The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Office Hours: How Much Should I Spend on Marketing? When Your Colleagues are Getting Poached, and Talking to Teens About Their Futures
Episode Date: December 20, 2023Scott gives entrepreneurial marketing advice, speaking as to why startups should focus on creating an exceptional product over spending on marketing. He then discusses how to deal with management team...s within your company when employees keep getting poached. He wraps up by advising a listener who is speaking to their nephew’s high school class about their career path in entrepreneurship. Music: https://www.davidcuttermusic.com / @dcuttermusic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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NMLS 1617539. Welcome to the PropG Pod's Office Hours. This is the part of the show where we answer your
questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like
to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursatproptumedia.com.
Again, that's officehoursatproftoonmedia.com. First question. marketing. As you think back as a successful entrepreneur or perhaps an entrepreneur that
has experienced a failure, you know, as they think back to the very beginning, when they're
getting ready to launch their business and seek to gain traction, what was their perspective
around the value of marketing and communications. Was it viewed as a priority?
Maybe there were some learnings that are worth sharing
for awareness and credibility, right?
For lead generation.
Any mistakes you made or you know others made,
I'd be really grateful to get your perspective.
Thanks so much.
Jackie Omaker, thanks for the thoughtful question.
I don't think startups think much about marketing, nor do I think they should.
I think what you should think about in a startup is building an amazing product that 10x, your
goal should be a 10x better product that will get its own discovery.
Traditionally, if you had a better
product and you didn't have marketing, it was like a tree falling in the forest. No one cared.
No one heard it. Now, if you put out a better widget that's generally better, people's social
graph will take over and they'll start talking about it. So initially, I don't think you want
to spend a lot of money on marketing. Here's the problem a lot of entrepreneurs fall into,
is that they think expenses make a business. No, expenses don't make a business. Revenues do. It's fun to lease a nice
office space, fix it up, hire a bunch of people, start marketing, have glossy brochures, a cool
website. Those are just expenses. Expenses put a business out of business. So here's the thing.
You want to start a services business? You got a client. You want to start a product business?
You build a product and you try and ensure that someone might actually buy the thing, you want to start a services business, you got a client. You want to start a product business, you build a product, and you try and ensure that someone might actually buy
the product before you even think about marketing. Every company I've had, I've poured all of my
effort into making a better product. And then once I knew I had a better product, I then think about,
how can I get earned media? Specifically, once you have a great service, it's truly differentiated,
or a product that's truly differentiated, which is just table stakes. Now your product has to be better.
Don't spend a dollar on marketing until you know you have a product that's so strong
that people naturally want to buy it or use it. Otherwise you're just, I don't know,
you're putting lipstick on a pig. Once you have a product that you think resonates, then I would go very small ball into some
Google key terms, search terms, some mild advertising across social media, and I would
be very, very disciplined in terms of the spend and the ROI.
And don't let some cool people wearing black show up and talk, do a big game like I used
to do about brand.
Also, a small business that accelerates faster
than other small businesses are all going to have one thing in common. One, see above,
10x better product, or at least 2x better. And two, they're going to embrace new mediums.
Now, what do I mean by that? L2 probably had a much bigger footprint than the size of his
business. When we sold, we were $20 million. We sold for $160 million, but we had, I don't call
it global awareness, but in our industry, in luxury and consumer, we had near ubiquitous awareness.
Why? Because I leaned into this emerging medium 13 years ago called YouTube, and I would do these
funny videos. And we had these really talented people, some of whom are at PropG Media now,
who would do an incredible job editing and filming and the quality, the production quality of the
videos, and we put them out on YouTube every year.
And we would talk about our research and our findings and couch it in humor.
And, you know, we were good at it.
And these things would go viral or they would get go viral.
They would get between 30 and 2 and 300,000 views.
And then we would put out a freemium product.
And that is when we put out research reports,
we'd put out the first 10 pages for free. And if you wanted to see page 11, you had to click on a
link that said that had an email form that said email us for information about membership.
So over the next five years, if you have a small company that punches above its weight class in the
service of the product, the consumer industry, I would bet that you have done one thing. And that
is you have learned in addition to having a great product, you have learned how to leverage TikTok.
That's what I would be leaning into right now. I just think that's where everyone's going. I think
that's, you know, basically Tory Burch was a brand built on Instagram. You know, Burberry was a brand
built on digital media. And also in the services industry, what we did was we absolutely
over-served those first six clients because what is your marketing? It's client references
across your initial clients. Thanks so much for the question. Colorado College, good to be Jackie.
Question number two. Hi, Scott. This is Jack from New Jersey. I'm a solution engineer at a
SaaS company that recently underwent a 10% reorg after securing significant capital
from a large PE fund two years ago. We're facing a unique challenge. Our top sales engineers are
being poached by larger players in the industry, despite consistently outperforming them in the
field. It feels like our leadership team isn't stepping up with innovative strategies or
recognizing that the market's telling them they need to reset their expectations
to retain the winning talent.
As a 30-something navigating their first job in tech,
any advice on dealing with an anemic leadership team
in this landscape?
It's been a wild ride.
Jack from New Jersey, thanks for the question.
So look, it sounds like you're in sales.
It doesn't sound like you're in a senior level position.
So it's like they said, or Heath Ledger said in Brokeback Mountain, if you can't fix it, you got to stand it.
And that is you can talk to your boss and set out what your expectations are in terms of compensation.
But if, in fact, you feel your management team doesn't get it around compensation or strategy, you can go somewhere else.
And, you know, management teams aren't dumb, or they're
usually not dumb. I shouldn't say that. Sometimes they're dumb, but if they're losing people,
they'll get the memo. And especially with a software company, the assets go home in the
elevator every night. So if they're a decent, you know, a decently managed company, they have
churn rates. They should know what the average is for the industry. I know when I'm on boards
of software companies, I ask them to produce data on what is the
average churn by position, by level.
How does that compare relative to the industry?
What they've done in terms of a layoff is not surprising.
This is kind of the year of efficiency, starting at Twitter and then moving through the system
where companies have said, we've stuffed so many calories down the esophagus of the growth
industry that there's fatty deposits everywhere.
It's not that they're losing people that's worrisome. It's whether or not they're losing
key people and they're seeing a decline in revenues. One of my companies had, I remember,
100% attrition one year. We had, I think, 60 employees and not one left. And I remember saying
that must mean we're overpaying them. And you don't like to say that. We have zero attrition
at Prop G Media because I've consciously decided to overpay people. And no one ever feels overpaid.
No one ever says, no one ever says, yeah, I'm definitely overpaid. Everyone feels like
they're underpaid 90% of the time and occasionally 10% of the time they feel like they're fairly
compensated. But I would say, look, if you yourself don't feel like your management team
is making the right decisions, the bottom line is they get to make these decisions. In this economy, a decent, you know, a decent opportunity is just, quite frankly,
is to find another job. Appreciate the question. We have one quick break before our final question.
Stay with us. Welcome back. Question number three. Hi, Scott. I'm Kurt Paul from Montreal.
Thanks for the show. My nephew gave me the honor of being a guest speaker for his career week at Welcome back. Question number three. My path to entrepreneurship was a little different. My grandfather started a bicycle retail business in 1948.
When I was growing up, my father owned it.
I started working for him at age 13.
In college, I wasn't really successful.
I took some time off of school, and I went to work for him full time.
I quickly became the service manager, and by 22, I was running the store.
At age 25, I was buying the business from him,
and five years later, I grew it into a second location.
I unfortunately never made the time to go back to school.
I love entrepreneurship.
It's the environment I grew up into,
and I wouldn't trade that experience for anything else.
I guess I'm a little bit nervous
speaking in front of a bunch of kids about entrepreneurship
when I learned it from my father instead of in school.
Thanks for your insight.
Pierre-Paul from Montreal. By the way, I love Montreal, mostly because my experience in Montreal
or my exposure is during the first week of June. I used to go up there for Formula One. And in June,
Montreal is wonderful. I did go back there once in February. Not as nice, not as nice,
but most European city in North America. Okay, so I have some experience here. I had the opportunity to go back to my high school university charter school in West Los Angeles last year to film an episode of CNN+. I don't know if you've heard of them. I had a TV show on the streaming network of CNN. And I spoke in front of the senior or the graduating high school class. And there's a few things. One, in terms of being self-conscious about not pursuing college, I would just cite the
data.
And the data is the following, that if somebody, if an 18-year-old or 17-year-old has the opportunity
to go to a good school and has the resources, it's a pretty good backup plan.
Even if they plan to start their own business at some point, college grads on average earn
almost twice what non-college grads earn over the course of their lifetime. It opens up a ton of doors. It opens up, you know, there's just a whole cadre vein of corporations and institutions, whether it's the Secret Service or Google, that it's almost impossible to get a job out unless you have the certification that an undergraduate degree offers.
So I would just acknowledge that point, but also say, if you don't decide to get a college degree, there are other paths and tell your story.
Now, you also have to recognize your privilege.
And that is essentially, it sounds like you inherited, and not that you didn't deserve it, but you were put in a place of opportunity to have some wind in your sails as an entrepreneur because of a family connection or family ownership of a business. So I would just acknowledge those points. In terms of what you
tell kids, you know what I, and I would root in your own experiences. My own experiences was that
if you feel like you're lonely and not doing that well here and don't have a ton of friends,
aren't that popular, just keep in mind the correlation between how popular you are in high school
and how successful and happy you are as an adult
is not only not correlated,
it may be inversely correlated
to the importance of taking risks and chance
and being resilient.
I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president
and student body president.
I lost all four elections
and I think that was hugely valuable for me.
And then I think it's really nice to try and develop a sense of being in touch with your emotions and being generous with your emotions at a young age, telling friends
that you care about them, you know, being trying to be a good person at home, realize your parents
are your allies. But I would just root it in personal experience. I think that kids want
someone authentic to talk to them about what they were thinking about in high school and what went well and what didn't go well. But
congratulations. That's a nice, that's got to be a nice moment for you going back to your high
school. I mean, it took me, you know, the better part of 35 years to get back to my high school.
It's taken you about 36 months. So congratulations on your success and try and avoid what you think
you're supposed to say and just say what you feel.
Thanks for the question.
And again, congratulations.
That's all for this episode.
If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursatpropertymedia.com.
Again, that's officehoursatpropertymedia.com.
This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and
Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to The Prof G Pod from the
Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice,
as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.