How Chris Wolpert is Redefining Healthcare Management for Businesses

[00:00:00] Colten: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chris Caldwell. This is the owner of Caldwell Creative in Saskatchewan, Canada. Chris, thank you very much for being here with us today.

[00:00:08] Chris: Yeah, happy to be here, Colton. Awesome.

[00:00:10] Colten: Chris, would you tell everyone what you do at Caldwell Creative?

[00:00:12] Colten: seems like you might have grown beyond, what it originally appears to have been, which is kind of a creative company. But now you seem to do a lot more for the clients that you work with. Can you walk us through that a little bit?

[00:00:22] Chris: Yeah, my backgrounds in digital software agencies, used to run global creative 15 years ago as a web design and development shop, which did some SEO and, some e commerce work over my journey.

[00:00:37] Chris: I've helped start and build teams from the ground up in small businesses, working with clients from Microsoft to Google, and eventually working my way into Shopify, and more recently, starting back up with Caldwell Creative and figuring out what that. journey looks like for me, along my path, I've applied design thinking and design practice.

[00:00:59] Chris: Kind of my core root skill sets through the practice of leadership and management. so it's very human centered, very focused on combining things like strategy systems thinking. I'll combine that to help teams perform better, better communication, better collaboration and working on the business as well as in the business and trying to kind of get teams to share the load, distribute that from founders so that they can actually get time back in their day.

[00:01:24] Chris: And so I go into teams. Now I look for. What's working. What's not working. I help entrepreneurs who might not have the best leadership skills develop those leadership skills to align teams, create focus and truly take work off their plate. And then I help teams work with the founders to navigate, the complexities of their business and create leverage through Their activities day to day.

[00:01:48] Chris: So translating big picture where the company wants to go, where the founder wants to take it and then translating that into, , systems and approaches for the companies and teams to execute on really well.

[00:01:59] Colten: Got it. So there's, there's no complexity there at all. Oh, no. And that's, fantastic.

[00:02:03] Colten: That's the reason we wanted to talk with you because, we work a lot, like I said, in the construction, engineering, architectural supply space, and we see so often that, from an external public facing perspective, we're missing what I would consider brand fundamentals, things like, your core market offer, your brand promise, brand awareness strategy, brand recognition strategy, all these different things that kind of feed into your go to market.

[00:02:26] Colten: And. the ability to grow business, but on your side, it looks like where it sounds like you're working a lot with, companies to kind of untangle and unravel the complexities of scaling a business and how you, one delegate work, decide what work needs to be done, et cetera, et cetera, and come up with a systemized approach to.

[00:02:43] Colten: Deploy that execute on that as a team. so really when we're working with, say an engineering company, both of those pieces can be weaknesses and we really help them dial in external public. Facing side of things, but tell me some of the things that you, notice more often, when you're working with, let's say teams under 20, 25 people, in terms of some of those internal issues that you help them unravel.

[00:03:04] Chris: I think the most common issue with teams of that size is that it's very easy for the founder or the CEO to keep everything in their head. And it's hard for everyone on your team to actually know what's going on in your head when you're controlling most of the organization wide strategy, when you're the one driving the vision.

[00:03:22] Chris: And you've hired people to take stuff off of your plate. It's very difficult to distribute everything that's in your head in every category of your business to other people and have those departments where people heading different aspects of the business communicate well and have kind of that cohesive decision making that.

[00:03:40] Chris: You'd have in your head because you have access to all the information at all times. And now you obfuscated that with people taking over certain roles who don't know what other people are doing or what their challenges are. And it just creates more work for the founder. If those teams don't have a shared picture of the problem space that they're working on, if they don't have a shared understanding of what the company is really trying to do, what that value service delivery chain is, what those brand promises are.

[00:04:06] Chris: And it makes it very difficult for the team to really move. And grow your business effectively and really take work off the plate of the founder.

[00:04:13] Colten: when you look at crowded markets, lot of players in a market where you've got a lot of competition showing up, quarter by quarter.

[00:04:19] Colten: are some things that you think, small businesses can do to. position themselves for success, in a crowded market space like that. What are some internal changes that you think they can deploy to position themselves properly give them an edge over their competition?

[00:04:31] Chris: It's actually pretty common in the startup world.

[00:04:33] Chris: The advice I'm about to give, but it's the idea of that. Instead of focusing on what makes your business similar, you focus on what makes it different, what makes it unique on a person to person level, like a brand level, what promises you're actually making. if you're making the same promises as your competitors and showing up in the marketplace the same way, there's really no reason someone should go with your business or your company over another one.

[00:04:59] Chris: So a lot of teams that I find, they try to tackle problems in very similar ways, and they don't actually add their own, I guess, flavor to it, their own twist and position themselves in the market competitively.

[00:05:11] Colten: Got it. as far as, businesses that are scaling, because this is the other thing that we went into is, the 8 years, and they're kind of ready for that next step.

[00:05:19] Colten: And so they're, see new territories or, trying to capture more market share in their local geography. How do you advise teams to scale human power resources, appropriately to be able to capture more geography? you find that more people is often the answer?

[00:05:33] Colten: Or is it just deploying the team that you have

[00:05:35] Chris: differently? I'm a big believer in finding teams that can create more leverage, So before you start scaling. Your overhead and resources, when you're 25 people, when you're starting to get into the 50 person range, or you want to get there, it really comes down to putting those foundations in place that are ever present.

[00:05:53] Chris: So things like making sure you've nailed your culture, because that's really, really part of. When you bring someone in how the team goes about solving problems, working through things together, and if that's not working well scaling, it just compounds problems and frictions in the business and creates more people problems for everyone to deal with the other thing to is like always make sure you're trying to look at your systems and processes and building out your standard operating practices and procedures at that level.

[00:06:20] Chris: you've had some traction over the few years got locked in and if you aren't able to. Train people on how your business actually goes about doing its business. Scale is incredibly difficult. And then the last pillar there, the third one is getting some process optimization in there. if you're, systems and software, there's ops specialists right now that can come in and help you streamline all of the processes in your business with all the new tech, which I imagine is a huge struggle for a lot of these companies, especially with the oncoming.

[00:06:51] Chris: threat of recessions and streamlining and, economic inflation causing consumer behavior changes. so those three pillars of make sure you've got a strong culture, make sure you've got good systems and processes for the people and then make sure that your technical systems are streamlined and as lean and automated as possible.

[00:07:09] Chris: Awesome.

[00:07:10] Colten: Actually, I wasn't even going to go in this direction, but think it's interesting. I think it was valuable for everyone listening to this. when you're running a business, and more so in 2023 and beyond than ever before, there's so many software solutions out there, and there's so many tempting solutions to little, problems and, rough patches in your day, and they're all subscription based for the most part.

[00:07:29] Colten: And so you end up with this, nest of software solutions, some play together, some don't, inevitably end up helping companies that we work with unravel some of that just as a matter of doing the work that we do. what are some of the things that you see as a base foundation, would you say, for companies to be successful both through, you say, internal communications, document organization, like just really basic stuff?

[00:07:50] Colten: what's your kind of preferred suite of solutions or softwares for that? Oh,

[00:07:55] Chris: it's so variable. Really comes into coming and seeing what's in the organization already. If it's working for people, if it's not, if you already have technical stack implemented and the team loves it, then you want to build that out based on the gaps that you have and what works with your existing tool kit.

[00:08:13] Chris: There are tools out there right now, like Zapier that are trying to connect these things and create APIs. Easy data communications across platforms, but it's become so complicated that I think the people who are going to win the space over the next few years are going to be these consulting companies that come in for a short time and streamline your office process, get it working for your team, and then they bail.

[00:08:36] Chris: And that way, companies aren't having the overhead. They still get. The automation's in place, they get the training, and I actually work with a company down in the States, out of Florida, who does a lot of operations work. It's called Puzzle, and so if anyone is looking for an ops company. I'd highly recommend reaching out to that group of people.

[00:08:54] Chris: They're fantastic.

[00:08:55] Colten: Thanks. Awesome. Thank you. so, Chris, have you ever worked with a company, come in before the phase and been with them during the phase that I would call rapid growth? Have you ever been in the mix with the company while they're experiencing, increased sales, revenue, scaling geographies, that

[00:09:11] Chris: type of thing?

[00:09:12] Chris: I think later stage at Shopify, when I joined, it was still Really rapidly growing, but it was, like ready for growth. It was like, we've been growing for massively and we're just still on that rocket ship. A lot of the early companies that I work with, some of the founders that I talked to that run business run business in the startup world, want to grow way sooner than they're ready for.

[00:09:34] Chris: And what I've seen is that it, if you're not ready to get everything locked in, if you don't have the right product market fit, if you don't have your, Existing processes locked in when you try to scale and add manpower to get volume or, or invest in your go to market and expanding regional and customer support, it becomes very difficult for you to scale.

[00:09:54] Chris: And oftentimes it ends up setting you back. If you're not ready for the go to market at that scale yet. Got

[00:10:00] Colten: it. said product market fit. I'm at a point in my life now where I'm realizing so many people have very different definitions of what I would consider, shared terminology. But, product market fit to one person might mean something very different to another person.

[00:10:13] Colten: What's your definition of product market fit? What does it look like when it's working?

[00:10:17] Chris: Yeah, it's, solving the right problems for the right people in the right ways. And it's that simple as part of, what I consider part of my value creation, matrix that I run clients through when they're struggling with, why aren't people buying?

[00:10:32] Chris: Why are we having customers churn? Why aren't we able to sell this? And we always go back to those fundamentals of, are we solving the right problem for the right people in the right ways? And when you solve the right problem, you're easing their pain. and if you solve in the right ways, it's a solution that people love using and they want to keep coming back.

[00:10:51] Chris: And it's just a really simple framework to get your team. All the line on what you're trying to do and to talk about the problems in the organization in a way that everyone can relate to rather than a specialist here with all of their specific knowledge in their area who doesn't know the other branches of your business or the other roles of the different levels can all come together and they can start talking about what's going on in the business and with a shared simple language and the model of the business is trying to achieve by it.

[00:11:21] Chris: Having a dialogue with each other and talking about gaps in these areas and what everyone's seeing from their different vantage points in the business.

[00:11:28] Colten: Sure. how do you think companies land on their ideal product market fit? So let's say, enter the market with a hypothesis, they create a product, MVP of some sort, again, in the engineering or construction world.

[00:11:39] Colten: basically know what services are needed, how do you package that properly? so we talked about a little bit about differentiation. so if everybody is doing a, well, then, you know, that is what the market wants. how do you go out on a limb and say, well, we're going to do.

[00:11:51] Colten: A, but we're going to call it B and we're going to package it and present it differently to the market. what's the strategy behind, taking that risk and putting something new out into the market or the same thing, but

[00:12:00] Chris: package very differently. think a really good recent example is the introduction of threads as a competitor to Twitter.

[00:12:09] Chris: if people aren't familiar, yeah, yeah. Sorry, it's like there's so much going on In that tech space right now, but threads launched and everyone was amazed at the adoption rate of the platform, but I read an article this week that indicated that only about, 30 percent of people who adopted are actually using it.

[00:12:30] Chris: so it's a question of they built a competitor, but the competitor is essentially so similar to the original thing that people are just so used to using their old platform that the cost of switching there's no benefit to

[00:12:45] Colten: that switch. I think that's a true term.

[00:12:47] Colten: Sorry to cut you off, but that cost of switching, whether it be an emotional cost, a financial cost, whatever that is, once you have a supplier, once you have a shared partner in the business world, especially there is a high cost to switching. And if that alternative is not really defined as a better alternative, better functional benefits, better emotional benefits, whatever it is for you as a buyer for your.

[00:13:07] Colten: Company as a purchaser. can be really tough to make a go of it and to capture more market share, Because then you're not looking for companies for switching. You're looking for, perhaps new companies in the market who don't have as much budget as established players who already have those partners.

[00:13:20] Colten: What do you think is the best strategy for, let's say, a newer business? work a lot in the startup world, but newer B to B business, for example, Yeah. To package something a little bit differently in a way that is going to be meaningful and not encounter that kind of threads. What are threads X scenario?

[00:13:35] Chris: Yeah, I have a pretty different perspective there than most of the people that I know on the subject about differentiation. I think it all starts with culture you build for your business and oftentimes when you're smaller. That culture is dictated by what the founder believes. So when I come in and I work with say a solopreneur, just starting a business who is trying to say, Hey, I need to get ready to start hiring a team.

[00:13:58] Chris: What do I need to do to make that go smoothly and to truly, truly scale? From one person to five people or 10 people over the next year or two years, and it comes down to codifying how you want the organization to make decisions. And this comes down to strategy. So my version of strategy is based on a thoughtful analysis, guiding policy and principles and a cohesive plan of action.

[00:14:26] Chris: that's what incumbents is. so your culture, your vision, your mission, your purpose, the values, the core beliefs you want your company to embody that you think is going to bring success to market that may have brought success to you personally and gotten you where you are and is likely going to carry your company forward.

[00:14:42] Chris: Getting that in place is, I think, one of those pieces of friction that most people overlook that prevents them from growing faster, from hiring the right people who are going to thrive in the environment that you want, that are going to reduce friction. And when we start talking about growing teams and hiring and scaling, it's early on groupthink and people that think similarly is very helpful to reduce friction and move at a faster rate.

[00:15:06] Chris: And as you grow and scale, you want to transition that. So you're adding. Greater diversity of thinking diversity of backgrounds because that strengthens decision making it slows you down, but it helps make better decisions because people are challenging showing you gaps and thinking that might be completely valid that the person who owns the decision making be that the team leader or an individual contributor working in a very specific area where the founder can then check their thinking, covered the blind spots, consider it and then move forward.

[00:15:37] Chris: With better thinking and that should take them a lot further with their team and if they work together, that culture is really gonna drive the business forward and it informs brand. It informs how you show up for customers. It shows how you show up for each other as a team, it can create a really big competitive differentiation.

[00:15:56] Chris: You look at companies like Amazon, Back in the day, they established these leadership principles. Yeah. And you can find them online and I went through the Amazon hiring process at one point, and it's this huge, long process getting all the way through. and what I really loved about it is that you could see that their culture and those values were woven into the hiring process.

[00:16:16] Chris: They're woven into the performance culture. their growth and. People management practices are all informed by those leadership practices and those beliefs that they want the company and the people in it resonate with and whether or not you want that culture is a different thing, but that culture is a huge competitive advantage for the long term viability of your business.

[00:16:40] Chris: And if you're going to grow and scale, messing that up is one of the surefire ways to slow your business down when you need it to Move quickly and together.

[00:16:50] Colten: Got it. And think that's a really good point. companies who have, that culture and their hiring process nailed tend to end up with better talent that supports, the overall mission, a lot more smoothly than trying to put a bunch of mismatched pieces together per se.

[00:17:05] Colten: final question for you, just kind of as a curve ball here, knowing that you operate very. Much in the software world in the startup space. And really, that's my background as well, that over the past couple years here working so hand in hand with, really B to B engineering companies, architect, architectural supply, construction, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:17:22] Colten: see a reticence very often to invest in marketing. The idea being that they're in a B2B space and, especially for companies that have been around for 10, 15 years, like, Oh, if such and such needs our services, they know to pick up the phone and call us. And I hear that quite a bit. they get a lot of their business from word of mouth or just kind of reputation within the market.

[00:17:42] Colten: However. Then I sit down and I talk to the owners, the executive teams, and they're looking to scale their business. They're looking to cover new geographies. They're looking to have a new office, hire more people, and that all requires revenue, which then requires more work. the reticence to try something new, To really deploy a brand strategy, whether it be on social media or paid media or anything like that, is always there.

[00:18:02] Colten: And so they, typically don't have a very high marketing budget as a percentage of their top line revenue. The curveball question is for you, if you just had to off the cuff, come up with a number, what is a reasonable, marketing budget as a percentage of top line revenue? Do you think for a company that's doing, let's 5 million, there are,

[00:18:21] Chris: Oh, wow.

[00:18:22] Chris: I, the person in me is just like, you don't want to answer this until you look at a business, what their operating costs are, what their gross profit margins are before they choose what to reinvest in. some companies that I work with, their margins are so thin that their marketing budget just is so difficult.

[00:18:46] Chris: But before I actually give you a number, which is probably going to be, yeah, there's so many different ways to slice it up. But at the end of the day, if you're looking to grow, you need to really consider do people know you exist? Okay. And if your answer is you have 500 people making calls every day to talk on the phone, that's okay, you're hiring salaries, you're doing all this other stuff. But digital marketing is great because you create an asset. Once and you can reuse it forever you can really fine tune and craft it to lower your costs over time, reducing that marketing budget fine tuning in that messaging, fine tuning in who your company is, how it shows up in market, how your customers can treat you.

[00:19:28] Chris: how do people get to know your business? Without trying it. do they make a decision between you and a competitor? it could be priced, it could be whatever, but the best business relationships, and they've told you already are built around talking to people, working with people.

[00:19:43] Chris: That's the cheapest thing is existing companies. Yeah.

[00:19:48] Colten: There's this element, sorry to cut you off, but like, exactly that. the reason I asked you that question as a curve ball is I get asked that on the spot all the time. Well, how much we spend on marketing? sometimes the first meeting, Oh, we have this much revenue and we got three offices.

[00:20:00] Colten: what should be spending on marketing on LinkedIn? there's no answer to that. And to your point, the idea of leveraging. Free work that you can do, a podcast, constantly posts on linkedin, putting out high quality articles, white papers, that type of content, it costs time.

[00:20:15] Colten: It doesn't necessarily cost as much money. And then you amplify that with a little bit of ad spend. my take on this personally is, if you're doing at least 5 million ARR roughly per year, as a baseline, I would, especially in the B2B space, be on LinkedIn doing minimum like 10, 000 a month in paid ad amplification of content that you're putting out.

[00:20:34] Colten: But it's the prerequisite for that is you are creating content at scale and you're creating decent content that is worth amplifying and you're not just calling

[00:20:42] Chris: it in. Yeah, there is a simple answer and. That answer is largely when you consider all things being equal, the company that has the biggest marketing budget wins, that's true.

[00:20:53] Chris: that's Amazon, right? Common. Yeah, it's once you get to scale, if you're doing better, so your marketing can help you. Get to the top because again, it's that product differentiation. It's that brand differentiation. It's more touch points that when people say, Oh, this is the thing I need.

[00:21:11] Chris: You're you've been in their mind more frequently, more recently. , and it's really critical to make sure that you are. Like if you want to conserve the ad spend that you spend more time figuring out where customers actually exist rather than just shotgunning everything that process can really cut down costs and reduce spend.

[00:21:30] Chris: But overall, if you're trying to grow, increase it to a larger percentage because you know, you're going to need it and if you're experimenting. And trying to figure out that messaging before you scale, slow it down and give it a steady burn so that you can have findings really tweak the messaging, do more exploration, and then once it's dialed in, throttle it back up.

[00:21:51] Chris: And if it's working, then you start focusing on what works. you can pull that budget back and it's really an ebb and flow thing, depending on, your current situation and where your plans are. But it has to be proactive. because if you start marketing too late, I see this in the.

[00:22:06] Chris: Yeah, it's 1 of those ones where there's a long term cost of delay it's not that gap between the revenue you could be generating now. It's part of it, but it's if you don't do it now. You won't be able to be where you want to be when you want to be there, and that can be devastating to some businesses, either.

[00:22:26] Chris: They're too early. They're too late. but at the end of the day, marketing is 1 of those things that it's a leading activity. That produces results downstream, and there's no guarantee on how quickly those results will come in unless you're constantly exploring and testing and figuring out the messaging that works and doesn't work.

[00:22:47] Colten: Beautiful. listen, Chris, I appreciate your time was very insightful talking with you and really getting a perspective that I think, the industry that we work with doesn't often get, which is that software background startup community perspective. And I think it's valuable because at the end of the day, business is business and how you deploy capital, how you build a team, how you, amplify Your activities to take market share and said to make, drive revenue.

[00:23:09] Colten: Basically, I think that's consistent across business. so yeah, it's, important to get different perspectives and I, really appreciate you sharing with us, some of your experiences thought patterns and paradigms that help you operate.

[00:23:18] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It's been great.

[00:23:20] Colten: Beautiful.

[00:23:21] Colten: Thanks. I'm so sorry. I just realized I didn't ask you to, point us anywhere. Would you like to point, listeners to like a LinkedIn or a website or

[00:23:28] Chris: anything like that? Yeah, I think what I probably ask people to do is, if they're looking at trying to figure out and improve some of the effectiveness in their business that they just ask what they think the company's focused on this year, where they're trying to head a lot of companies, I think, and teams lack that clarity around what we're trying to do.

[00:23:48] Chris: And they just get stuck Doing the job. And if you want to take your business somewhere, if you're ready to grow and scale and really get that marketing out there to grow, just doing a limits test check, that is fantastic. if people do want to find me, then I am on LinkedIn. it's Chris Caldwell of Caldwell creative, and they can shoot me a line, on LinkedIn.

[00:24:09] Chris: If they want to connect.

[00:24:11] Colten: Beautiful.