How James Pratt is Scaling James Pratt Auctions and Building A Career in Film Through An Emphasis on Effective People and Time Management Skills.

[00:00:02] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the How to scale a business podcast. My name is Hector Santisteban and I am your host for today. Our special guest is Mr. James Davis, he's the president at Touchdown Strategies, and we're going to get into how he's built exactly that and how they've scored more than just the touchdown.

[00:00:18] Hector: James, thanks for hanging out with us today. I appreciate it.

[00:00:20] James: Hector, thanks for having me.

[00:00:21] Hector: We could go through a long list of the accolades and check the bio because we'll include James's official bio in there. But I'm curious, from your standpoint, after all the things that you've done and all the accomplishments, the list, the rankings, things like that, what stands out to you as your biggest accomplishment or when people ask, what you've done or what you're building, like, how do you answer that question?

[00:00:43] James: Yeah, well, I saw an opportunity in the PR, and marketing space , and worked with agencies before, I worked at agencies before, some great agencies, have different experiences working with agencies, some good, some bad, in terms of the experiences that didn't necessarily mean the agency was bad.

[00:01:00] James: Was largely reliant upon the client teams that you got and who was your client lead and how invested were they in your issues, did they really partner with you on it? Or was it more like a transactional relationship? And by the way, that can happen on the client side too. If they treat you like a transactional partner, you can't really unlock the potential value that's there.

[00:01:21] James: I saw this and I had built an internal agency for the stand together community, which is a philanthropic organization, spent tons of resources ultimately trying to bridge the divide across America and , find common ground on issues that the American people care about.

[00:01:36] James: And I learned a lot through that process of building that agency. And I thought, you know what, there's an opportunity to take this to the market in a different way. I had bet on everyone else so much and they had bet on me to build things for them, but I had been reluctant to bet on myself, even though that had been my kind of desire.

[00:01:53] James: So Touchdown Strategies is really, when I talk about the diversity of projects, whether it's healthcare, energy, technology, new startup companies, media companies, public affairs, people are like, wow, you're doing a lot there in sports and entertainment, why didn't you specialize?

[00:02:09] James: And the reality is like, my heart wasn't in specializing, and if your heart isn't into something, how can you get your mind wrapped around that, right? I wanted to learn new things alongside my clients and to be a good partner. And so we're problem solvers at heart. We're an agency, a communications and marketing agency that really focused on solving problems and partnering with you to do that.

[00:02:32] James: And we lean on more communications and marketing strategies to do that but it's not completely coloring within the lines because sometimes I'll tell companies or CEOs actually you need to rethink your product here a little bit. You need to rethink your government affairs strategy, the policies that you have actually aren't going to set you up for long term success.

[00:02:51] James: I'll give you one example, this is the wine, in spirits space, right? the age of COVID, there was a relaxation on of those policies where you could go direct to consumer more. was evolution and had a prospective client who wanted to just basically stave off what could see was the inevitable writing on the wall.

[00:03:11] James: I said, well, I put together a strategy to do that, but if you don't evolve your business and become sort of like the Amazon can go direct to consumer, you're going to get left in the dust anyway and so your business is going to be obsolete. So we could work with you for a year or two years or three years, then you're going to potentially die off.

[00:03:28] James: And it's that honesty that we come in on the front end with quite frankly, people like it, some people don't like it. We didn't get that client, I'm okay with that because rather be honest on the front end and say, PR and comms are only going to help you so much if you don't change business strategy. So,at the heart of it t, we're problem solving agency, I would say.

[00:03:46] Hector: Yeah, I'm curious for you as the leader, the founder, and after all the sort of success and growth that you guys have experienced. For you, do you find that you're still in that problem solving mode for the clients and that's where you like to stay? Or have you taken what I found it becomes the ultimate or lot of artists, you know, end up becoming the entrepreneur, right? And they end up becoming the business owner and the executive, which is a lot different than the technician. And so, what's your evolution been like? In the sense, do you still find yourself in the campaigns, in the trenches of solving these problems? Or have you moved back into moving the pieces on the chessboard to make sure that this, I don't, I mean, I don't know if it's a conglomerate, but this entity that you've built is really able to sustain its growth and success into the future.

[00:04:32] James: When you think about growth, growth starts with having a good product or a good service, right?, but scaling means you need a great process and you have to think systems and not superheroes. And so it's not just me being a superhero coming in to solve your problem, because if the business is all relying on James, right?, then the business is going to have a ceiling there on our growth potential. And so what we want to do, and good leaders do this, is we want to create other leaders and develop other leaders and not followers, all right? I don't need a bunch of people just doing what James says, I need other people coming up with innovative solutions to get the job done.

[00:05:09] James: We have a young guy working for us and it was really incredible. He came, . I guess it was at the last quarter of last year, early part of the quarter, he came and said, hey, you guys, have got an idea. We are constantly thinking about how do we get our clients in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or New York Post or wherever, and these mainstream outlets, CNN, CNBC, all these things, we think about it from the what is your goal and then which audiences do we need to reach? And we're doing really well at the traditional media route, and we do really well at also pairing a marketing strategy with that.

[00:05:42] James: But what he said was there's these great sub stacks out there that have tremendous reach with some of our target audiences, I've been cultivating relationships with a bunch of sub stack authors that match up with their audiences, match up with our clients. And so I'm now pitching our clients to the sub stack authors, not CNN, but more going kind of the individual media brand way, and it's paying great dividends for our clients, is paying great dividends for our company.

[00:06:10] James: But it took that kind of he knows the formulas for how we think about developing strategies, like what are our goals? Who are the audiences? How are we going to reach them? And he's expanded the ways in which we're going to reach out to them, which is tremendous, right? I was then at the Inc. 5000 conference where we were getting awarded, last year for being one of the fastest growing companies in the country.

[00:06:31] James: And Rebecca Minkoff, fame from Real Housewives, she also has a prominent brand within Nordstrom for purses and handbags. I didn't really know that beforehand, but she was speaking on stage and the editor and CEO, was asking her some questions about tips because they were really on the front end of taking their products through social media and being a publisher themselves their company, that's the way they think about their company, they're like a publishing first company.

[00:06:59] James: So She said, the greatest tip I can give to people who can't be on every platform Is maybe think about sub stack, think, about this and then she actually shared a story that actually tagged back to what we had been doing as well for our company and what this 25 year old in our company had brought to the table.

[00:07:17] James: And so I gave him huge kudos and praised him amongst the team, and took a clip of that and sent it around to the team. And I was like, look at this, this is the kind of innovation that we all need because you might do something that might work really well, and so then we tend to fall into patterns of how do I repeat the thing that works really well, but we have to continue to innovate in order to stay ahead of the game.

[00:07:37] Hector: Yeah, it's a great evolution. I've seen a lot of founders of needing to take that role. I think you called it going from superhero to systems to superheroes.

[00:07:46] James: You want to think systems and not superheroes because any individual can save you and save your bacon, save your company's bacon, but you don't want to be reliant on heroics, you want to have a thought process and the way we actually, we've done communications and marketing audits is something that we put a process around.

[00:08:03] James: How do we go into a big organization? We went to the University of Auburn and we audited their communications and marketing function. We reorganized their entire marketing and comms capabilities across the university from department to department, and gave them some additional best practices.

[00:08:19] James: And one of the things that we look at is we borrowed this from the practice maturity scale. I don't know if you ever heard of that, that's actually in computer science. And the very beginning of the practice maturity scale, there's this function of how you rate things, it's like, this was not done, this function was not done. The next rating is this function was ad hoc, that means it just happened occasionally here and there as necessary. The next function would be, this was planned, okay? So you had a strategy, you wrote down your strategy, we had a plan for it.

[00:08:46] James: The next level is this was executed according to the plan, right? So now you're evaluating yourself. Are you in this practice level of maturity? The next level is that we actually monitor the results for this. Many people monitor the results for stuff, but the final stage is to optimize based off that. So you can measure all the things in the world, but if those measures aren't making you better every time, then your maturity as an organization, as a practice, is going to be stagnant.

[00:09:14] James: And you're going to always rely on one or two individuals to save the company or organization's bacon by some super heroic, like they had a great relationship with the Wall Street Journal, they were able to change something in the story, or they were able to edit a video and come out really strong.

[00:09:29] James: But if everyone is optimized, if you're working off this optimized mindset, and you're evaluating and then learning from what you've done in the past, and then tooling your strategies to accentuate on what you did well, and then to mitigate against the downsides, then everybody in the organization is going to get better over time and you're going to get better results year after year.

[00:09:50] Hector: Yeah, this is really just selfishly great stuff. I know our listeners are taking copious amounts of notes right now. They've probably hit the back button a number of times, just because that process that you've laid out has been something that I've intuited or I've stumbled my way through those stages, right?

[00:10:04] Hector: Just not realizing that if we could just realize that those are , some pre laid out gates to get through, or we can know the phase that we're trying to get to the final state, I think. I know I would have gotten there a lot quicker. So

[00:10:14] James: I think one of the things that I noticed just even in setting up, when you reach out for the interview and stuff and we set it up, you've done a really great job at automating the things that can be automated really well. And that allows you to focus on the things that really require your attention.

[00:10:30] James: And I've taken notes even from the automation process that you have set up around putting your podcast together, reminders, notes to the guests and all those things. So I give you great kudos on that. I think I don't want you to undersell yourself at all.

[00:10:42] Hector: Well, I appreciate that we are similar to you. That's part of my problem solving and we are trying to figure out what makes a good podcast, and maybe unfortunately where my brain goes most days. James, this is so great and we've covered so much in just a short bit when we get back from break, my curiosity is you've gone through this evolution of going from a superhero to sort of being the integrator of these systems. I'm curious what the evolution of the business looked like and if there were sort of stages of that along the way, and so we're going to get into that right after this quick break.

[00:11:11] Hector: Hey, y'all. Today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media, and we are a podcast and content production company. Well, we like to think of ourselves as like the media entity of your company, because chances are, if you're listening to this, you probably have a product, a passion, a mission, a message, some sort of service that you're trying to get out to the world, but you might not have the time, the team or the technical skills to do it.

[00:11:28] Hector: Well, if that's the case, we can help go to Amplafy media dot com. That's A M P L A F Y media dot com. You can also check the show notes for the link. And with that, let's back to James. So, James, during break, you were talking about just some brilliance that you had had sort of gone into to effect some of these stages that we had talked about.

[00:11:46] Hector: And I use the word effect, you know, with an E and that's my nerdiness coming back and saying, to implement some of these things, because I think a lot of business owners are going, well, that's great. And you've started to develop the process to move through each of these stages at whatever sort of transparency you'd like.

[00:12:01] Hector: I'd love for you to share what you've came to understood and how you're using that with your clients and and such.

[00:12:07] James: I think part of it was in the early part of my career when I was working for Secretary Rumsfeld, I did Crisis communications for the Pentagon during Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, lots of fun stuff. And I learned a lot at a young age, but most of my focus, unlike a lot of communications people, I was less on the media side and it was more on the strategic planning side.

[00:12:29] James: It was more on building methodologies that could help us get our message out, looking at new tactics and strategies for getting those messages out. And so that kind of led me on a journey, a little bit more to develop a curriculum, if you will, around best practices of communications and marketing, which allowed me to do the audit for Auburn University.

[00:12:49] James: I've also done that audit for one of the largest private health companies in the world, and all their subsidiaries, as well as a couple of Fortune 50 companies, and each time I learn something new, and I like blend a new skill or background in there , what we've now done is if you can audit an organization like that, you can certainly put together a strategic plan around it.

[00:13:10] James: Not only that, you can put together sort of a curriculum for each of the practices, the key practices. So we're looking at like 19 key practices across communications and marketing. And that goes everything from a bucket of items in the vision level, so understanding the vision of an organization, because without a vision, execution is a dream, and then execution without vision is chaos. So we want to try to put some structure around that and what that looks like and making sure that everyone in an organization understands the role that they play in the organization and how their role and the daily contributions that they can make, advance the vision.

[00:13:47] James: I tell people, if you're running a company, you want your, housekeeping crew that comes in and cleans up after everyone to know what their part in the organization is and how it advances the overall objectives of the organization. And if you can get to that level of a personal knowledge, not just had knowledge like I repeat a statement, but like the personal knowledge of now, how do I take this information and apply it to add value to the company, then you're going to have transformational opportunities, you're going to have transformational growth.

[00:14:16] James: And without it, you're going to be stagnated, because you're going to have conflict and chaos. And so, just like we do that on a vision, we do that in the execution side, so one of the principles are one of the key competences hat you need to have is knowing how to talk to the media, so we ask people all the time, have you identified who the spokespeople are? Okay. Who are they? Great. Do they have the right points that need to get across, what does that organize? We have a whole process around how to organize it, so that people are communicating both the emotional as well as the rational, reasons for why, what they're saying is important, right?

[00:14:49] James: Is it convinced the audiences that they need?, and now they have, they've been trained. Have they been media trained? Do they know how to get those messages out regardless of the interview? So we build curriculums around that. And so we try to put curriculum around all of these things and then show how it all merges together.

[00:15:03] James: So if we're working for you, chances are, if we do media training for you, we'll wind up doing messaging for you. And we'll wind up doing narrative stuff for you. We may wind up working with pollsters for you and, helping with your focus groups. If we're doing that, chances are we're writing op eds for you, we're putting web copy together for you, we're doing your social. And so on and on and on.

[00:15:21] James: Because it's all interrelated and at the end of the day this process helps us not only stay on the same page as our team and cultivate other leaders on our team who can do this and they can go into these media trainings and they can lead the media training, so it's not just incumbent upon me, but our customers, they're like, wow, you have a strong point of view on this and that's what people want. They want someone who has a strong point of view and can concretely share that with them, right? How do you help me through this?

[00:15:46] James: Because success is rented and the rent is due every single day. You got to come in and you got to work and you got to perform every single day. How do we set up the systems, that equip, our leaders to maximize on those opportunities.

[00:16:00] Hector: Yeah. It's such a great framework. I was recently talking with our head of production about we were talking about internally some changes that we wanted to happen. I was kind of going through a basic framework, is it that we don't know the answer and we haven't told them, is it that they don't understand the answer and we can make it clear, or is it that they don't want to do it? And for whatever reason, we haven't given them a compelling enough reason to do it this way. And in the same sort of way you are working through all of those things, but all the way, it doesn't just stop internally, but now how do we take that message and then share it with whomever needs to hear it out in the market.

[00:16:32] James: Yeah, absolutely. You have to empower your team and you start by getting at that vision level, but also creating those process, those mental models that they can employ cause you want to empower your team to solve problems, not just report to problems, that's not helpful.

[00:16:45] James: We're an agency that solves problems, so I need my team to solve the problems that we have internally, but also help our customers solve their problems. And it's a different kind of mental model, I think, because there's a reluctance to speak boldly and honestly, authentically and say, Hey, actually you think this is your problem, but this is your problem. This is what I observe as your problem. And you can do that with humility. It doesn't assume that you know it all. You don't have to know it all, not knowing it all is a wonderful trait and it's a wonderful trust builder with clients in a professional services environment.

[00:17:21] James: It's showing that you have humility and that you know what? I don't know that. I'm going to work on it. I'll come back to you and find you an answer. Clients don't expect us to have every answer and when we do, when people in the comms and marketing world have every answer, then they look at you a little bit like, hmm, I don't know. Is this guy just a fast talker? Is he just super persuasive talker or does he have the goods to back it up? If you kind of come at it and say honestly when you don't know the answer, I'm not sure, I'll look into it. I'm going to consult with some folks on my team. Let me get back to you on that.

[00:17:51] James: I feel like people appreciate that because they realize that you're being human instead of robotic kind of just telling them what you think they want to hear.

[00:17:59] Hector: James, I have so many more questions that I had to cycle through my head and go, no, we don't have enough time. We know we don't have enough time. So I'm going to save the one that I have. think it might be on some people's heads, that I think we might be able to cover in the time that we do have. And that's how does AI play into your world in all its sort of iterations, whether that's from deep fakes to just your typical chat, GPT writing sort of stuff. But is that something that you're thinking about a lot and what's your perspective on how businesses should approach it with regards to their media and their public image, and all these sorts of things that are seeming to become more of a priority for

[00:18:34] James: Well, it's funny that early on in the chat GPT days I had just made a new hire, our team was expanding and we did a conference call and I did a display of very elaborate prompts to write a press release using chat GPT. And at the time it was very, very early, the world wasn't talking as much about open AI as we are now. But I walked the team through it and they were like, Oh my goodness. And some folks on the team were like. Wow, our jobs are going to be obsolete, and I said, guys, all of you are better writers than this AI right now.

[00:19:07] James: I mean, we have an exceptional team of writers. You guys are all better writers, but we can leverage technology and learn from technology to expedite some of the work and processes that we have. But you can't be over reliant on technology. I mean, it's the same thing that our parents told us, you got to learn how to do a little bit of math, you can't carry a calculator everywhere. And now, obviously, we all have a calculator everywhere because it's in our pocket. It's helpful to be able to do a little mental math and come up with a quick answer without having to pull out your iPhone every time to do that or your Android, whatever.

[00:19:39] James: I say embrace technology, embrace technology, use it where you can to automate what you can, but if you're too reliant on technology, you're going to lose your edge in the game. If you run away from technology, you're going to lose your edge in the game. So you got to meet that happy medium.

[00:19:54] James: Don't be a Luddite, right? There's going to be new applications in many ways, OpenAI and Chat GPT are somewhat better version of a Google search, right? At this point, for some things. But you can't rely on it for everything. So, that's my pitch on the AI. I think it's going to change the industry, no doubt, responding to deepfakes is a big deal. It will create all sorts of misinformation campaigns, you got to be quicker on the reaction. The thing that it will require most is for humans, you and I, leaders, CEOs, executives to be quicker and make quicker decisions. I don't know if you saw the Wall Street Journal article about Elon Musk, as it related to the Cybertruck and what was going on in Vegas.

[00:20:35] James: So for those that didn't read that, go check out the article. Cybertruck exploded in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas just right after New Year's and for someone in the electric vehicle business, this is a big fear. You do not want a narrative that maybe your battery exploded.

[00:20:53] James: That's been something that's been promoted many times and social media could have taken off on something like that. It could have dominated it and then Tesla would have been responding to all of these concerns, all these other ev manufacturers would have also been concerned because Tesla took this hit but now we're going to take the hit, Elon jumped on it really really quickly and he started communicating. Oh, you know what? It's the density of the sides of our truck. We're six times the size of the density of an ordinary truck. It caused the explosion to go upward rather than outward. In the end, the Cybertruck is so tough, it's so badass that it saved people walking around it and also limited damage to the hotel.

[00:21:32] James: And then that meme actually took off because he was communicating facts in real time that maybe the police even didn't have because he's using the computers that were in the cyber truck that said, Hey, you know what? Automated driving wasn't used. Here's what time the explosion happened, he had all this data.

[00:21:47] James: They were now relying on him and he's communicating a real time to give them those facts. He set the narrative around ,it and then the memes are cyber trucks are bad ass. And so speed, being quick, no time to be indecisive in this world. We got to be really quick.

[00:22:00] James: We don't want to be so quick that we say something or so bombastic that we say something that's not factual because that'll come back to bite us. So you have to be quick and measured, and thoughtful and what we put out. You can't just wait media cycle after media cycle anymore. Your narrative is set, your stock dips and you're in trouble.

[00:22:17] Hector: Such good stuff. I remember reading that exact series of tweets and just thinking, Oh, that's helpful information, not knowing that there's a PR genius behind it going, we've got to take advantage. James, great stuff. If people want to find out more about you, more about Touchdown, anything that you're up to, where's the best place?

[00:22:33] James: Sure! You can check out touchdownstrategies. com, that's our website. Got a little bit of information on there about it. You can also reach out to me direct, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm James Davis, Touchdown Strategies. You can hit me up on social, Twitter, whatever. I'm James Davis, easy enough. I am James Davis on Twitter. And just reach out to me, happy to talk to folks and if you need help, would love to figure out how to partner with you.