Morgan Friedman (Host): Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m excited to have Gee Ranasinha here with me. Did I pronounce your name correctly?
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yes, you did a good job, Morgan. You get 10 points.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Gold star! I can …
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): We’re all done. I can go home.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Well, thanks for joining us, everybody. You can go back about your business.
Morgan Friedman (Host): And I’m happy to have you on, and let’s jump into your horror story. What happened to you, Gee?
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Well, we were a small marketing agencies, serving startups and small businesses.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Mm-hmm.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Even though we’re based in Europe, most of our clients are in North America, but primarily the US really. And the usual problem, when dealing with startups, is one of funding, right? They usually are underfunded.
This wasn’t the case for this particular client, so we thought, all right. This was in the days when it was pretty darn easy to get funding, you know, PEs and VCs was basically falling over themselves to throw money at you if you had a decent idea.
So the organization in question was well-funded, let’s say. They were doing something quite interesting in the crypto space…
Morgan Friedman (Host): Okay.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And sort of dates the story on its own, really then. Doesn’t go much further.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Someone will be doing a podcast about 15 years from now, and they’ll be talking about a client of theirs in the AI space.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yes. And we’ll all reminisce about, oh yeah, whatever happened to AI? Because it just sort of disappeared and became woven into the fabric of whatever we’re doing every day.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Exactly.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And it won’t be called AI, it’ll be called software because that’s what it is. But that’s a different, that’s a different subject. Yes… so, it was an interesting innovation within the crypto space, and it was a small team and the person who was volunteered as being the CMO, didn’t actually have any marketing background.
I learned later actually that she’d come from the… I think she was an economics major, which is probably as polar opposite from marketing as you can get, to be honest, and that’s for another time
Morgan Friedman (Host): In this podcast, tangents…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Are encouraged. Let’s say smart tangents are encouraged. On that, there’s an interesting point implicit in that, which is marketing to me, seems like this combination of like math and science, and art creativity. You need both sides.
So it’s interesting, someone from an mathy-econ finance background, on half of it, they’ll probably do an awesome job. They can probably do the stats analysis. It’s much deeper than many marketers I know, but it’s a per side profile that is likely completely missing the understanding of the creative side of managing creatives as well.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I think it’s worse than that. I think you’re right in terms of having a… let’s call it a finance background, rather than economics, but coming from a finance background, maybe the reporting would be as good, but if you’ve come from a finance background, you probably know what questions to ask, right?
Even if you may have to query to pull the relevant data out and then obviously make insights from that data. The issue I have with bean counters, finance types, ecologists.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Bean counters.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah. Getting involved in marketing, is because they’re trying to make marketing the wrong kind of science. Let me explain what I mean.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Go for it.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): The issue in finance, or maths, or science in general, really, finance, is that you’re dealing with finite, defined, measurable entities for everything that you do, right? Two plus two is always four.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Four.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And it’s never anything else, right? Everything that you’re measuring has a defined SI unit that is relevant and can be communicated across competencies. You know, a kilogram, if you’re an engineer, is the same thing as a kilogram if you’re a physicist, right?
Morgan Friedman (Host): Right.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): We’re all dealing with the lingua franca, right? It’s a common language, a common SI unit. The problem is, when you deal with marketing, you’re not dealing with measurable units in the same way, because the output or the intended destination… human beings are not fixed, logical, rational endpoints, right?
Human beings are lots of things, but, they’re definitely not rational, right? They’re not logical. They’re emotionally driven. And as a result, their buying behavior is contextual.
And the problem with trying to create a Newtonian model of marketing, is that there is no standardized SI unit of measurement for fear, for regret, for anger, for jealousy, for being drunk at three o’clock in the morning in front of an Amazon window.
We’ve all been there, right? Don’t say we haven’t, right? Yet all of these things, are valid, contextual influences that affect buying decisions.
And this is one of the reasons why I think there’s a disconnect between marketing and pretty much every other core part of the business at the high echelons at senior management and C-suite level.
Every other part of the business is dealing with sequential, logical engineering type models while marketing isn’t. Sorry, go ahead.
Morgan Friedman (Host): So I have two comments on this and then we’ll get back to this story. The first is, I totally agree with that. I would take it to another level, which is…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Okay, well…
Morgan Friedman (Host): In addition to all that, it’s not just that the emotions you’re dealing with that lead to… by decision are unquantifiable, I agree with that a thousand percent, but when you’re a bean counter, love your phrase, haven’t heard in years, when you’re a bean counter, there’s this natural incentive to increasingly shorten the time spent until you see the results.
When you’re just tracking the numbers, then you’re not thinking about what will the profit margin be in a hundred years. It’s like, “What’s this year? No, what’s this quarter? What’s this month?”
But let’s look at value number reports, which leads to this obsession with very short term results. And like the ultimate or one of the strong embodiments of this is like private equity type firms.
They like go buy firms and then just cut everything to make the numbers bigger, shorter, and profit sooner, sooner, sooner, and quicker. And this goes against the heart of marketing in the truest and deepest sense, which is… because marketing in the deepest sense is about cultural shift and like changing cultures, but also changing buying patterns at a bigger level.
And that fundamentally isn’t something like you can do when you’re just obsessing over the results you get after day one of a launch of an ad campaign.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): There’s a reason why the average tenure of an SCMO is around… I think the last time I read it, it was about 14 months.
Morgan Friedman (Host): I never heard that stat.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah. The first time I read it, it was about 18 months or 24 months. Last I heard it was 14 months. And it’s exactly for the reasons that you just given, because companies are operating on a quarterly model. They’ve got to lift up their dress and show everybody the goods every three months. And…
Morgan Friedman (Host): Love that metaphor.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And if you can’t show a tangible movement of the needle within three months, there’s only so many quarters you can do that before you show the door.
And depending on where the marketing is within the organization, when that CMO joins, making sustainable change within the organization takes time.
There’s latency before the sausages start coming out the other end of the machine. And that’s…
Morgan Friedman (Host): Sort of.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Quite often a year or more, by which time it’s too late. And they get somebody else in who starts again from scratch, usually by changing the logo, because that’s what marketing directors do, right?
Just so, you know, changing the logo is like, it’s the CMO version of a cat marking its territory in the garden or something, right?
It’s just… I know I’ve been here because I’ve left my mark, which is going to last X amount of time. And that’s what happens, and you go around and around again. And of course, this doesn’t do marketers any favors because we’re ridiculed by the C-suite who think we don’t know what we’re doing.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Well, unfortunately, that is our own fault half the time because most of us don’t know what we…
Morgan Friedman (Host): Most don’t know what they’re doing exactly.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yes.
Morgan Friedman (Host): But… by the way, to bring us back to the story, there’s another interesting philosophical connection here, which is this, finance types teaser word, okay, not the econ types, but people are so focused on the numbers.
It’s very easy for them… more common than not in my experience to lose the human touch. Because the human touch requires going beyond the numbers. Say what’s happening… and you’re toyed by that on the grand level, you want to like play with the fears and emotions of millions of people?
Yes, of course, but also on the individual personal level, you need to manage a team and just managing people, like humans are not robots where we say, “Okay, here are your KPIs, go. Good luck, report back.”
Because of this, you can manage people merely just like as you manage a spreadsheet for stock trades. But you need this human touch that those whose passion, love, and personal expertise is around the numbers can…
And that might be a reason why this new CMO to go back to this story might not… your new CMO, probably did something difficult because this is why you mentioned it leading to the story and it could be related to being a numbers type, not a human type.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that. I think the issue is that… the problem is the extremes of finance and extremes of marketing are both detrimental to the business, okay?
Extremes of marketing means you give me a blank check and I spend it the way I think I need to spend it. I’m going to promise you the earth and deliver something. Earth minus N, right? Whatever N may be.
And often, you know, I’m writing checks that my sales can’t deliver. And ultimately that puts the business in a precarious position. On the other hand, finance, is about creating efficiencies within systems, maximizing performance, maximizing output for a particular input, regardless in many occasions of whether they’re maximizing the potential of that output.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Or maximize…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): What they’re actually optimizing for, is to create the lowest possible input to create the same output.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Correct.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): The downside of that is obviously missed opportunities. It’s a myopic, in my opinion, process. It addresses the problem for today, but there’s no planning, no forethought, no strategy on medium to long term.
Again, potentially putting the business in a precarious position. So the extremes of marketing and the extremes of finance, are actually not too far apart in terms of the ultimate result of the business.
Where it all goes, memories vertical… if you take my meaning, is when marketing gets into the boardroom and doesn’t realize that their audience are not marketers.
Marketing 101, take your message and craft it in a way that we’re using vocabulary that resonates in the language of your buyers, of your target audience, of your ICP, okay?
But as marketers, we don’t do that when we go into the boardroom. We don’t realize, that when we’re in that boardroom, we need to talk the language of business, which is the language of finance.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Numbers.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Marketers don’t talk board, right? So we go in there and we use all of this jargon and acronyms that we love to talk about when we’re having a beer with amongst ourselves. But, when we go to these sequential, rational engineering, scientific, finance types, and we start talking about salience and excess share of voice and emotions and, behavioral influences…
It’s all sort of west coast, hippie, dippy, tie dye, Woodstock, leave it to the power of the crystal, right? And scares these people after death. So it’s no wonder that we’re derided in private and in public, when we don’t do ourselves any favors.
What do you think?
Morgan Friedman (Host): I agree. And I have to make that same point in different language, which is my way of making that same point is, I see what I’ve seen happen so many times to marketers is you put on your marketing hat when like you’re in marketing load, like crafting a campaign for a client, but you forget that you kind of have to be in marketing mode all the time.
You have to be in marketing mode to the boardroom, to your boss, to the clients, and…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): To the sales team.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yeah, to the sales team, to everyone.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Which is everyone… every individual and every group speaks a different language. And you have to say, “Okay, what is the language of this… of the sales team?”
In fact, I wrote a book, “Beloved by Clients”, and one of the main theses to this is… to the book is, you doing great work isn’t enough for the clients to love you. You have to speak the language of the client and understand them and what they want. Even beyond… even separate orthogonal from the results.
It’s just marketing. Oh, it’s not turtles all the way down. It’s marketing all the way down.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Absolutely, yeah. Couldn’t agree more.
Morgan Friedman (Host): And with that, so…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Back to the story.
Morgan Friedman (Host): There’s a CMO who is a…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yes.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Finance person.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): A CMO who’s a finance person, and she had a very decent budget as the entire organization had, right?
They were spending money like it was going out of fashion, you know? Spending money on the offices, on decent furniture, and top of the line hardware, and you know, all of the trappings that we stereotypically associate with well funded startups nowadays. We look back in with rose tinted glasses somewhat.
She was thinking that marketing was pretty much an executional, a tactical endeavor. And so her idea was to automate as much as possible the tactical side of marketing. So her marketing tech stack… the company’s marketing tech stack was certainly extremely overengineered for what they needed from day one.
I mean, by a factor of… you know, 50 probably. But, they picked best of breed solutions from various particular strands of Martech, and you know, put the whole thing together. You know, it was comms of the Starship Enterprises stuff. I mean, it was awesome, okay? But like I said, it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
They didn’t need anywhere near as much stuff. And to be honest, I would say that, 90 percent of startups don’t need anything more than a CRM, really. Anything else is… they don’t need all the rest of it. Certainly until they get to about, I don’t know, between sort of maybe 2 or 5 million or so.
I mean, obviously it depends on the industry, the product, the audience, and the rest of it. But, generally speaking, I don’t think you need that. Obviously, yeah. I mean, if you’re selling stuff really, really cheaply and you need to sell in volume, different matter, but, generally speaking, I don’t think you need to.
So, she had all of this stuff and they were building campaigns and there was email stuff, there was digital stuff, there wasn’t anything analog to be honest, which I thought was a little bit full sighted, but they figured anything analog was old school and irrelevant.
Because a brave new world was digital and everything started and ended with digital, and that was the end of it. And they wouldn’t hear anything else, despite much protests from, not just me, but other people within the team.
And so she built out a number of campaigns, one part of one particular, the largest campaign that they were doing, involved payment, which I’m guessing because it was hip and trendy at the time, rather than any real reason behind it, that they were accepting payments by crypto.
I think it was Bitcoin, but I can’t remember to be sure.
So, okay, fair enough. If you want to use, you know, Bitcoin address as your destination endpoint, you know, knock yourself out, go for it. But what we wanted to do was to actually go through and to see the whole process.
Do the buyer journey stuff, right? So you go through, test everything. Well, it’s not testing how it works.
What you want to do is find out what doesn’t work, right? If I don’t do it the way people think, the buyer journey is going to pan out… what happens? What are the warnings? Right?
Morgan Friedman (Host): So, I’m…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): You’re trying to sort of soak test it. You’re trying to blast it. You’re trying to make it fall down, don’t you?
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally. On…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): And your wanting to QC it, to test it, I want to make a comment to tie us back into what you said five minutes ago, that they massively overengineered it.
And what’s interesting is, from the outside, we all intuitively understand the risks of overengineering solutions. Oh, it’s a big waste of money, but there… and a big waste of time.
But there’s a more subtle risk in this mess of overengineering, which is when something is overengineered, the more engineered it is, the more places there are for the system to break.
And the much riskier it becomes and the much harder it becomes. Oh, this microservice has an API that integrates with that microservice that’s like eight layers hidden under everything else.
And from a startup point of view, it’s just so important to learn, learn, learn, figure out what people are doing, that you basically spend all your time and energy trying to either QC or figure out what’s out… what’s actually happening.
When things break that you don’t actually have the time, energy, or money left for what’s actually important, learning.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I think there’s this inverse correlation between the price of a piece of software and how easy it is to break it.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yes, exactly.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah? It’s like there’s an inverse correlation between enterprise… the price of an enterprise, especially enterprise software, and the user experience interface of that software. Not mentioning any names, Salesforce.
Sorry, did I say that out loud? Right? But there seems to be an inverse correlation between the more you spend, the less user friendly the interface is. It’s like something from, you know, 1993.
Morgan Friedman (Host): It… unfortunately, I think it kind of has to be that way because sadly one characteristic of human nature is people judge books by their covers.
The saying exists to say not do that because that is what’s done. And if you have a simple piece… if you have a crazy, crazy complex Salesforce-level of software… but the interface is just click one button, guess what? 99 percent of clients are going to assume it’s a super, super simple… no, there’s just one button.
This is really easy. So, to justify the high price points, you need this complex user experience.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I think it’s related to the way these systems are sold. Because quite often you have the manufacturer and then just below them, hierarchically, you have a network of integrators who are making their money on professional services.
So they come in and say, “Oh no, Mrs. Customer, you don’t want to touch any of this.”
Morgan Friedman (Host): Correct.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): “That’s our job.” It’s going to take us three months, six months deployment, you know, a couple of grand a day. But it’ll be awesome once we get there, which of course it always does, but it overruns by another three weeks, right?
But, you know, that’s the great thing about enterprise software. You’re always spending somebody else’s money.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Exactly. So you wanted someone to spend money to have you guys QA it. And…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I wanted to say, look, I wanted to make sure that this thing wasn’t going to fall over. I wanted to find out what happened if you didn’t go through the prescribed buyer’s journey.
Because we needed… but because there was a almost fanatical trust in the stack that they had built, probably based upon how much they’d spent, i. e. We’re spending a shit ton of money on this tech stack.
Of course it’s going to work and it’s going to be better than any human could possibly imagine. Because look how many zeros are at the end of the invoice. So they didn’t. They said, no, there’s no problem. It’s fine. It’s, it’s great. It’s wonderful.
And yes, okay. Maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, should have pushed a bit harder, Morgan, because I see that part of our role in that client relationship is from a client education perspective.
Client is never going to know as much as marketing as a marketing specialist, whoever that provider is, you would think anyway, because that’s the reason why they’re getting somebody in it externally.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Exactly.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Otherwise, why do you need someone? You’re not going to buy a dog and bark yourself, right? So if that’s the case, maybe I should have insisted more. Saying, look, I strongly advise or we’re going to… you know, threatened withdrawal of service or something. But I didn’t. Anyway, they launched the campaign.
They spent another shit ton of money on getting eyeballs in front of the digital ads, and messaging, and emails that they were sending out to these individuals who were deemed to be the ideal profile for their potential buyers.
But there was a little bit of a faux pas that had been made. And that was… here comes the rim shot, right? Here’s the money shot here.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Oh my god. I’m nervous and scared.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): There was a typo on the Bitcoin address. And so, all of these people who had actually decided to pay by Bitcoin, none of that money went to the company.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Oh, my goodness.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah. Now…
Morgan Friedman (Host): How…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): In the aftermath of this…
Morgan Friedman (Host): By the way, do you have a sense of how much money was this…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): It was five figures. It was five figures. I don’t think it was six, but then the exact number was never shared. Because I think they couldn’t… they couldn’t articulate the number between the tiers, between the sobs.
And now, you know, doing a forensic deep dive afterwards, you have to ask yourself, “Well, if it was a real typo, nothing more than a typo, would the transaction have gone through?”
I mean, the chances of it being a valid address, purely from a typo is infinitesimally small, you would think.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Right.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Now, I can’t comment one way or the other on that because I don’t know. You know, certainly the cynic in me would question that.
And like I said, you know, five… five figures is five figures in anyone’s language, right? I mean, you know, it’s not to be sneezed at.
Morgan Friedman (Host): So… so did in the forensic investigation, did they find if it was like a typo? Like did they look at the real address and then when it’s sent to there’s like one character off, or was it like…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): It was more than one character. It was more than one character.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Wildly.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah, it was a significant…
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yeah, it…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Significantly different. It wasn’t like somebody had manually tapped in the numbers and put a three instead of a five or something. It was like it had been copied and pasted from the wrong place,
Morgan Friedman (Host): Right. So…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): That’s what it looked like to me. Obviously, I don’t know if that’s what happened, but that’s what it looked like for me.
Morgan Friedman (Host): I just want to add…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): We mentioned before some of the downsides of overengineering and complex tech stacks. There’s like the cost at a time. And then I mentioned before, it makes it harder to find and debug problems.
But this is actually another one, another risk of overengineering that your story is bringing out, which is overengineering also hides corruption better, like, if it’s a really… if it’s a simple thing, this one guy, hide his money, put together a WordPress…
Dude, if the money’s going to the wrong place, and going to a different bank account, you know who configured the WordPress, but here? All these hands touching a complex system, there’s so many people and places and parts where this could have happened?
It becomes very, very difficult. It was very, very easy to hide. Oh, I’m going to send the money to my bank account instead. And very hard to find out who actually did it or how.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I think there’s two… there’s two questions. There’s certainly the one that you’re just posing, right? Not saying that there was anything untoward going on, not saying that there was fraud involved, but it’d be quite easy to come to that conclusion, certainly.
But I think also, there’s the issue of being overly confident in the tech and ignoring a non-technical bump in the road. Because clearly this is a human induced error rather than a tech-induced error.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yes.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And by concentrating on the procedural robustness of the system, somebody wasn’t looking past the end of their nose to actually check the basics. You know, getting a personalized email and it says, “Hello, brackets first name,” right?
Because…you know, it’s… the mail merge is gone.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Exactly.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Right. It’s an easy mistake to make if you’re not wary of where the human interaction of the system can easily break down, which is the point of checking, right? Subeditors exist for a reason because writers don’t get it right first time.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And it’s the same for this. And of course, when this all came out, the individual concerned tried to throw us, the marketing agency, under the bus for not pointing out the error or pointing out the error early enough to give them a chance to address it.
Since this wasn’t exactly my first rodeo there Morgan, not even close, there was a clear communications trail, including a message where an individual had said, “No, we’re going to do it like this. We’re not going to do it like that.”
So, I mean, it didn’t go legal, but if it did, if anybody ever sort of sought legal advice, I’m sure, you know, even a rookie lawyer would have looked at that one piece of communication and said, “Yeah, you haven’t really got anything there.”
And that would have been the end of it.
Morgan Friedman (Host): I think a lot of people… I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of “CYA”, of covering your ass. Like, getting every little thing like this documented, in ideally, not just documented, but documented in a shared environment because it’s much easier…
It’s much easier to say, “Oh, no, he never sent that email. No, he made that up. When he submit it, most of us would go to court.” But when a lot of people are copied, then you can’t play that, you can’t play that game, and CYA is deeply important.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And I think it’s something that smaller providers fall over many a times, especially freelancers, obviously. Because I think, if you’re a freelancer existing job to job, and anything that comes your way, you’re just grateful for the opportunity.
And the last thing you want to do is muddy the waters by asking for written approval on amendments or whatever, signatures on contracts, or any of these things. Because for some reason you think that this is going to delay or cancel out the agreement that been previously worked out.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Actually, I want to connect this to the overengineering point that we were discussing before, because I think there’s an interesting metaphor, or this same principle applies to both, which is, a boil down of our overengineering part of our conversation was…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): You need to engineer something to the corresponding level that’s needed. Based on the usage, the speed of learning, et cetera, and a lot of people go over, up and sometimes under.
But the same happens on paperwork and legal stuff where often a lot of people, especially freelancers, as you point out, go under the amount of legal pay. No, it’s not worth it to have this one page contract or documented or to send this email to cc CSM.
But also, like, I’ve also seen situations where companies wanna hire smaller companies for fairly, relatively small contracts, and they just want to kill them with paperwork, and due diligence, and procurement bullshit. And like…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): It’s basically… it’s not worth dealing with procurement unless it’s in the six figures. So, so on… So, on that side, you need to like, not overengineer. We could say over legalize or under legalize, you need to find the right balance as well.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): It’s an interesting point about procurement because that’s another subject of mine. I will not touch procurement in any shape or form. In the 16 years we’ve been in business, we have never touched an RFP, RFI, RTT, whatever TLA, three letter acronym…
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yes.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): You want to give these things, right? Won’t touch those. You’re playing with a loaded deck, right? 99 times out of a hundred, the RFP is just there to have two poor saps go through the process, so that the third company, who’s already the preferred supplier….
Morgan Friedman (Host): The one that can…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Can get the work.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah. It’s fixed from the start. It’s a shell game. It’s find the lady, that’s what it is, right? You know that… it’s you know, the guys on the street corners and when they’re playing that find the lady with the three cars…
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yeah.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Right.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): It’s… you’re doomed from the start. You can… especially agencies, right? Who usually can’t charge for pitching and that can… they can put in hundreds of hours, man hours of work on these things.
And there’s… they didn’t have a chance as soon as they accepted the request for a proposal. There’s just no point. So, we don’t do it. And we say, look, if you can’t see by who we are, what we do, how we express ourselves, how we think we’re different, how we think we serve you better…
If we haven’t made that clear in our customer facing communication, then you shouldn’t be employing us as a marketing agency because we suck.
And if we can’t do it for ourselves, we can’t do it for you, clearly.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yeah.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): So, do not darken our door. Not interested. Move along.
Morgan Friedman (Host): One hundred percent. And that’s the subject for another podcast as well. The pains of procurement are never worth it and it’s surprising to me how many people don’t realize that just submitting these RFPs…
Even when they reach out to you, I’ve also seen it like, oh, we’ve been pointing you as one of the finalists and a younger version of me… the younger version was like, wow, this is amazing, but very, very…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Sure, it’s an ego thing, isn’t it?
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yeah, totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Those things, they are the procurement’s version of the African prince wanting to put money in your bank account.
Morgan Friedman (Host): You have a talent for metaphors. I love it.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I know. I should be in marketing, shouldn’t I?
Morgan Friedman (Host): If your company goes under it, you can always become a copywriter. So on the story, what ended up happening? Did this end up ending a relationship? Did they fire you? Or the company go under, what happened?
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Well… Yeah, I mean…. it didn’t end the relationship there and then, of course, now the elephant’s in the room, right? So, moving forward, there was always… animosity is probably too strong a word. But there wasn’t that level of trust and a conducive working environment moving forward.
And we carried on working with the client for about three or four months on other campaigns, which were QC’d, strangely enough. One of the things that soured the relationship was obviously this and trying to pin the blame on us, which I took too personally.
I can look back and say, yes, I took it too personally. But, also it became quite quickly apparent that they weren’t getting anywhere near their revenue forecasts.
As month went by… well, not even close, I mean, less than half, probably be nearer 25 percent of what they had forecast. So, they started belt tightening. They tried to renegotiate their contract with us, which wasn’t going to happen.
They kept their head count quite low anyway, so there wasn’t… I don’t think there was any layoffs. They did reengineer their tech stack, but I don’t think it saved them that much.
I mean, you know, when if you go from the gold level to the silver level, you know, you save a couple of bucks. But I don’t think it was anywhere near the… serious amount of savings they needed to make…
Morgan Friedman (Host): But, they didn’t.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): To keep shareholders on their side. So, I got to the point where we parted ways, pseudo-amicably.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Yeah.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): They didn’t pay their last bill. But, to be honest, it was a price worth paying, to be honest. Cause it wasn’t fun anymore, you know? Cause like I said, the elephant’s in the room and it was like, no, you’ve shown your true colors.
You’ve shown that, when push comes to shove, we’re not a partner, we’re just another supplier. In which case… consciously or unconsciously the day to day chemistry changes, doesn’t it?
Morgan Friedman (Host): Question. Did this end up with you guys changing your process? So, like start, like mandating, should like QA? And like, most standard along the… along these lines, or you step back, or are you still winging it?
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): We have… I wouldn’t call it something as official as changing the process. Since that time, which… like I said, it was a few years ago, we’ve obviously run into similar situations, but we have never, hand on heart, I can tell you, we have never had pushback from a client.
They have seen that no matter how much trust they have within the system, either what they’ve specified or we’ve specified together or whatever it may be, they’ve understood that it makes sense to have another pair of eyes look over your work, and they’ve not seen it as a threat to their competence or whatever.
So we’ve never had pushback. So there’s never been any need to sort of change terms, or process, or anything else? I think it was more to do with… let’s call it “Imposter Syndrome”, right? A bean counter in a marketing role, not an ideal fit.
Morgan Friedman (Host): There’s a lot of imposter syndrome in the marketing world, which… interestingly, what marketers do well is get people excited about stuff, so therefore, there’s this risk whenever you hire a marketer… that you’re hiring someone that’s really good at getting people excited about stuff. So you’re good at getting someone excited about hiring you, hiring the marketer themselves.
And as a result, it creates a world where everything talks and sounds more inflated than it is, which is the breeding ground for the imposter syndrome.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Possibly. Yeah, possibly. I think the issue with many providers is that they’re overly focused on the tactical execution side of things, whereas we’re coming at it… well, not just us.
I mean, there are other ones, you know, other agencies like us who come at it from a business process kind of thing, right? Like for instance, we don’t take on any new… our onboarding process includes, needing to see the client’s business plan. If they’ve been trading for any length of time, we need to see the last year’s accounts.
This is not to judge how are we going to set our rates. Oh, you can afford more. No, there’s nothing… not like that. But it’s also to us, to find out whether the business financially can sustain the level of investment required to generate the particular sales result that they’re looking for us to help them achieve.
Because they always underestimate these things. Business owners always think, oh yeah, all we’ve got to do is turn the tap on, right? And then we get eyeballs, and then we just need to close the sales and job done, right?
It’s easy, you know, we wake up in the morning, the sun shining, the birds are singing, our children marry millionaires, and we all live happily ever after, right?
Morgan Friedman (Host): Presence of mind…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Exactly. Right. So, you know, these are the sorts of things that we need to see and as an aside, it’s quite amazing. Not even with the majority, not even the minority. It’s a very small minority of small business owners who haven’t got a clue how to run a business, Morgan.
It’s certainly marketers have not a clue about business. And I think it’s absolutely astonishing. That a startable small business owner, especially a small business owner would take the risk of employing a marketing person or a marketing agency who doesn’t understand business, doesn’t understand a balance sheet, or a P&L, or marketers couldn’t even spell EBITDA, let alone tell you what it is, right? It’s ridiculous.
Morgan Friedman (Host): I agree with that a hundred percent. My interpretation of that observation… and I made that same observation before it, is the following, vast, vast majority of restaurants… at least in New York where I’m from, and known fact in New York, is the vast majority of restaurants fell in under a year. It’s like the worst business ever and it…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Absolutely. Sure. Super risky.
Morgan Friedman (Host): At some point I was thinking about it, wow, like, why does so many fail? Why does it go so badly? And I realized something, who starts a restaurant? A cook, a chef, someone that loves cooking. Oh, I love food. I love cooking. What should I do? Start a restaurant.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): “You cook really well, Morgan. You know what you need to do? You need to start a restaurant.”
Morgan Friedman (Host): Exactly. Exactly. So… and I feel like a lot… the same pattern happens with almost all small businesses and startups, especially in marketing. Oh, I’m really good at designing logos. Oh, this is fun. Because you’re good at this, you’re like, oh, let me get a client.
Oh, if someone wants to pay me freelance for this then you’re doing well you hire someone else, hire someone else, and so on. And I feel like what happens what most people don’t realize is the skills needed to be a chef, a good chef are completely different than the skills needed to run a restaurant.
You need to like negotiate contracts, think about locations, manage the all… like all these low paid employees and so on. And similar with marketing and every industry, the skills of the profession are completely different than skills to run the business, but they’re… but could they tend to be started by people who are really into that profession.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): 99 percent of successful restaurants are successful for other things apart from the food. The food is important, of course. Can’t sell them slop. But it’s not even top five of the most important things you need to run a restaurant. Not even top five. It’s certainly, as you point out, you need to be a business person first and a chef second, number one.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): The point about a restaurant is 90 percent of the experience is theater.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Like everything.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Right. It’s about the packaging, right? It’s about the cleanliness of front of house. It’s about the starched white napkins. It’s about the crystal glasses that they have on the table, or the cutlery which is positioned within a micrometer of its life and polished. You know, with fastidious attention to detail, right?
You know, bring… bringing the plates all at the same time, maybe with covers, which they synchronize when they open in front of… you know, whatever it may be, okay? Depends on how fine your fine dining is, right?
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And all of that stuff has got nothing to do with the food. Nothing to do with the food. But they think… you know, just like if we build it, they will come brigade. You have all the people who say, “Oh, yes… that.” You know, if my food is great, my food speaks louder than anything, right?
But it doesn’t. There are plenty of really talented chefs with amazing food that go out of business in six months. You know, it’s the hard thing about restaurants is not getting people in the door, is getting people in the door every day, right?
What makes you want to come back? It’s not coming through the door. You have a great plate of food. And it costs you whatever it costs you. Why would you want to come back? Especially like you mentioned in New York, it’s like, you’ve got a little bit of a choice in New York City as to where you could go, right?
Morgan Friedman (Host): Totally.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Why should I come back?
Morgan Friedman (Host): 100% and…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): This is a great note to end the podcast on. I can always end everything by talking about food because it makes me want to go and eat. Gee, do you have… and before we… or as we wrap up, do you have any…
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Yeah.
Morgan Friedman (Host): Final comments on the story about the aftermath, things you’ve changed, anything you learned, or final insights about marketing life, universe existence, you want to share any of them?
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): Well, I’ve got loads of those ones. When we started the agency 16 years ago, okay? There were three of us and one of the foundational pillars of the agency were we’re not going to work with arseholes. We had a no arsehole policy.
And the reason was that throughout our working lives, we either worked with or for arseholes. And so, we said, any new client we took on board would have to be voted in. And that’s… it’s a policy that I still have today.
I mean, there’s 19 of us today. And everybody who’s going to be working on that account needs to be on board with working with that particular organization. And if just one person is not happy, we do not take that client on because we’re not doing it, a month, you know, okay, money is obviously a driver, but it’s not the primary driver.
That’s not the point. Now, this kind of stuff scares my bank manager to death. Doesn’t please my accountant either. But, you know, we have to walk our walk and we do it for a reason.
So as a consequence of that, I like to think that I have a pretty good nose for smelling bullshit, okay? And if I do smell bullshit, I’ll come up with a number of reasons why we can’t take that particular company on as a client.
But then, every so often, Morgan, just to keep me humbled, I get an outlier that sort of slips through the net.
Morgan Friedman (Host): You’re still human.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): And brings me back down to worth with a bump. And we probably have one client like that every year. And maybe that’s the cost that we pay for being able to take on the wonderful clients that we do take on.
And if that’s the case, so be it. But what I would say, if you’re a small business, you either trust in the supplier that you take on, whether it’s marketing or whatever, it doesn’t have to be marketing. You either trust in that supplier or you don’t trust in that supplier, but you can’t have it both ways.
If you’re taking on somebody with expertise that you do not have within your organization, then you either allow them to do the job that you’re asking them to do or you fire them. Because it’s never going to end well. And in our case, we usually end up firing them, a client, on that many times.
Because if we know… if we can’t make us a tangible difference to the organization and have a bit of fun along the way, then what’s the point of it? You know, once we’ll close up and we’ll work in a bank or something, and get bored, stupid every day, you know?
Morgan Friedman (Host): I agree. And it’s surprising to me how many people prioritize the dollar sign. Even for like tiny amounts, oh, this is an extra 10 cents. You can’t do anything over the fact… wow, I spend all my time every day, eight or many more hours a day with these people working on this, thinking about this and doing that with people you really like internally and on the external team is worth its weight in gold.
Gee Ranasinha (Interviewee): I was just gonna say that one of my team has a nice quote, which he uses quite often, which he says, “We don’t have clients. We have friends we do business with.” Which I think sort of summarizes our philosophy quite well.
Morgan Friedman (Host): I love it. And on this, this is the perfect way to wrap up the episode. Gee, thank you for your time and everyone who has made it to the end, the exact hour mark.
Thank you for watching until next time.