Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast, everyone. I am your host, Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest, Casey Stanton, who is a Fortune 500 marketing consultant and founder of CMOx, the Fractional Chief Marketing Officer company. He helps 7-and-8 figure companies scale with an experienced fractional chief marketing officer who use Casey’s Functional MarketingĀ® Framework. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son, after having been a professor of marketing at Tulane University in New Orleans.Ā Welcome to the podcast, Casey.

Hey, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, no problem.

And I’m super excited to talk to you because we’re going to be kind of framing a different discussion that we’ve had before. And that’s going to be talking about how does the e-commerce business create their own marketing team? What does it look like? What are the skill sets that the individual should have? And really how do they put it all together? A lot of times I know on this podcast we focus on a specific strategy, but these days I think it is really super important to create your own team and whether that team is something that you formulate and put together in-house or you outsource it to a company that has their own team, you still got to know what that team looks like on the other side.

So either way, I think it’s very important that you really know what the right marketing team is made up of. But before we dove deep into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

Awesome. So I graduated college in 2008 and fell into the housing crisis. And it was tough, right? I couldn’t find work. I had one job lined up that I thought I was going to be able to slam dunk. And I lost it on the second interview and I had nothing else. I graduated Michigan State University with a bachelor’s of science and environmental policy. What am I going to do with that? So I did what every everyone I knew did effectively, which was go and live with your parents for a while.

And I hopped on the back of a lawnmower from a guy I used to know from the fire department. And I knew that that was my time to figure this out. I felt my my university had let me down. They told me that they had this high placement rate after college and it just wasn’t true. My friends weren’t getting jobs. I also went into college and I didn’t no one anticipated the housing crisis. The subprime mortgage crisis was just so devastating for job prospects, I would think similar to how it is today for folks coming.

I say out of covid just because we have the vaccines out. But still we’re going to be dealing with covid through all of twenty, twenty one. So there I was on the back of this lawnmower and I said, OK, I’ve got to figure this out for myself. And that’s what I went to the library and I got every Tony Robbins tape I could find, I thought, and download a different audio programs and seminars. And ultimately I motha a guy’s lawn.

And he had a beautiful house. And I was just kind of feeling, I don’t know, a little daring. And I went up to him. I was like, Hey, Dave, beautiful house man on the lake in Lake Michigan, northern Michigan, just like a beautiful place. I’ve got the car. You got it, man. How’d you do it? How did you do this? And he said, Oh, I invented a product.

And I have people sell it as like, tell me more about it. So it did. That’s like. I waited a couple of days, came back for the next job, and I said, hey, can I sell your product? He goes, Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great would you give me some units so that I can go sell them? He’s like, no, you got to buy them at wholesale. And if you don’t sell them, you’re stuck with them.

I realized that that was an opportunity for me. So I jumped on it. I saved up money. It took me a couple weeks more, saved up enough money to buy a couple of units. Then I went door to door in my small town and I made more money today than I made in the two weeks previous. I knew I was onto something that’s interesting, that’s exciting, but if anyone listening hears from a small town and you remember 2008, oil prices were through the roof and I had some old beater car that I was planning on swapping out once I got a proper job.

So I wasn’t going to go driving door to door to sell. It just wasn’t feasible for me. So I did that kind of millennial thing, which is I got on my computer and I tried to figure out what to do. That’s when I found Dan Kennedy and Direct Response Marketing and fell into that and took the product online, made some sales, figured out it wasn’t the product that I really wanted to be selling, and started a career of helping businesses grow through marketing.

And it’s just been really exciting ever since. I’ve worked with agencies and I’ve worked with individuals and companies all across the board. I helped with launch for Jordan Belfort, Wolf, of Wall Street when that movie came out, OK? He got a lot of publicity and he was also a felon, so he couldn’t make money off the story. So he had to make money somehow. Right is a great kind of time for him to make money. So he sold a straight line persuasion system.

And I was behind the strategy and marketing of that. We’ve done New York Times best selling books. We’ve raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter, all sorts of different campaigns. And through all of that, I realized that there was this through line with marketing. And I took a job at Tulane University in New Orleans as a professor, which was pretty strange because I wasn’t a great student and I definitely didn’t have the accolades to be a professor. But I went in and I guess taught for a class and they loved me and they they offered me the job that day.

It all kind of precipitated pretty quickly. I took the job and for three years I taught students. And what I had to do was I had to teach them in a way that they could take something home with them. They needed something valuable that they wouldn’t forget. So it’s not like how do I teach them everything about marketing and all these archaic marketing strategies? No, it’s like, how do I teach them what matters? And I fell into this idea, which I later understood to be first principles.

And when you know, first principles, you know how things work. There’s a lot of people who make stuff like they bake things and they follow a recipe. And that recipe produces a great cake or a great cookie. But if you say, hey, we’re all out of baking soda, they’re screwed. They don’t know what to do because they don’t understand first principles of baking. When you understand first principles of marketing, you’re able to kind of tackle any problem.

Another way I’ve heard this described is mastered the things that are slow to change. And I’m a big fan of that notion. There’s a website, Farnam Street F-stop blog. They are Keiller at mental models and helping you just get better at decision making and thinking. And they talk about mastering slow to change. And I took that direction and I said, if I’m going to get good at something, I could be like those guys that I’m sure you know.

Arlen, you know, guys that have done really well in Google ads or Facebook ads or buying ads or there was like just before that big SEO update, they were making big money on something, or there’s all these little hacks where some people get runaway successes, where they can fill their pockets pretty quickly. But it’s short lived.

Yeah, it’s Chambal. And like, those are so exciting. I remember just getting, like, so jazzed about that. I met a guy at a meditation retreat in Italy and he had told me that he was advertising on Ask Jeeves. This was 2010, 2009, that he was like, yeah, right. And Ask Jeeves had an ad platform. It was something like Google AdWords was being delivered, your Asked Jeeves. And then Google did a big update and they limited what he was bidding on, which was like misspellings of travel, keywords like Abu Dhabi.

And he was getting all that misspelled traffic. Google outlawed that on Google search, but they didn’t outlawed on Ask Jeeves. So for a very short amount of time, he was making thirty thousand dollars a day, while those stories are so exciting and you kind of want to be a part of it, but you have no control over that, and he made that money, but he couldn’t repeat that success.

So what I decided to do was like master the things that were slow to change so that no matter the landscape, I could be successful. And that’s what I taught the students at Tulane. That’s why the students at Tulane have gone on to do some pretty cool stuff that students kind of in a number of fortune. Five hundred some are entrepreneurs doing well for themselves, and it’s because they have been slow to change principles. And I’m just like such a fan of that.

So I think of e-commerce marketing. I think that that’s an important component. It’s not like how do I do this hacky thing on Shopify?

It’s what are the principles or the slow to change processes that I need to have and how do I make that happen?

Yeah, that makes sense. That definitely makes sense. And thank you for sharing that. And I think your story is not unlike a lot of others that graduated in that time frame where they got out of school and they thought, oh, wow, my university that I’ve paid, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to its own people. Promise me I’d be able to easily get a job. And they did it and I had to go home and then kind of rethink everything.

And it’s just really awesome what you did. And, you know, you kind of saw an opportunity, figured it out and just kept it moving. I think you’re so right, though. Slow to change principals are the things that you just you have to focus on. I was talking to a gentleman earlier today about my company’s bread and butter, which is word of mouth marketing, which is what our affiliate in our platform is based on. And I was telling him that word of mouth marketing has been around since there was any type of business or any concept of even barter and trade that’s always been there.

And that type of model doesn’t change. And so those are the things, like you said, that you really have to focus on and leverage. There’s always those one off success stories that we all hear about. And, you know, they’re exciting because of a a hack or a glitch in Google’s algorithm. People are able to get millions. But likelihood of that happening to your company or to you individually is very slim. So, you know, those principles are the key thing to focus on.

And the people that do chase those like FASTA change things. And there’s people that are doing it. And I think SEO is forced to change. Well, I think some SEO techniques are fast to change, you know, writing good content, having appropriate keyword density. You know, like there’s some basic stuff, having good schema, good images, whatever. Yeah, that makes sense. But there’s also the fast to change stuff. There’s the way that you’re back linking the way that you’re building natural back links.

Someone needs to stay on top of. And every single time I’m happy to pay their fee. Yeah, I’m happy to pay that person who’s the nerd on it who like I know a guy here locally that I met at a local meetup and he said, Seo, I don’t know, nerd. He knows all the stuff. He’s super technical about it. I would much rather pay him whatever his hourly fee is to do the work or to do the strategy and then get the work executed by the team.

And that’s what I kind of want to dove in today, which is this notion of like and muscle, which is like a lot of companies, when they think about building the marketing department, they think they need someone that can do it all. And I just want to promote this other idea. And that idea is. Get the strategy laid out, create the processes, and then have your team execute it. We just started working with a company and they’re paying an agency to run Google ads for them.

Anyone here listening has any experience with Google ads. You know that if you’re selling an e-commerce product and you don’t really deviate from that core product, once your ad account set up, plus or minus, it’s kind of good to go, you know, get someone who knows what they’re doing to build it and run it for a year, and then you kind of don’t need them running it anymore. You could bring someone in more junior. And very true.

Most agencies want to put a junior person on your account to run it, who they’re paying twenty, twenty five bucks an hour and charge you two hundred.

Yeah, yeah. That’s definitely the case. I see that all the time. The key thing to think about is really what you say that is that you have to think about this whole marketing, you know, this whole marketing that you need to do for your company as not just really an activity that really goes under one person’s head. You really got to create an effective team. Like you said, you’ve met a gentleman meet up who is what you would call initial nerd.

You know, he’s the guy that will stay in the weeds with really what you have to do on page as far as a CEO is concerned, off page and you know, all of those finer details, that’s his individual job. But there is a lot more to it with regards to a marketing team. So outside of the CEO particular person, what are really some other if you’re looking to kind of put this team together, what are the other competencies when you’re looking to hire a team or put together your own team outside of, you know, just to see an associate person?

What are the other pieces in this whole puzzle? Yeah, great question.

So if you’re in e-commerce, which if you’re listening, you probably are the first one to offer kind of a mental model of sorts, which is if you’re kind of a type A person in business, which I am, I’m kind of like a type person in life and a type of person in business. If you’re a type A person, you think you have a discipline problem, but you probably have a leverage problem, meaning you think, oh, shit, I just got to do that.

OK, I got to knock that out. I’m not working hard enough. I’m not doing the five ABM’s with ice cold showers. I’m not intermittent fasting. I’m not it’s me. It’s like, no, it’s a leverage problem. I’m a big fan of strategic coach. And the guy behind it, Dan Sullivan, he has a model called Who Not How, which is don’t figure out how to do it.

Just figure out who can do it. And I think there’s a lot of, like, validity in that get leverage. So as I talk about this, don’t say to yourself, oh, Casey, you’re right, but I’m going to do it myself. Let’s stop that and focus on your unique ability. That’s another Dan Sullivan processer model, which is you were born to do something. There’s something you’re great at. If you’re really good at sales and you kind of suck at everything else, how can you maximize your time in the sales role?

I’m terrible at I’m not terrible at it. I’m competent at, like, payroll. I hate it, though, man.

I hate taxes. So I pay someone to do all that stuff. I hate laundry. So I pay someone to pick up my laundry and do it and fold and bring it home. I’m like, what’s your unique ability to figure out what that is and focus on that? OK, so now that that’s out of the way in, you’re not going to just like self select as a listener and say, I’m going to do all the stuff myself. What are the constituent parts of a marketing department?

Well, there’s a leader and then there’s labor. OK, so I look at the leader and the leader needs to have some kind of direction. So in a proper organization, a CEO as a CEO, and if they’re on a ship, they’re on the top of the mast and they’re pointing and saying land is that way. They’re saying land is that way, not land is that way, how much gas do we have that someone else’s job to figure that stuff out?

Right, that’s the CFOs job. So they just point in the direction and they’re the person who has the elevation to see what’s happening, the market or the lead marketer or the CMO if your organization’s large enough to afford one. And I think that’s a good distinction. I heard that from a guy named Cameron Harold and the CEO of Space. Cameron said We too often give people titles without the pay and they feel the gap. Right, right. Right.

Now, you don’t have a CEO. You’ve got Becky who does operations look very different, because if Becky goes over the glass door and looks up close and she realizes the average CEO makes over a hundred grand a year and she’s getting paid 60, she’s going to want more money simply because of the title. OK, so you’ve got this marketer who’s a leader in your organization, and their job is to make the dreams come true. I think that in an e-commerce business, the CMO or the lead marketers job is really to make the dreams come true of the executive.

So first of all, the executive has to have an actual like. Outcome will have to be clear, they have to know what they want, they have to know what they’re going to have to know what success is, so know what success is once you know what success is. And when I say what successes, I mean how many units of product A, B and C, do you want to sell a day by win? You’re currently selling ten a day of products and B and you want to produce product C and you want to grow your product and B to 20 unit today say by the end of the quarter you want that.

So your team has 90 days to make that happen. You have to provide that clarity so that they can self have self discipline and kind of like align their actions to your outcomes. Then you need an outcome goal. I like the traction model where there’s rocks, very measurable, very clear. And we just did a quarterly planning with my team. And everyone has rocks. They know what their outcomes are. And for our CEO guy, it’s how many back links, right.

For our content writers, it’s how many articles for our designer, it’s how many pieces of design. Like everyone knows. The joke is you can go to any of my team members in the middle of the night, wake them up from a cold sleep and say, what is your outcome by the end of the quarter? And they’ll tell you you want that in your marketing department. So that’s like management structure before you even get down to the brass tacks of who does what.

So when it comes down to who does what, you need, your strategy, your strategies, how you’re actually going to get those units sold. So there’s a model we put together. We call it slice of the pie. So you want twenty units sold, you’re currently selling ten. How do you get those other ten? You don’t get ten by doing ten things. You get three from doing this thing. You get for a week from doing this thing or four day from this thing have slices of the pie that drive that whole outcome.

So if you want to get an extra couple you might say, I bet if we enhanced our Amazon listing, we’re going to get a higher conversion rate. So we want to move our current Amazon sales from two units a day to four units a day. Our hypothesis on how we can do that is we’re going to improve our listing. We’re going to change our title tag. We’re going to do a referral drive and see how many referrals, reviews we can get.

It’s those kind of clear components, those constituent parts of the outcome that need to be defined. I think someone needs to be experienced to be able to do that. You know, most marketing people, you give them a task and they say, yes, sir, yes, ma’am, I got it. And they do the task, but they don’t see how that task actually has a bigger picture value. So does that like structure so far makes sense before we talk about the people?

Yeah, it definitely does. It also really just sounds like before you even dig deep into this, you have to you have to really define what are you trying to achieve, what’s the outcome before you even just start thinking about it. And then, you know, like you said, you once you’ve got that what you’re trying to achieve and you have your goals in place and then you have all of this together, then comes the step of what you’re saying, the people.

How do you determine the right people for these particular tasks?

That’s it. And structure is so important here because you can get some really great people and you have them do work and they screw it up because they don’t know what you need to be happy. There should be clear goals when you finish a meeting, a brainstorm meeting, what’s the outcome from it? What are the action steps and what’s the buy when you want to create a disciplined approach in business to be able to tackle that? And if this feels like exciting and you have no idea what to do, go get the book attraction.

If you want, go hire an implementer. There’s someone who does that for the whole company. They help you figure out your values and your quarterly rocks and your two year and your five year and your ten years. They’re very well disciplined in helping you become disciplined. But let’s say you can figure it out and you say, hey, I know how many units I want, at least by the end of the quarter, OK, how many units per product.

And then you start figuring out what channels you think they can come into. If you don’t know, then obviously you need a marketing strategist more a CMO who’s experienced that person going to help you figure out, oh, for ecommerce products that are in this space, like men’s clothing, I think we can get them from influencers and then from paid social. Let’s say maybe it’s also email marketing and you buy lists or maybe it’s there’s so many different options here.

Right. There’s running other people’s lists or having them mail on your behalf, maybe for an affiliate commission, maybe there’s going to websites or companies that were you dropped a large email lists like dedicated emails, dot com, maybe you swap someone’s pixel and you sit there pixel and you sell a complimentary product to what they’re selling. There’s like so many different options here that you could do. So you have to be able to know kind of the landscape of e commerce, marketing like marketing, campaign types to be able to choose.

And then once they’re chosen, you need the right person to execute it. And when someone executes the task in their role, I want them to create a process for it. So, again, another business distinction here, process distinction, which is there’s two types of tasks, new and different and routine. And I think that that is a critical distinction because when it’s new and different. What needs to come with that is an acceptance of subpar results, like long times, confusion, frustration, it’s everything that happens when you learn a new skill you want learn to play guitar and want to learn how to play what Freebird like.

You’re not going to do it in two weeks. Definitely not. Doesn’t matter how hard you practice, doesn’t matter who coaches you, you’re not going to do it in two weeks. So when you start doing new and different stuff, know that it’s new and different and take on that, that learning in order to create a repeatable routine. So new and different in routine routine is where everything you want to go to. We started working with a company and they hired a marketing technician, which I think is a great title of someone marketing technician.

It’s not a marketer. It’s a marketing technician. It’s the person who builds the thing and sends the emails and pulls the analytics and whatever. They’re kind of like a jack of all trades kind of. I think most companies need a marketing technician that just does stuff right where they’re not really thinking about it.

They’re simply following processes that were already laid out.

That’s really correct. And occasionally they’re doing something new in the organization. And you say, hey, this is no different. I want you to go do it. Here’s the outcome. Here’s your time to do it. Do you feel like you have enough information to figure it out and to Google it and to go to the webinars from the services and ask questions and do that? And by the way, you’ve got a fifty dollars a month education budget.

OK, that’s a kind of a Tim Ferriss move just to give people a budget to get better. Fifty bucks a month.

Yeah, but you’ve defined it and you’ve kind of set the guidelines. And then on top of that you’re telling that person even though that because this is new and different and like you said, you want to have this particular task set up to be a repeatable process. So that person will have to document everything that they’ve done and have a process so that every body after them will be able to follow that easily.

Absolutely. And that’s the point here. If you’re going to invest in an employee, you want to make sure that if that employee ever leaves, that you aren’t hurt that bad. Right. It’s always going to suck to lose an employee. Yeah, always.

But you can limit that by having soapies and then having an S.O.P directory for your organization. Right now with my company, we have seventy six soapies that are fully created. That’s a lot. But we just hired a guy in his onboarding process just to review the recipes and review the software. And you know, he’s spending two weeks of just like getting up to speed and then he becomes useful and then we say, hey, go take over these routine tasks.

Cool, he’s got them. Once he has those, then he can start dabbling in some new and different stuff, which is where we get to innovate.

Yeah, that is key because any time you bring someone on, if you already have those things in place, then it does make the whole onboarding process of that new employee a lot easier. Where everything is laid out, all they have to do is review it, see how everything is done, and they can just execute by following those steps. But yeah, if you don’t have those things in place, then and that’s where the headaches come in a place where you’re you know, you’re doing too much handholding and too much kind of direct consultation where it doesn’t really have to be because you should just have all of those things documented.

And in place cases, we are ready to wrap things up. I wanted to kind of jump into put something in there that you mentioned is really, I guess you could say, the role of the executive, the executive that is really at the top of the ship or at the helm is just pointing to go there. He’s just saying we want to hit land and we go that way. And it doesn’t matter how it gets done, all the people that are below in the engine room and all of that are the ones that are pressing the ship forward and doing all those activities to to to move forward.

But, you know, at some point in time, you’re going to need to figure out, all right, are these people that are doing all of these tasks, are they doing the right job? How are they performing? And as far as measuring the performance, is it really just a matter of seeing have they reached all of the goals that you set out for each particular job? And then how timely have they reached those goals? Is that really down to?

It’s a quarterly outcome, right. So I would say that the process that I like is kind of every quarter the team is on. I don’t wanna say the chopping block. Right. But like, it’s kind of where you do a review of them and it’s an honest review of are they doing the things that they said they do. And more than that, it’s are they estimating effectively? Do they know themselves and their limits well enough to know that they’re not taking on too much or too little?

Are they getting the things done that you want? And this is a marathon. It’s not about getting everything done by next Friday. It’s about getting a lot of really important stuff done in the next quarter and then the following quarter compounds that, you know, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a quarterly outcome. So for let’s say you have a content writer for CEO, you say, all right, I want twenty ish word article published every week.

With that, we need all these SEO on page things to be perfect. And I need you to work with the designer. I don’t want to be. Let’s just say that’s what it is and they’re a part time person, cool now at the end of the quarter to deliver one a week, that’s one way to measure them. But also along the way, you have to support them. So we do weekly team meetings, and if your team’s big enough, you do a scrum daily.

And a scrum is where you say what you do yesterday. What are you doing today and are you blocked with anything? And you can run scrums with automated software like on Slack or just ask those questions to people and then they can check in, especially if you have like a distributed team. But you just got to know what people are doing and then they need to reach out. If they’re stuck and if they fail to act like an adult, then they’re not a good fit for your team.

But most often people want the job, they want to work, they want to be good, but they just don’t have the direction from the leadership. And more often than not, it’s the leadership that fails. It’s whoever’s listening. It’s your fault that people aren’t hitting the outcomes because you haven’t clarified them, you haven’t given them realistic expectations and you haven’t deputized them to actually solve the problems. You say they can solve the problem, but you don’t give them a budget to solve it within.

You say they could solve the problem, but every time they come up with an idea or a test, you shoot it down because it seems too risky. Let them take risks, let them fail, let them learn from it and support them. That’s like the psychological safety that you can create. I just want to wrap with a piece here, which is I think your organization can do well having a marketing technician in-house. I think a marketing technician around the twenty five to thirty five dollars an hour is a really good person to have.

That’s the person who’s swinging the hammer and doing all the heavy lifting in your organization. That’s all the labor. That’s everything from maybe writing. I think that your marketing technician should be a great writer, actually have a whole training on this, if you don’t mind. People can opt into it. There’s nothing for sale on it. It’s CMO Xcode hire. You opt in there and you can get this webinar replay and I walk you through exactly what this person should be.

There’s the job postings where to find the person, how much to pay them, the application, kind of everything that you would need to copy and paste it. You know, the different websites that I encourage to find your own marketing technician. So once you have that person, just know that they don’t have the strategy ability and you want someone to strategy. And that’s like where our company as its footing, which is we provide the strategy for businesses and then their team executes it very different than an agency model, which is where an agency creates the strategy that is best for them because it uses their talent the most effectively.

You don’t want that. You don’t want the agency to, like, write what you want is you want the strategy. That’s right. For your business. So what we do, our fractional CMOs, they step into businesses and they define the marketing strategy and say these are the processes actually here, the soapies, let’s get a marketing technician in place and have them run them. And then we support that marketing technician and build them out. And in that way, you have the strongest possible marketing team without paying those unnecessary fees to an agency long term.

You know, you have a CMO in your organization and you have the talent, but you’re not paying a full time CMO. You’re not paying marketing talent that is doing both strategy and implementation. They’re just doing kind of implementation. And for that reason, you can keep their fees a lot lower.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And really, as far as determining the performance of everyone, I’ve seen it time and time again, just like you said a lot of times where individuals that are doing these particular tasks, a lot of times where it kind of fails is not that they are doing the jobs correctly. It’s just they don’t have the right support and you don’t have the right processes in place to support them. They check in with them and to kind of hedge things off before they really go south.

I think that’s I think let’s see that time and time again where you see a lot of time wasted, where it could have been resolved with just clear communication and the proper support, the proper budgeting. So that I really appreciate that. And that really makes a lot of sense. Definitely learned a lot. I think the model that you guys do, Casey, is definitely different. And as you just highlighted, it’s different than a marketing agency where a marketing agency is just they’re utilizing their resources to try to fit in to really kind of balance things out the best that they can to support their clients.

And so in a way, they don’t necessarily have all of your interests in mind. You know, they’re just trying to kind of get their load balance the best that they can and not necessarily, you know, of course, they want to have results for their customers, but they don’t want to lose their customer. That’s exactly that. Because when it comes to that type of results.

Right. Unless the performance agency. True. So often those agencies just the worst part is I worked in industry for a long time and I got to see this, which is the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So there’s limited talent in an agency, and if one client is blowing up, all efforts, go there to fix it and it leaves you the good, happy, peaceful client to lose out on the good talent.

So then you get the new talent and it’s just not fair. And that model is really hard to beat. Like agencies aren’t going to change that model because it’s how else can they staff without having a bunch of unused time, you know? That’s just what’s going to happen.

So build your own bench long term and kind of inclosing. I would say it’s OK to hire an agency to get some work done. I hire agencies all the time. I hire experts all the time. I’m also like wonderfully surprised by how far one hundred or two hundred dollars can get you.

Definitely. Definitely. They just have to be clear as to what you’re expecting and what tasks you’re hiring them to do. Totally.

Well, yeah, but I mean, more than that, you could just say to someone who’s an expert like, hey, I’d love to ask you some questions. Can I get you on the phone for an hour? I’m happy to pay two hundred bucks for the hour to do that. And they’re like, yeah, like, that’s flattering. And you’re going to pay me. Absolutely. So you’re out 200 bucks and you just got every answer that you need it.

That’s the right answer because you talk to the right person. I mean, I think you’re hard pressed to find someone who won’t take two hundred bucks for an hour for a one hour call. And all you do is you prep your notes and you just hammer them with questions. They feel like a million bucks. You send them a nice thank you email afterwards and you’re done. And you know what to do in your business.

True. Great advice. Great advice. I appreciate that. Casey and I definitely learned a lot furiously taking notes here. I want to run back to my marketing team because I know there’s some things that we need to do on our end and I know our listeners are going to be doing the same. So we definitely appreciate you coming on. I always like to close out with one final thing, just to switch gears a little bit, just so our audience get to know you a little bit better.

You don’t mind sharing one fun fact with us that you think our audience would be interested to know about you.

So I was at Tulane. I loved it. I was teaching, but I don’t know, I kind of got to be a little old, to be honest. Right. It’s like the same classes for a couple of years. Love the students, but I just didn’t feel like much of a growth. So my wife and I sold everything. We bought an RV and we drove around the country for three years and ended up getting married while we were living in the RV with our dog in Nashville in February.

And our sewer line froze for five days before the wedding. You know, we got a hotel for the wedding, but it was it was pretty tough. And then after we got married, we hitched up and I took her out to Savannah and then we drove up Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Raleigh, all the way up to Philly. We found Philly fell in love and then we moved here.

OK, wow, that’s awesome. That definitely is a fun fact. During a large part of the U.S. in an RV with who initially was your soon to be white, then became white. So I’m sure you guys got to know each other quite a bit in that three year period. Yeah. Yeah.

So I guess if anyone has a once like a crash course on how to get to know your mate an RV, travel around the country and be able to do it. Well, thanks for sharing that, KC. That’s awesome. I appreciate that. Lastly, before we let you go, if any of our listeners want to reach out to you and pick your brain any more about marketing and hiring the right marketing team and putting all this together, what is the best way for them to get contact with you?

Sure.

So our website, CMO Xcode, go and check it out. We’ve got a free report there on the seven marketing KPIs that all CEOs must be focusing on. So I encourage you to take a peek at that. We’ve got other resources on agile marketing. I’ve got a webinar. They’ve done an agile marketing to take a peek at that. If that’s helpful, that’ll give you a better understanding of those Sprinzen rocks and how to lay out outcomes. And if you’re interested in hiring a fractional chief marketing officer, we’ve got a great short list of CEOs that I’ve trained that are very experienced, that are ready to step into organizations and help them scale.

So if that’s you and your organization, go to CMO X.com and click the schedule call button and we’ll chat and I can get you placed with the right CMO.

All right. That is awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that case initiative and encourage everyone to take advantage of that. And once again, thank you for joining us today on the e-commerce marketing podcast. All right, thanks. Thank you for listening to the E Commerce marketing podcast,

Podcast Guest Info

Casey Stanton
Founder of CMOx