My guest for today’s episode is Andrew Capland. Andrew has worked at B2B startups for just about 14 years to-date. During his career, he’s worked at several amazing companies including HubSpot (early team member), Wistia, and most recently Postscript.
Now he runs a coaching/mentoring/advising business—“Delivering Value” where he helps other growth leaders at early-stage SaaS/product-led companies.
Kenny Soto 0:00
Okay. We are now recording and 54321. Hey, Andrew, how are you today?
Andrew Capland 0:09
I’m doing great, man, I appreciate you having me off.
Kenny Soto 0:13
So we’ve already had some cool conversations prior to recording this episode. And I wanted to basically give the audience some background about who you are as a person. So my first question just to dive right in is, why did you get into digital marketing?
Andrew Capland 0:34
In mean to it, I kind of fell into it, everyone has their own journey. But, you know, for me, when I was in high school, I was a skateboarder. I was like, super into skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, all that kind of stuff. And a huge part of that culture is recording videos, or at least at the time, when I was in, you know, at the age when I was into it was like, recording videos and editing them and posting them online and sharing them with other people that you were friends with online and these forums and things, and I loved it.
And I thought I was gonna go to college and major in video editing and like, become a professional videographer for small business. And like, the reality was, I wasn’t that creative. And so I really liked this space. I liked being creative. But myself personally, I found myself gravitating more towards like, hey, how many views did I get? How many plays? Did I get? Can I can I like track and monitor? Who’s watching the stuff that I made? And are they liking it. And so I love that space. So I went to college.
And, you know, my parents are both small business owners. My my dad’s an accountant, my mom is a professional coach, I sort of fell into the business world. And I had this like passion to be more creative in this sort of more analytical mindset. And I just kind of fell into marketing. And so at the time, there’s only one marketing class in my college, I went to University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, which is for anyone in the US listening, you know, the State School of Massachusetts. I went there, they had a good business program. But there was only one online marketing class, every other class was like the four Ps of marketing kind of stuff.
And class was sick, though. And it was just so interesting. And we would break down and dissect how they did it. And it was super cool, man. And I knew I wanted to do that more. And so when I graduated, you know, I had this passion for the space for in, like, sort of this drive to be more creative, but really more of like, an analytical skill set.
Kenny Soto 2:43
okay, I don’t I have no idea. Yeah, I can hear you. I have no idea what happened. But if you want to, you can start off again, talking about the four P’s of marketing, because that’s where it cut off.
Andrew Capland 2:57
Okay. Okay, you want me to just kind of jump right back in?
Kenny Soto 3:01
Um, yeah, that’s fine. Go.
Andrew Capland 3:06
So, you know, I was going to University of Massachusetts, I was in the Martino’s in the business school, I knew I wanted to major in marketing. But there was one online marketing class. And so the rest of them were just like your typical marketing, foundational stuff, your four Ps of Marketing, like that kind of stuff, marketing 101201301. But it wasn’t, hadn’t caught up to the digital world, right, there was this one online marketing class where, you know, we would talk about SEO, and we would talk about optimization and how to use a website to drive traffic and how conversion rates sort of drove that traffic into sales.
And it was just cool. It kind of opened my mind up in these different ways. And I knew I wanted to do that I knew I wanted to do like, online marketing, before my college had caught up to this space that was clearly blowing up. And this is in 2008 is when I graduated, internet kind of in a different place than it is now. But just as much innovation, just different innovation. And so I graduated, there’s, there’s like no companies that are recruiting for marketing at my school. You know, if you are an accountant, all the big four firms, KPMG, Ernst and Young, they all come in and they just hire a bunch of young folks, and you have a job before you even graduate.
But in marketing, it’s not that you know, as as you know, companies hire when they need a new person in so for me, I graduated and I kind of blindly applied at all these companies that have online marketing related stuff. And I was trying to network but I didn’t know how to network and I got lucky. And I My first job was at this really cool ad agency in Boston, but it’s global. Some of your listeners will probably have heard of it. digitus is the name of the company. So my publicist, which is a company that owns like, tons of big advertising agencies, but Dignitas was one of those. And that was my first job.
And so my first day at work, I show up and they say, Hey, Andrew, you’re going to work on the ad trafficking team. That’s the team that takes that takes client’s money and turns it into ADS, like banner ads, and video ads that you’ll see online, in your clients going to be Disney. And I was like, Oh, this is sick. And so this is my first job, I’ve got no experience, I’ve got this really cool company that I’m working on and working for Disney. You know, I’m like walking into the office like kind of swag a little bit feeling real cool. And it was just neat man, you know, I was the super low end of the totem pole is like all the grunt work. That’s what I did a lot of data entry, stuff like that. But you know, I was there for three and a half years, and I kind of just paid attention to what they were doing.
And it was really neat, they would, you know, Disney resorts and cruise lines was the side of the business that I worked on. And so success for them looked like selling hotel rooms, basically, and selling resorts days. And so what they would do is there’d be a few times of the year when they would do, you know, 60% of their sales, right? It’s around the holiday season and around Easter, you know, around times when families want to get together. And sometimes they would get together at Disney. And so I would see what Disney would do. In in in like October, they would spend like 2 million bucks on a test campaign.
And they would test Pluto versus Donald versus Mickey ads all over the internet. And then they’d figured out which one worked. And then in like November and December, they would put 20 million into whatever worked. And so I was like, wow, this is crazy. This is how the internet works. These big companies just test the test tons of different stuff, they don’t care what works, they don’t care if it’s Mickey or Donald or Daffy Duck or Pluto or whatever. They just want to drive hotel bookings. And they don’t know. And they use data to find the answer.
And my mind was blown. And I was like, Well, this is what I want to do. I wanted to do this, for as long as I can, I can do it. And it remains interesting. And man, that was 14 years ago, and I’m still kind of learning today. So I never thought I would be in online marketing, but it’s I just haven’t been able to get out of it.
Kenny Soto 6:55
Now I’m gonna ask a softball or lead in question, if you will. And that question is how do you define growth.
Andrew Capland 7:13
So growth is defined differently at every company. And so the way that I think about growth is growth can be two things. One is there can be a growth team. And I feel like that’s what’s talked about a lot of growth team is it’s usually a team that focuses on scale, and conversion. And it’s usually cross functional. And so I’ve worked on several growth teams, it’s usually somebody leading the team, and then a few engineers, and a designer, and maybe a growth marketer as well.
Andrew Capland 7:43
But there are people that come from different backgrounds who are focused on driving more revenue online through the business and scaling. And so I feel like that’s a really common thing, especially at at companies that get a lot of customers without going through a sales team. So like companies like, like a Dropbox like a Survey Monkey, like Squarespace, those are all great examples of really popular companies where you can become a customer without ever talking to somebody on the sales team.
Andrew Capland 8:13
And so a growth team, which is like what I’ve worked on, basically is the team that thinks through how how do people buy through the website? And what’s the optimal path to show someone, what should be the first thing that they see when they log into the product? What should be the right email to remind them if they haven’t upgraded and that their account is running low on credits and things like that.
Andrew Capland 8:32
So I think that that’s a really popular perception is an accurate one of like, what is growth, and then even at companies that don’t have a growth team, sometimes there’ll be someone who focuses on growth. And you don’t have to have a growth team to have a growth approach. In the way I think about that is like a growth approach is, is basically a problem solving approach that relies on data and experimentation, more so than intuition. And so an example of that might be if you work at a company that is going to do a website redesign, they want to redesign their homepage, because the previous one they’re sick of or where it doesn’t represent the brands in the way that they see it.
Andrew Capland 9:14
And so at some companies, they might just say, hey, great, we’re going to launch the new homepage. Here it is, we’re going to turn it live next Tuesday and off to the races. But a growth approach might say, hey, let’s, let’s make sure that we don’t tank our our leads our installs our conversions. Why don’t we actually design this new version of the homepage, and then we’ll run an experiment so that we can track the impact of it. And if it if it tanks, our conversions, then maybe we iterate before we move, you know, and we and we implement it at 100%. So both of those are, are like the way I think about growth growth team as well as a growth approach to problem solving. And and I think they’re both like extremely valuable and applicable at different types of companies.
Kenny Soto 9:57
I’ve been taught that When you think of like a company that’s focused on acquisition, whether it’s b2b or b2c, sales and marketing work hand in hand, but based on how you’ve defined growth right now, would you say that growth can also be like a replacement to sales, depending on the business model?
Andrew Capland 10:22
I think growth can work really closely with sales. I’ll give you more of an example. So at most of these companies that I mentioned before, like survey, monkey, Squarespace Wistia, is a company that I used to work at, as well as postscript, which is the most recent company I worked at. They were, they had growth as a capability, growth was responsible for driving a lot of the self service revenue. So the revenue that comes from people that never talked to sales, but all of those companies do have a small sales team that talks to like, the top biggest leads that come in.
Andrew Capland 11:00
And so kind of the way that it’s worked at companies that I’ve worked at is a visitor goes to the website, they sign up for the product for the very first time, in as they’re using the product, you figure out, Is this a lead that we should send into the Self Service flow? And that the growth team sort of owns the lead? And they work on activating them and converting them? Or are they? Are they a whale? Are they a potential for a really big customer? In which case, let’s send them to sales, because they’re probably going to be better suited to have someone one on one to ask questions to maybe they need to customize some contracts stuff, maybe there’s some like legal back and forth that they’ll need to resolve to become a customer.
Andrew Capland 11:41
And so both of those two teams can work really closely together. And like, the main thing is just how do we drive more revenue for the business together? Right, we could send all the leads to the growth team. But we might not get as many sales as humanly possible, because we’ll, we’ll be leaving these these large companies without someone to ask questions to, or we can send every single lead to a sales team, which is kind of the process that a lot of brands have been doing for like, you know, the last 1015 years. But what happens is there are people that don’t need to ask questions, they’re just ready to buy today.
Andrew Capland 12:14
So we might as well just publish the price for them and get out of their way and let them pull out their credit card and buy. And so the way that I think about my role as a growth leader, and now someone who helps other growth leaders, is to figure out where do you draw the line? How do you maximize the amount of customers that you get without leaving the whales, leaving the large companies without having someone to ask questions to and without bogging down all the people that are ready to buy today with all of this process? And so that’s where some experimentation and like segmentation comes into play? And that’s sort of how I think about that.
Kenny Soto 12:47
Now, you would agree that growth is different? And is like the objective of growing is different. For every single team? Are there any specific skills that a growth hacker growth market or growth leader should have, regardless of the team they’re in or regardless of the business they’re trying to grow? Yeah, for sure.
Andrew Capland 13:16
So I think some skills that are applicable to anybody who identifies and one of the ways that you mentioned is usually someone who’s experienced or is interested in learning more about using data to make decisions. And that’s kind of a blanket statement, but someone who is interested in investigating and going deeper and using both quantitative information, so like spreadsheets, numbers, reports, etc, as well as qualitative, so using customer research, and customer interviews, and user research, and all that stuff, as well.
So someone who’s used to using data to make decisions, I think someone who realizes that there’s more than one way to solve a problem. And so investigates many different approaches, often, oftentimes through experimentation, or AV testing, and things like that. But someone who kind of throws out the ego throws out the playbook and says, Hey, I’m not sure, I don’t know the right way to solve this problem. So rather than take one approach, I’m actually going to explore several different approaches, and all the all sorts of let this process and this data guide my thinking and tell me which one is working more.
And then I also think being able to work cross functionally, is a big part of it as well. Because if you work in growth, to get access to data means that you need to work with the teams that control that data. You need to figure out how to work with the business intelligence teams. And sometimes you want to you might need to work with engineers as well. And maybe you’re working on I don’t know, some crazy project that you can’t do yourself. You can’t build a landing page or a page inside of your CMS, you need a custom experience. And so I think all Also being able to communicate and work with these other teams is like a real big differentiator as well.
Andrew Capland 15:07
And then I think the last thing is like, someone who’s an exceptional communicator is like one of the biggest things that I’ve seen as well, because when you’re working with other teams, you need to find ways to fit into their workflow and to explain the value of what you’re working on and why it’s important so that that work can be prioritized. In usually, the process is that someone more senior than you might need to sign off, if you want to have help from an engineer, usually, an engineering lead is going to want to talk to the manager of your team, and the two of them are going to need to figure out, hey, is this really more important than the other things that we have in our roadmap right now. And so I think those that are really successful in this career path, are really good communicators as well. And that’s how they’re able to get their work prioritized, which I think is a big part of it.
Kenny Soto 15:56
You have created a, and correct me if I’m wrong, a course slash school that teaches heads of growth, how to succeed during the first 90 days, when they get that role. Can you explain to the audience why you decided to create delivering value? And what is the general gist of your program?
Andrew Capland 16:21
Yes. So delivering value is a business that I started that really has three components? And I’ll explain each and then I’ll answer the question about the course. So there’s a one to one coaching and mentoring side where I work with people who usually work in growth at a startup that are looking for mentorship, because they’re the most senior growth person at their company, and they don’t have someone that can mentor them. And so I work with those people one on one in a professional coaching capacity.
And I give them advice and feedback and act as a sounding board for them to navigate their careers in tech. So that’s one part of it. The other part of it is that I do advising for other early stage SaaS companies, and I help them grow, I usually work with founders on the advising side. And then I also have a course that I made as well, I’m going to make other courses down the road. But I made a course helping people that are new to working in a growth, leadership role, head of growth, Director of growth, something like that. help them navigate their first 90 days when they start a new job.
And what I found is over and over and over, in my coaching business, people would reach out when they started a new job, they’d say, Hey, I worked at this company, before, everything was great, I was really successful, but it just started this new role. And I’m a couple months in, and it’s not going that, well, I’m lost, I don’t have the resources that I thought I would have. I’m feeling like I don’t know where to focus my time and energy. I’m being blocked out of doing the work that I think we need to do. And I just noticed these patterns. And to me, what it came down to is that they we’re used to working at a company that when they showed up, there was already sort of a plan for them. Right when you’re like a marketing manager usually show up for your first day of work.
And your manager says, Hey, here’s your onboarding plan, and you go, okay, and you dive into it headfirst. But what happens is when you’re in a leadership role, and especially a leadership role on a team that other people don’t totally understand, is you show up for work the first day, and they go, what do you think we should do? And then you go, Oh, my God, I have? I don’t know, I didn’t think you were gonna ask me this. I thought, Okay, let me think about it. And what happens is, when you work at a startup, and you know this, like, there’s always more to do. And so what happens is you show up in an effort to like, make some progress and feel like you’re getting some wins, you start to do some work, and you try to do it fast.
And all of a sudden, you kind of end up on this hamster wheel, we’re doing a bunch of stuff, but it’s not really the right stuff. But you’re already kind of going, so you got to keep going. I wanted to solve for that, because I just heard it over and over and over. And so I made an online course where I talk people through exactly how to onboard themselves, how to show up on their first day of work with a 90 day plan in place that had all the most important things prioritize for anybody that works in growth, so that they would develop the right relationships, they would gather the right information so that they could figure out where to focus so that they could make like a real roadmap that has quick wins, but also some longer term stuff in there.
And really how they could show up with confidence is like the whole thing for me. And having a plan is a big part of that. So I made that course. I launched it back in in April. And it’s been really, really cool to see the reception of it, because it seems like it’s really helpful. It’s the exact plan that I followed when when I started over and I left Wistia and I went to PostScript and I was the head of growth at a small but high growth company and I needed to have my own plan and other people have taken it and customized it as well. And I think it really helps people get off on the right foot
Kenny Soto 20:00
I don’t want to assume, which is why I’m going to ask you this question. I think we might have the same answer. Do you think today’s colleges and universities prepare marketing majors for the career they’re trying to get into?
Andrew Capland 20:18
I’m a little bit biased, man, because I’m a few years older than you. I would hope that it’s it’s increased in terms of the folks that they bring in and the curriculum that they teach. But no, I mean, for me, I left college completely unprepared for what it would be like to work both like in the tech space, like in the startup world, which is where a lot of marketing jobs are. And then also, I just didn’t really, they didn’t really teach us how the Internet work, I feel the same. Yeah, it’s like you only learn how the internet works when you go to a tech company. Or you go and you start reading the blogs, and you start getting into the space. And you listen to all the YouTube presentations from the keynote speakers at the impressive conferences. And you kind of have to figure it out on your own. And that’s a shame like egg it really is.
Kenny Soto 21:05
Let’s say that you graduated college this year. And you don’t know where to start. You took some web design courses, you took some advertising courses, copywriting design, yada, yada, yada, but you don’t know where to start, you don’t even know where to apply. Well, what would you suggest be someone’s like, three month roadmap, if you will, because it will be like the summer for them to prepare to get that job they’re looking for in around September or November?
Andrew Capland 21:42
I would do two things is is a great question. I would continue to learn, and I’ll tell you exactly what I would do. And then simultaneously, I would start to research the kinds of companies where I might want to go to, and so I would do them both at the same time, because neither of which will be a full time all day everyday thing. So I would go to I would go to HubSpot Academy. And I would get inbound certified. I’m biased. I worked at HubSpot for three and a half years, you know earlier on in my career, but their career they do this, like they teach they teach people how the internet works. They’ve got a whole course that goes through that takes people through it. And at this point, it’s very well respected in the space. So have you been through it? You know what I’m talking about? Yeah,
Kenny Soto 22:31
I one was on inbound marketing certified, I think it was back in 2017 was last time I got certified. And that was the first digital marketing certification that I got. So I agree with you there. It definitely is a good starting point. Yeah. Okay, it’s, it’s
Andrew Capland 22:48
good man, it really takes you through everything. And if you do that, and you maybe have like a side project, like a small business or a family business or something like that, where you can apply some of the stuff, you can really learn a lot like it’s, that’s, that’s what they should be teaching in school. But anyways, I think that’d be a really good place to start. And then what I would also do is, I would see if I could talk to people that worked at different sized companies, because this something that’s personal to everybody.
But a marketing job is totally different at 1000 person company, versus 100 person company versus a 10 person company. And you don’t really know what the job is until you show up. And so if it was me, I would figure out which one of those was the right fit for me and the kinds of things that I wanted to do. And so what I would do is I would go in, I would look at I will look into places, I would look probably at product led.com, which is a website of various business sizes on the tech space, all companies that are hiring in and around growth and marketing roles. And I would look there, and I would look at three companies of different sizes.
And I would reach out to learn more about the job, informationally, you could apply, obviously, but I would probably see if I could just talk to someone around, hey, what’s it like working there? On a marketing team, I would, and I would just reach out to him, I would look at the company, then I would go on LinkedIn. And then I would see if I could find somebody who worked in a marketing role at that company. And I would just connect, and I would message them and say, Hey, I’m thinking about applying to the job. I wanted to know if I could learn more about what you do and how you like it.
And I’m not trying to sell you anything, and I don’t want any help. I just want information. And whenever people do that to me, I always say yes, because, one, it’s flattering for people to ask you questions like that, and I think everybody inherently wants to help. And so those people I think will be happy to talk to you. So I would do those things. And then if you’re looking for a job, I mean, there’s a few different places depending what it is that you want, but I feel like nowadays LinkedIn is a great place to look like you can filter LinkedIn by companies that are hiring, you can also search for like the title that you want. Like, let’s say you want like social media marketing.
You could Google like social media marketing, hiring, and look at people that post content that’s related to that, that might not even be in the jobs boards, they might just be there. And so you can do those kinds of things to filter and look at opportunities and things like that. And that’s where I’d start.
Kenny Soto 25:28
If someone wanted to find specific experts to follow on YouTube, or just anywhere, like read a book, even, what are some What are you like your top five marketing and growth experts that you would recommend people fall?
Andrew Capland 25:45
Wow, it’s a really good question, man. So when it comes to growth, I follow less people. Now, although I guess on Twitter and LinkedIn, I do follow a few people that are in the space. But I think that there’s like these networks that are just as powerful as the individuals. And so if it was me, if I was interested in, in growth, there’s probably three places I would look I would look on. So reforge is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of like growth education online. reforge is the name of the company.
It’s an online school that only teaches like the most advanced growth stuff there is. And it’s made up of all these Silicon Valley experts. It’s led by Brian Balfour, who was the head of growth at HubSpot was a venture capital, I believe, venture capital in the venture capital space before that, and like he partnered up with Andrew Chen, who was the head of growth at Uber, and has now moved on to Andreessen Horowitz. And the two of them are like the godfathers of growth and have pulled in all these really impressive people that talk about advanced growth stuff. And so I follow them.
And I also follow the people that are in their network. So Brian Balfour is one, Andrew is another one that I follow. He’s the head of growth at Eventbrite. But I think before that was head of growth at Pinterest, he’s like, these guys are like on another level, and will just blow your mind with the kind of stuff that they read about. So I like to follow them. And then I think on the marketing side, there’s a few other folks to follow that I think will be interesting. Dave Gearhart is certainly one, he’s actually another local Boston guy. He’s He’s created a really cool brand for himself. And I’m trying to think of those but I think that that’s like a pretty good start for folks that are looking to get into this space. And, and follow some folks and just kind of learn and listen
Kenny Soto 27:43
to requests questions. First one is hypothetical. If you had a time machine, and you can go back 10 years from today, knowing everything you know, right now, how would you get to the point you are in your career today? Just faster?
Andrew Capland 28:00
Humm, Here’s an interesting reframe of your question. I don’t know that I would want to get here faster. Here’s like an interesting thing that I’ve learned not to turn your question upside, I’ll answer your question. But what I’ve learned is that there’s a different job of being an expert in marketing, and leading a marketing team, what I thought it was, is different than what it is. And so when you’re a marketing expert, marketing manager, Senior Marketing Manager, expert, marketing manager, whatever your title is, but when you’re doing the work, success for you is amazing marketing.
And for you to be successful, you need to talk to amazing marketers, you need to be reading about amazing marketing, you need to be up on the latest trends. And you need to be trying all the cool stuff. When you lead a marketing team. Your job isn’t to do the marketing anymore. It’s hiring. It’s talking with other leaders at the company about what they’re focused on. It’s participating in management level conversations around the future of the business. It’s managing your team and helping them problem solve. It’s it’s that kind of stuff, presenting the outcomes and the goals for your team for the next quarter.
And it’s, it’s not doing the marketing anymore. And so for me, what I’ve learned and there’s no right or wrong path for anybody, but what I’ve learned is that I love the work. I love it. I like I can’t get enough of it. I just find it so fascinating. I can’t learn enough and feel like I’ve ever accomplished enough. And that to me is more fulfilling than some of those other things. The presentations, the management stuff, like those are all fun and interesting challenges to learn how to do but I don’t think I would be in a rush to get there faster.
I think if anything what I might do is enjoy the ride a little bit more. Because what I thought it would feel like when I got to a certain level was different than how it felt like I thought, hey, when I finally make it, like, for me, my goal was always to be like director of growth Director of Marketing at some cool company. And then when I got there, I just felt like stressed and lost. And I didn’t, I didn’t know how to do that job. And so it took me a while when I got to the director level, to recalibrate a little bit, I had to learn new skills, I had to get really comfortable presenting in public, I had to figure out how to put together hiring plans and strategy docs and gain internal buy in. And those were all new skills to me that I didn’t think I would need.
And so I think if I could go back in time, I would just try to remind myself to enjoy the ride a little bit, because, for me, the journey is, is everything. Like it’s just so fun. So I share all that to share, like my personal views on career development, which is, which is like, it just depends what you’re interested in. And for some people, going slower is probably the right thing. And for some people, if they do want to go fast, I think the things that I would do differently, would be to spend more time being mentored. I would ask for feedback. Like, almost almost daily, like if you want to get better at being a leader, there’s two ways to learn.
And there, it’s usually painful, right? You make mistakes, something doesn’t go well, someone on your team says like, hey, that meeting didn’t really go that well. Hey, the way that the way that we presented that kind of made me feel like someone else took credit for my work, like those are all tough leadership lessons. And so I think the way that you learn is you tell someone in advance that you want to have feedback, before a presentation before a meeting before you share some kind of a document. And then you you listen, and you adjust, and you change and iterate on your approach so that you can get better. And if I could go back in time, I would, I would be the person who was asking for the most feedback, I would have that relationship with my manager so that we were always talking about things that I could do better and do differently. So that I was I would focus on being the best at getting better, is how I would think about it.
Kenny Soto 32:04
That may have been the most impactful answer to me personally, based on like what’s going on with my career right now. So I really appreciate that. And my last question to you is, do you have a question for me?
Andrew Capland 32:20
Well, yeah, so tell me why that question was so impactful for you.
Kenny Soto 32:24
Okay, so I’ve been sort of my answer, I guess, to the question. Yeah, I’ve been skating around different roles within marketing. I’ve done media buying. And then PPC, as an SEO website development content strategy is what I’m doing right now in content development. And now I’m being groomed for more of a growth role. And I’ve noticed that although each role requires different skills, they somehow bleed into each other.
And that’s reassuring to a degree, but at the same time, I want to make sure that there’s a way for me to prepare in advance for the roles that I’m getting. So that’s one of the reasons why I started this podcast is because I’m able to do those informational interviews with people, but at the same time, create content, which then creates a feedback loop. That’s like self sustaining in multiple ways. So I think it’s impactful, your answer to the question, because it helps me put things in perspective that if I just asked for more feedback, and ask more questions in general, not just to my manager, or my leaders, but also to marketing experts in the world, I’ll eventually get to whatever it is, I want to get to in the future.
Andrew Capland 33:31
Totally, man, one of the most powerful Well, thank you for sharing that. And this is a genius play, by the way, what you’re doing, like the exact thing that you thought through which is how do I learn from people? Well, creating content and establishing a brand for myself, is they should teach that in school. Like that is like some genius level shit. So kudos to you for thank you for taking the initiative and doing this. And that’s cool that that answer was impactful for you.
Personally, I think for me, like the thing that I tried to do to make it actionable is at the end of everything that’s meaty, like so if I’m leading a big project, or a quarterly, Sprint, or there’s a new KPI or a new product launch that they you know, that I’m involved in or whatever, at the end of it, I always send out an email, and or talk to people in person and say, help me get better for the next go round. What did I do that you thought was really good? And tell me what I can do differently. So the next time things go even smoother? And I get answers in it’s really great. And like, sometimes they’re things that I know about, and I’m like, oh, yeah, you know what, I didn’t do a great job of doing that. And sometimes it’s things that I didn’t even know that I did.
And those are the most helpful. It’s your flat sides. And for me, like the most painful answer that I ever got was someone on my team said something like, Hey, you presented to the whole company, and it made me feel like you took credit for my work. And I was like, oh my God, I almost cried, I felt so bad it was I was totally blind to it. And I think what happened is, I was sharing the outcome of my team’s really hard work. And they had done some amazing things. And I shared it in a way that was proud because I was proud of my team. But I didn’t say publicly enough, hey, this is the team’s work. I’m just up here sharing it. The team’s over there clap for them. No clap for me. And I think it just came off in a way that I totally was blind to.
And that’s like, good stuff, man. It’s like you only make that mistake once. And thankfully, the person on my team felt comfortable enough to share that with me. And so that’s something that I think about every presentation now is how can I pump up my team? How can I give more credit to the people that are around me? How can I make it clear that I’m just up here sharing the results of all the hard work that they’ve done over the last X amount of weeks or months or whatever? And, and you’ll get stuff like that, too. And that’s just part of the learning process is you make mistakes, and you learn about them, and you get better. And even though it’s painful, it’s more painful if she didn’t tell me and I did it again. Right.
Kenny Soto 36:06
This has been an amazing interview with Andrew Kaplan. Thank you so much, Andrew, for your time today.
Andrew Capland 36:13
No worries, man. I appreciate you having me on.
Kenny Soto 36:15
My last question. The real last question is, where can people find you online if they want to connect?
Andrew Capland 36:22
Yeah, I mean, the platform that I’m most active on is probably LinkedIn. I try to post on there a few times a week my thoughts, ideas, perspectives on growth. You can follow me on LinkedIn and connect with me on LinkedIn. Trying to up my Twitter game but my Twitter game is pretty weak. But if you want to follow me on Twitter, it’s at acapland. And feel free to check out my site. I’ve got some great resources on there deliveringvalue.com. We linked from all my social accounts. All good stuff.
Kenny Soto 36:49
Perfect. You’ve just listened to another episode of Kenny Soto is Digital Marketing podcast. This interview has been with Andrew Kaplan and amazing genius, awesome guy, and to everyone listening. I hope you have a great week. Bye.