‣
- Graduated from Georgetown University in 2007
- Moved to NYC to work at Deutsche Bank in their investment banking division
- Joined a travel startup, learned about tech business and marketing
- Worked at a small venture fund, started doing digital marketing consulting work
- Started and ran digital marketing agency
- Joined a fintech client full-time as CMO while continuing to operate agency
- Left in 2021 to focus on consulting, investing, and advising
- Currently on the boards of Urban Dove and Forum Education
- Recently purchased a 75 year old candlepin bowling alley
‣
- Built a digital marketing agency with 70+ clients in 5 years
- Helped scale a fintech company as CMO from ~$2M revenue to ~$20M revenue
- Bought a small bowling alley, 80% revenue growth in year 1 (without raising prices!) and 4.9 Google rating since purchase
‣
- Another small business to acquire
- OR - to join a small/medium sized company
- To meet new people doing interesting stuff!
‣
- Profits and growth are downstream of service/product quality which is downstream of mission and culture.
- Reputation is what keep pricing power and margins high.
- Market growth is existential for many companies - great companies die because the market isn’t there yet or is contracting.
- An underrated quality in new employees is whether or not they have experience as the customer or know the customer’s issues well.
- Good leaders prioritize the right thing to do even when its hard/difficult. Easier said than done and rarer than it seems.
- Marketing should be visual, simple and empathetic.
- People purchase when they trust you. There are often many unknowns for customers and they will buy from companies and people they trust.
- The speed at which a company (or person) learns is most correlated with success. There are compounding returns to learning. Stay as close to customers as possible to do this.
- Being correct is only half the equation for winning. You also need to be counter-intuitive.
- One way to think about the role of the owner/ceo is that they need to deeply understand the machine that is their business. Specifically - what inputs drive what outputs. Then to optimize that machine. Look for the current single/primary constraint and focus exclusively on that. Once fixed, move on to the next one.
- For marketing hires: can they speak to your market (in all forms of media/communication), in the places and ways that they want you to?
- On management of employees: Most people want to feel useful and impactful. That can be internally or externally. Motivation comes when this is true, and demotivation comes when its not true.
- Marketing is about creating a presence where your target customer says “this place/company is for me”.
- With rare exceptions, make decisions for the long term not for the short term. Being long term when others are short term is one of the only true arbitrage opportunities left.
- Never sacrifice product/service quality. Most company failures are some recursive loop of cutting costs, lowering quality, losing customers, cutting more costs, etc etc.
- Its good to have multiple people doing the same job. They teach each other, raise each other’s bar, fill gaps in each others understanding, etc.
- Companies/marketing teams need an explicit or implicit R&D budget. Keep ~20% of effort/budget for testing/experiments, especially when things are working (it's harder to do this when things aren't working).
- Making decisions from a deep understanding of causal relationships is more useful than being data driven alone. Data is important, but decision-making without an understanding of the underlying rational/mechanism often leads to the wrong conclusions.
- Good judgement comes from recursive thinking on your experience.
- A marketing team’s goal is for your target market to say “this company gets me” - through every touchpoint you have.
- When hiring for leadership roles - back people who actively want to be leaders, not just those with tenure/experience.
- Team internal culture ebbs and flows and mission and customer orientation are key. People turn inward (political games, etc) when not focused outward.
- Employees need to be doing things they naturally want to be doing. Find what inspires them and have them doing that.
- Companies should explicitly define what ‘good communication’ means at their organization. Poor communication is a bigger driver of problems than it might appear.
Contact me:
james.shook @ gmail