85. Always Be Brewing: Continuous Fermentation with Cauldron's Michele Stansfield

[00:00:00] Thanks for having me, Hector. Appreciate it.

[00:00:49] Uh, we grow companies via advertising. We place ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok, Hulu, audio, banners, et cetera, with the goal of either generating leads or generating sales for our clients.

[00:01:19] Yeah,

[00:01:38] yeah. In 2013, I had been, uh, I had marked my 10 years working at advertising agencies. Started in oh three, and by 2013 I felt it was time to go out and do it myself. Um, so when I started the company, I was a solo person, but I didn't think of myself as a solopreneur. I didn't think of myself as a freelancer.

[00:02:02] Um, technically our business is called the, the official name is Brill Media Consulting LLC because there was a moment in time where I thought I'll be a consultant. But once I decided that I'm going to build an agency, even if it was just me, it was always us. It was we, the vision was always, I'm going to build a, uh, an organization because that's what I understood existed.

[00:02:26] And I think the vision is very important. You don't have to, you don't have, you know, at any moment in time, you don't have to have achieved your vision, but simply having a goal, simply having a, an end point that you're striving for allows a business person to make a decision that I think is far more suited to achieve their goals than if you don't have the goals and you're just kind of like winging it.

[00:02:49] So I never was a freelancer always with the goal of building an agency.

[00:03:18] You know, I'm actually just finishing up that book. I'd never read it. Um, but I've heard over the, like I all it's, it's this route where I, I was a practitioner, but I didn't know I was a practitioner. I mean, I knew that I, I felt comfortable considering myself an expert at ad buying, especially at the corporate level for, for big brands, Bacardi, Toshiba.

[00:03:39] PetSmart, Sony, Disney, Capcom. I understood Northrop Grumman even, but I understood media buying. So I understood the practitioner work. I didn't know that there was anything else and I didn't realize that it was something very different to be, uh, um, the owner of the business, to be a board member, you know, all these sort of like different parts of the business.

[00:04:00] So as an entrepreneur, that was a, I, I think, I, I believe that if you don't know what you're striving for, It's hard to achieve it and it's possible you will achieve it accidentally, but I think it's far harder And you'll make the wrong decision. You might work against your, your, what you're trying to achieve.

[00:04:19] So I learned about those concepts of being a practitioner versus being, you know, someone who runs the business versus a board member. 2019, 2021, somewhere around there, probably 19, 2019. It was the first time we were on the Inc 5, 000. I met this person named Norm Brodsky, who, um, Had sold a company for like 100 million dollars and he The thing that he gave to me we met at the conference.

[00:04:47] Um, and he said you need predictable repeatable and scalable That's the thing that comes out of that conversation. But it was in that environment where I really started to understand that there's a difference between being a practitioner, being an owner, being a board member. Um, but once I had that, I definitely had been striving for it.

[00:05:09] So now I'm squarely out of the, you know, for a long time I was working in the business. Like I was running campaigns. I was cashing the checks. I was doing the client management. I was, you know, buying ads on like the trade desk. Um, Until I realized you need standard operating procedure and then you can hire people and then You can have people do the work and then I can focus on other things like growth

[00:05:50] Yeah,

[00:06:03] yeah

[00:06:14] sales and marketing It's it's product development sales and marketing and then a minority of the time is going to be focused on cash focused on invoicing focused on um working with clients on Um, when I say working with clients, it's like, you know, I may not talk to a client for six months and then something comes up and we have a conversation and they could be good conversations or they could be bad conversations, but it doesn't necessarily mean bad.

[00:06:43] Just means new things are coming up. I really enjoy working with agencies. So I, I really, so one of the things we do is we're a white label for other agencies. When we go to market, when we, when, if you see our ads, it'll see, it'll say white label media buying, which means. An agency like a creative shop or an influencer marketing company needs ad buying services and we mark, we run ad campaigns for their clients, but we do take clients directly.

[00:07:07] We just don't actively market towards them, uh, businesses directly. And, um, So I really like working with agencies. So occasionally I'll just loop myself into a project where it's like, Hey, we're trying to win a new piece of business. Let's do it together. And it's kind of like fun or, or mentoring new agency.

[00:07:26] Um, people who maybe spent like me 10 years working inside, uh, inside corporate America, but want to start their own agency, I'd really like taking on those projects. But fundamentally for me, I'm paying attention to our ads. We have this really, um, We have ads, we have our social content posting, we have our SEO.

[00:07:46] And my job is to, to ensure we have that predictable, repeatable, and scalable growth process with the goal of me not being working in the business in any way whatsoever. Like I'm not doing, I'm not doing any sales. I'm not doing any marketing. I'm not even doing any finance stuff. Um, We're not there yet, but that's, I think it's very important to have a goal.

[00:08:13] When I look at marketing and sales, sorry, when I look at marketing and sales,

[00:08:17] a A lot of what we do is focused on mirroring back to the marketplace, what they want from us. You know, if you follow baseball, you have that Babe Ruth moment where he calls his shot and then he hits a home run. That's not what we're doing.

[00:08:33] A lot of marketing and advertising in 2024 is using data, algorithms, engineering, to achieve 1 percent improvement. Because over time, 1 percent improvement results in 3700 improvement over the course of the year. So I want to run 10, 20 or 100 or 1000 different ads. 95 of them will fail. So you spend really low volumes of money, like 25, 30 to churn out the ones that are bad, to filter them out.

[00:09:04] So the ones that are good, scale up your spend. And that's what we do for our clients. And that's what we do for ourselves. I'm really passionate about that work because at the end of the day, as a practitioner, I really enjoy this work.

[00:09:16] You know, as it was happening, it felt like the, the day, you know, each day was a month. And each month was a year or something like that. Like it felt like a very slow, drawn out, dramatic, visceral process, visceral experience in practice. Some of the things that I'm thinking about only lasted like nine months, but it felt like three years.

[00:10:13] Um, and I understand why, and I've been able to deconstruct why I felt the way I felt, and part of it was just me, like not being experienced to have, you know, Challenges and friction. And then realizing that I'm so bogged down in the work in the, I couldn't see the forest for the trees. There was a moment where we tripled our staff over a summer.

[00:10:38] And no one had told me that you need a standard operating procedure. So for six months, I had staff who were, it was, it was going to the exact wrong direction, more staff. And I was doing more work, more staff and no one was happy, including me. And our clients were starting to become unhappy. So I went to, a friend of mine, a colleague, someone who I went to college with, who I had hired once in the past, actually twice in the past.

[00:11:07] And he hired me. And so we, we, we have a really special working and, and, uh, personal relationship going, spanning two decades. And, he said, Robert, duh, you don't have a standard operating procedures No one knows what they're doing now. Granted. I hire really smart, intelligent, capable individuals. that didn't know what they were doing because I didn't tell them what they needed to do because the organization wasn't nurturing their, success.

[00:11:35] There were no guardrails. So he said, Robert, you need to hire me. So he became our chief operating officer and he extracted from my brain in Vegas one weekend, um, what our standard operating procedure is. And then over the next month and a half, he put that all into writing in very gory detail. And then our job through our operations people and our team has been keep the process, enforce the process, expand and evolve the process as it needs to be evolved.

[00:12:11] But hands down one of the most important things i've ever learned in business and what I talk about and advocate for All the time is that we need standard operating procedures.

[00:12:31] Yeah,

[00:13:11] great.

[00:13:19] I want to talk about the sprint test It's a sprint test 900 I don't have a landing page. I need to make one.

[00:13:37] I started talking. I started talking about it. I mean already so yeah

[00:14:32] Yeah, I mean look I think You know, I'm, I'm actively reading the e myth right now. And one of the most mind boggling concepts for me, literally over the last like two months, I'm not that I'm a slow reader, but I read books in like chunks. I'll like, I'll stop at like 85 percent and I need to finish the last 15%.

[00:14:52] And that's where I am. So when I say it took me a few months to read it, that's why. Um, it's a short book. It's a great book. Um, is, uh, What a good SOP gives you and what a good business framework gives you is the ability to hire the, actually, this is so controversial, like get ready for it. Hire the least experienced people, but the SOP supports them because I've been going to market and I'm been saying, look, we hire really talented, experienced people, seven to 20 years in the business, but guess what?

[00:15:27] Those people are exceptionally expensive. So if I can hire the least experienced people and get a high level of output out of them. That meets what we need them to do. It's massive on the margins. It opens up the, the, the, the volume of individuals I can hire. And it, it fundamentally changes the game as a business owner.

[00:15:51] So I'm trying to implode. So that, and that's, that's magical for me. What I, what we got wrong in the beginning was, I mean, I'll tell you our experience, our experience was people didn't want to follow process. We have people inside our organization who love the chaos inside our business. Not in a bad way.

[00:16:10] Like they just, they're like, look, I want, I want openness. I want to be able to do what I need to do. And I want to be valued like that. And when you start having to put systems and processes in place, some people say, well, no, I liked the old organization that was crazy and chaos, but a lot of people didn't like it.

[00:16:26] So the people who loved it were in the minority. So people will fight against process because they think process, they think, they think bureaucracy. And they've been at big organizations where bureaucracy kills the spirit and that's not us. SOPs are a method to ensure that, like, you can go, you can wake up every morning, enjoy your work, go to sleep at night, knowing you succeeded.

[00:16:50] Which then means as an employee, you will stay with us longer. We'll get more of that tribal, uh, tribal knowledge that will come from just people being within the organization for many years, the org grows, people become managers, and we can introduce new people into the, into the system. So it's this vibrant ecosystem of, of growth.

[00:17:12] I guess the things that hurt us is that, you know, if we stop, if we stop enforcing it, it becomes a problem. And people are going to actively try to not enforce it because they don't want to. That's the biggest problem. And the next level for us is I'm going to hire some crazy, like, this is not like what I want to say to sell someone, but I'm going to, like, as a business person, I'm going to try, I'm going to experiment with hiring relatively inexperienced people to see if the SOP has the ability to sustain them.

[00:18:03] I can hear, but it's okay. No problem.

[00:18:32] Listening to the team, you know, there there's, there's a fine line. Like when you talk about. leadership, right? There's the type of leader who, who bears down on people and forces them to do things that maybe they don't want to do. Then there's a type of, I guess, servant leadership where the leader is at the front of the pack and ensures that everyone that's behind them is happy, is successful, is getting what they need personally and professionally.

[00:18:59] And that's, that's who I want to be. And I think I've become over the years, number one, I've learned the difference between those two things, those two concepts. And I've worked my way to become that type of person where I'm the leader. I lead the conversation, I lead the, the process. I lead the I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm at the, for, at the beginning of, at the start of this experience, so that people who are following me have the ability to do the work that they know can be done because I've done it, their manager has done it, someone has done it before them.

[00:19:35] We also have no egos within this organization. Which again is is a result not of me, but the type of people we hire the type of the type of Organization we've built like we have a very passionate loyal Helpful group of individuals who? Come to work every day. They do a great job. They like the people they work with.

[00:19:57] I think all those things work together to build this like really fortuitous cycle of opportunity and growth. The last part is, you know, people don't, you know, you're not stuck in, you're not stuck in a system with us, even though I, we talk so aggressively about standard operating procedures, like we cross train our people, you know, we hire people, for example, for paid social, we may hire someone who's only really understands Facebook ads.

[00:20:29] But they'll get trained on how to buy digital out of home and buy TikTok, right? So there's an there's an upscaling opportunity in our business that I think plays a lot of diffidence Personally and professionally for the people we work with.

[00:21:11] Yeah, I mean training is key like, you know We tried at one point to hire Senior people inside our organization and having someone senior come into our business Would completely disrupt this sort of like magic that we've created inside our business. So rather we want to hire junior or middle level people and have them ascend through our organization because there's definitely a specific way that we do things.

[00:21:41] There's documentation that we have that allows us to become successful. There are platforms that we use and visualization tools that we use. It's not what we use. It's the way we use them. That is our own unique, I guess, special sauce. And a lot of that happens organically. Like before there were any buyers on my team, it was me with a workbook managing campaigns.

[00:22:08] And so the systems that our team has implemented over the years originates from me, but has evolved over time. And once it's evolved, I'm out of it. I'm not touching it at all. In fact, I look at some of the documentation our team has, and it blows my mind how complex they are and how, how versatile our team is and using them.

[00:22:27] It's shocking how intensive it is.

[00:22:49] Yeah,

[00:22:55] it requires therapy,

[00:23:00] right? Because no one, no one is going to be able to do things the exact way that I want to want them done. In fact, my, my ideal for myself, I don't even achieve for myself. So it's actually quite. It's, it's quite a challenge to be in a position where I see someone I react. I'm like, Oh, I wish I would have done X, Y, or Z.

[00:23:23] But the reality is, is that even I, on my best day, I'm still not a hundred percent. I'm like 95%. I'm still making mistakes here and there, and I'm not living up to my own ideals. That's one part of it. The other part of it is look, if I have a hundred people that are doing 70 or 80 percent of the work that I'm doing at that quality, massive, that's massive growth opportunity right there.

[00:23:45] It all comes down to individuals, to people. And if, if you can enroll people to take on the mission that we have, it's great, but it's hard to do. It's hard to let go of, especially as a practitioner, right? Cause if you're an entrepreneur, you know how to do things effectively. And letting go of that is, um, it probably took a year, year and a half for me to completely let go.

[00:24:24] Um, no, it's, it's not, it's, for me, it's not our,

[00:24:36] I feel, I feel excited when we have SOPs. I feel excited when we can set up an SOP. I feel excited when I can go into Notion and write like checklists. That's very exciting for me. And if my team has a better solution than what I have, that's exciting also. So it's not what's in the SOP. It has to work. It has to result in good outcomes, but my dopamine receptors light up when I see SOPs.

[00:25:31] Yeah. So go to Brillmedia. co and inquire about our, um, our sprint tests. The sprint tests are really great way to understand the exact verbatim language that resonates for your customers. Because when everyone's selling something you don't want to be in a position where you're also trying to sell and competing What you want to do instead is ensure that you have The ability to go directly to a problem statement because that means that you're able to solve someone else's Problem and be a solution for them and it's for like nine hundred dollars for two weeks You can get the exact problem statements that resonate when we've done this for ourselves We've lowered our ad costs our lead cost by 76 And you can, uh, email me robert at Brill media.

[00:26:17] co or go to Brill media. co to learn more

[00:26:28] SOPs. It's so simple.