[EO Louisiana] The Power of Niching Down: Building a Specialized Agency With Mike Krass

Jeremy Weisz 09:43
I love that, like there’s two things I kind of take out of that. One is obviously the power of a niche And the second is just being as helpful as humanly possible to people, you know, because because of that, you’re not looking to gain, but you’re just you’re able to make those connections because you have a deep relationships in a specific niche. And then you’re you’re I mean, because people do there’s people who have deep relationships in a niche, but they’re also not necessarily looking to make those connections and being helpful to people, too. So, you know that I always think about that. One of my favorite books, Brian Kurtz’ Overdeliver, which is kind of he’s got this like 100 zero, which is like, I just give as much as humanly possible and don’t expect anything in return.

Now we both know what happens is when you give as much as humanly possible to someone, the right people want to help you as well, which it sounds like happened in that particular case.

Mike Krass 10:43
100%. Yeah, I’m a big believer in reciprocity. It goes both ways. You know, When someone helps me, I look for ways I can help him or her in the future. And in the example again that I gave, I’ve already received in return, right? I’m getting this no cost sponsorship, attendance, you know, to this this very tight conference in terms of the attendees, it’s not going to be a large it’s not a large conference. It’s going to be 3 or 400 people. Like by design like that, just the right 300, 400 people. It also makes it so that, you know, Gary V always talked about jab, jab, hook when you do need something like. And with this guy I actually did need something. I was I was looking for an introduction to an investor that he had worked with in the past and raised some capital from years ago when I when I mentioned the name, he was like, oh, that was like lifetime ago. Like, yes, I know that guy pretty well. Why? Because I want to meet him. And if it’s not too much to ask, like, can, I’m going to send you an email. Can you just push the forward button, put his name in the two line and hit send? Like, you know, I’m not I’m not asking you to write anything, like just literally push forward his name, send an outlook and you’re done. And he’s like, oh yeah, of course I’m happy to do that. So I didn’t know I was going to ask him for that down the line. But we can’t predict the future, so eventually there will probably be something that that person can do for you. And at that point you can ask. I use the word appropriate. Is it appropriate to ask you to do this? And if you say no, I respect that, of course. But if you don’t have any objection, I would love if you would do whatever I’m asking you to do.

Jeremy Weisz 12:18
Yeah. I feel like we have very similar philosophies on this, Mike, because when I’m if if someone’s going to introduce me to someone, I like to call it the no work intro. Like, I don’t want you to do any work, you’re already kind of doing enough or making an intro. So you sent them an exact email, literally just copy and paste it. Or, you know, I even say, hey, do you want me to reach out and just mention your name so you don’t have to do anything? And most of the time people are like, no, I’m happy to send something, but you didn’t make them do any extra work. You know, because people oftentimes because I sometimes make 5 to 20 introductions a day. And if you know, if someone sends me just an email, I can copy and paste. It’s just so much easier, better. And I’m more likely to do it right away too.

Mike Krass 13:09
Yeah. And it’s it’s funny you mentioned copy and paste I that used to be my go to and I was informed by a, a fellow kind of center of influence type person. If you’ve read Keith Ferrazzi he talks about being a center of influence. Never eat alone. Yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 13:24
That’s a great book. Never eat alone.

Mike Krass 13:25
Yeah, that book’s right there. That my friend who shares our same mindset actually said copy and paste is now too much today. And I was like, I totally get it. I like just a couple clicks and he’s like, you need to get into the forward game. Like, they should literally push forward and nothing else. And this person should receive it. See the name. Go. Oh, I know, Dr. Jeremy. Open. Well, it’s an empty mess. Oh, wait. No. I scroll down, okay. There’s the message. Like it should be. It should be that. I was like, are you sure, man? Like, copy and paste is a couple clicks and he’s like, it’s too many clicks. He’s like, you got to do fewer clicks. I was like, I love that.

Jeremy Weisz 14:01
All right, you got to be getting the I need to get in the forward game. I’m way behind with the copy and paste. That’s totally. So why cybersecurity and SaaS. So you go okay we’re going to niche. You’ve been in this niche for a while. Why those niches. Because you you kind of said off the bat there’s only 7000. Well I’m like well thinking okay why then.

Mike Krass 14:30
Yeah. So cybersecurity in and of itself is too small right. You’re talking about 7000 businesses, not all of whom are even in a position to hire a marketing agency, even if they wanted to. Right? So like that, that kind of funnels down into a very, very focused number. And that’s why we also work with SaaS businesses. If you look up, I think I was on Statista or something last week. Globally, there’s over a million software or SaaS businesses. Keep in mind that number accounts for, like Mike created like a Firefox widget extension that helps you like find good prices on Amazon. Like, I mean, it’s those all the way up to, you know, a huge fortune 50 company or fortune 100 company. And the reason we made the connections there is that the product delivery of a cybersecurity product is almost always unless you’re getting into physical security, which is kind of a subset of cyber and related, but not the same. It’s almost always a SaaS delivery, like you go to a computer terminal and whether it’s a web application or actually a download, like a physical desktop application on your machine, that’s how you’re actually accessing the product. And so when we looked at those two things, we noticed a lot of similarities. We also noticed some differences. And so for us it was like cyber alone is too small. SaaS alone frankly, is probably too big. But when you look at what they share in common, we generally we do work with some startups, but it’s generally more like mid-market and and larger enterprises. And so what they all shared in common is long sales cycles. Right. So they like they really need somebody that understands, hey, I’m not selling a pair of Nikes, right? I’m not Michael Jordan in the mid 90s where it’s like people know they want them. They’re lined up around the block to get into footlocker at 6 a.m. when it opens on a Saturday morning, you know, with the new shoe release, like, you know, it’s like a very transactional.

Jeremy Weisz 16:29
Thing here with the Foot Locker. Yeah.

Mike Krass 16:32
I know, yeah, I know some of your listeners might be like, what? So those long sales cycles, that’s kind of our point of view of where we stand out is anything that has a long sales cycle, which is often a SaaS and or cybersecurity product. We work really well with those types of brands because they can’t just do a bunch of bottom of the funnel lead generation, like hire a call bank and just dial for dollars. Like they won’t get there on any of their revenue goals. They’ve got to have a full they have to have full representation from generating awareness to some consideration in their product, maybe even some trial. That’s where, you know, like a trial or a demo request shows up all the way down to like, okay, I am, I am ready to purchase and it’s between you and you. And, you know, we just want our clients to be positioned through that decision process as really a leader in the process. So those long sales cycles, that’s the common thing that they have is it’s going to take a long time to close this deal. Which also means that as an agency, if they’re going to hire somebody, I always tell them, if you’re not ready to commit a minimum of six, but more like a minimum of 12 months to an agency. At any price point, you shouldn’t hire an agency. You should. You can accomplish getting this work done in other ways, but it’s going to take a while, and I don’t want you to look at our engagement eight months in and go, you know, I was really thinking we’d have more closed one deals. And it’s like, well, you know, it takes eight months to close a deal. So really, like at this point, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re just now starting to get our deals that we’re generating or influencing to the finish line. And by we I mean like we generated them. And now your sales team is working them.

Jeremy Weisz 18:13
Yeah. Like we’ve definitely experienced that. You know maybe it’s a couple of months in. Yeah. We haven’t gotten any kind of like well how long is your sales cycle. Oh a year like well it’s only three months. So you know maybe that’s why. But I like how you think about fit of a client. Right. They have a long sales cycle. What about from a size and personality perspective for you?

Mike Krass 18:40
Yeah. Besides the business, we’re really. We really shine and will show the most impact in an organization that’s somewhere between 100 and 500 employees. And I use that word intentionally of showing the impact because they’re just big enough where they can afford somebody like us, but they’re not too big that there’s so many things happening that it’s hard to kind of show like, yeah, like I see your report that says you did these things. MKG but also there’s like I got like a bunch of other vendors and internal team, like I got a lot of people doing things all focused on helping this business grow. So 1 to 500 is awesome in terms of us not just doing strategy, but executing and activating that for you when we get to working with the larger clients. You know, 1000 to 5000 employees, 5000 plus. Generally, I like to say that we’re the tugboat steering that tanker ship through the harbor. They already have enough resources and usually the problem statement they come to us with and they never actually say it this way, but this is what they’re saying. The problem statement is we have we have a lot of resources. We got capital and agencies and internal headcount and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We just kind of need to help steer it. Right. So you think of like a series of tugboats as a large ship, like a container ship is coming into a harbor. They’ve got the ropes on them, like they’re just there to make sure that for whatever reason, like the ship doesn’t start veering too far in the wrong direction. So our counsel becomes really important for them at that point. And so it’s just a different need and a different pain point based on the size of the organization. They they like us to activate stuff, but frankly, they have enough people to execute on things that like, they’re not short on that. The only thing that all those clients agree on is that they don’t have enough money or resources, which is awesome because it’s like you’re a 50 person company, a 500 and a 5000, yet you all don’t have enough time, money or resources, which is Interesting to us.

Jeremy Weisz 20:39
What about from a personality perspective?

Mike Krass 20:44
Personality? Yeah. So we’re looking for somebody that. Their personalities are generally. They are. I don’t want to say aggressive, but they are motivated. They really enjoy building teams and managing teams. That’s kind of our points of contact directly. And they also do a great job. The most successful client personalities for us are the ones that appropriately shield us from things we don’t need to know, or from taking flak that we oftentimes didn’t deserve. Right. It’s really easy to throw a vendor under the bus because they’re external to the company. And we’ve had client experiences where we found out after the fact where it’s like, oh, we took the hit on that one. We didn’t know it, but there was an executive meeting. And here’s what came up. And by the way, our client just chucked us straight under the bus.

Jeremy Weisz 21:44
Was it because why was why what’s the scenario like? Is the person worried about there’s something going on in the company. They’re worried about losing their job, so they place blame somewhere or what’s going on internally that when that happens, typically.

Mike Krass 21:59
Yeah, what’s going on is usually a mistake has occurred or a number or like a target wasn’t hit. And so the question usually comes on I from the executive leadership team of like, okay, why do we think we didn’t hit it, you know, or let’s have a little bit of a retrospective here and discuss. And some ELT teams are a little bit more diplomatic than others. Some are more like, we didn’t hit this, what the heck is going on around here? And others like, truly want to make this a collaborative experience. So usually there’s something that’s not going right. And so that’s what comes up a number being missed, maybe an overspend that’s happened to us a few times. So as an example, we’ve done this multiple times over the years where we overspent on a client budget and it wasn’t actually always our fault because sometimes our clients, we found out after the fact through, you know, the change log and the ad platforms went in and made the change. And then they look at themselves and like, oh my gosh, like, I’m going to get I’m gonna get fired if they figure it out that I just, you know, spent $10,000 more this month than I was supposed to. Well, MKG like part of your statement of work is you do budget management on our paid ads accounts. So, hey, you know, let me let me launch you straight under this bus. And we’ve always I’ll say this to listeners, we’ve always made a good with our clients, whether it was truly our fault or not. And there’s been instances of both. We’ve just out of the the importance of the relationship. We’ve just made the client whole and said, you know what? We overspent by ten grand, ten grand. Coming off your next bill or 2500 is going to come off your next four bills. Or like, we’ll find a way to make you whole. But we want you to have the trust that like if if we put it into our statement of works and something goes wrong. We want you to trust that we’re going to make it right.

Jeremy Weisz 23:43
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And this kind of touches a little bit on I’d love for you to talk about the triangle assessment.

Mike Krass 23:56
Yeah. So our point of view and this is relatively new for us. So you’re getting it fresh. All the listeners are getting it. You know with all the bumps and the warts attached.

We believe that when you’re hiring an agency, it’s like a triangle, right? So it’s three points on it. The top point that is almost never talked about is can a marketing agency even address or solve the problem that I’m asking them to do? Like, is that even do we have some sort of confidence that that’s even possible? Like, is this the right problem. And the and will an agency be able to address it? The bottom left corner of the triangle is the agency itself. This is where everyone spends their attention, right? So they go out and they put together some sort of RFP or RFQ, whether it’s formalized or not. They just they put it in writing. Here’s what we’re looking for. Here’s our budget. Here’s the things we expect you to do. Here’s the things we need to see from you to evaluate you. So it’s all about outwardly facing. Let me put together a list. I’m going to evaluate you. I’m going to whittle you down. I’m going to pick one. That’s where everyone focuses today. The other part of the triangle, the third corner, is also like the problem that I never actually thought about by most clients. And that is as the client, as the brand manager, whatever my title is, am I actually in a place to effect change to solve the problem at the top of the triangle? So you’d be surprised. We’ve been hired before and paid significant sums of money, and when it comes down to it, it’s like, oh by the way, like I’m not empowered, as you know, the brand manager, to make these changes that are now critical to this program, showing impact and success. Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don’t. But it’s that triangle is that point of view we’re trying to share with folks as they’re considering any kind of marketing agencies, which is are you sure that this is the right problem and that agency can handle it? Are you sure that as a brand, you’re ready and you’re actually empowered and able to make the changes required within your organization? That gets tricky in larger matrix organizations, because sometimes they do, and sometimes they find out after the fact they don’t. And then the one that everyone thinks of in the triangle, that third corner is okay, well, how am I going to find an agency? So for us, those three have to marry up, right? Like, are we the right agency for you? Are you going to be able to empower us and collectively, can we work on this problem and effect change together? And that point of view really stops a lot of clients and makes them think. Some of them hate that thought process. And so they like I can see that we’re clearly being, you know, Dismissed from the process. Others actually appreciate it. They’re like, actually, no one’s really framed at this point of view before in a way that made me really think, like, is this a good idea? And do I have some sort of structure to think about that?

Jeremy Weisz 26:42
What do you do at that point if they are not in a position to move forward, they’ve hired you. Do they just have to try and move it up the chain somehow or wherever? Maybe up, across wherever it goes? What do you do in that situation?

Mike Krass 27:00
Yes. Well, what we do and this is this is new for us, and it’s centered around a universal truth that we have found, which is all clients are liars. And we as clients of other people, we lie. We inadvertently lie to our suppliers all the time. And I’m not trying to make us sound dishonest. It’s just like these lies of omission, right? Like, oh, I left that out because I didn’t know it was relevant to what you were working on. Jeremy. Oh, well, it is relevant. Let me tell you why. So I don’t look at the clients pessimistically. I just know that like it. It takes time to work together so we can actually suss out all the details of what’s happening. So what we’re doing now, instead of signing, like most, most agencies will show up and they’ll say, Jeremy, I’m going to send you a contract for 12 months. Or if you want to lock in the pricing, no, you know, no cost of living increases. I’ll send you a 24 month contract and you can sign that instead. What we’re saying instead is we’ve got a triangle assessment. And that assessment answers. We’re going to just do some work together for a couple of weeks. And in that couple of weeks we’ll understand. Is this a problem that can be solved by by a marketing agency like us? Are we the right marketing agency? And are you right for the problem? And us like is there that is that is this triangle going to get lines drawn between the three points, or are we going to have like some holes in our triangle. And so the outcome of that is first the first finding is, yes, the marketing that we do at MKG will solve this problem, and we feel confident that we can do this together. So yes, we should move ahead. And this is what moving ahead looks like. The other outcomes are one of those three points is off. So say the client and the problem are right but we’re the wrong agency. Hey, no harm, no foul. Like this was a two week exercise. You didn’t lose a whole bunch of time and energy here. You didn’t spend a lot of money doing this. And I’m actually going to introduce you to somebody who I think is way. Now that we really know what’s going on, I’m going to introduce you to somebody. I’d like you to sign an NDA with them so we can disclose the the findings from our triangle assessment. And as painful as it is for me to say that they’re better than we are at what you need, but that’s the honest truth. What doesn’t happen very often is the client is is the problem. But it does happen, right? Looking at an assessment like this, we understand, hey, for whatever reason, like you are not in an empowered spot, so you really shouldn’t hire us or anybody else because this problem is not is not going to get impacted in the way that you want. In fact, it’s probably going to balloon and then you’re going to have the expense of hiring us.

Jeremy Weisz 29:38
It makes me think of, you know, my background. I guess I’m a recovering chiropractor, Mike. So people would come and go. I have no idea why my back is hurting. Right? And then I discover, well, six months ago, I tore my ACL. So I’ve been limping, I’ve been on crutches, and then I sit, you know, all these things I didn’t think that was. They just don’t know. Like, I didn’t think that was related to my back. I’m like, well, yeah, you’ve been hobbling around on crutches and, you know, whatever it is. So yeah, it totally messes up your back. So it’s not on purpose. But yeah, it’s like sometimes the connections aren’t made there. I totally relate to that. And I’ve done the same. I’ve left stuff out of a doctor’s appointment like, oh, I didn’t think that was relevant at all to what I’m talking about. But like, no, Jeremy, it definitely is. So I love that that piece so I could see the niche part. Mike, I want to talk about the evolution of your role and how it’s changed. So yep, take us back to the beginning of the agency. What did that look like? And then we can kind of, you know, hit some of the high points of how your role has changed.

Mike Krass 30:57
Sure. So as you can probably imagine, you know, having been in business for yourself and a lot of your your audience is entrepreneurs as well. You know, our first cat life was me doing everything. You know, me and my business partner kind of just running around. We were doing our own marketing. We were selling, you know, taking sales calls. We were doing the work. We were building out the KPI reports, you know, it was it was just everything. And so I think calling it an individual contributor is probably an understatement. It’s just like you are the only contributor, so you are contributing or you die. Now in the second stage, when once we started really the second life of our cat lives, we started focusing on just tech companies in general. What we did at that point is we actually got we were out in front of a whiteboard, we wrote down every client we’d ever worked with and what we did for them, just at a high level like SEO, web design, PR, backlinks, you know, podcasting, whatever. And then we went through that whole list and we used color coded markers. You know, red is not good. Green is good. I think we had a yellow in there, which is like, we’re not so sure about this. Undecided. And we actually just color coded circled all the services we did and the types of clients we did them for, because before we started focusing on tech clients, we were working with nonprofits. We worked with a pet food company I can tell you so much about, like fish fishing for tuna in Thailand and how it gets into your cats, you know, can of food like it’s embarrassing. The amount of cat food info that I know to this day. And so we circled in green. Here’s the types of companies we we actually performed really well for. So not who we subjectively felt like they were cool companies, or we thought it was fun. It was like, who do we actually move the needle for? Circle, circle, circle. And then what did we do for them? Circle, circle, circle. And that’s how we got into doing SEO and paid ads for tech companies. And at that point we had a small team, you know, it was still as as Jeff Bezos would call it, like a one pizza team. You know, we were probably 6 or 7 people in total. So you get an extra large pizza maybe from Costco, and you could feed that whole team with that. And from there, you know, I started to transition more into, well, what is you know, like Verne always talks about, you know, what is what is working on the business look like to you? And that was that was a pretty scary thing to go from a whole contributor to a. Oh, now I need to like, trust and empower some other team members to just do really good work and kind of, you know, support them in that, that effort. But they need, you know, for them to continue to have paychecks like, we need a steady flow of new leads. And I need to go to a conference and network every once in a while. And I need to understand, like business finances so that we can, you know, we can actually be in a strong financial position. So it really started to force me to work on things of which I was never professionally trained and frankly, had very little academic training to. People always ask, if I could go back to college like undergrad, what would I what would I take more of? And I said, I always say economics. I was like, I wish I took econ classes. I avoided them because they were hard and people got low, low grades on them. And I was like, oh, they’re just going to ding my GPA. I don’t need that. And in hindsight, I’m like, I like GPA, like doesn’t matter compared to what I probably would have learned in an academic setting. That I’m now catching up on years after the fact. And then transitioning into the niche that we’re in now, we really decided, like, are we for all tech companies or do we tend to work for some over others? And so my role we run EOS, Gino Wickman was part of the whole EO and burn tribe there. So as an owner visionary seat, it’s my responsibility to do a little bit of visioning. And I say a little bit because somebody wise once told me for any non large corporations, the amount of visioning you need to do is frankly, it’s pretty minimal. Like don’t don’t overestimate the amount of work you need to do here. You’re not Mark Zuckerberg thinking about making, you know, smart clothing connected to your Facebook account or WhatsApp or whatever. Like you’re just not. And that’s okay. You can get there one day. But like Mark Zuckerberg needs to really think about that kind of stuff. You need to think about what are your clients really need? And as an example, I was like, well, the clients that we work best with are long sales cycles. They tend to be within tech, SaaS and cybersecurity. And now even today, you know, this is five years after we made that niche decision. Now we’re thinking about the point of view of our offering of like, well, how would you go about hiring somebody like us, not just us, but like us? And that’s where the triangle assessment came from, because there’s so many false starts and the price of getting it wrong, because all your prospective clients are going to lie to you and you’re going to lie to them to a little bit, you’re going to omit some things. It’s just going to happen as you get to know each other and get more comfortable. That triangle assessment is how we think the future of what an engagement should look like. You shouldn’t spend. You shouldn’t agree to spend $100,000 immediately. You should spend a fraction of that to understand if you should spend 100 behind that. And if I can spend a fraction, tell you it’s a bad idea. You can take that capital and invest it elsewhere in your business. And I think that’s really where we’re going right now. And what I’m working on, and I think I’ve demonstrated is like something that in the first cat life of our business, I never would have even cared to think about. And the second cat life might have started to think about, but probably not a whole lot. And in this life we’re like, oh, this is really like where my attention needs to be right now.

Jeremy Weisz 36:42
How did you meet your co-founder?

Mike Krass 36:46
We worked together at an ad agency in Seattle, so we were actually coworkers. She was actually my boss. She was brought in and we worked together for about a year at that agency before we both decided to try doing our own thing.

Jeremy Weisz 37:01
How did what was that conversation like was, I’m wondering, was she like, I want to start my own thing? Do you want to join me? Were you just like, hey, I think we should start our own thing? What was the conversation like early on?

Mike Krass 37:17
Yeah. The conversation was it was. So it was.

Jeremy Weisz 37:21
Like Jerry Maguire where she’s like, I’m fired. I’m taking Mike. You’re coming with. No.

Mike Krass 37:27
Yeah. I know everybody. All the lines are full. I can still see the phone in that scene of Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise is trying to call everybody. So the scene, it was very casual and we were just talking one day, and she was like, have you ever thought about, like, what? What if we could do this kind of on our own and set our own terms, not just from a work standpoint, but from a what we’re going to do standpoint. And we started talking about it more and more, and we got to this point of, hey, why don’t we try this out? You know, she she quit that company and did this full time. I did it nights and weekends. And that was our our agreement of like nights, weekends. Like, I would be more of, like an operations type guy. Like operating things, you know, pulling levers. And that was that was our agreement. And we said, let’s go six months. If we don’t get any clients, great. If we get a client, we can review at that point. It’s like, how big is the client? Could this sustain both of our lives at this point?

Jeremy Weisz 38:28
It’s kind of like a test run.

Mike Krass 38:30
Yeah, totally. And and it was about two months in that we got our first client, and she who she hates selling. She actually landed our first client through a referral, a friend of a friend who ended up subbing out some work to us from their agency to us. And I still remember we got a check for $30,000, and I thought we were the richest men and women in Babylon. I was like, $30,000 is an exorbitant amount of money. Like, we have taken these folks to the cleaners. There’s no way to financially recover from this check. They’re about to write us. The company that wrote it is called Box. They were called Box.com at the time. They dropped the.com, and so they were competing with Dropbox. And yeah, they’re huge, you know, file sharing, security, that kind of stuff. And I’m sure when they wrote us that check, they probably like. We agreed to the terms and we were super excited. We left all like that, and I’m sure that as soon as we were out of earshot, they were like, oh my gosh, we just like hosed these guys. They have like, they have no idea how much we were willing to pay. And the number that they gave us was like, yeah, we’ll do that. Sounds good.

Jeremy Weisz 39:33
It’s a win win, right?

Mike Krass 39:35
Yeah. It was it was a fantastic first logo to have. And it was at a time when they were really ascending. You know, they had they weren’t at the startup phase of we have to be responsible adults. They were at the startup phase of everyone loves us. VCs are trying to literally throw money at us, like they’ll drive by our office and throw briefcases of cash. I mean, it was fun. Like a couple years into working with them, the fun stopped and the adults showed up because there’s a lot of money involved. But when we started with them, they were just like the darling of Silicon Valley startups, and they were just so popular. So anytime I mentioned Box, people were like, whoa, like they gave you, they let you do some stuff, they gave you some money, of course, of course. Box Fox would do that.

Jeremy Weisz 40:16
You know, I notice, you know, on the site, Kerry is Owner/CEO and your Owner/Visionary, right? So I’d love for you to talk about the CEO/Visionary journey a little bit from your standpoint.

Mike Krass 40:37
Yeah. People.

Jeremy Weisz 40:38
I just want to mention you mentioned Gino Wickman. I have a episode with Gino Wickman. I have an episode with Mark Winters. Mark Winters and Gino Wickman wrote Rocket Fuel. So anyways.

Mike Krass 40:51
Yeah, we we discovered EOS six years ago and you know, the accountability chart that exists there. If y’all aren’t familiar with it in the audience, you know, just look up accountability chart in the letters E, O, and S and you’ll find out what I’m talking about. The accountability chart of visionary and integrator. So I was the visionary and my title was CEO. Yet I was also responsible for all of finance.

Jeremy Weisz 41:24
And isn’t that like. Isn’t that a visionary’s Kryptonite?

Mike Krass 41:27
It is not where finance should live. It’s just not. So I was doing sales and finance and she was doing operations like client service and marketing. So you can already tell that within the accountability chart and the three functions of a business within an accountability chart, it’s like we kind of took them and just split them in half and gave half to one another. And it actually was during a free consultation with an EOS implementer. He was asking us some questions and he’s like, do you realize that you actually kind of conflagrated this whole thing and you gave each other like, Mike, you took some integrator stuff, and Kerry, you do some visionary stuff. And he was like, and then he started asking about that, you know, Kerry, how does it make you feel that, like, Mike knows a lot more about finance than you. And she’s like, well, frankly, like, you know, I wish that I knew more, but it’s really his lane. I try and respect that. And I’m also so busy over here that I don’t I don’t really have time to check Mike’s work. And I had a very similar answer where I was like, I mean, marketing connects to sales and, you know, big relationships. That’s kind of a big job task of a visionary is what kind of big relationships do you foster over time? I was like, I kind of like, wish that I knew more that was going on with marketing. But like, Kerry just kind of does marketing things and I just do the selling. And he’s like, don’t you think this should be more attached, even if you are not doing the marketing, like with your own hands, like, shouldn’t you be more involved in that? And he asked a lot of questions that were at the time frustrating. And so we ended up rewriting our job, our accountabilities, you know, spots. And I took over visionary. She’s Owner/CEO and she wanted to she was being the CEO is really important to her. And for me I was like the CEO title doesn’t do a lot for me that the owner or founder title wouldn’t also do for me. So that’s kind of how we ended up splitting those two things.

Jeremy Weisz 43:24
There is a thanks for sharing that. There’s a good episode I did with Dan Zawacki, who started Lobster Gram, and now after he sold it, he became an EOS implementer. Do you know Dan?

Mike Krass 43:35
No, but the word lobster gram is funny.

Jeremy Weisz 43:37
Oh. Okay. Dan the lobster man. Yeah. So he used to. He sent live lobsters in the mail, and he was, I think at one point they talked to him on Howard Stern and Oprah and all these, all these places early on. So it’s a fun it’s a fun interview. I love for you to talk a little bit about mentors. Right. We talked about EO. We talked about, you know, you’ve learned from a lot of different people and maybe a few of your mentors and maybe a piece of advice they’ve given you.

Mike Krass 44:12
I still to this day don’t have a, like, a single mentor that I look up to. Like one person I know some entrepreneurs do. They can point to that one guy or girl who’s like, I value this person more than anyone else. I, I treat it like running back by committee. If you’ll take the football example. There are certain people that I look to as mentors. The first one that I look at is a guy named David C. Baker. He’s a former agency owner. Now, he runs a consultancy. He’s out of Tennessee. The state of Tennessee. I just think he’s an incredibly clear thinker. And he he writes and he’s published quite a few books. He’s such an the way he articulates his thoughts and his experience is just it’s unlike a lot of other people that I’ve ever come across. There are other kind of agency consultants and mentors out there, but I’ve never quite seen anyone like David and I really value and look up to him. And as soon as this episode publishes, I’m going to send it to him so he knows he gets some props. The other person that I really, I really enjoy. I would put, I would say two of them. The Phil Knight story. If you’ve read Shoe Dog, it’s great. It’s just an incredible story of like how he went from being effectively a reseller of Japanese running shoes to like, starting Nike. And I see a lot of similarities between Phil and Richard Branson and Richard Branson’s early books. You know, like, screw it, just do it. You know, things like that. I will argue, Richard, if you ever hear this podcast that you regurgitate a lot of your stories across your books. Like, I don’t see a lot of original content these days. Like, I need something new, man. That’s my only beef with you. But I like those two because they’re just they. While they will roll up their sleeves and using EOS language, they can be the integrator and the bottle washer and the everything they think at such a high level or they, they, they used to I mean they’re now in positions more like in chairman type roles. So they don’t need to do that type of thinking anymore. But in getting their business ventures, you know, the whole Virgin empire getting started by Richard, Nike getting started by Phil, they were thinking at such a high level and they made certain bets, you know, like betting the whole shoe division on Michael Jordan insane at the time, like he was popular, but he’s nowhere near what he became. And so I really like just the adventurous, the adventurous part of it, the playful part of Richard Branson. And I really value the exercise, the the ethics or the work ethic around exercise for Phil Knight, because he was always said that when he was really working over a problem at Nike, he’d go for a run, so he’d be like, Where’s Phil? Like, is he in his office? Like he’s strapped on his trainers and like, we haven’t seen him for two hours. Like, I don’t know where he’s somewhere in the state of Oregon because he couldn’t have gotten that far. But like where in Oregon? Like, I can’t tell you because he’s thinking through problems. And I really I look up to people that use physical movement and motion and as a way to cope and to think. And I look up to people like Richard, who just have crazy high ambitions across a number of industries.

Jeremy Weisz 47:27
Mike, first of all, I want to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey and your stories. This is super fascinating. I want to encourage people to check out. You can check out mkgmarketininc.com to learn more. You’ve seen it on there and more episodes of the podcast. And just Mike thank you and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Krass 47:50
Thanks, Jeremy.

Outro 47:51
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