually contributed to the vision board and we kept adding to it then when we moved it got lost in translation and then I've had them in my house and then I had a sales coach who had us as part of an exercise go into canva and make a vision board an 8 and 1 half by 11 printed out and that lived on my board for years and years and so our team this year actually did it as an exercise together and then each person went through their slide to talk about what their goals were what their Vision was their big picture and it's nice cuz I think you learn a lot about your team in a way that you might not have had that conversation or what really drives their purpose and it's really lovely to hear how they grew up or what they're hoping to achieve next year or where they want to travel to or a pet that I didn't know that they had like a snake they've never talked about all of those pieces come together and to your point it's amazing when you look back at it that oh my God I had this idea five years ago 10 years ago and here we are and it happened it's a nice reminder so true so often you hear someone pulling one out of a box you know from years ago and they can't believe how much has actually come from it do you have Cadence do you do it every year and do a reset or do you continue to add to your existing we make these leaps through our life and our business every time I want to make a leap I'll do a board or a wall and I admit i' been sitting so much I just got the treadmill desk and I'm obsessed with it and so I just put my smaller vision board on that desk so every morning as I'm waking up and starting to move and it doesn't replace my entire workout but my apps keep telling me you're moving more and actually it's amazing how much more energy I have throughout the day since I'm moving so much more instead of sitting primarily is it hard to type so if I'm doing something where I really have to focus I won't be on it or I'll go very slow but if I'm moving files around or doing something where I'm it's not taking so much of my effort I'm really enjoying it love that you'll have to send me the link in Amazon I will I will it's so fun many leaders are hesitant to embrace new tech like Ai and automation which you know at times are things I feel like I can't live without how do you help compan iies modernize without feeling like they're losing the human element it's baby steps people think AI is All or Nothing I'll talk to people about how what their perspective of AI is or how they're actively using it and they're be you know like I have no intention of ever using it and then you start talking through what their Tech stack is and we're like but it's already built into to all of these things that you don't even recognize that it's natively in there doing a lot of that heavy LIF which isn't a bad thing it's saving the manual time and energy so that you can free up your time your head space to be able to do something way more productive and beneficial to the organization but I'm hoping that they come around and it seems like in the last 3 to six months it's from my perspective I've had less conversations around to use it or not use it it's more like how does it fit into the Matrix of what we're doing and within like HubSpot for example there's no getting around it like it's built into tone and voice there's a tool where like if you're having five people go through and write content and you want to make sure that the inflection sounds like the organization it'll streamline all of that or the ability to have podcasting and you type in it and then it automatically generates the voice for a podcast so you don't even have to get on video I think it's small tweaks over time and I think it it will continue to get better and evolve but as marketers it's silly to not think about how it fits into the bigger picture and how does it move the needle faster and I think about that within podcasting too will it take over everything you know but you can't be worried about that because we still want to have a voice and we still want to have convers we will always want that human connection too that's the biggest piece is like the face-to-face human when we had a physical office and then also like when we travel and team on site places but even just like Zoom preco there was such a difference where people they get on Zoom but they would just be a black Cube and it was still socially acceptable and now I can't tell you the last time I've gotten on a call where somebody doesn't have their face on the camera and it's refreshing you want to have that human tohum connection yeah before Co I did all of my podcast recordings in person and then most people went to zoom and now it's hard because I don't want to miss out on talking to people all over the world I think that's one of the good things that came out of Co for us we hired in like Texas Nevada South Dakota all these places that we would have we were previously only hiring in a 30 mile radius around a Massachusetts office and it just seemed crazy and so to be able to talk to anybody in the world and get their insights in their voice I think is incredible what's one lesson about leadership or business that you learn the hard way but that you wouldn't trade just one the biggest lesson to learn in the early days is failure is not truly failure and having the mindset to really shift to this is a positive thing I'm able to fail faster and grow exponentially from this and not getting stuck in that moment whether that's hitting a goal or closing a deal or whatever it might be hitting a certain metric in terms of team or culture it's accepting where you are having Grace with yourself and with your team to accept that and then say to each other how do we learn from this what are the takeaways how do we improve next time is a team that value alignment one of the things we look for is like an open-mindedness and a willingness to have that self-reflection CU without that it's so hard to grow and assess those failures and make them glass half full moments of okay that was actually a good learning like this is how we would do it different and that's how I think we've been able to scale at the rate that we have it's so true and I really learned this I'm a twin mom and they're so unpredictable every time something would happen i' think okay how do I avoid this happening next time I mean so much to where it drives my husband a little bit crazy but that has transpired into my business life I've thought like that before but I think with the twins I really started to think like that cuz I had to be prepared for unpredictability and then after something would happen I think okay how can I be prepared so that doesn't happen again and it's interesting because to your point I see that happening in my business life every day it mirrors over that muscle memory is once you fine-tuned it it really does make other parts of your life better magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy we talked a lot about your business today what is one thing that you do for you to make sure that you're finding and living your joy when I was a lot younger I did a lot more art and I have recently started getting back into doing art and having that creative space and similar to what we were talking about failure and like learnings I think a lot about art in the same capacity of trying to figure something out and so I've been enjoying painting and drawing and I have a son and he it's at our special time that he gets to just be with me and that's like our thing and so that's really where I've been finding the most Joy at this stage I love that and it's great to do something completely different than our day-to-day and I would think that's completely different it's free flowing it's not structured it probably also brings new ideas and get you out of your mindset a little bit yes it was interesting because we had a very large canvas it was like 36 by 48 and he kept saying so are you going to paint and I said first we have to look at the picture and figure out where the lines go and then let's think about what are we going to draw on it so that we're prepared for when we paint and it kept saying when are we going to paint when are you going to paint because he was painting while watching but from a child's perspective that same ability to understand like taking patience to get to what you want to but taking the time to really slow down and think about things was really interesting to watch from a child's perspective yeah so interesting thank you so much for joining us today please share with us how and where we can find you absolutely thank you for having me connect with me on LinkedIn at Janelle McGrath on our website market.com and we have a podcast called finding business happy thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheil it on social thank you to my editor rich shelino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave