Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Your ability to think is the only thing that protects us. We're in the age of AI. It is our human ability to think that is not accurate. That's not the strategy. That's not actually the output that I was looking for. AI is not giving you original ideas you think it is because it's original to you. And if you think that you're original and you're only getting your ideas from AI, you are exactly the kind of person that we were talking about before. That's just copying the competitors.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome to The Entrepreneur's Output Logbook I'm your host, Zach Bernard. You can find me on social at. It's Zack B. In each episode, I bring on experts from various industries for you to learn about their strategies and insights driving extra business growth. Today we're joined by Brooke McLean, CEO of Market Wake, an Atlanta based growth marketing agency built on the idea that data and creative storytelling have to work together, not separately, to actually make a brand memorable. And broke actually grown market week to nearly 80 people landing on the inc 5000 likes six times. Also the inc best places to work with five years running, a combination that in my experience most companies are told that you kind of need to pick between one or the two. And then she also got an early crash course in high pressure leadership running the email automation company KV as CEO at 26. And today she splits her time between market week and backing early stage founders through Market Week Ventures. But she's also not really new to the podcasting side of things. I mean, she was a TEDx speaker, hosted the Venture Atlanta and she's also someone who's traveled to 30 countries. Most fit solo. Brooke, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: I'm going to need you to do every intro for me for the rest of my days.
I'm really thrilled to be here. Yeah, thank you.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: No, I really appreciate coming on the show and we, we've obviously had a lot of different conversation with every industry that you could think of, but I think is going to be like an interesting one. I mean, at 26, you were CEO, you have like multiple companies, you travel all across the world. So I'm going to assume you have a couple of stories under your belt that we can obviously touch on here.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: I have some stories. Some are great for morning coffee and others are better for an afternoon cocktail.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Fair enough. So one of the things I always like to do with anyone that comes on the podcast and I'm curious to hear your answer because everyone has a different answer around that is if you have to, like, restart your company from scratch today, what's kind of maybe the one thing that you feel you would do differently that a lot of people get, like, totally wrong.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: It's interesting because I think that all of the things that you do when you're first creating a company are actually very important. I mean, think about a child. When a child is first learning anything, it's messy, it is not the proper way of doing things. But it's important for them to explore. It's important for them to test their bounds, to see what works, to see what doesn't. So it's hard for me to go back and say these are the things that I wish I would have done differently, because in every single failure was a lesson for, for how we do things now. And I actually think that there's something really important in that concept of allowing yourself to be childlike in starting a business. You don't have to have it perfect. In fact, the exploration is a part of the process, and teaching your team to explore and hit those bounds is a part of the process.
If there were things that had more negative impact that I wish that I would have gotten right faster, different, I would say that the, the, the contractual side of the business, which is not a very sexy thing to talk about, but that actually had negative impact because we didn't invest a lot in the, the legal foundation of the business. So a lot of companies and a lot of clients had different SEO or SOWs, different MSAs, different terms. All of those things started to become a real.
As we got bigger and we had to abide by said terms. Same thing. With an operating agreement and making sure that our contracts with our team were okay, those are the things that are not the, not the pieces that you want to learn through exploration. You want to get those right.
And then I also think we.
I was kind of the system right? It was. People would come to me, ask me what I thought, I would tell them the exact answer to give because we were small. And I wish I would have spent more time teaching them to figure it out themselves while we were exploring and there was a lot of opportunity to grow and fail. I, I did end up giving my direct answer. And I think that that adds a level of enablement that maybe you, you, you want to avoid if you're trying to grow true leaders in your company.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good point. In that last point that you mentioned, like, I'm seeing that myself in every company. I'm kind of like realizing, like, hey, if I want to people to have like judgment, like initiative. I can always give them like the answer. Like they need to be able to go like find it on their own. But I'm with you on your first answer though, because I feel like it's so true. And I'm a big believer that like any failure that you go through is a lesson. It's not actually failure. Like you only learn by doing and you're never going to get everything perfect on like the first go if you haven't done it before. That's really just how you learn in the first place.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: But that's it. And I'm going to look back 10 years from now and be like, oh my gosh, what was I doing then? It never changes. It's never like, oh, we made it past the toddler phase. We're, we're still figuring that out.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah, fair enough. So I'd love to dive a bit into like the, the marketing side of things because that obviously I know that's like your bread and butter at the company and for like yourself too. And you've obviously been in the space for, for quite a while, to put it very simply. And when we think about like innovation, like all these things going on, like maybe like the economy and everything like that, there's a pretty like common instinct that when things in like time is starting to get like uncertain, like marketing is like the other first like line item that people like, okay, we need to cut that. Like we need to cut our spending on ads, you know, and just focus on the current customers. Is that ever like actually like a smart move or is that actually more backwards in your opinion?
[00:06:04] Speaker A: I think it's backwards. And everyone who's listening is going to be like, oh, that's very self serving. Obviously you're in the industry. But I do have a reason why.
The reason why I think that it is backwards is because when everyone starts to cut their marketing spend, what you're, what you're doing, you're missing out on the biggest opportunity for your dollars to go so much farther. If everyone is doing that, your competitors, they're, they're starting to lessen their dollars. They're going dark. You have the opportunity to take your ad spend, take your dollars and make it have so much more meaning. There's also a psychological impact in this. So when there is an a downturn in any industry that people want to do business with, a sure fire business, they want to know that they're not going to go under. They want to know that they're investing in their Clients, they want to know that they're investing in their roadmap. So when you cut your marketing, it's not just the marketing that's impacted, it's the perception of the health of your business. And that's what we want to say is people actually apply a lot of meaning, whether you intend it or not, to say what is the health of this business? And if they no longer can invest in marketing, maybe they're not doing well, maybe they're unhealthy. Maybe I should go somewhere else where they are investing in marketing because then I know that they're going to last through whatever downturn or whatever change this is. So people don't realize it's the unintended impacts of cutting marketing and cutting your message. Yes, it is. It is an opportunity for you to actually do way more than you ever could with the dollars that you have. Even a lesser budget. I understand sometimes you have to cut budgets. Absolutely. I mean, we're in the same boat. Like sometimes we have to cut budgets. But turning everything off is never the right play because of the unintended impacts of, of psychologically speaking, people creating a reputation that you might not want.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I, I never thought about it that way because if you're, by not marketing yourself, you're marketing out to people that your company is maybe not doing too well and that's affecting like the brand perception in a way.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: You're always sending a message, always as a company, are you aware of what it is? And not sending a message is a message.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about it. But the, the other thing that you mentioned, like in like the, your first answer, which I thought was like, interesting is when you're dealing with obviously just like the market, whether like uncertain time economy or anything like that, the people who are doing well are obviously going to keep spending on marketing. But the people that are, you know, maybe they're, they're a bit scared they're going to like stop the spend on like marketing. So the people that keep spend, spending are going to get better results because there's less people competing for keywords, ad clicks and everything like that. So your thesis, like, keep spending. Obviously if you have to like cut down a little bit the budget, adjust as needed, do so. But yeah, interesting, because I know a lot of people just cut it. Good.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: They, they do cut it and I think that it is a good time at, at any point in a company, it is a valiant effort to look at what is working and what's driving the most roi? Where is there the highest margin opportunities, Being analytical in those senses to figure out what le working and what aren't an amazing exercise. No matter what the state of the economy is or the state of your business, you should be doing those things. But to turn it all off, that's a risk.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah, no, fair enough. So we talked about marketing, but one thing that I thought was like really interesting about your company and we, we talked about this a little bit earlier when I was giving you that amazing bio that you mentioned in terms like culture that you guys have created like a great company. And I think I was looking at your website, I could be wrong, but I swear I saw some people like skiing or something like that. I thought those like really interesting. I'm terr. Terrible skink by the way, but I thought that was an interesting thing that you guys are doing with the company. So having grown like fast, building a culture that's obviously been recognized like one of the best places to work with the same time most people, and that's something I really want to dive into like a little bit here because I feel like you'll have like an interesting perspective. Most people just told that like, hey, you're either focusing on building an amazing company culture or like, everyone just loves to work at that company. It's great. Or you focus on like growth, growth, growth, growth. Even if that sabotages is like a little bit of like the company culture. And I'd kind of be curious to hear like your approach, like how you go about having the two work in cohesion and still perform like very well.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I.
Having a good culture is the strategy in my mind. That is the strategy because when you have a good culture, you retain your team. And when you retain your team, you retain your clients. And retention of both means there's on every decision that you make.
And I think for, for me, that is the most important. When I have a team that's healthy, when I have a team that's happy, when I have a team that's excited to come to work, they're going to give their best to the client. When the client receives the best, when they, when they look at us and they go, you're happy to be on this call. We've been with agencies for years and they're never happy. And it's always a miserable call and we always try to get through it. But you're the, you're our favorite call of the day. Like, those are the things that we love to see. And that doesn't happen because we're faking.
Happens because we are.
Have the energy and the capacity because our cups are full to show up and. And enjoy that other person. And I think that the thing when. When everyone is so business focused, if.
When everyone is so business focused, you lose sight in the fact that you're still doing business with humans. We are in the service industry.
You, whether it is a restaurant or a hotel and hospitality or marketing, the products vary. But we are still in hospitality, we are still in service. And people forget all the time that you're serving a human. The work is necessary. But when our culture is strong and you get comfortable with the fact that people are people are people, it becomes a whole lot easier to do business with people. And so it just has this. This compounding wake, this compounding effect. And yes, you mentioned the ski. I. Okay, so I've made mistakes, but I really. But they're good. They're great mistakes in.
They're great. They're plenty of stories from them.
In the past, what we've done is every single year that we hit our goals, we would take the entire team and their significant others out of the country. So we have been to Iceland and Belize and skiing in Big Sky. I underestimated the danger of putting novices on a mountain, and I will not do that again.
That was a mistake. But we've gone to New York and all these places, and so we've gotten to really bond and have these incredible experiences that we then get to bring back to say, oh, we know the world better, we know cultures better, we know people better. And then also, you learn a lot when you travel with someone. And so we're very close.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I can imagine. I mean, I've seen that myself whenever going. My girlfriend, we're traveling a little bit, maybe we're going to Europe or anything like that. But no, that's always interesting. And I love that. So, like, the. The culture is like the strategy of, like, a company in terms like growth. If you build an amazing culture, your people will want to obviously serve clients better. They'll be in a better mood, better culture, emotion, all that fun stuff. Yeah, it's a compound effect, as you said. It's like a ovulan motion. If you make one thing right, the other is just going to take care of themselves.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: What's so funny, because in marketing, everyone's looking for the flywheel. And it's like, when I do this one thing, I get this many dollars, and I'm like, the flywheel actually starts with your Team.
It starts with your. That is the flywheel effect. And no one talks about that, but I'm like, no, actually I think that the flywheel starts with your team, and when your team does good work, the output is compounding indefinitely. So yeah, the. The. It starts a lot sooner than people think you have, but you have direct input.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, but I kind of like the fact that you're tying the. The culture to, like, goals as well. Like you talked about. Like, hey, if you re. If we reach like a certain goal, like, we're gonna go like out on like a trip. And that obviously makes everyone want to, like, reach the goal as well. And I feel that's like an important component. Like, we obviously talked about great culture being able to have good results as well. But if you're able to inline the culture, make sure you have good KPIs, numbers that you want to hit goals and everything, everyone is working towards, like, one common goal to make sure that you can get it done. So I guess that's like, one thing in terms of, like, building a good company culture. But I'd be curious if there's like, any other, like, thoughts on, like, how you go about building a good company culture, Because I'm always interested in that, always looking to improve on our culture.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: So it's fun. You'll see me get very excited. So the other, the other aspect is transparency. Like, we're really transparent.
We do. We even do profit sharing here. Once we reach a certain threshold of, of what our revenue and our profit needs to be because we're bootstrapped. I don't. There's no debt, there's no VC money. It is brutal. But it is completely worth it for us to be able to build the company the way that we want to. And in that, I want everyone here to feel like they have ownership. And so we do profit share, which means I have to be very transparent with our dollars. Everyone knows when $5 of coffee has been spent.
But the motivation. And a lot of people wouldn't dare do this because they're like, well, they shouldn't see that information. I'm like, first of all, they don't really look for it. They do trust the process, but we show it if anyone really wants to see it. And at the end of the day, we split every $50, 50 with the team after we reach the threshold of what it takes to be healthy the following year. And that is a huge motivation to be like, no, they actually have buy in. You're investing in market week, and we're Investing in you. And it's a very interesting model. Not a lot of companies do it, but it's worth it for us because we believe culture and growth are one and the same, and so that's why we do it.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I love that. I'm big on transparent too, transparency as well. But I feel like the model that you've structured, it also helps to, again, build a better culture, but reach better goals because people want the company to succeed because you're investing in them at the same time. It's really huge. Not a lot of companies do that. So, yeah, we'll have to look in the profit share. That's an interesting one.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: I have tips.
I learned a lot.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Okay. I imagine, you know, that's like you said, you make mistakes, you learn from them. Learning experiences, they're just lessons in the end here. So I love that. And just shifting gears a little bit, we talked about, obviously, the company culture, the marketing side of things, but I know we talked about earlier, like, when you have different companies that are, like, spending, maybe they're cutting funding or anything like that on, like, their ads and everything. So there's always like that competition between different companies on what I'd be curious to hear from you because I imagine you've probably seen that working with, you know, quite a lot of companies, when a company just decides to, like, basically copy paste whatever the competitor is doing. I'd love to hear from your perspective what usually goes wrong there. I mean, a good example. Everyone nowadays, like, using AI, some people might just copy paste, like a website from a competitor, like, oh, I'll just slap my logo on there, call it a day. That's your new website. So. And in branding and everything, that's even, like, more important. You want to dilute your brand by any means here.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: I wouldn't call that a strategy.
It's not very unique. But yes, we see it happen. I mean, if you're copying what your competitor's doing, you're already late because by the time you've seen it, there's. There's creative fatigue. People get the creative fatigue experience right now is rapid. So by the time you've seen your competitor do something, they're probably already working on the next. And by the time you're able to produce and recreate it, you're so irrelevant that what you've done does not matter because they're dropping the next best thing. So, like, people underestimate the time it takes to create something. And anytime you copy, you're so far behind the speed at which creation is happening right now is, is astronomically fast. Um, so, yeah, you're, you're, you're missing out on opportunity. And also people right now, it's the age of the, of the Creator. They want to follow a unique voice. They want to know what's authentic. They don't want to see more AI. They want to connect with humans. And I think that we're in a really interesting time. It's, it's very polarizing. I mean, we're seeing AI propel us faster than we ever thought possible. And that's an entirely other different podcast, if you will. And then at the same time, we're seeing people really ground themselves. Like, they want to connect with real people. They want mistakes. They want their Instagram posts to be messy. They want to know that there's dishes in the sink because they're really human. And so I think that, that, that polarization is what brands can really leverage. Yeah, use AI to process information. F.
With all of the extra time that you have, spend it in creating something that's unique. People want to identify with brands that they feel connected to, that represent a piece of their life that they can laugh with and at. And if you're not reflecting your, your niche, your audience at all, they have no reason to stay. There's, there are other options out there.
So I think with the time you're saving, it is not just speed, it is actually to take back your soul as a brand. And so how are, how are companies taking their soul back? Like, use the time, but use to do something that's worth watching?
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Yeah, intentionally. And I mean, one thing I'm sure that you've seen is if you look at X, Twitter, LinkedIn or anything like that, like, you have so many people nowadays. I mean, you can easily tell when the post is just written by chat, GPT, cloud or anything.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: If I see one more LinkedIn post, it's an immediate skip.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I swear. But maybe I saw that somewhere and it wasn't true. And maybe someone's like playing like a joke or anything, but I swear I saw something that LinkedIn was like, adding like a skip. Like, this is AI slop or something like that. And like LinkedIn, you could just click at three dots and then just click.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: That would be our number one user.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: I thought that was hilarious. I was like, report, that's a good one.
But no, I mean, obviously having your brand not, like, copying people, because obviously that's going to, like, dilute the branch copying people, and you're obviously going to be Left behind.
One example I like to think about is some people, what they'll do is they'll see like someone that has like posting really great content and like, oh, I'm literally just going to like, you know, grab AI, copy all their content, get an understand like what their voice is and I'm just going to use that as my own. And I feel like it's a bit similar for some brands. Like they'll just look. Yeah. Like, let's look at Facebook ads library. Let's see what kind of creatives they're running. Let's just do the same thing. Change a couple colors here and there and then let's run that. They've been running those ads for like a year. Probably works well, let's, let's give it a try ourselves. And then you just end up seeing like the opposite effect. And because you're, you're using your, your creative judgment, you're not using it actually. You're just using someone else's creative judgment.
The ad just doesn't perform well. You scramble to found another winning creative and then you don't know what to do. So it's, it's kind of better to just, you know, learn how to do it yourself or it's just copying people.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: It is. And if you don't want to do it yourself, that's what agencies are for. You can hire people who love the creative part. And, and the thing that I don't understand about that is like, like you really want to copy someone. Like, that's really what you want your brand to be about, is just to copy the most expedient answer. What are you? I, I would say, I would say to get like really psychological. Take a psychological impact. I'm like, do. Why are you here? Why are you working? Like, why do you have this job? Like if you don't have any level of connection with your brand or your product to actually want to do something that is meaningful, impactful or awake leaving like, like why are you. May you maybe you should get another job.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with you. I think there needs to be, I mean some level.
Maybe passion is not like the right words, but some sort of like creativeness where you're not copying people.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Belief. There should be some level belief to be like, we can do this better and different. If you don't have that, I don't know. Good. Maybe there's something else out there for you.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: Fair enough.
And we talked a little bit about AI and that's where like you mentioned it could be like an Entire different conversation. I still want to touch about it, touch on it like a little bit here because everyone uses it nowadays. I mean I know I was speaking to someone on your team and he was saying like, yeah, I'm using it like every single day. Like I built like some really cool stuff whether it was like just on like a zone for like some like cytos or so. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I thought it was like interesting. And you mentioned yourself like, yeah, we want to use AI, but we want to make sure that we're using it correctly and we're not using it to just obviously dilute your entire brand, copy people or anything like that. And I guess with you guys being a very like culture driven, like human centric, like people centric, like company, just by like everything that you were telling me earlier, I'd be curious like how you, you think about using AI like within your company. Perhaps how you see that being like interlinked maybe with the culture, like the, the approach that you guys take to just obviously doing great work.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: We have this concept here called the debate room.
And the rules for hosting a debate room, it's actually really exciting. I would love for you to fly on the wall in one of these. Is if there anything here that impacts the way that we work, the way that we sell or the way that we deliver to a client. We need to debate room at first and really understand what the impact is before we just like adopt, enroll.
This has been a lot of our debate room. Is, is, is this concept of what does this look like in creative and design? I mean it's different in each department, right?
Creative, in copy, in data analyzation. And the actual output, is it branded, is it not branded? How fast? What are our rules for delivery? I mean there's so much to, to talk about there. And so what we decided is yeah, we have to have an AI ethos. Like what is it that we actually believe here as the best use case for AI? And it comes back to if you own the inputs, you can influence the outputs. If you are not spending astronomical time really defining the brief, the strategy, the voice, the direction, your output is going to be weak, it's going to be empty, it's going, it's going to have absolutely no meaning. It is going to be AI slop that you report on LinkedIn. And we, we, we can't name behind that. We're creative agency. We, we, we can't deliver that to a client with pride.
So we also have a rule and this is Might be controversial. It's fine. We give people access to Claude. Of course, we have rules, we have skills, and then we revoke access if you've lost rights to it.
So okay, yes, you can lose access.
So if we're not seeing you use it correctly, or if you've outsourced thinking to the AI machine, you've lost access, you then have to reprove that you can think and you're not being lazy. Because my biggest fear is that we're going to get to the point where people have lost the ability to think and then they believe what the AI says is true right now because it's new. There's enough of us who have experience and wisdom and critical thinking to be able to look at something and say that reads wrong. That is not accurate. That's not the strategy. That's not actually the output that I was looking for. But the more that we use it, it the less likely we are to have that critical thinking. So our X factor at Market Wake is to teach critical thought and that comes through wisdom and experience and learning. And so yeah, you can lose it. You can get it back, but you can lose it.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: Of course. Yeah, that, that's really interesting though because I, I find myself obviously I use AI pretty often, Claude, and that's like one of the things I'm like, I need to make sure that I still use like my own judgment and I don't trust like the AI to like do everything because at one point like you're just thinking like hey, like in a couple of years we're going to be totally dependent on these things. If we don't like still use our judgment, that becomes a bit scary because if you don't control the input, output's not going to be too pretty. As like you were saying, you want to make sure that you can get a good input in and that's you that's controlling that input.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: Exactly. Your ability to think is the only thing that protects us. We're in the age of AI. It is our human ability to think. So, okay, I was in the road the other day and I was watching, I was watching ch change but relevant. I was watching a Waymo. You know a wayo the. The self driving cars.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: A way. There was a four way intersection here in Atlanta and the. It's. It's a wide intersection and so a Waymo was taking a left hand turn and it had, right away it had a left hand turn arrow but because it was a wide intersection, when it turned left it captured the red light. For the opposite side. And it just stopped in the middle of the road. And the poor girls in the back were like, banging on the windows. They were getting honked at. They didn't know what to do. And to me, that's a perf Example of human judgment. A human does not look at the rule and say, oh, no, there's a red light. I guess we have to stop. A human in the car would have continued. And so I think that that's where we are with AI is like, there's just a level of human critical thought that is still necessary to drive the freaking car.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: It's not black. It's not just black or white. No, it's red. We stop. It's like, there needs to be that judgment.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Yeah, but do you remember it was green.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: You stop the car. It was. It was green. Right now we stop it.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: We stop the car.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Yeah, but I'm still with you. Like, I think AI like the. The way I like to think about it, it's more like an amplifier to, like, anything that we do. But again, we need to be that, like, core, like brain, to be amplified in, like, the first place. If you don't have that, you don't have that judgment and everything like that and wants to be amplified. You're just dealing with something that might not be factual. And I find myself oftentimes just asking, like, yeah, is this factual? And oftentimes gonna return like, oh, no, I made a mistake. It's like, you really need to, like, use your judgment in a lot of cases, review everything.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Well, if you look the. The search for the term is this real or is this true? And Google has skyrocketed. So what people are doing over the past nine months, what people are doing is they're getting output from AI and then they're still going to Google to say, is this real? Which is hilarious. So I think that when we're talking to clients, science, SEO and AEO are still very important is because, yeah, people are frap checking in Google and then going back to your earlier concept about just copying people. So AI is not giving you original ideas. You think it is because it's original to you, but all it's doing is compiling what already exists. And if you think that you're original and you're only getting your ideas from AI, you are exactly the kind of person that we were talking about before that's just copying the competitors. So, like, that is the other aspect. Like, get it to give you an idea, brainstorm some things. Absolutely. But getting people in a Room to, to iterate off of those initial brainstorm ideas is really important. Otherwise you're actually just copying your competitors. But you thought it was original because it was the first time you heard it.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, that's kind of funny. Like we, I know we talked about like copying people. I didn't think directly about like AI, but it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're using, you're just reusing stuff that's like already public out there. And then you're like, oh, new idea. This is great. I came up with this, like, just new to you.
Fair enough. And just before we like wrap things up, one of the things I always like to ask anyone that comes on the show, obviously even around the block, to put it very simply here, for any brands, companies out there, is there any piece of advice that you would give in terms of maybe building a great company, building a great culture? I mean, I know that encompasses quite a lot here, but I'd love to hear if you have any specific thoughts, like, hey, maybe you need to be not doing ski trips because that's not gonna end too well. Maybe just go for some skydiving instead.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: But you know, oh yeah, BASE jumping, much safer.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: There you go. That's so BASE jumping.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: I immediately get sued.
She told me to do it.
Yeah, I, I think the three things that I fall back on often when, when I think about what are the, the components of building something successful, it's, it's caring about the details.
I am not a detail oriented person, so I have, I have surrounded myself with a lot of incredible people who support me. So get the support and pay attention to the details because the small things actually have huge impact. I mean, Disney built an empire on the details for a reason. It works. So you do need to pay attention to the details. And if it's not your strength, then you need to surround your people who can help you there.
Also create an environment that is safe.
People don't do good work when it's not safe and safe.
I don't mean physically safe. I truly mean like mentally safer. Give people the ability to think, to play, to be themselves, to explore, to try new things. And, and you can do that a lot of different ways. You can do that in spaces and having like Creativity Inc. Has a concept of, of a brain trust and it was a structured place for them to experience that where ours is very fluid. I mean, you might see me with my shoes off, running around barefoot with a glass of wine in my hand. So they know, okay, we're, we're safe here for, like, I'm not going to mess up too much because look, and then, and then the third is you have to be.
You have to really get close to your clients. You really need to know how. What is it like to be on the other side of me? I mean, it's a good question to ask in any relationship. Like, what does it feel like to be on the other side of me? Is it. Is it messy? Is it thoughtful? Is it what you're looking for? And then reassessing those relationships, if you start to get too far from the client and the experience that they have, you start to lose yourself and what they need and then you lose your voice and it's just a ripple effect in the worst way. So, yeah, I love that.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Well, I learned quite a few things from this conversation and I think the. Just like even the culture said things like leading a company. There's definitely a couple things that I'll need to brainstorm and think about just based on everything that we covered. I'm not sure about the skiing, as I mentioned, not too good of a skier. You know, we'll. We'll consider maybe space jumping, as you mentioned. You know, that sounds like a safer option. So that's an option.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe we'll go with that.
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: So really appreciate coming on the show, Brook. I feel like anyone that wants to get in touch with you, reach out to Market Wake. What's kind of the best places to. To look out for you here?
[00:32:07] Speaker A: Hit our website, marketwake.com and then you can always find me on LinkedIn. And it's Brook Mlan.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Perfect. Perfect. Well, we're going to put that all in the show notes if anyone wants to check that out to your listeners. If you've enjoyed this episode, subscribe. Like Comment review. Reach out to Brooke here in Marky Wake if you need any help with your marketing or if you want to build, you know, an amazing culture and you want to learn from her, maybe work at Marky Wake scenes like that. They're doing some pretty cool stuff and yeah, until then, keep pushing and we'll see you in the next one.
