[00:00:00] Speaker A: Productizing in this landscape is the fastest way to scale.
It's really difficult to find the one thing that you could sell to everybody. Recently we've got some quotes from some of the very big holding companies saying that the scale at which agencies used to transact is no longer really relevant in the business. Today it is very very easy for a group of consultants to spend a few hours looking at the executive profiles and creating a thought leadership platform for which the executives can simply share their we of knowledge. My superpower is really being transparent and honest with myself with our organization and with the client on where we can and can't help and that increases our referral rate and increases our hit rate.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneur's Lockbook Podcast. I'm your host Zach Bernard. You can find me on Social at it Zack B. In each episode I bring on experts from various industries to learn about their strategies and insights driving extra new business growth. The Entrepreneurs Lockbook podcast is sponsored by WEGPR where we're dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build their own thought leadership and business through by booking them on podcasts and launching on podcasts. Today we're joined by Tiffany Coletti Kaiser, CEO of Iberia Digital, a growth marketing consultancy that's changing how businesses approach marketing through their flexible people centric model. She's essentially a seasoned marketing executive with over two decades of experience building future facing operational structures and strategic positioning across various interest from technology she CPG and she's also been recognized as an adage woman to watch and has led her accompanying involving beyond just a constraint of traditional agency land where she's created a collective of senior level marketing experts who manage half a billion leads annually. Tiffany, it's great to have you on the show.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Wow, thank you. That was quite the introduction. It's great to be here.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Zach, thank you so much for joining on.
But yeah like what I started doing with the show as I love to kick things off by not really asking a bit about yourself because I obviously give like the the introduction here. Ye but I'd love to hear if if you had to rebuild your company from scratch because you've been in the space for like quite a while. You've been running your company obviously for like a few years knowing everything that you know. What's the one or like two things that you would do if you had to like restart from scratch that like a lot of optimism get wrong.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think productizing in this landscape is the fastest way to scale and to make things codifiable.
And I think in the consultative space it's really difficult to find the thing that you could sell to everybody. But if I had maybe spent an extra two weeks on really thinking through the lowest common denominator of what everyone needs in the marketing space, creating that as a turnkey application where our senior consultants could really come in and deliver immediately, clients could take advantage of that over and over again. And that would have created a level of sustained revenue that doesn't really need a pipeline of new business activity or effort from the rest of the crew. Especially in a world where AI today is generating so much of the output for marketers and really supporting the humans in a more efficient approach. Obviously 10 years ago we didn't have that, but even having that product base layer today may have shifted how organizations could access the apiary collective in a more turnkey way. So productization is massive. It's easy for people to buy, it's easy for people to wrap their heads around, and when done correctly, it becomes a really great added value piece.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Interesting. So when you talk about like productizing it, would you say more as like a, like a SaaS platform in a way or just more like streamlining like your offerings in a way?
[00:03:45] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting. SaaS is such, well, certainly is a buzzword. And SaaS companies that do very well obviously create a tremendous amount of revenue for themselves and allow for access to customers in ways that non SaaS organizations don't. I think in the B2B space, we oftentimes think about productizing only in the SaaS complex at this point. And unfortunately, SaaS isn't the only way to go. So when we think only SaaS or only application based or only platform based, we're really shortchanging what is possible. I'll give you an easy example. Everyone who is an executive today, and certainly everyone who is marketing an organization, needs to have a presence in a business capacity. On LinkedIn, it is very, very easy for a group of consultants, senior level consultants, to spend a few hours looking at the executive profiles and creating a thought leadership platform for which the executives can post weekly or bi weekly to simply share their wealth of knowledge and get an extended layer of application of their profile to the companies in which they are supporting in their leadership positions. That can easily be a product. You give us access to your LinkedIn, we'll back with four or five cases that you will answer questions on and then bam, all of a sudden you have a thought leadership platform on LinkedIn had nothing to do with SaaS. It had nothing to do with an app. It had Nothing to do with a platform. It's simply doing something that everyone needs in a really turnkey way that everyone can say, oh, yeah, of course, I would spend X amount of money on that or four hours of my time on that because it's going to lead to an ROI over time. That is really worth it.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And like I said, like, sauce, but, like, I see your point. Because, I mean, like, there are, like, some offerings that we have with our company where we try to, like, productize it.
It's less of having a software like a platform like that, where you can take some offerings and somewhat package it together and make it a repeatable process that you can offer for multiple clients. So if you can do that, you have a lot more opportunity to scale a company as opposed to creating something like just custom, like, at every single turn. Exactly right for you. That's like one of the changes that you would have done if you were, like, starting.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: It's probably one of the changes I would have made earlier on. Because we're a bespoke organization and because we really work with our client partners to determine exactly what they need and then offer flexibility in that none of our engagements have any sort of penalty for cancellation or for accelerating or decelerating the scope. In fact, quite the opposite. We encourage flexibility because the marketing landscape, the platforms that we have to work within, are changing constantly. Sometimes something's going to work for a customer and sometimes it's not. That's not the customer's fault. That's really just an outcome of the world in which we live today.
So if we had a product system earlier in our time frame, I think it would have made some of the contingencies of those platform reliances less friction points for the apiary business and greater gains for the client partners. I'm always focused on what makes it easiest for the client to be successful. And if they can buy something, quote, unquote, off the shelf, that requires very little thinking on their end and doesn't require a long consultative sale process, they're probably more apt to see success quickly and therefore feel really great about their investments. We are so tremendously lucky at apiary that we have a return rate of our clients at 98%, which I recognize is like, beyond industry even. Yeah, it is dreamland.
85% of our new business in the last year has come from referral from existing customers. So we are so blessed by amazing consultant partners that make this referral network and these amazing clients happy. I literally could, could not be more thankful every day of my Life. And there are a whole host of organizations that we don't have access to in those referral networks that we would love to be able to, you know, ring their doorbell and say, hey, we have this really cool product for you. We think it can add value here, here and here. It's a really light lift for you.
Are you interested in that?
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it kind of becomes like a no brainer in a way for those clients with you.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: So if I'm starting today, I'm thinking of those no brainers now so that in the long run those no brainers become part of the muscle memory of the organization.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: I love that. And I guess just like taking a step back, going back to like the model because you, you have like a pretty like unique model when it comes to anywhere.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Like you, you've built like this collective model that seems like pretty different from like a lot of like these other like the agencies. And I'd love for you to perhaps give like the audience some of a walk through like how you guys actually help like accelerate growth for these companies here.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: So if you think about apiary, by definition is a collection of beehives and that is actually what the word means. And each hive that a beekeeper has is designed to generate the most amount of honey production. So at any given moment, if you imagine those little white boxes on a hill with the different colored drawers, a beekeeper is taking in and out different size boxes to create the most colony effectiveness. And at the leadership level of apiary, that's really what we're doing. We're looking at a client's business constantly and saying, oh, if we added in a little bit of organic social, or we added in a little bit of generative search optimization, or we thought more about the content application and their paid approach, we could be creating more lead generation for them, more business activity, more pipeline results, or in some cases, let's take that out. It's not working. It's actually draining the system.
It's a constantly flexed environment that is looking at the most senior resources to deliver the most amount of honey production for those clients.
We do that by looking at a landscape of humans who really no longer want to work in an agency environment. You mentioned agency, so I'm going to borrow that.
Agency environments can be great. They're great training grounds. You learn a tremendous amount, you get access to amazing clients.
Recently we've got some quotes from some of the very big holding company senior level executives saying that actually the scale at which agencies used to transact is no Longer really relevant in the business today. That's a big watch out moment for marketers to say, do I really need to invest in that level of overhead and infrastructure to get the returns on the investment that I need for the spend that I'm spending? And if the holding companies are saying no, it's probably time to look at how else can you do that? And so we did that 10 years ago. How else can we achieve results for clients, make it feel really good for the humans? Because I believe if a human is happy and they're doing good work at the same time, the outcomes are going to be better, the energy is going to be better, the partnerships are going to be better, and therefore the client outcomes are going to be more positive. They're going to be all geared at the right things because we are creating an environment of goodness, not just profits and attention. And how far can we string out, you know, a young agency human to do three things when we're really only paying them to do one and reaping the profit rewards? That doesn't work. On the flip side of that, you know, the consultant models have long been this way. If you think about the origins of a Bain capital or a McKinsey and their tremendous structures of you're on a project and you're 24, 7 for five weeks and then you're on the bench or the beach, depending on the consultancy, and you're kind of chilling out for a little while, it's a similar model to that.
In our instance, we're not retaining people full time. We're actually encouraging them to go out and live their lives. And when there's a great project for them, we're going to invite them in and say, this is something we think really fits your bill of expertise. Is this something that can fit into your life right now and then celebrating and supporting them as they go through that journey?
[00:11:34] Speaker B: No, that's definitely like a very unique model because I spoke into a lot of companies and it definitely is not structured that way. But it seems that you somewhat cracked a code in a way because you mentioned, like yourself, that 98%, I can guarantee that not a lot of companies or agencies have like that type of return there. But I guess, like something else I'd be curious is like, I saw, I think it was on like your LinkedIn, if I'm not mistaken, where a lot of like the, I mean, all the consultants, if I'm not mistaken, that you work with, you have like a new June no junior policy where, like all of them have like, an average like 12 years. Is that correct?
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is, this is like crazy. Our tremendous founder, who is the most empathetic, thoughtful creature I have ever met. And that includes dogs, cats, elephants. Like, she is just so intentional. When she founded Apiary, she had this idea that you could be more efficient, you could spend less time and therefore money on the time that is necessary to achieve something if you focused on a seniors only bench. And when I arrived on the scene some years ago, I think the minimum years of experience required to be in the apiary collective to pass into an apiary approved, as we call it, consultant was 10 years. And the challenge with that was the marketing space is moving at a pace where TikTok shop didn't exist 10 years ago. So how can I possibly find someone who has 10 years of experience in TikTok shop? So we lowered it to seven years and now we're hovering at about five years. And there's a couple of exceptions in there. We're not looking for Someone who has 5 years of experience in TikTok shop. Looking for is someone who has strategic and hands on keys in a paid social environment where they are trying to monetize a product and then understanding and knowing of the platform. So you can be platform certified last month. But if you have an understanding of how the economies of these things work, that qualifies you. Now you have to test into the API model, you have to pass an actual written exam, you have to pass an interview exam, and then you have to actually moonlight and do a presentation to a panel of deemed experts in your subject matter expertise. That kind of allows us to bench check, like, are you the right type of human, Are you bringing the right energy, Are you bringing the right amount of love to this excitement? And do you have the subject matter expertise in which you can sustain this five years? What we tend to see as a result of that, Zach, is that people who have had careers already, they have managed big clients and small clients, they've been in and out of agencies or consultancies. Maybe they've even been just an independent consultant in their own right.
When you get that level of expertise under your belt, you tend to age up a bit. These are people who, you know, it was fun to be in the agency world when they were in their 20s and now they're in their 30s and they don't want to. But this seniors only mentality also creates a level of trust. I trust you. Let's pretend you're in my collective for a minute. I trust you, Zach, that you're going to run your own ship, that you know exactly what needs to happen, that you're going to be communicative, that you're going to support your partnership and you're going to be able to deliver and develop what's necessary to make the client partnership a success.
That comes with time, that comes with wisdom, that comes with having a lot of people over time tell you what needs to be done and then making it your own.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Yeah, and I mean that, that reinforces like the, the thought and like belief I had about like what you were saying about having a very unique company. I mean, you guys have a model to vet people. They have to take an exam before they could be considered consult. Yeah, I've never seen that before. And I can imagine that probably has a lot of like, benefits and it probably becomes like a like key differentiator when it comes to like having. I mean, you mentioned yourself, I mean you wear your mouth, referrals, et cetera, but you're probably providing a really good experience that people just keep on referring you. So you probably, you guys are probably doing something right.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: I'm not. You know, I, I have to say we have a tremendous leadership team that is also filled with great humans. But the intentionality in creating a virtual space of belonging has been the work of the leadership team certainly in the last five years. We want all walks of life. We want people with all types of experiences, all types of backgrounds in all of the countries and all of the states. We want people to come to apiary and feel like it's part of theirs. Because again, when humans feel supported, when they feel they have the capacity to be successful and live whatever life they want to live, at the same time, they are going to come to our, our shared client partnerships with a level of excitement and intentionality that actually does produce those results. We have some consultants who moonlight as coffee roasters in their kitchens because they love roasting coffee and selling it on Etsy. We have some people who are caring for aging parents and that requires them to need a level of flexibility.
We have some people in the collect who are active military and love working. But because their partner is deployed, they need to say yes to projects sometimes and no to projects on another time. So it really does start to look at the humanity of work and shifting how we think about success not just as a did you show up at 9am and did you clock out at 5pm? But how are you using your time to be intentional for yourself, for your family, for your loved ones, for your community and doing Great work in your client partnerships. At the same time, that takes a unique human. Not everyone is designed to do that. A lot of people need the structure of a 9 to 5 and that's great. We celebrate that. A lot of good training, as I mentioned comes from that.
I also think in a post Covid world where there kind of are no real rules anymore on how you are supposed to live your life or where you're supposed to be in space and time. And I heard Jamie Dimon say maybe everyone doesn't need to be back in the office after he said last year, everyone definitely needs to be back in the office. Well, you're the largest bank in the world. Talking about where we should be and whether or not we're getting it right, I think it's still a question mark. So in a cloud based team, creating that sense of belonging and integrity and shared values is really the mission that the leadership team has. And then cultivating those product offerings and ensuring a pipeline of business for these consultants to take advantage of. When we bring all of that together, it does become really special and I'm so very proud of us for doing that.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean like the leadership team definitely, they're definitely doing a good job to have such a, an amazing company culture and it, it speaks like the type of people you let within like your organization as well. I mean they obviously have to pass like an exam. Someone that could task, they have to present like to like a panel but they also have to bring like certain like energy, certain like experience, background etc and like putting that like all together you have like a very unique structure when it comes to like a company which I think is like really interesting.
Talking about like structure, one thing I'd definitely be interesting is I saw something, I believe it was like the website I saw that you guys are managing around like half a billion leads like every single year which is like a pretty big scale. If you just put as like a number like that. Is there like any specific strategies that you guys take to even be able to like handle that kind of volume? Because you mentioned yourself like there's a lot of like project base with the consultants and everything like that.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: You know the agencies and the consultancies have long transacted on the amount of money under management. Right. That we think about this in like investment terms and let's say you're managing $15 billion in media spend.
That's cool, that's a lot of money. But what is that actually doing for the client? What is that actually driving in terms of business and so a couple years ago in a powwow with some of our amazing subject matter expertise, we really wanted to shift. It's not about the money we manage, it's about the outcome for the client.
And you're right, that structure shift actually was a big unlock for us in thinking about when we talk to a client, we're not really asking about how much money they have to spend. We're asking about what their goal is and working backwards from how that is going to benefit their business model. And as a result of that, they're humans in their organization. Not only their employees, but their investors, their stakeholders, their end customers. And when we started thinking about that and we started doing the math on how many leads Both on the D2C side and the B2B side were actually managing, we were like, whoa, this is significant. And this does change how we think about ourselves. We are managing a tremendous throughput and we're doing that through an amazing data science team that is so dialed into the shifts of data flow, how to visualize, how to bring to life for a client a data story that they can really analyze as a business and determine what's working and what's not working, where the optimizations need to take place.
But even more than that, it really shifted our mentality from everything has to be pay to play, which is definitely the agency model, to how can we do things that are in the control of the humans, specifically on the client side that are going to drive leads for them. Old school things, emails, events, how are we thinking about their content deployment? You know, I mentioned productizing LinkedIn at the executive piece. All of those things drive activity. How do we funnel those in and measure them so that they are part of a mix, not just the nice to haves that maybe we'll spend time on. And I love thinking about how many leads we might be managing for customers in the years to come. Because I'm hoping that over time and as we continue to scale, thank you to the universe for that opportunity that we're hitting, you know, 10 and 15 billion leads per year under management, because that would be tremendous. And then I would say to all of us, you know, job well done, because that is really the work of the work.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, and I love the way that you framed it because yes, there's like a lot of like agencies, companies are going to take the angle, like, hey, like we manage like 100 million, like ad spend like every single month for like clients. But that might not be like, I mean, that's definitely not what you're getting as far as like results. Like if you're working with E Comm.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: It'S not a good indicator of success. It's a good indicator of you can manage a lot of money or, you know, you have the network appliances to be able to extend that capital into the world. We also have that. It's just not a metric of success for us.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: No, it's just like it's, it's someone like a, I want to say, show off metric in a way, like a metric of scale. Being able to like show off, like, hey, like we're managing this amount. But again, you're not speaking directly to the impact that you're having with like the clients, customers that you're working with. Like, it should be like revenue, profit generated, like impact that, like tangible impacts.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Right. We just signed a new D2C client who is brand new. They just got funding. They're managing through all the supply chain pieces. They don't have a tremendous amount of money to spend. You know, it's a limited investment and they're really looking to move product. And if I came to them and I said, you know, we're, we manage $500 million in media spend, they would look at me and say, well then you don't care about me, clearly. But if I say to them, you know, I'm excited about driving leads for you and figuring out how to optimize funnel and we're doing it here, here and here for clients. Let's figure out how we do it for you.
Now they're willing to listen and they're thinking about us as a partner, not just as someone that wants to spend their money, which is a big shift.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I love like how you shifted that because you're like a partner. You're not just someone that's like micromanaging like a thousand clients and then just using that big number as like a marketing stunt and like marketing promotion material.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: So I mean that's no stunts here, only roll up your sleeve leaves.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: No, I love that. And I guess like another thing that I always like to ask all your gas and I feel it. I'm probably going to get a pretty unique answer from you because the main reason is.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: Oh boy.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: I always like to ask, like, what do you feel really differentiates yourself, like when it comes to marketing yourself? And the one reason I'm saying I'm expecting perhaps a different answer is you guys don't really do much marketing. It's like all like words, your mouth, referrals and everything like that So I guess I should probably shift that, like when you present yourself to clients, when you start speaking about potential clients. And we obviously have a pretty big difference when it comes to, like, your business model as a whole. Comparing it to, like, just like the agencies. But I'd love to hear if there's anything specific that you. You're like, hey, this is like, what makes us different when it comes to marketing yourself. So there's talking with, like, potential clients.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: Putting you on the spot here.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: We don't do a lot of marketing intentionally. We do a lot of relationship nurturing. I spend a lot of my time checking in with clients, what I call friendlies, people who are really invested in our collective success and how we're helping them and supporting them. I spend a tremendous amount of time collecting feedback.
We do a lot of pulse surveys through a platform that we have deployed where we can get real time feedback from both our consultants partners and our client partners. But when I'm talking to a new customer, and I think you can tell here my energy is like a little bit crazy all over the place. I try to have a lot of fun. Like, this shouldn't be boring. This should be exciting. And like, we're on the next frontier of an unlock for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client.
I always want to be in service of an outcome that is best for you. And oftentimes that means that AP area is not the right fit. And I want to be really transparent and upfront with that. The minute I see that this is not going to work, I want to figure out who in my network is actually going to help you reach that next goal. So. So for me, my superpower is really being transparent and honest with myself with our organization and with the client on where we can and can't help. And I actually think that that increases our referral rate and increases our hit rate. Because if I'm actively saying to you, Zach, I love you, I would love to spend more time with you. I really think you need someone who does this, this, and this. And we just don't have that today in our collective or we're just not geared at that. You're going to trust whatever I say after that, because I'm being really frank with you. You. The other thing I would say is I am an extension of apiary. I continuously live as an extension of apiary in all of my digital footprint and ecosystem. So when we get a referral in from my personal network, I want to treat that just the same way as we get a referral in from the more traditional apiary network. Those are two worlds colliding. And they're colliding kind of in and with me and my leadership team and. And the more integral we are in those moments, the better our outcomes are for our consultant partners and for our client partners.
When I sit with a client and I start listening to them speak about what their opportunities are or where they have friction points or where something isn't going well, it's very, very rare that I can't hear the actual problem. You know, you go to the doctor and you're like, my finger hurts. Oh, you have arthritis because you're vitamin deficient. Right, right. It's not that your finger hurts, it's that you are missing something. So my funnel is broken or this broke on my website and Meta is no longer working. Oh, yes, yes, I understand. You changed something on your website and you didn't know it and now the down funnel approach to that. So I've become really good at diagnosing and then looking to my consultant partners and saying, here's what I'm hearing. Help me generate something for this client that's actually going to provide value. And I say across the board, apiary is at its best when it puts apiary out of business with that client because it means we have set up such sustainable ecosystems for them that they really don't need us anymore. They simply need to do all of the things that we've taught them and help them set up. And that is best case scenario. I don't want to be in the you have to pay me forever mode. Certainly we can do that and we facilitate that a lot for customers who need that constant support. But I really want to set you up to be sustainable. I want you to be in a position where you can continue to support succeed even without us. That is the end goal for me. And that screams volumes versus an agency model or a consultant model.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: No, I can tell that you guys have been still like a very like, amazing culture. I mean, it's even like reflecting like on you, but there's like a big component around, like transparency, making sure that you're focusing on like the client to actually make sure that they get a good outcome. But like, even us, like, I love what you mentioned there, like, saying to your client, like, hey, like, we, we might not be the best fit for you, but I have someone else in my network that I know I'd probably do that first before you even look at working with us or another company for that matter. And I feel like again, like, with what you were saying, it's, it's so much adding some credibility to yourself. Like, you're not trying to get like a quick buck out of it. You're invested into like the success.
But I love what you said at the end as well, where you're trying to like, put yourself out of business in a way because that means, like, you've done your job correctly where the client doesn't need to work with you anymore. And I feel like a lot of people are going to have this continuous cycle where there's just trying to increase the LTV of the client. They're not focused on like the outcome against surround, like that fancy metric managing like more like Aum, for example. And I feel like that's, that's definitely something like a lot of agencies people struggle with. And I think we should be definitely pushing more for like a culture like AP is built here. So. No.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Oh, if we could push more for a culture of this in the marketing, advertising, digital ecosystem, I would be so happy. Zach. That would be like the penultimate goal.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: A good legacy to leave changing down the marketing space for a while here. But no, I love that. Tiffany, thank you so much for like, joining us here and for like, anyone that would want to get in touch with you. I know, like, I obviously reached out to you on like, LinkedIn, but is there any other platforms people should have a look at here or.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd love you to check us out on LinkedIn. Come visit our website@apiary digital.com and drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear what's working, what's not working, and just generally say hi.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: I love that. Great. Well, you've heard that, everyone. Head over to AP digital.com if you want to learn more to our listeners. If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You can also find more
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