Why Real Growth Comes From Accountability, Not Tools

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: You need people to show up every day and to bring the tool to life and to affect change. Uh, even if it's agent, even if it's ai, you need the capacity for somebody to sit in the center of. To put their hand up and say, I will take accountability for the end outcome, and I'll show up every day and ensure we are driving towards it.

[00:00:17] And that's what our profit engineers do. That's what we want to be, is we want to be that partner that is accountable to you for the result of the thing we said we're going to do. And then we want you to trust that every day we're gonna measure the entirety of our organization against those expectations to support you in that effort. 

[00:00:32] Forecast, measure, learn, adjust, forecast, measure, learn, adjust, forecast, measure, learn, adjust, and the benefit the CTC has and why. I would just like contend that this system that we've developed is one that you should just simply adopt instead of trying to recreate your own and spreadsheets or anywhere else is because we get to do this 200 times every month, 12 months a year, and we've been doing it for 10 years.

[00:00:54] So the amount of repetitions through this loop, forecast, measure, learn, adjust, forecast, measure, learn, adjust, forecast, measure, learn, adjust. We just get the benefit of failing at it and improving the system way more often, way more times. So if you go and you listen, what you'll, what you'll start to notice, like I you, you hear this on the Marketing Operators podcast, I heard this between two former employees, Andrew and Sarah on his podcast.

[00:01:16] You will start to notice that big as people journey through this process of building a business, they come to the same conclusions. And it's not 'cause we're smarter, I'll just tell you it's like we are just. Repetition's out further than everybody else in terms of what you discover as you begin down this process.

[00:01:31] Someone sent me a tool yesterday called that they're building that's a, an attempt to understand like, okay, we wanna set goals, we wanna create visibility to tracking, and off we go. And I just get, I can immediately see all the gaps that will come up as they encounter the problem simply because. We've run into all the problems and we're still encountering them every day.

[00:01:50] Do you know how hard it is to actually create accuracy around contribution merchant, like as a financial metric inside of an organization? The idea that the underlying data structure for that is like easily accessible, is accurate, is trustworthy, is like an immense complex tax task. And every one of these things, whether it's the the LTD models or the spend a ER models or the the calendaring effects like.

[00:02:14] All of those are complicated and subject to big errors that become smaller over time as you learn from your mistakes and improve them. 

[00:02:22] All of this modeling we do for you, our data science team is growing all the time. We now have, uh, almost as many engineers at CTC as we do media buyers. And what that means is that we're constantly both. Building and updating our marketing calendar models, our event effects, our, uh, spending a MER models, our retention curves, holding them accountable to making adjustments, figuring out ways that we can improve the efficacy.

[00:02:48] And then what I'll really tell you is that you've heard me probably talk about Seans, this idea of software enabled agencies, that this, my belief that that service and software are collapsing together. And if you need an illustration of this, uh, the, the team at ReadySet, which is a, a, an agency that exists on the creative side, just launched a product called Air Post.

[00:03:05] Okay, go read John's post about the launch of Air Post and you'll hear the description, which is that these tools in and of themselves are really nothing. They sit there waiting to be used, waiting to plug into an overall set of accountability inside the operating system of an organization. And then you need humans.

[00:03:23] You need people to show up every day and to bring the tool to life and to affect change. Uh, even if it's agent, even if it's ai, you need the capacity for somebody to sit in the center of. To put their hand up and say, I will take accountability for the end outcome, and I'll show up every day and ensure we are driving towards it.

[00:03:40] And that's what our profit engineers do. That's what we want to be, is we want to be that partner that is accountable to you for the result of the thing we said we're going to do. And then we want you to trust that every day we're gonna measure the entirety of our organization against those expectations to support you in that effort.

[00:03:55] So the modeling done for you, the execution done with you, it's not likely that we're gonna do every part of it. There's gonna be roles for you and your team to play. And the easiest way, I like to think about the best function of those roles. If, if I could offer you anything about organizational design between the best partners that I see work in our spaces, that there's two rhythms to the marketing and e-commerce operations rhythm.

[00:04:14] There's the day to day, every short term thing that needs to be resolved to close the gap today. But if you're on that hamster wheel, you're gonna miss a bigger thing, which is that there's a second rhythm. It's the longer rhythm, the one that focuses on building the peaks, the model breaking moments, months from now.

[00:04:30] It's the new product development. It's the big partnership between Bose and Skull Candy and the Cool campaign that surrounds it. And the best organizations and partners that we work with, they're working on that rhythm. They're saying, okay, we will go out to April, to July to September to design the new product, to build the new campaign, to find that licensing deal, that partnership, that moment, that will allow you to seed the expectation where whatever the model thought we were gonna do, the, his, the extrapolation of the, of the history of this business gets broken to the upside.

[00:05:00] And so giving someone space for that kind of work is enabled by allowing them to turn the brain off to the present. 'cause you've got a partner that you know has a system that's trusted that's going to deliver for you based on those results. So that's how I'd encourage you to think about it. Your internal team should be working on those peaks, the things that drive disproportionate value, that have massive potential return that are going to deviate and alter the trajectory and course of your business in entirety.

[00:05:25] 'cause we won't do that. And I've never met an agency who does, who develops the new product ideation for your organization. Who comes up with that big campaign? I'm sure they're out there, but it's not what I see most service providers offering. And instead, what we could live in is next month there's a 30 day cycle, and every day it requires action.

[00:05:44] Every day it requires change. And we will take a responsibility to define that organizational expectation and then ensure that every day we are driving towards the achievement of it. 

[00:05:54] Um, so that's what we have for you today is an illustration of three things. If I could just say them back, that you take away with you.

[00:06:04] It's that clarity, accountability, and capacity are the key to accurate forecasting. And if you're sitting here today on January 21st and you're off course in any way, shape or form, there's some gap to whatever present reality would say. Do not let go of the accountability. Go seek out clarity, figure out who has the capacity, or maybe even just the willingness, the courage to try.

[00:06:29] To put their hand up and say, I think this might help us get closer to the result that we stated and see how fast you can execute it. And one of the things I'll say, and this is like leaders, we have to wrestle with this constantly, is that you can do more than you think you can do. People can produce more faster when given the expectation and clarity that the result isn't optional.

[00:06:55] That we just find a way, we find a way to move closer to the goal. And maybe you won't get all the way back, but maybe you'll go from minus 8% to minus 3% and that's gonna give you the chance that the next time you get to plus 3%, now all of a sudden you're back on course. So every little improvement towards the overall expectation matters a lot.

[00:07:12] Um, and while I'll say it's exhausting to hold this every day, it's actually the most challenging thing about the work that we do is to be the kind of people that invite friction every day. 'cause the gap is friction. The gap between where you said you were going and where you are is just friction. It's just the ability to go press up against it and say, hang on, you're behind 3%.

[00:07:34] Why? Why aren't you spending what you said you were going to spend? Why is the efficiency not where it is? And you're going to watch I, I deal with this every day. I sit next to a young man by the name of Anmar, who's one of our best growth strategists, and yet every day he will resist just slightly the reason why the efficiency isn't where it should be.

[00:07:53] Because It's so natural to accept, a victim disposition or, something circumstantial. And these things are real, they're real circumstances. It's not that they're making things up, but the question is, so what now? What in light of that change or that unexpected performance or that campaign that didn't work like we hoped, or the creative that you don't have, that you're waiting for, that somebody told you they were gonna deliver on a day that you don't have, what are you gonna do?

[00:08:17] How are you gonna make it up? Um. And that space is really powerful when you begin to sit in it and occupy it and go try and fix it. So, um, be the friction, uh, or let us help. It's what we train our people to do. It's what we think we can offer you. Importantly, you know, there's this funny, uh, sort of trope about, uh, McKinsey, right?

[00:08:39] That it's like the, uh. They come in and they get to be the reason why people get fired. Right. Um, and I think what that really is is that most of the time organizations are resistant to conflict and it's necessary conflict. And so sometimes a partner is good for that, um, to be the third party that says, Hey, hang on.

[00:08:59] What are we doing today to do this? And if I'm, if I'm a CEO, what I want is as many people that create friction for the sake of the goal as possible. I want as many humans showing up and being as dissatisfied with the gap to the goal as I know. I feel as a CEO. Um, you know, there's this funny, like, we.

[00:09:19] People at CTC know very well that like, if there's any deficit to what we call our sandbox, it's our realtime view of the p and l, that like my mood is directly proportional to that size of that gap. Like it just is. That's what I've learned to drive towards. And so what happens is that becomes infused into everyone, right?

[00:09:35] And so eventually they become dissatisfied when there's a gap. And that's what you want as a, as a leader, is that you want people who are on the hook and connected to that expectation. So things like giving them visibility every day. Red and green is a powerful indicator. Nobody likes getting an email every day knowing that your CEO's on it, knowing that your CFO's on it, and seeing that there's, Hey, everything's red.

[00:09:58] 'cause what it, what creates for you is when you receive that email at 7:30 AM and I know the CFO got it, and I know the CEO got it. I better damn well have something that I'm saying I'm doing to reconcile that gap. Otherwise, it will be obvious that it's negligence. So all these little pieces of the system, the great modeling, the clear expectations, the good data, the integration of the marketing calendar, the qualitative and quantitative, combined with the daily emails that show up to everyone, all the tooling and visibility for every person on the team to where they're supposed to go.

[00:10:26] It's all how the accountability occurs. It's a partnership between the systems, the tools, and the people to get towards the outcome.