Kerry Guard on Building MKG with No Shortcuts, No Silver Bullets

Overview:

In this episode, Elijah Drown converses with Kerry Guard, founder and CEO of MKG Marketing, about establishing a digital agency that emphasizes clarity, consistency, and care over quick fixes and flashy tactics. Kerry discusses the journey of transforming MKG from a state of reactive chaos to a powerful strategic entity. By focusing on data and messaging and setting realistic goals, Kerry reveals the systems and mindset essential for achieving sustainable growth. This episode is a must-listen for founders, marketers, or team leaders seeking to streamline their go-to-market strategies, offering valuable insights into the benefits of taking a measured approach to scaling.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:00

And then when they plateau, and going back to the data, clear results, if the data plateaus and you're not seeing any more lift, then you can say, okay, maybe it's time to bring in ads, to get outside into a broader audience and start layering into this.

Elijah Drown 0:15

Today's guest is Kerry Guard, just in case you haven't guessed, CEO and co-founder of MKG, and digital agency that is focused on cybersecurity, SaaS and B2B growth. She steered campaigns at Microsoft. Bacardi, publicist, the publicist, thank you. I gotta learn new words. And Mac, of course, providing her skills to lead in delivering MKG to seven figures pipeline lifts for series A to C, and building long-term SEO and paid media programs that consistently exceed ROI benchmarks. And if you call my bullshit, I'm here to prove you wrong. Don't worry the real deal, I must say. And of course, we're here for the master class and growth, real conversations, real stuff going on with Kerry. Hello, Hi and welcome. You're too kind, yeah, well, you pay me. I have to say nice.

Kerry Guard 1:08

You don't have to say anything. You are very good at speaking your mind.

Kerry Guard 1:17

You do balance out. Well,

Elijah Drown 1:21

Working well, yeah, but I also like to speak my mind while being respectful. I hope sometimes I forget to be that it just comes out, right? It's like, ah, we've been there, done that. So, yeah. Have you ever had any times where you can't think of a client scenario?

Kerry Guard 1:36

Think of where I did it with the team. How do you where's the retractable more recently than I'd like, Okay, we're going there. Here we go. I got I went off script. Yeah, no. So I totally went off script and I muddled my words. We are very much about proactive communication, one of our favorite phrases, thanks to the prolific reader Mike Krass, is slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. And being a marketing leader myself, I have my own direct clients, and I was in the thick of panic, as so many of us find ourselves. And I turned around to my team, and I was looking for what, I defined as urgency of like, I'm in panic mode. I'm freaking out. I'm looking for like people, for people to not panic, but like have a sense of a thing, and it's so not. It's by design, for very good reasons. We never want to operate in a sense of urgency, because then it creates random acts of marketing and for us to make colossal mistakes. And so being more thoughtful and proactive and getting out ahead of things versus being in that urgent place that I was in is like, not what we're about. So I went off script, I said some things the team, and I was like, Can I, is there a Be Kind Rewind button? Or week, you know, Blockbuster here helps the star out.

Elijah Drown 3:26

So the learnings, everybody's going through stuff. You panic. You're running the business. It's the whole thing. The weight of it's on your shoulders, and you're going, guys, I'm sorry. I'm a human being. Did they forgive you? Or did they just leave the firm?

Kerry Guard 3:38

Well, my lovely account director team, my agency leadership committee team did exactly what they were supposed to do and stepped in and said in like, I've never received feedback from anyone with such absolute kindness, accountability and kindness, where they said, here are the things that are that are not working, and the these weren't their words, but me reading between the lines of being a founder, essentially the chaos you are causing. We would like to support you and reduce the chaos. And so they came up with the most eloquent solution ever, which is actually treating me like a client. So I'm too close to the team, I'm too close to the clients, and I need a buffer, AKA a glorious account person who knows how to manage both of us, manage me as the client, and manage the team in all of their expertise, and then meld the two beautifully, so nobody quit, because thank you to my ALC team for stepping in and putting that in place. And it's been awesome, like it's just been an absolute dream. My calendar is lighter, I'm able to think clearly. I'm able to give them better direction that's more proactive of what I'm seeing, and then allowing them to work together to figure out solutions. It's, yeah, it's, it's been awesome.

Elijah Drown 5:14

Done a lot of refining, even come up to a few pillars that we're working on, messaging and positioning side in the marketing, you have clear results, systems that work connect channels, and even senior strategy that doesn't need diapers and babysitting. It's kind of nice. It's a nod to what's going on in the industry, unfortunately. But here we are trying to be better, do better, and actually be that sounding resource that people actually are begging for. Just do the work. I don't want to do all these things. Just tell me what I need to do. Tell me what my team is going on, and tell me when I get more business and I can collect a paycheck, that's all. And maybe you can give me a few ideas, Kerry in this little pillar power play, as I call it, to bring home clear results and get you thinking it doesn't have to be perfect. I just want to get in the mind to Kerry and figure out that's not perfect. It gives people inspiration to kind of come up with this stuff and the kind of iterate and have some fun. Are you up for it? Rock and ride? That's the new slogan. I love it. So for clear results, is one of them. I'm curious. Why are clear, transparent metrics a must-have for founders today?

Kerry Guard 6:19

Because you have to know where you were to, where you're going, so looking at trending month over month, and then looking to forecast for the next, you know, three, 6,12, months. I think a lot of the times, founders tend to throw No offense. Sorry. Love you all, I swear. But they tend to throw numbers up against the wall, saying, we just need to make $5 million, yeah, quick ones, yeah, you're at 2 million. Where do you expect us to pull 3 million out of thin air? Right? Like there needs to be a sense of creating goals and KPIs based off of what was to what could be, versus just throwing, you know, a number at the wall and telling your team to go figure it out that's.

Elijah Drown 7:07

There’s only so much PPC in the world that Google has to offer you, and to two and a half times your revenue in a year on ad play is kind of bananas.

Kerry Guard 7:19

So, yeah, bananas. Yeah. You need a system. You need to jump ahead. Yes, you need numbers. Know where you were and know, then forecast where you're going.

Elijah Drown 7:28

Like a lovely messaging connoisseur, you're already segwaying to the system that works because you've you've learned that I've told you things in order. Does a solid system actually fuel smarter, faster growth, or is it just a word that, a buzzword, that kind of is, man, nothing.

Kerry Guard 7:46

You got to build on itself. So you got to get the foundation down in terms of your what, your positioning, your messaging, your branding, build that into your website, and then how you build the channels out to capture it and then grow, right? But if you immediately go try and build brand or demand without having that strong foundation, you're just you're an open you're a sink, right? You don't have a stopper in that sink, and it's just draining, so you have to take a beat, and it feels really hard. That's why slow is smooth, and smooth as fast is so important, because you have to take a minute to build that connected tissue, that connected system at the bottom that then you can build on top of, and build on top of and build on top of and then feed. So I just did this working with a client. We have a solid foundation now. We got our website going about our petitioning and messaging. We got Google bringing in exactly what it can bring in across all the different from Google My Business to local service, ads to paid search. We're going to try some other avenues there, but Google is basically humming. And we got organic social going. We got newsletters happening. We have all the foundational pieces. And now we get to go higher and broader to start building that trust sooner. But you can't just all of a sudden go buy a print ad and hope it's going to make it's going to get the job done right, like, you have to have all of these things building on top of each other towards that moment of being able to make those bigger splashes.

Elijah Drown 9:27

And I think you helped the team save themselves from the panic of just going lipstick on a pig and just rebranding all the pretty stuff on the front end. Like, hey, we're going, we're pretty again, we have, I don't know, digital makeup, if I may say that, because it makes me look pretty too. And then you go through the ads, and then the logos and the branding, and like, Hey, we're new, we're exciting. We're going to make loads of money. And you're like, Ah, no, you forgot all the things I told you about. Remember that session? Remember? No, okay, we'll try again. Here we are. It's nice. We. A crazy version of everything that happens on the daily. It's a good time.

Kerry Guard 10:05

Nobody wants to do the hard work of positioning and messaging because it's slow

Elijah Drown 10:09

And yeah, it's not the quick wins, it's not the low-hanging fruit that you love to talk about.

Kerry Guard 10:14

It'll make everything else go so much faster, though. Oh my gosh.

Elijah Drown 10:18

I’m surprised how many businesses still have pillars that don't talk to each other, like you have marketing and sales. And how many people are talking they should get together. Like, isn't this natural? People are hanging out in the conversations on the podcast. They're saying, I just go over to the kitchen because sales is right there, and I kind of Hello. What's next is there a product rebrand that we can do or re-shift or launch, and maybe that's more important than we really recognize. Is there an approach for connected channels so powerful in today's landscape? Do you have any ideas?

Kerry Guard 10:54

For SEO and digital ads in particular, making sure that while your SEO is a long game. It just is. You got to build so much credibility with Google around what your core terms are and what you know and why you to show up in both SEO and GEO, and in the meantime, using paid ads to get up top and in front of people, it is so helpful, but you don't want to cannibalize the two. So here's a great example, working with a client who does it's a little off the beaten path, because it's my client. So and I work with more smaller businesses outside on more of the it's an estate planning client, and they're Michigan, and they do local service ads, but they also have a huge, strong presence on Google. My business, when you go to maps and you go estate planner near me in two counties, they have really strong presence. So when I run local service ads, my SEO for for the maps tanks, so I don't need to run ads in those counties, because SEO does it for me. So I can save my pennies and go move the money over here into other counties where we're not as strong because we don't have a physical presence, but can still help families through a virtual engagement from anywhere in Michigan. So knowing that and having those two channels talk to each other, those the SEO side and the ad side, we're able to make sure that one doesn't cannibalize the other.

Elijah Drown 12:32

I noticed real quick that a lot of people businesses don't use the organic strategy in the Google Maps my business, some business owners will take pictures of their office or share things in regular basis. It's almost like YouTube community, where you can actually post things like a social media feed, but so many people don't do that. Would that help your play? Or is that something completely you're kind of doing this, but it's maybe it's two different pillars that kind of sort of work together, but not really like distant cousins, is that more it?

Kerry Guard 13:02

So organic is important. And this is another great example of where organic, social is really important for ads. If you're talking about something like meta or LinkedIn, having a really strong social presence for validation while running ads is critical. You can't just run ads on LinkedIn and hope for the best, because their chances are they're not even going to click on your ad. They're going to go validate that you your real company, and they're going to go look at your LinkedIn profile, they're going to go look at your website, they're going to go search you across the web. They're going to go to ChatGPT and start asking questions ads as a Brand Builder, to remind people that you exist or what you do if they didn't know that you were there and did it. But chances are they're not going to see it like a buy, especially from a B-to-B perspective. They're not going to click on that ad. They want to make sure that it's a real company. So you need to have a social presence, posting on a regular basis, engaging with your audience on your social channels, not just as as both the owner, Founder, CEO, even some sales folks have great social presences on LinkedIn and then their channel, their profile for their company, also has real, you know, posts on a regular basis, engaging with the community, and then you run ads, right? So you need all three of those things working together. And I would not even start doing ads until you had those first two humming and then when they plateau, and going back to the data, clear results. If the data plateaus or you're not seeing any more lift, then you can say, okay, maybe it's time to bring in ads, to get outside into a broader audience, and start layering into this.

Elijah Drown 14:52

Your analogy reminds me of the real-life billboards and bus posters or ads, right? You see it all over, but you can't. Click or do anything, and I'm not taking my QR code because I'm even on a motorcycle. I'm not saying click, click, get trouble. It's not good. But yeah, gives me that sense. Not only is it important to power the teams, but what kind of things do you kind of focus on to get them confident enough to do their own thing without having to worry if they're going to mess it all up? The team mess it all up. I know they won't, but there's the worry from new hires or something like that. How, how far do you let somebody go while you're empowering them to give yourself the confidence that's going to do the thing? Because people a leadership often has that need of sense of control or a little bit right to they want to know the pulse and what's going on. They don't want to just kind of let somebody go so far that they're on their own island, so to speak, or acting like their own business. They want to be able to empower them. But is there a balance between the two for your own confidence so you can measure their ROI or or is there an option to kind of create that, that barrier? Hey, this is the sweet spot of empowerment, and let them do their own thing. Or does that just happen naturally?

Kerry Guard 16:05

Well, there's a sense of focus that everybody needs in terms of again, coming back to clear results, so making sure that you lay out clear KPIs of what each person needs after you know, we just did this internally, little marketing in public. Here we create a scorecard. I just sent you a lovely loom video. Elijah, you're welcome. Where we create a funnel. I It's very simple, right? We don't have a lot going on. We're very focused on LinkedIn and podcasting and content that way. And so we don't have a ton of channels where we need to have this gigantion on way of measuring everything, right? We just need to know. How many impressions are we getting across the board? What's the engagement like? How is that trickling down into conversations and DMS? How are we getting people on the phone? And are we able to have, you know, sales calls from that? So just a really simple funnel, which, when you get to see numbers and to say, Okay, this, I'm responsible for this number. So if I'm responsible for people registering for our monthly meetup, and I have a number now, I have, I have a row that I have to fill in on a weekly basis to say how many people I got into that, it's going to put more emphasis on what I need to be focused on. So I send an email every Friday to our guest who is on the show and invite them to come to our VIP meetup. And sometimes I get a little busy, kind of forget to send that email, or I send it out, kind of like the week after, and it's just not that important to me, but now I have a line item. Now I gotta fill that in every week, and so now I have focus on what my priorities need to be to make sure that I can hit my numbers. And so the team has that.

Elijah Drown 17:57

You don't want those touch points become stale, because if it's not important to you, it won't be important to them.

Kerry Guard 18:03

Yeah, exactly. And I, you know that I have scorecards for all of my clients, and I just sort of happened to forget to, like, show the team, because I didn't have an account director who was helps, you know, spearheading the whole operation. And so when I showed my scorecard to my account director, who then took that internally to the team. They were like, This is amazing. We have clear numbers and KPIs, we get to get after right. And now they're fired up and ready to go. And so they know their channel, they know their expertise, and now they know what I'm on the hook for, and they're ready to get after it. So I think that's really the way you keep people sort of focused, as you give them those clear boundaries. This is the budget. These are the KPIs. And this is what you know, depending on the client. This is what's most important to them in terms of what they're selling these. This is the ICP. This is what the ICP buys, and this is where we want to what part of the market we want to capture. You give them those clear guidelines and boundaries, and then let them get after it right, and then come back and hold them accountable to the numbers of how are we doing with this?

Elijah Drown 19:11

You had to be accountable for the numbers a couple of years ago, you had a couple big clients, and you're on the verge of bankruptcy. Scary for any founder like 15, what is it? Twelve years in the business and with the company, all of a sudden you could have went belly up. Was that because of the lack of accountability, measures and systems in place? Or do you think there was another reason why you kind of all of a sudden found yourself into kind of financial despair with the company?

Kerry Guard 19:38

So it was threefold. One is we never figured out our own marketing. We're still trying to crack the code, which is why we started this year marketing in public to show it's terrible, isn't it? Yeah, it's so hard we, you know, for people to sort of, quote, unquote, eat their own dog food and do the thing for themselves. The same time, we didn't know how to do the. The hard stuff of positioning and messaging for ourselves until we've learned how to do it for our clients. So we've learned a lot in the last few years, and now we're in a place where we have interesting, well, people are telling us this is interesting, I guess we'll find out, Elijah, but some interesting positioning and messaging of where we're headed as an agency. Could I still use that word partner for now.

Elijah Drown 20:22

For now and other people have started sending signals while we're building in public. They're resonating and giving us the feedback and saying, Okay, this makes sense for what we're trying to get out there. So stay tuned. We're getting there.

Kerry Guard 20:35

Some programs happening. Something's happening. Yeah. So we've been very reliant on our of growing through our network. So we could, at one point, it may have been that point, trace all of our clients at the time back to our very first client of VMware, back in 2013 so we started with VMware. They left and went to another company, brought us along. We met new people. They all left and brought us along. And it was just this beautiful tree of how we've grown the company over the last 12, 13, years through that, going back to that one that one client, and so for the last few years, we've been very focused on, how do we get visible and get noticed outside of our existing client base? So that was one challenge. Another challenge was we didn't have a great feedback system. I mentioned, you know, that my ALC team pulled me aside and with care, kindness and respect and accountability, told me what was up, right? We didn't have that three years ago, and we had an account director who didn't feel like she had a voice to say that the account wasn't going well, and so out of the blue, our biggest client let us go with no notice. We were renewing the contract for the following year, we had a client concentration problem, and lo and behold, we lost our biggest client. The good news is we were definitely nowhere near bankrupt. We had over six months. We had about four months of runway, and then I reorged the company, and I got to six months of runway. And then we went and might as partner my cross, went after his network and shook all of the trees and all of the land, and we built partnerships, and we just got to work. And then the other thing we did was Mike and I haven't worked in the business in a long time. We hadn't had our own clients. We hadn't been client-facing. We had a wonderful account team. We had great experts doing amazing work, and we kind of looked at each other and said, We need to get billable. We need to bring in business into the into the company, and we need to get billable. So what could we do? And that's when we started being fractional Marketing Leaders. My very first client was this really super cool company called Avalanche Fusion. They are building micro fusion reactors out in Seattle through my friend Kate. She brought me in. I got to build their website at the time, I got to help them with some initial positioning and messaging. Originally, they were called Avalanche Dot Energy. I was like, but you're a fusion company. You don't have fusion in here anywhere, like we need to rank for that. I got them on the map from an SEO perspective, wonderful, wonderful opportunity. So cool. And from there, I went and built a portfolio before clients right now, so, and that's about 10% of our revenue, and we're looking to say, okay, like, this is really awesome. Can't be Kerry all the time, but this is definitely an opportunity to bring in more fractional type folks who can plug into the system of needing whatever channels they need to activate, whether that's web dev, email, social content, SEO, digital ads, and start to build that engine that we talked about earlier and those connected channels, so that they too, can have a growth engine like I've been able to build for the last few years for some of my clients.

Elijah Drown 23:55

That growth engine is misunderstood. I think a lot of people put a lot of for lack of better expression, voodoo magic behind paid ads. And they're like, this is a lot of hoo ha and crap in I think a lot of people in the industry, unfortunately, SEO experts, let's label them. They position a lot of snake oil in the industry and gives SEO and paid a bad rap. But do you think there, that's the misconception founders have, or is there anything specific, specific that you run against in your sales calls, against the impressions and ideologies behind the paid media play?

Kerry Guard 24:32

There are two big misconceptions. I would say. One is that digital ads is a faucet. I guess they kind of go hand in hand, but digital ads is going to save the day. Let's just throw money at it. The meat, as soon as you start spending money, the leads are going to roll in and all will be gravy. And that is just not the case. It's again, building from the bottom up, right? So where are those low hanging keywords that people are searching for. You right now that need the thing right now. And you probably think you have this huge market to draw from. And I'm telling you right the people who are searching for your product and the need right now is so small, comparatively to what you probably think is out there. And I mean, I can't say it enough, the people who are searching for what you solve right now is one thing, and you want to go capture those people, but it is not going to save the day, because then you got to start building on that. What are the broader keywords? Not broad match, please don't do that. But broader keywords that are going to that, where people are researching, they kind of have a problem. It's starting to prickle. They're like now trying to figure out if there's a solution out there that might help them with this thing. What are their companies out there? Let's do some comparisons. Let's figure out what competitors are happening if it's in the B to B space, especially from a SaaS perspective, you're looking at six to 18 months before these kinds of folks are going to make a decision, and there's a much bigger pool of those guys, especially if they're gearing up to put their budgets together for the following year, right? And those are the people where you want to be in front of them, and you want to help them make that decision and be part of it's like, by the time they're ready to come to the sales table, they have three people in mind, and they have very clear questions on how, trying to figure out who they're going to go with. They've already done their homework. And so those keywords, those landing pages, of helping them do their homework, is where the messy middle is that people don't want to play. They're like, this isn't working. Not yet. Hello, yeah. Not yet, right? And then you can layer in, even you know, your branded keywords on top of that, because you want your competitors bidding on that. You can layer in some display.

We're dabbling with p max for some of our clients, and trying to figure out how to get that humming, because it's a little bit that's definitely a black box, and you can spend more than you should there for sure, there's demand gen ads, there's YouTube ads, and there's a whole host of things that you can build on to go build brand and bring people sort of to that well, of wanting to do the research, but you have to build up. And there is no silver bullet, and you don't just turn it on. And magic happens. The same misconception in terms of the faucet is that you can turn it off and on. Oh, we just we need to recalibrate internally. And so can we just turn ads off? We kind of need to save budget right now. You can do that. But then, when you turn it back on, you're going to re-kick off the whole learning process, and you're going to lose months of trying to get that engine back up and running. So it's better to sort of dial it down to a low hum of exactly what's working, and then you can dial it back up again. But do not if you can help it, just turn it on.

Elijah Drown 27:52

Similar to social algorithms. If you take the summer off because you want to go on hiatus in the jungle somewhere and do some sort of a big, long siesta in meditation, and you come back and go, Why doesn't anybody love me? Same idea. So, yeah, who knew the idea behind an OS? Creating an OS for an agency, a partner or a marketing engine called MKG? Is that just a skin on top of Asana?

Kerry Guard 28:19

No, I mean, Asana is so just for folks who are listening. Asana is a product management tool, kind of like Monday. JIRA base camp was the or, I guess, the original, we've used Asana for, I don't know, eight years now. And the reason why it's really hard to leave Asana is because of all of the systems and processes we've built into it, so we probably could pick up and move those, because so much of its proprietary to what to how we operate. But there's workflows. It's connected to other channels. It's it's sort of the heartbeat, I guess, of how we run the agency, but how we operate Asana in terms of our clients plugging into it. So normally, one of the challenges that I think marketers have when they bring on an agency is they immediately want to get them into Slack, like, can we add you to our Slack channel? And the answer for us is no, because that creates reactivity, which we try and steer clear of, because you have to be so methodical in your marketing these days and not throw spaghetti up against the wall. Then you end up random marks marketing. Then you're like, why is nothing working? Because you didn't build slow, smooth and smooth as fast up into the growth engine. You just tried to, you just went into Slack and said, we're not getting enough phone calls. Do something about it, right? Well, even if we were to do something about it, you're not going to feel it for a few days, and that's and then it's going to be the wrong people outside of the ICP, and you're going to be mad about that. So it's like, no, we don't join your Slack channel. But what we do is we bring you into our asana and we give you a board. Board. That's your board, where you can see exactly where you're getting deliverables when you're getting them, and allows us to communicate asynchronously, not waiting for a status meeting, bi-monthly, right? Which is a waste of everybody's time, where you can actually see, okay, they're stuck here. Let me comment to that. Let me get them this thing they need. Let me give it to them in Asana that'll go into our workflows. The team will see it and be able to use it keep the project moving. And so it's yes, Asana is, is the heartbeat, but all the systems and processes of how we plug clients in, onboard them, get into their systems from like an analytics standpoint, and then kick off on our side and get the engine, sort of moving, passing things back to clients so that they can go execute from an SEO perspective. Or maybe we need a message, new messaging for digital ads can all happen asynchronously without having to wait for a meeting, and then when the meeting does come, it's strategic. Here's what happened in the last month based off of all the great work we've done together. Here's what we're seeing. Here's what we're seeing. Here's what we've already done based off of that data. And here's where we'd like to take things we're looking at, like a month, two months down the road. Here's how we would need your help. What do you think about this? Does this fit with what you're trying to do? And that's where the babysitting piece gets thrown out the window. Yeah, right. You don't have to poke the bear. You don't have to wonder when you're going to get the thing. You don't have to tell the team strategically what you want. I actually learned that the hard way, part of the problem and the urgency and the problems I was creating, the chaos, was because I was trying to solve it. I was showing up with solutions that were not the right solution, or the problem existed, sort of thing. No, I was in the thick of the problem, but I wasn't telling the team about the problem. I was just telling them to go do these things, and they were like, but why are we doing these things? And do these things really make sense? But it's Kerry, and we probably should go do the things, because she's the CEO here and signs my paycheck, right? So, this way, now that I have an account director and I'm part of the system in a way that I'm the client, I can say, Here's the problem I'm facing. Here's the data you have access to: the dashboard, the score card, and this week feels really low. Just sent them an email last week. I was like, things were really quiet this week. Here's why I think things were quiet. But can you tell me? And is there any way to squeeze this lemon? And they came back with solutions, right?

Elijah Drown 32:19

Sounds like so between the I guess the sweet spot for Santa and the culture that is taught within mkg is in between email and real-time DMS. And the neat thing about this is that I've heard no one internally will allow vendors or clients or anyone outside to come into their project management tool and have near real-time access to the information that is humming along and going. It's almost like when you go to I don't know, financial institution, they have a bunch of customer notes. You're not allowed to see those. But what if you people were be more respectful, they'd be more thoughtful, they'd be more proactive, and they'd actually care about what people read on the other end. And that's kind of what's going on with the mkgos. It's pretty cool, except about it for dates. I'm going to talk real quick about how I take the Google Sheets and help with the AI strategy in the social media. So I come up with a social media strategy. I plunk that into Google Sheets. I built a script that hits the Asana API, adds my tasks, automatic, automatically if I may, and then assigns it, and it's ready in the calendar for me next month. That sort of thing is kind of cool. Yeah, it's there. It's in other places like JIRA and Trello and others, but it's how you interact, and then you have that whole ecosystem to make things happen be more efficient. Everybody, I think, is generally happy with how it performs, could be.

Kerry Guard 33:51

Then I can review it, right? So you get all those posts up, and then I have a task to review them every Friday, and I go in and I add a pictures, and I add commentary, and then we can collaborate asynchronously on it, without again, having to wait for a meeting or putting another thing on the calendar.

Elijah Drown 34:06

Actually, if I can create a task and get you excited about something, you're probably going to respond in the same day, versus waiting for a meeting because you need that full hour of time, you're like, Okay, I got five minutes. I gotta check out this thing. That's really cool. I'll do it, and then I'll go back later, when I have more time, and you'll get through it faster it people don't realize you don't need an email that should have been an email or a meeting or whatever it's called. You just need to do the thing and assign somebody to get to it when I get to it. Usually, if it's done properly in the right way, they'll get to it faster than you'd ever dream of magic. It's easy, and then you make it sound so easy, maybe we can, we drop the T's to the community here. Is that allowed? Or am I just going to create some sort of cliffhanger that nobody's likes? Is that inside joke? I don't get it.

Kerry Guard 34:52

Well, let's see what happens. We don't know until we try. Yeah.

Elijah Drown 34:56

So Santa now from the project management tool, going to create. Create a pilot of creating the, I guess, spin-off of the monthly VIP community. People don't always have time to attend, just like we talked about. But what happens if we create a task and projects where people can communicate asynchronously and asynchronously in real time, almost real time, we'll call it almost real time, and we can have conversations, we can learn, we can share, we can grow, kind of like a community, like mighty networks or circle or heartbeat, but in kind of a forum style where we're just kind of assigning tasks to each other, and in the comments, we're just threading out and having fun to think of the work. Yeah, I think,

Kerry Guard 35:38

I think that's what I wanted to show, is how you can, you know, unfortunately, we, we law, had lost a few prospects because they were worried we weren't going to be meeting with them as often. And they're like, well, we're not going to be collaborating. And it's actually so the opposite. We collaborate so much more. It's just asynchronously, through Asana, people are ending this meeting forever, everything. Oh, meetings forever, and it gives people time to think so like, if you create a card in Asana of this great idea you have, I have this idea. I want to vet it with you guys. Here's the idea. Here's what I'd like to understand, and here's the resources of all the things that you can go look at, these documents, these presentations, whatever I've pulled together for doing positioning and messaging. Here's here's the resources I love. For you guys to check this out and in the comments. Just let me know what you think. Right? If that happens in Slack or circle or whatever like, then it's these weird threads, and you just lose all context, because then other people are adding to it, versus it being a card that is yours. People get to add their ideas, and then you get to take that kind of with you, almost like, in a way, that you could create your own archive of all of your ideas. They don't have to die in, right the conversation. They can go live on you can go get it done. And that's really what I was looking forward to. This of like, really being able to show people how you can asynchronously collaborate, get ideas on paper, get feedback and get it. Go get it after it.

Elijah Drown 37:02

You could even take, like, the card is, like the pinned comment, right? It's great. It's always there. And you can take the asana information, export it, probably pop it into AI and be like, hey, I need some suggestions or ideas in industry research as an expert, based on all these comments and feedback from other people that are, you know, titles, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think is a common point? What do you think is a pain point? Or some ideas how to solution for this and bring this back to my team? Done. And the nice thing is, even if I find a podcast, I don't want to wait till a monthly meeting comes up or an email I want to do Hey, I'm really excited about this podcast I learned. I want to share it with you now. Here are the things you learned. Go listen to it. Tell me what you think. And that sort of thing is the magic, kind of like what you do for the remote teams we have at MKG, a full remote culture, is that kind of, this sort of idea and thinking, what is motivate you to have that full remote sort of entity that goes on because a lot of corporations are trying to force employees back to the office.

Kerry Guard 38:03

Please stop. I had somebody at tennis the other week asked me, well, if they're not in an office and you're all the way over here, how do you know people are getting work done

Elijah Drown 38:12

our MKGos, hello.

Kerry Guard 38:15

Oh my gosh. Are we still having this conversation five years after COVID, and we are, and it's because people haven't figured out what we have in terms of working remotely. It's more than in a project management tool; you need systems and processes and what we call SOPs, standard operating procedures, behind the scenes that everybody adheres to, because if nobody adheres to them, then the system falls apart. So every time we bring a contractor in, every time we hire a new employee, they get onboarded into the stand, the SOPs of how it operates, so that they follow the protocol, so that the ship keeps moving. Because if somebody doesn't complete a task on time, then there's a whole trickle-down effect of other people getting their work done. And so everybody has to understand that. And if it doesn't mean that shit doesn't happen, people run into roadblocks all the time that they didn't see coming, right? That's fine. We have an SOP on how you comment to say, Ah, I ran into this issue. This isn't going to get done today. Can I get a task tomorrow with this many points? Let me finish this up, start, you know and, and I'll get this done tomorrow. First thing.

Elijah Drown 39:25

I have right guilty of doing the A, h, h, h, exclamation point and tagging our a DS, and they just kind of like, yeah, that you should have stopped saying yes, stop it, because velocity points and you have to track how much time things are taking. And I don't want you to burn out, because we actually like you. You know, that happens?

Kerry Guard 39:43

Yeah, yeah. It's really important to it's how we keep the work-life balance. It's how we keep people from burning out. It's how we, you know, work asynchronously. To say, Please don't work into the night. If this thing isn't done yet, it's not done, let us know that it's not done. We'll reorchestrate behind the scenes, and we'll let the. Client, no proactive communication, and we'll get this done when it makes sense, to make sure we deliver it properly instead of half assed and incomplete.

Elijah Drown 40:07

And make sure that Series B, Series C founders aren't doing things half assed. Do you have any advice for scaling their marketing plan? Because a lot of them are just coming into this like, I'm supposed to be a marketing lead. Now somebody said, I have funny memes on socials. I'm a natural. What do I do? You have any tips?

Kerry Guard 40:25

Understand that marketing is not going to swoop in and save the day, so the sooner you can find a partner or a consultant who can either coach you on what you need to be doing, or if you're like, I don't have a knack for this. I have no desire to do this. This is exhausting, and you can find the funds to bring in a fractional marketing leader. I The sooner the better, because, like we said, earlier, the positioning and messaging is crucial and takes time to cultivate. We have interviews that have to happen between all the team members. We have to hear your story of why you got started, because chances are you forgot now we need to remind you, because that's going to be the crux of a lot of what we do. There has to be branding that goes with that positioning, investing. You're looking at three to six months just to get the foundation that nobody has seen yet in a place where we can start asking questions of your the network to see, are we on it's like what we're doing right now. We've been working on our positioning and messaging for like six months, and now Elijah is just getting out there and starting to say, How's this sound? Are we an agency? Are we a partner? MKG, operating system? Is that landing with anybody? How y'all feeling about this?

Elijah Drown 41:43

Because it's not all about just us. It's about how our clients and customers perceive us.

Kerry Guard 41:47

Do we have a thing here? We're not just going to launch the market and say, look at us. Get ready, right? If this isn't resonating with you, we want to run away from it, right? So that takes time, and the sooner you can get somebody in the door. There's some amazing brand people out there. We have them on our show who can help you, but get some consultants in there, find people you vibe with, and figure out what you should be saying and how you should be saying it. And then you can figure out, are you the founder LED? Are you gonna get out on socials? Are you gonna do the thing? Are you gonna bring people in to help you, who are gonna take over doing the thing of talking about it? Then you can figure out what your go-to-market strategy is. But first and foremost, figure out what it is you're going to say and how you're going to say it.

Elijah Drown 42:36

You are clearly passionate about what you're doing, and for you to be saying you're doing anything else, I think you're bananas. So for you passion, MKG 100% this is what you should be doing. But outside of work, people don't know what you should be doing or what you love to do. Well, what brings you joy? Anything particular or do you'd like to just work all day, all night?

Kerry Guard 43:00

I do love what I do. I can't help it. I chose I'm a founder. I feel you, founders. We are working day, morning, noon, night, even if we're not at our computers, our brains are going however. I do like a good brain break. They are important, and my favorite brain break is tennis. I cannot think about anything else while I'm playing tennis. If I do, I do not hit the ball well, and things go horribly wrong. So I get out every Tuesday and on the weekends with my son, and we hit the ball. And I just, I just love being out there. And I could be out there all the time if I, if I had the time.

Elijah Drown 43:32

Maybe something someday I hear, yeah, summer is always a great time to do it. Or maybe there's an indoor place in the winter, and then you don't have to go out in the cold, and, you know, shiver to pieces when you're on an island. But Kerry, this has been an amazing opportunity for you to share your MKG os, your deep moments of struggle and what ifs. And of course, the roadmap we have magic making work-life balance real, which is kind of cool, especially being remote. So you heard it here first, and if you love this chat, you'll probably want to binge on these episodes too. We have episode 12, scaling smart from seed to Series C. Episode 27 has some AI driven growth beyond the buzzwords. And 33 for Tea Time has remote first secrets from top CMO, so why is this culture still pretty good? There's more than Kerry just saying it. We have the details in the show notes, so check them out. Thank you so much, Kerry for sharing your roadmap. Mkg, OS, remote first agency. And of course, that near-whoa moment when you had to step up and be billable, you're showing how to make work-life balance real and how culture matters. If you love this chat, you'll love to see these episodes too. Episode 12, scaling smart from C to Series C. 27 AI-led growth beyond the buzzwords, and 33 of course, other people are talking about remote first secrets, top CMOs. It's not just Kerry that loves remote work, I promise. And we'll have all the details and links to the show notes. Check them out. I'm Elijah, your marketing director. This podcast is powered by MKG. Of course, we manage the details you capture the market. I am too sexy for my microphone, and we'll see you soon. I'm Elijah your Marketing Director. This podcast is powered by MKG Marketing. You manage the details we capture the market. I'm too sexy for my microphone, and I will see you soon.