[EO San Francisco] Building Challenger Brands and Fractional Marketing Teams With Scott Kabat

Scott Kabat is the Founding Partner and CEO of 621 Consulting, which provides fractional marketing leadership to help companies accelerate growth and navigate strategic transitions. With a team of over 350 seasoned marketers, 621 Consulting offers services, including go-to-market planning, demand generation, revenue operations, and brand positioning. Before founding 621, Scott held executive roles such as CMO at One Medical and Prezi, led the launch of Flip Video (acquired by Cisco), co-founded the edtech startup Knowmia, and held marketing positions at Cisco and Clorox.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:08] Scott Kabat shares how coaching swim teams as a teenager shaped his leadership and discipline skills
[4:56] Building a challenger brand to disrupt an established product category
[7:16] Strategies for balancing product simplicity with innovation during development
[9:05] Challenges of integrating a startup culture into a large corporate environment
[15:07] Difficulties in monetizing edtech platforms and exploring exit strategies
[21:25] The role of fractional CMOs in guiding companies through inflection points and transitions
[25:08] Building flexible marketing teams that support diverse work-life priorities

In this episode…

In today’s competitive landscape, building a brand that stands out isn’t just about flashy campaigns; it’s about challenging the status quo and forging deeper connections with customers. But how do companies navigate this process while assembling the right marketing leadership to scale effectively?

According to Scott Kabat, a seasoned marketing strategist and entrepreneur, the key lies in crafting a clear challenger narrative that resonates emotionally while delivering simplicity and value. He highlights that too many companies get trapped in complexity, diluting their message and missing their moment. By focusing on what makes a brand likable in an otherwise unlikable category, leaders can differentiate themselves and inspire loyalty. Scott also emphasizes the growing importance of fractional marketing teams in bridging skill gaps and providing strategic direction during pivotal growth phases.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran sits down with Scott Kabat, Founding Partner and CEO of 621 Consulting, to discuss building challenger brands and leading fractional marketing teams. They explore how to align brand storytelling with business strategy, the benefits of fractional CMOs, and why marketers need to embrace experimentation. Scott also shares how his early career experiences shaped his leadership philosophy.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“We had a real commitment to thinking there was a way to democratize that.”
“A lot of the discipline was keeping the product really simple and building a brand that could really empower people to share their lives.”
“It was very important to us from the beginning not to operate like a transactional marketplace.”
“We want for our team — want to be an enabler for each of these people to make a living.”
“There’s something very energizing about getting to a point in your career where you step back.”

Action Steps

Define your brand’s challenger narrative clearly: Establishing a compelling story that differentiates your brand from competitors helps create emotional resonance and customer loyalty.
Leverage fractional marketing leadership for inflection points: Bringing in fractional CMOs during key growth phases provides strategic expertise without long-term overhead, enabling faster, smarter scaling.
Align marketing strategy with customer pain points: By focusing your marketing efforts on solving specific customer frustrations, you can increase relevance and drive stronger engagement.
Invest in building a flexible, high-trust marketing team: Empowering marketing professionals with autonomy and flexibility fosters innovation and increases retention among top talent.
Embrace experimentation and iteration in campaigns: Testing new ideas and rapidly adapting based on results ensures your marketing stays effective in fast-changing markets.

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Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:12

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before, the every week we feature smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. And you can check out the archives to see some of our episodes.

I am the Co-founder of Rise25, which is a company that helps B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done for you podcasts and content marketing. And this episode is brought to you by EO San Francisco, which is the Bay area chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of more than 20,000 influential business owners across 200 chapters, 60 countries. And if you are the founder, co-founder or controlling owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over seven figures a year in revenues and you want to connect with other like minded, successful entrepreneurs, EO is for you and you can learn more about us at eosnetwork.org And email us at admin@eosnetwork.org. All right.

My guest today is Scott Kabat. He is the Founding Partner and CEO at 621 Consulting, which he launched in 2017. The San Francisco Bay area built a community of over 300 fractional CMOs and marketing operators who provide strategic, operational and organizational guidance to companies that are navigating scale up and strategic transitions across various different industries. And prior to doing that, he served as CMO at One Medical Group, and he’s also held a number of different positions as CMO at Prezi. We also worked had a startup that went through Y Combinator, worked on the flip video brand.

If you remember that product, I had one. We’ll ask about that as well and hear about his whole journey. But Scott, I love always starting people with what they were like as a kid and any little side hustles that they had as a kid. And you said my side hustle was swim lessons growing up in North Carolina and making money teaching kids to not drown. Tell us about that.

Scott Kabat: 02:08

That’s right. Hey, John, good to be with you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So, yes.

Background I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was. Did not have great entrepreneurial vision as a kid. To be honest with you, I don’t think I was fairly cautious in my risk profile. I did get into swimming year round and that was my life for several years.

And you know, my sister and I, during the summers would just live at the pool, hang out with our friends there and practice all day. And eventually that led to getting a job as a coach, assistant coach, eventually head coach of the summer team that I used to compete on as a kid. And so through my teen years, yes, I coached about 100 kids age 5 to 18. That was a great learning experience and gave me a little bit of a preview of what it would be like to be a parent much later in life, and then to kind of side hustle, make some extra money. Before I went off to college, I taught swim lessons all day long in between practice.

And I mean really gratifying, really, really exhausting, you know? Yeah, in the bed, in the pool, not the bed, the pool, you know, holding little kids, you know, teaching them to put the face in the water, getting them to dive down and all that super fun. And it’s, you know, it’s neat to sometimes come across them and hear what they’re up to. They’re grown ups now.

John Corcoran: 03:34

Yeah, yeah. That’s so cool. It’s such a critical life skill too, right? It’s like it’s if you can prevent kids from drowning. It’s such a wonderful thing.

Scott Kabat: 03:44

That’s right. I will say that, you know, one of the things I learned from being a swimmer that I’ve carried with me in life and tried to impart in my kids, is just kind of losing yourself in the process and finding value in grinding away day after day. And I did take a lot of that, that kind of foundational experience. I wasn’t a very good swimmer when I started, and I’m learning from just grinding it. That was something that that taught me a degree of discipline I think I’ve used later on.

John Corcoran: 04:11

Yeah, it seems like you had you kind of threw yourself into a couple of different things. Athletics, swimming was a big part of your life, academics as well. I mean, you went to Penn and then Harvard, you got an MBA at Harvard and then became an entrepreneur after a number of years working in the corporate world. I want to talk about some of those different corporate stints along the way. So flip video for those who don’t know, was this super cool little device.

It was maybe around the time that USB was starting to take off, and we were kind of this tech transition from like using floppy disks of different sorts. And, and then they had this USB, so well, you can describe it a little, little cool little video device that could just plug straight into a computer.

Scott Kabat: 04:56

Yeah, look, that was an incredibly rewarding experience. And one of my business partners now is my old boss, the guy who hired me to to launch flip. And so I’ll tell you, just a quick backstory was came out of Harvard Business School at the height of the dotcom boom. And, you know, a lot of folks were going into, you know, what became, you know, Pets.com or, you know, various startups that flamed out. Some went to eBay and, you know, companies that made it.

I didn’t really have the the confidence to bet on myself. Then I felt like I really needed to learn and to cut my teeth. I was interested in marketing. I went and worked at Clorox for several years, kind of learning the fundamentals of brand marketing and what it means to own a PNL, and then eventually decided I was ready. Bad timing, right when I became a dad, to go leave and go to my first startup.

And flip was just an idea Then we had this notion that we could build a brand and launch it. And so I was there from the inception in terms, you know, everything from what are we going to name it? What’s the story we’re going to tell retailers, you know, Best Buy, Walmart, Costco, how are we going to sell this story to the press and explain why it’s new and different and not just another boring electronic, you know, the problem, if you go back in time, was that people would buy these fancy video cameras and then you can never get the video off like it would just you’d you’re just big special occasions, like your kid’s graduation ceremony. And it would sit in your closet. And we had a real commitment to thinking there was a way to democratize that.

But a lot of the discipline was keeping the product really simple and building a brand that could really empower people to share their lives. And this was right as YouTube was starting to take off and we became a vehicle to help democratize video. And so, yes, literally, you know, went from selling the first camcorder to three years later, we were the number one selling product in the category and were acquired by Cisco. But, you know, if you ask anyone from our team, I handpicked the folks on that brand marketing team and I would I would still go to war with them any day of the week. And this was, you know, almost 20 years later.

John Corcoran: 07:11

Was this was the product fully baked when you came in or was it still in development?

Scott Kabat: 07:16

We had a test market. So the prior incarnation of the company had been focused on single use imaging products, like, I don’t know if you remember, you could buy cameras like one time, use cameras, take them into the drugstore and they’d process it and give you a CD. So they the company had done that originally with the first version of a digital camera, which, you know, there were no one time used digital cameras, and they tried video and found that consumers were saying, hey, I wish I could keep this thing. So we had the idea of a product, it was still in development. And, you know, so we were working on the features and also figuring out like what’s what’s the brand going to be.

Everything we had done before was private label. So we had to bring that all to life and figure out how we were going to seed the grassroots without a whole lot of money to spend.

John Corcoran: 08:06

Well, it was such a cool. It was such a cool product. I mean, I remember having one and I didn’t have a lot of money back then, so I don’t remember the price point was, but like 130 bucks. Okay. Yeah.

So it wasn’t too expensive. I mean, I think I might have had it later in its life cycle. I think it had been around for a few years before I got one, but I just remember how cool it was to have something like that, because I grew up with a dad who had a camcorder. And you’re right, it was like this massive, heavy thing that you only got out.

Scott Kabat: 08:32

On your shoulder.

John Corcoran: 08:33

Soccer games and weddings, you’d get it around, you know, and then you’d you’d have to. Oh, wait, do we have a blank videotape lying around? Okay. We do. Okay, put that in.

And then you didn’t consume it as much. So what a cool, you know, time to be involved in that.

Scott Kabat: 08:46

So thank.

John Corcoran: 08:47

You. You go to Cisco. You’re there for a while after it’s acquired. What was it like going so you’d kind of gone corporate? Clorox to the startup ecosystem for a few years and then back to corporate.

You’re in a big corporate environment again. What were you like mentally at that point in time, being back in the corporate world?

Scott Kabat: 09:05

Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, Cisco had had such an enormous machine and global footprint, and they were were so well oiled in terms of how they acquired and integrated companies. We were a little bit of a strange acquisition for them, because their core DNA was an enterprise, and we were primarily a consumer business. And the whole ethos was that they wanted to bring in a team that knew consumer could help really grow that. So we operated semi pretty autonomously for a while.

So it was really working with the core folks that came in. I think that, you know, over time it just proved to be a mismatch for a number of reasons. The market changed, You know, some of the dynamics of Cisco’s priorities changed. And, you know, it was it was a painful period, I think, for everyone on both sides, because we ultimately came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t really a match. But, you know, amazing learning experience.

And I learned a lot from just seeing the scale at which Cisco could operate globally was really new to me. When I was at Clorox, they were they had some international business, but it was primarily domestic, and Cisco just had such a large footprint and so much vision. I presented to John Chambers a couple times and just seeing his vision about the guy, you know, thinking five, ten years down the road. So I learned from that, and I learned I wanted to get back to the startup world. You know, culturally, it wasn’t somewhere I, I realized I had become enough of a startup person that, you know, I wasn’t I didn’t want to end my career doing that.

John Corcoran: 10:40

So you you go to work for a startup, as you’re having your first kid, then you go back to the corporate world.

Scott Kabat: 10:46

And another kid along the way. Yeah.

John Corcoran: 10:48

And then you’re like, all right, honey, I’m gonna go start my own startup. So you start this Nomia, which is online platform for teachers, and you even go through Y Combinator, which I think Y Combinator. I haven’t been through it, but I’m just imagining a group of 23, 24 year olds, you know, who don’t sleep. And all they do is focus on their startup. What was that experience like?

Scott Kabat: 11:07

Yeah, you know, amazing learning experience. So I teamed up with our old CPO from flip, who was a fantastic guy and just brilliant product. Guy had had this idea of Nomia and I joined as his co-founder and we thought, hey, we’re both going into a new space in edtech. Let’s kind of just go back to school and go through YC and and learn from that. Taught us both a ton about just, you know, some of the fundamentals, the lean startup fundamentals that YC has dialed in really well, I also think to your point, you are correct that like we were both, you know, 40 at the time, we were a little bit of a of a mismatch for how they typically operate.

Like people ask me all the time, like what’s the biggest thing you learn? I learned, I wish I started a company when I was 22. Yeah. Because my, you know, my, my co-founder and I both had, you know, families and bills to pay and all that. And so, you know, we built a product, we got some traction.

I think we also realized that, hey, to really get this thing to scale is probably going to be a longer horizon than any either of us have. So we eventually.

John Corcoran: 12:20

What was the idea behind it was an online platform for teachers. Was it?

Scott Kabat: 12:24

Yeah. The idea was, you know, Khan Academy was just starting to take off, and the idea was that every kid learns differently. And what if we could enable, like, give them access or give even give teachers access to content from other teachers from all over. So we created a video, a content creation tool on the iPad. And we created basically a library where teachers from all over could index could publish an index videos, and then you could go find them.

So depending on how you learn and what you want to learn more about, like if you need some tutoring or extra help, you could go find it. Got to know a ton of teachers and a lot of startups. I loved working in that space, just really mission driven, and the companies were all very open when I was in hardware. It was very protected. Like, you know, we don’t want you to see our secrets and just, you know, real sense of purpose.

And everyone I came across in the education space. So we learned a ton from it. And, you know, unfortunately, I see this with a lot of edtech companies. They have great ideas that have a hard time getting to breakthrough velocity when it comes to revenue growth. Like the the, there’s just an upper bound of how much you can monetize.

John Corcoran: 13:38

And what was the idea behind monetizing it? How were you going to monetize it?

Scott Kabat: 13:43

You know, we we wanted to build a two sided marketplace. And there was a lot of debate, you know, as we would talk with the YC partners and with other potential investors and folks around whether to focus more on the supply side or the demand side. First, what we were trying to do was essentially to have gated content that you could pay for for, you know, essentially tutoring, tutoring or supplemental instruction. We didn’t want to charge teachers or school districts. We ultimately got to the point, like as we talked to some potential strategic investors and B2B partners, that I think we realized there was a pathway to scale it through selling to districts.

And that really wasn’t our DNA. We knew how to sell to consumers. So we ultimately we sold the business to to a, an online education company that had more of a motion and a footprint to do that. And so it’s Nomi is still around. They’ve they’ve tweaked it and evolved it.

But it was a really great learning experience. And I did learn, you know, learn a ton from the whole. Yeah, I referenced the YC experience a lot. And a couple of the companies I was in with that have been just wildly successful.

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John Corcoran: 14:58

Yeah. And what was it intimidating going through the YC like Demo day and, you know, the pitches and all that kind of stuff. Raising money.

Scott Kabat: 15:07

Super humbling. Super humbling. You know, we raised some money and we we got to the point where it was like we needed to raise more. And we went through the process of selling a story that honestly wasn’t really landing. And that was where we realized, like, hey, we gotta hunker down and really bootstrap this thing for an extended period of time, or we have to go to plan B, and we ultimately went to plan B.

John Corcoran: 15:31

Yeah, and that’s a hard thing is, you know, facing that kind of rejection over and over again. We were saying like, I don’t like your baby. I don’t want your baby. You know, you need to change your baby before I buy your baby.

Scott Kabat: 15:44

That’s true. And the trick is, a lot of times they they they don’t opine on your baby. They say, bring your baby back to me in a month or three months, and, you know, you have to you have to keep pushing on those. And sometimes you never get an answer about how they feel about your baby.

John Corcoran: 15:59

So I’m looking at your your history here, and it’s almost like, you know, this porridge is too hot. This porridge is too cold. This porridge is just right. You have the corporate experience, the big corporate experience. You have the small startup experience.

And then you go and you work as CMO at Prezi and one medical group, which I don’t know how big either of those companies were at the time, but they they kind of strike me as at the time they were like, not not tiny companies, but also not huge companies either.

Scott Kabat: 16:26

Yeah, no, that’s a great observation, John. I think the common thread through both of those was. They were companies who had gotten out of the gate, gotten some traction with their product and some initial, you know, virality, raised some equity and then got to the point where they really needed to uplevel and professionalize, professionalize their go to market engine. And so my mandate in both of those was to kind of scale the scale, the marketing machine, the marketing team, and really thoughtfully uplevel the brand. You know, one of the things I learned in the flip experience, that was kind of a common thread through one medical also was balancing, you know, how do you think about LTV and monetization, but also balancing that against a brand narrative and the common thread through all three of those foot pressing?

One medical was likable, brand and unlikable category, right? Like with flip, we were competing against that big hulking camcorder your dad had. Yeah. Prezi. Like, you know, we’re competing against PowerPoint, which everyone has, but nobody loves, right?

And then one medical like, what’s less likable than us primary care. Right?

John Corcoran: 17:42

Yeah. Right.

Scott Kabat: 17:43

And so, you know, this whole notion of building a challenger brand and tying that to the mission and values of the company, like, it’s one of the things I love about loved about one medical and still do is the the passion of the people and the the commitment to the service delivery. And the way we connected that to the marketing was a fundamental part of what we did.

John Corcoran: 18:04

Yeah. It occurred to me that not everyone has is familiar with what one medical is or what it looks like. There’s one not too far from me, and it’s really cool. Like you look at this. It’s like the waiting room is actually quite elegant.

It’s like an elegant doctor’s waiting room, and you have kind of a fast track to getting access to a doctor. You explain kind of how it the how the company was different.

Scott Kabat: 18:27

Yeah. It’s funny, I just got back. I was in Dallas last week at a portfolio CEO meeting of a private equity firm, got all their CEOs together, and we’re presenting to them on some marketing best practices. And one of the things I referenced about the one medical experience was that, you know, the fundamental idea was there is a better way to do primary care. And that can’t just be through the care itself.

It has to be the end to end experience. So it’s everything. And think about all the pain points you have today with going to see your your primary care physician. It’s like, hey, I’m waiting on the line for 45 minutes to get Ahold of someone. They don’t have an appointment for two weeks.

When I’m there, they rush me in and out in three months.

John Corcoran: 19:12

Three months.

Scott Kabat: 19:13

When I. Yeah, they rushed me in and out. Or I go into the office and it feels sterile, and I’m wearing this kind of icky paper gown. And so the whole idea with one medical was to to reinvent all of that. And we looked at it as a hospitality business, like we actually had everyone read Danny Meyer’s book about hospitality.

Fatality. And so, you know, we essentially wanted to upend that whole end to end experience of primary care.

John Corcoran: 19:38

Interesting. Now, after you ended up leaving one medical, you kind of went through an existential angst. Do you want to talk about that?

Scott Kabat: 19:47

I did, yeah. You know, I had very, ever since coming out of business school, had very carefully been curating my career. Like, I, I knew that the Clorox experience would teach me a lot of the fundamentals. And then I, you know, when I went to go launch flip, it was a, you know, a company that already that had a legacy business that could pay me a salary and that’ll lead into, you know, the next marketing role and the next marketing role and that kind of thing. And I got to the point where I had done a couple of CMO gigs, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go back and do that again.

And it took me a while to reckon with that. I started doing some fractional CMO work for, you know, mostly series A, series B, startups that didn’t need a CMO but needed a strategic thought partner really to pay the bills, the bills and buy myself some time. And I, you know, I spent a lot of time reflecting and writing and thinking like, hey, I’ve been on this path. It’s not that there’s a problem with that path or that I condemn it. It just I wasn’t sure that I was finding as much meaning and purpose in it as I wanted.

It was also challenging. My kids were getting older, and, you know, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing that. And so it took me, you know, a couple of years of kind of being betwixt in between on that. And in the meantime, dabbling with the fractional work before I really gave myself permission to burn my ships and lean in fully to building what we’ve turned into.

John Corcoran: 21:18

621 and why fractional? Why did you embrace that model?

Scott Kabat: 21:25

Yeah. Look, I think that There was an argument for fractional and a number of different functions. But look, I know marketing and what I will tell you that I see it as a really valuable fit for a lot of companies when it comes to marketing, is that there’s been this, this incredible proliferation over the last, let’s say, 15 ish years of special marketing specialties. So there’s so many different flavors of marketers and they all have legitimate experience. It’s very hard for companies to know what kind of marketing leader they need, when and for the next phase.

And oftentimes, even if they get it right, there’s a slight course correction in the business and you end up out of alignment, right. And so what we’ve done in building our team at 621, we’ve got a deep bench of fractional CMOs and marketing operators. Everybody’s grown up in startups. So they’ve all been there done that. We’re not meant to come in and be a replacement for these companies building a full time team.

Oftentimes we’ll coach them through that. But we can get them through these inflection points where we’ll be a thought partner or, you know, build the basic machinery and then, you know, help them think through, okay, what kind of leader do you need? What kind of team do they need around them? Does that team need some leverage, that kind of thing. So I think it’s it’s the fractional model works really well when you’re navigating change, whether that’s a funding round or ownership change like a private equity buyout.

We work with PE a lot or, you know, change in leadership and what.

John Corcoran: 23:03

So there’s the again it’s kind of like a marketplace where we were talking about earlier. There’s supply and demand side. Right. Yeah. How did you build the supply side.

That is like how did you find other talented experienced CMOs who could, you know, be your CMOs that you’re delegating the work to?

Scott Kabat: 23:19

Yeah. And it’s let me point out one nuance. So yes, while we have a supply and demand side, it was very important to us from the beginning not to operate like a transactional marketplace. So I have business partners, all of whom are, you know, when I went to business school with one who was, I mentioned, the guy who hired me to work on flip. We have a management team and another member of our executive team who leads all our staffing, and we are all very intimately involved in overseeing these relationships.

So when we meet a company, we go through a process of working through what they need, what their priorities are, and figuring out who in our team is the right solution. And oftentimes these become land and expand relationships. And yeah, to answer your question, this started off with, you know, people I had worked with before, you know, and then it expanded to people we knew and trust, referring people they know and trust. And we always vet them and backchannel them, get references. So these aren’t just LinkedIn connections.

They’re all people We feel really comfortable. And, you know, the members of our executive team have all brought in people they’ve worked with in the past. So these are people we know well and we trust. And, you know, it’s incredibly important. I always tell our folks that we want people who are great at what they do, high commitment to experiment and iterate and, you know, first class integrity.

And from there we learn together. And with most of them, we start building out repeatable acts from one company to another.

John Corcoran: 24:50

So given your feelings about this kind of like angst around whether to remain with being a CMO, how did you design the business so that you felt like it was something that you wanted to keep on doing, and that it didn’t continue that feeling of angst?

Scott Kabat: 25:08

Yeah, it’s a great question, John. I think for me, there is this underlying and I found this at my business school reunions, too, as we got older where everyone was grappling with, well, what’s my why, right, what’s the purpose and all this and I was really enjoying the stimulation and the pattern recognition of the fraction work, and also just running my own business. I don’t really do much client work anymore. It’s more now kind of tending to both the supply side and demand side, and what I ultimately found as I kind of got some reps with this was what I found in my why was that? I want for our team, want to be an enabler for each of these people to make a living doing that superpower thing that they love, that maybe they didn’t get to do enough of when they were in an operating role and doing a little bit of everything, make a living doing that, and also live the life you want to live outside of work, right?

Like we’re super transparent on that. Some of our folks are, you know, going at it, you know, 50, 60 hours a week. Some of them are like, look, I’m a working parent, like, staff me for three days a week or I’m going to take this June off. And that’s a part of the model and we work with that. So, you know, I think for me, finding a way to be an enabler for our team has been really gratifying because I think, honestly, a lot of them, having grown up as marketers, have been a little exhausted by the churn that marketers go through and, you know, getting whipped around inside operating roles.

John Corcoran: 26:40

Right. Did it take a while for you to kind of from a business perspective, you know, you would you’d perform the role of a CMO inside of a company many times before, but then you develop this business that has, instead of one client or one company you’re working for, you’re working for a lot of different clients, and then you’re managing, you know, all these other CMOs and marketers that are working for you. Did it take a while for you to figure out that that business model.

Scott Kabat: 27:07

It did, it did. I went through a big transition from it, you know, essentially being Scott Inc.. Right. Like doing my own fractional advisory work to playing more of a of a support role in selling new work and tending to the internal business, business operations and recruiting people to come in. So there was a transition in involved in that.

I think underneath your question is one that I talk about a lot with people who are dabbling in fractional work, which is like, will it feel different when you’re the single throat? You know, you’re used to being the single throat to choke, whereas now, like you’re coming in, you’re helping out, you’re giving advice, but you’re not a full time employee. And maybe, maybe you’re toggling between multiple companies. And I do think that’s an adjustment. I one of the things that I found stimulating, that I think our team would, would echo, is that there’s something very energizing about getting to a point in your career where you step back and you have to reflect on all the things you’ve learned, and then how can you repackage them in a very surgical way to add value to the companies you work with, and to do that quickly.

They don’t want you in there taking six months trying to, you know, figure out where the water cooler is. You need to put points on the board quickly. We usually work a 90 day sprint. And and I think there’s something really for the folks who really enjoy this work, get energized by that. Like, hey, I’m finding a way to give value and to give back wisdom in a really meaningful way.

Sometimes it’s as an advisor and coach. Other times it’s like we’re building a revops or, you know, account based marketing machine or brand positioning for a company and handing it off to them and making sure they operationalize it. But everything we do is in partnership with these folks we embed in there. So we’re kind of defacto members of the team anyway.

John Corcoran: 28:58

How do you approach potential threats to the business that you’ve built? You know, you survived Covid and now we are recording this in mid 2025. And AI is everything.

Scott Kabat: 29:09

Perfectly.

John Corcoran: 29:10

Predictable? John. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How do you you know, how do you, you know, approach those things or think about those things?

Scott Kabat: 29:19

Well, you know, one of the things I learned early in my entrepreneurial journey was to make sure you’re spending the majority of your time on offense, right. Like, I think it is tempting to spend all day kind of just parrying potential threats and reacting. And then what happens is you don’t spend enough time really leaning in on the bigger strategic capability building or, you know, people related opportunities. So I try to focus more on like, what can we control? I’m a big fan of the Stoics.

It’s a lot about understanding what’s in your control and what’s outside. And to your point, like it’s incumbent upon us to be savvy to what’s happening in the marketplace. So I, to your point, is a perfect example. And we are like really embracing it. I think there’s somewhat of this fear of like AI is going to take away marketing jobs.

Our approach has been more like, let’s teach marketers to really harness it and take advantage of it, and also to recognize that it’s changing every day. So we’re trying to stay on top of that and make sure that our folks on the front line are sharing what they’re learning, as well as some of the watch outs they’re seeing. And then we can we can pass that wisdom onto the companies we meet and investors we meet.

John Corcoran: 30:39

It’s a great approach. Scott, this has been really interesting. I want to thank you for your time and where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you and learn more. About 621 Consulting.

Scott Kabat: 30:49

621consulting.com and you can find me on LinkedIn Scott Kabat.

John Corcoran: 30:55

Excellent, Scott. Thanks so much.

Scott Kabat: 30:57

Thanks, John.

Outro: 30:58

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