How to Hire (or Create) Elite Creative Strategists for DTC Brands | Meta Ads & Creative Strategy

0:00So, that makes me really excited to announce that we are going to be launching the first ever UK creative strategist incubator program.

0:15I have no idea what episode we're on, so welcome back to another episode of DTC Diaries. We've got a pointed direct episode specific topic to cover today and we're going to jump right into it. Lucas, where do you want to start? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest things that we're i'd see say is one of the biggest pain points in e-commerce right right now today is is the abundance of creative strategists or good creative strategists i think there's a big supply and demand uh constraint here where um you know we're almost in this bubble where great or good creative strategists now are demanding you know quite quite crazy salaries or they are very loyal to the brands or agencies they are working within so actually you know the the the good or great creative strategists available on the market is like very sparse like there's not many of them essentially yeah i think it's our fundamental constraint right in our business is supply of creative strategists if we could back it down to the one thing that stops us growing the agency faster is finding high quality creative strats and i think it's also there's high quality create even defining what high quality creative strat i think e-commerce brands because they haven't got a point of reference they're often hiring that role for the first time obviously agencies of people business were hiring the same three to four roles over and over again which gives us loads of points of references of what great look like exactly i think a lot of businesses are struggling with it both to find talent and also to make the right decision about who what great looks like 100 and i think if you can't afford to bring in a uh you you know, world-class A player, creative strategist that has been through the years of reps to get to the point that they are today.

2:05Like the only solution really is to make them, you know, and reduce that time to value. And I think we've been doing a lot of work over the last 12 months on like how we can reduce that time to value of bringing in people that maybe have transferable skills, but not necessarily like really seizing creative strategists within Deed Sim, being able to get them to a point where they are extremely strong at what they do in a short period of time. So I think today we're going to be going quite deep into some things that you can apply if you're hiring creative strategists and how you can reduce that time to value to get them to a point where they are extremely impactful within your business and what they do.

2:48Because I think as we know, don't need to really argue this case, but like it's one of the highest leveraged roles that you could bring into your ddc brand or agency 100 before we dive into that i just just want to double click on the the fundamental skills point because i think that is important so if we're not if we're not able to find creative strategists and someone's going to go down the path we're about to segue into what are those like fundamental baseline skills that you would look for in an individual that make them that make their ceiling high enough and and make that shows that potential to grow into like a really high performing creative strategist?

3:27Yeah, we're going to go into this in a lot more depth in a bit, but I would say like it largely comes down to actually soft skills. So I think the biggest is curiosity as we've discussed. Like those that have come into our business, you know, in terms of like from a hard skill set perspective is quite low, but highly, highly curious individuals that like just are sponges, love consuming information in and outside of the office around creative strategy, like taking pictures of ads on the tube, like, you know, having folders where they, you know, saving creative that they love, inspiration, just really learning from that and absorbing all of the right channels and information.

4:16They are the ones that grow the quickest and curiosity is something that is really important to look out for within that hiring process, I would say, as like that ultimate soft skill. Perfect example of that is Chris. Yeah. Which I'm going to give Chris a shout out. I know he'll watch this actually. He likes watching these episodes. A great example of someone who literally will watch every single episode of DTC Diaries. He, we'll put it in the, we'll put it in the description, but he's, Chris has recently launched on LinkedIn and sub-stack his own creative strategy newsletter. Having joined the business with no creative strategy experience, what about probably eight about a year ago maybe no not even like eight eight months eight nine months ago but has embodied curiosity and throughout that journey but even now like i don't think you can get more curious than sharing and educating others that's like the next evolution of taking learning and then reinforcing that for education so i think that is an example of a of a mindset and a culture that builds competency quickly over time 100 um there are others i know in terms of like well sorry i'm all mean in terms of like from a skill perspective transferable skill perspective but we will get on to that because that that kind of goes into this uh this quantitative scoring metric um matrix that i've built for the role that we will get into in a bit however what i want to do before we um kind of feeds into this this problem that we are looking to solve internally i think it's like okay what do we have within hambian solve right now like we've got one of the biggest crips if not the biggest creative strategy team in the uk um we work with the best brands in the uk um we have a team that is driven by the same culture pillars and values with huge amounts of context and data from the brands that we work with from spending how much did we spend last year on just over 100 million just over 100 million so as you can see like all of that that that is hugely valuable context that can be funneled directly down into the creative strategies that we're producing across multiple different brands um as well as obviously knowledge sharing being hopefully at the forefront of d2c innovation uh In some ways, we hope.

6:34But this made us realize that we've created a vehicle for rapidly aggressive growth for new and young creative strategists to come into the business and thrive and grow quickly. And opening that door for young talent that align with our culture pillars and values, but aren't necessarily two steps ahead from a creative strategy experience perspective. So that makes me really excited to announce that we are going to be launching the first ever UK Creative Strategist Incubator program, which is super, super exciting. I want to be clear, this is not a junior marketing role. This is a training ground for the next generation of elite creative strategists in e-commerce.

7:24um you know we don't just hire creative strategists we like to continuously help build them and i think there's a compounding effect of the creative strategist network that we've created internally now or they have created themselves in many ways how that helps compound knowledge and growth uh internally as part of that so i'm super super excited like we are viewing this as the mba academy for creative strategy um and something that we have gone through multiple alliterations of over the years of training up uh you know dozens of creative strategists at this point so we are super excited to announce this and you can find more information on this down below there's a a link to the landing page uh if you would like to apply anything but i'm just going to go on to like who it's for but anything that you wanted to add there first no i think yeah obviously this will be a large proportion of this will be delivered within our new London space that we're going to be moving into in February attached to the roundhouse in Kentish town strangely near to your new house we won't dwell on that you can play it though it's a great space um so a lot a lot I'm becoming more and more bullish on in-person we did a really big in-person senior management day the day before recording this episode and just leave with a lot more energy and conviction and excitement and I think we want to harness that for this as much as possible.

8:52Also got word from Meta that will be backing this, we'll be doing days at the Meta HQ with the leading enterprise support team that we have there. They'll be kitting all of the members out with merch, getting on the front line of all Meta's upcoming updates like creative similarity data that's going to be coming into the platform that others aren't able to leverage. So I think we've got the right setup and the foundation there and i just think our culture is proven through looking at people like sam our coo jamie our cmo that joined at 19 and now we're in c-suite positions within five years that we can create opportunity and progression very quickly for people so just really excited to keep that impact going through this 100 yeah like i think it's that piece of your product of the closest people to you and i think professionally that that's that definitely rings through here and i think this isn't bill this this is very much built for entry level high potential individuals who are like obsessed with learning how creative actually drives revenue and and are you know maybe already consuming a lot of information around this but don't necessarily have that foot in the door yet to to know how they can actually can you know get a job within creative strategy so you might be early in your career and potentially frustrated with with slow progression and you might be coming from marketing you know content psychology data journaling media roles or courses that you've you've just graduated from potentially all of the above have very transferable skills into creative strategy yeah i think when you look at the like the curriculum it's it's very fundamental like it's it's obviously got meta-specific performance creative specific pieces but the the foundational building blocks is are the site is the psychology is the messaging it's the script writing it's the it's the research processes that that are transferable even beyond what we may do now and i think that's that was that sets you up for for success within creative more broadly as well as just meta creative with us yeah i agree um and i think it's you know so someone who knows they want to be in performance creative and they want a serious training environment where they can be aggressively upskilled.

11:14And we're only going to be selecting five individuals and we're going to be going through a process for how we select those five individuals. But from an outcome perspective, our goal from very entry-level point is within nine to 12 months, you'll have a clear pathway into becoming a creative strategist at Hamby and Soar. So there is a promotion at the end of it to the creative strategist position. End-to-end ownership of high growth creative strategy for big brands. I think we're at a point now with the agency group where we're only really bringing on big brands. So you will be working and have exposure to some of the biggest brands in DTC that you can learn from quicker.

11:55Yeah, I think we're on average. Average client spend will be north of 500k a month now across the group with top end of that well over multi-million pounds a month in spend, which is the very forefront of what's possible on Meta in this market, I think. Yeah, and I think having exposure to so many of those different brands and different verticals of D2C, it just accelerates your learning, doesn't it? So there's not only a curriculum that we take you through, but a lot of it will be driven through action and quick feedback loops, which I think is the best way to learn, which we'll get into in a moment.

12:31but yeah our goal over that nine month period is to to really get you to a point where you're a master of research strategy scripting um you know production optimization um and hopefully you know it's a it's a place that you will continue to to grow with us long term our we are obsessed with creating you know the best alumni indeed see in e-commerce and um i think for us this is really exciting because we can we can start that from the beginning of a lot of people's careers and journey um and help take them through that 100 100 so yeah sign up in the link below click it go through understand more um if if that sounds like a fit looking forward to looking forward to meeting everybody yeah um do we want to go into how we can maybe share some of our learnings on that shaped how we train creative strategists as as some something that other brands watching and founders operators will i'm confident from conversation with some of our clients that that but also generally just how to build train and educate great teams in general like i think we may we may focus some of this on creative strategy but the principles the foundations is is multidisciplinary i think if that's a word um but yeah i think should we go into a bit of that yeah yeah let's do it let's start with the problem because i think you know we both talk to a lot of brands um and i think there's multiple things that come to mind in terms of why it's very hard to upskill creative strategists i think one of the big ones is like it's a very it's a very demanding and hybrid role that taps into psychology script writing optimization data communication like a lot of different almost mediums here that that that you have to become you know a master into to do really really well then how they they all feed into one it's also pressure i think and it's pace and speed yeah pace pace and pressure and um some people love that and thrive in that because because what it does is pace drives it's pace of outcome but it's pace of learning so if you lean into it you can rapidly become an expert very quickly because feedback loops are so short so direct so objective but it but it is like it can be a bit of a whirlwind for people getting up to speed and and what's actually required from a volume perspective 100 yeah i fully agree um but yeah i think like previously we spent too long in the material in the training in the videos when really like the the it's setting the constraints and and making things very time bound and then just rinse and repeating reps and action through and repetitive feedback loops to be able to get towards a point of you know where where we're really um they're ready to take on kind of client work fully um i mean that it distilled down to its core i think is it was the big learning and uh how we've approached it but i think if we're to then break that down into to how we approach our actual training for for those roles specifically we actually spend like the whole of the first day on soft skills which i think is like really important because that comes that come like one of the things you just and this is why like culture alignment and going through your hiring process is really important to like tap into hiring the right people that can work in that kind of environment because grit comes to mind.

16:12You can't train grit, really. You can't train people that enjoy and thrive in pressure. And I think these are some of the things that it's about ensuring there's that full alignment on from day one in terms of what we expect from a cultural or value mindset perspective, which really then feed into the hard skills at a later point. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I think you can skip a lot of that. Some businesses that I've heard of just even the concepts of a structured onboarding phase. We have a lot of people who come into the agency who are like, this is the most structured I've ever had an onboarding process.

16:53And I still think we're at like a seven out of 10. There's another level to go in terms of intention. um so i think any any some for some of you watching maybe are adding headcount or early in that journey of establishing the org chart i think it's really important to map that out with intention and really structure it by day for probably the first two weeks yeah daily structure for the first two weeks is super important and yeah exactly and i think the reason that's really important is because previously we did have some form of like okay this is what the training roadmap looks like we're going to focus on psychology first then research etc but we wouldn't necessarily make that time bound and every single one of these modules a task is attached to the back end of it so they're watching something and instantly putting into practice and then getting instant feedback loop off the back of that and then they are rinse and repeating that once they've got feedback whereas without creating those constraints then you know that's where we get into the habits of um people not necessarily working at the pace and speed that we need to from day one so that's why it's super super important that although hard it's it's very it's being very clear and setting okay this this takes one of our existing creative strategists like let's say you know um scripting 10 concepts uh scripting 10 concepts would take an average creative strategist maybe like um one and a half days one day um let's say one day um we need to even though they are early into the journey it's like okay you have one day to script these 10 concepts even if you don't finish them by setting that it gets them used to the pace that they have to be working in from day one and it sets it sets and aligns those behaviors early yeah and i think that's what we were following that's where i think we were we were kind of create a disconnect weren't we were we weren't setting that expectation we weren't creating environment that is close to the reality of when they get on the tools with clients from day one and then it was it was really hard to ramp people to get that to or switch that behavior if they'd not got into that mindset from day one yeah fully agree um so yeah anyway we we break our training into a few different modules, psychology and research.

19:16So there are some theory-based videos that we have put together that align into psychology and research before breakdowns of how we run our research process. And then we pick a brand and they have to run that whole research process through for that brand within a time period. The one thing I'd say, if you're a brand listening to this and you're like well i don't have the training videos that to put to put in there for this i'd say for psychology the best person you could look at is sarah levenger yeah um who's done some bespoke training for us internally but a lot of that similar it's very similar material she's she's put out online um anything like from research strategy script writing optimization like i think we obviously talk about it a lot in in a lot of our episodes like script writing, the script writing mastermind is a good one.

20:07But then, you know, people like Dara Denny, it's an obvious one. So many of these topics have been quite extensively covered. So just do your research and start pulling together content that works well if you're not able to record this internally and use that theory element as a basis before we go into actually, okay, here's how we run the process. And then from there, they are just doing the task in giving a clear time-bound period where they have to complete that by giving that direct feedback to them and then rinse and repeating that twice per module. So we go through that in psychology and research, strategy and concepting, script writing, and then optimization.

20:50So we follow the process through. The one area that we stick on for longer period of time is script writing. So we will spend about two weeks fully just on script writing and that is real real reps so the best way that I've seen upskilled creative strategists from a script writing perspective as I say is reps but it's that constant feedback loop and and ensuring that we are splitting those scripts that they are writing intentionally into vehicles that are the higher the hardest to achieve so an example is a very narrative driven unaware podcast ad it's probably the hardest type of script that you you'd be you'd have to write from like a dialogue perspective so we start there like train for the hardest thing so they'll have to do 10 podcast ads that sit in unaware 10 that sit in problem where 10 that sit in solution aware then we will move to almost the other end of the spectrum and do 10 native TikTok style ads that sit at each stage of the funnel.

21:57And by doing that, rinse and repeating and giving those feedback loops with clear constraints, you very quickly get to a point where, you know, they have optimized based on that. Another little hack that is just interesting off the back of this is make sure that either through Loom or through calls, you have like meeting AI notetakers on them because it's a great way of consolidating all of the feedback that you're sharing with that individual. and actually sharing reports with them that kind of like share those macro insights that they can apply for the next time. You've mentioned two things, two words that you've probably said most in that block of speech was feedback and constraints.

22:38I think feedback is, I think that short feedback loop is something that's super important. There can be temptation to have like weekly check-ins with a new starter after the first day or maybe you have like every three days. I think that direct short feedback loop is super important. It's also something we carry through the whole business, through the culture. But you want to set that expectation. There's also a skill, as we've discussed on previous episodes, in how to give that feedback. You don't want to dishearten someone from day one because they've not done it absolutely perfect. It's empowerment.

23:14It's the right way of feeding back. So I think that's really important, like a soft skill part of the process and the management side of things. Yeah, empowerment is so important. You need to approach it in a way that by giving feedback little and often, it can come across disheartening at times. So you're not just sitting in the negative. Like there's lots of positives that you can take from every script. And especially when it's that, I hate to say it like this because it sounds really patronizing. I don't mean it like that, but it's like with a, obviously I've got a recently new puppy. And it's like when they repeat an action that you want them to do, like piss in the right place give them a treat similarly with a creative strategist if they're starting to do the things they were doing wrong, write in the next script tell them that that's something that's noteworthy rather than just focusing on the bad and that's how we can ensure that we're layering empowerment as part of that there's definitely a better analogy there but we'll go with it I think it's because I'm puppy trading right now I didn't mean it it sounds very condescending obviously it's not like that whatsoever but you know what I mean and then you said constraints I think we think we think about constraints a lot internally but I know I feel like for yourself and myself our podcast episode with Jack Rubin and the way he talked about constraints in the interview stage made me think more deeply about constraints in more situations I think if anyone's watching and hasn't heard that section of that podcast I'd give it a watch because really important to constrain time but also constrain tasks and like you make people that forces um specific outcomes it forces creativity a lot of the time yeah forces outside the box thinking um so i think that's really it's been really intentional with how you how you set those up and how you use them throughout that process yeah 100 um yeah so yeah i mean in terms of like that approach we we will go through those five different modules um spending depending on where it is like research we we spend usually around half a week on there similarly to strategy concepting and hooks but script writing as i say we focus on two weeks there and then optimization around a week at the end of that and then they're already doing work for the brands in question so for example if you're a brand you know really a lot of the work that they are doing as part of their onboarding is going to be usable material before long like if not straight away especially with feedback so it's like working smarter not harder how can we how can we utilize what's actually being done as a as another option like you know rerunning the research is never a bad thing no also that generates data which is the feat which is objective feedback yeah and that's like layering that on top of the feedback that the other the creators the manager has been giving through that process is it's like reinforcing that learning and again and and giving more more data points for them to learn off exactly um so the next bit and i'm gonna we'll share we'll share on the screen here what i'm talking through which is like a is a really important aspect of not only the the micro feedback that we're doing more on a task by task basis but more like when we zoom out like how do we quantify who is on track and off track and like what are the different elements that you feed into um what what are the different buckets that that make up a great creative strategist and we call it like the gold standard in our business that sits across every function um you know it sits across client centricity it sits across creative strategy growth strategy etc etc it's almost like the uh the mechanism for where the north star of where we want to to get to essentially so what makes up that from a creative strategist point of view and we essentially as you can see on screen here is we have this quantitative scoring guide that we follow on a monthly basis and that all of the inputs from obviously the the tasks that they're doing mindset etc feed directly into so essentially it's a 5d model which is broken into firstly cognitive ability each of these buckets make up 20 percent of their overall gold standard score so the first one is cognitive ability so this is all about how quickly they're learning um how can they apply uh frameworks intuitively solve complex problems independently so cognitive ability is important emotional intelligence is another element um so how self-aware are they how can they adapt tone to audience foster positive team culture etc makes up another 20 as you can see 20 20 20 20 makes up 100 um then we've got uh drive and ownership which is the next so how are they proactively leading on tasks independently asking proactive questions that feed into that.

28:25The next 20 % is culture pillars. So that essentially breaks down into, for us, our culture pillars are extreme ownership, client centricity, radical curiosity, and kind candor. We give each of those a score of five, which then takes an average that makes up that next 20%. And then the final one, which you can't see yet on this screen, is a skill set score which essentially is the different skills if i can now go on to the middle tab here the different skills that make up creative strategy which is in my eyes if we were to like simplify it's like research strategy scripting and optimization so again takes an average out of five uh takes an average from each of those scores out of five and creates an overarching skill set score So then when you add all of those 20 % up for each of these individual people, that gives you a gold standard score, which means based on where they're sitting in their gold standard score, it will give them a guide for whether they're on track, whether they need support, whether they're off track, or if they're hitting that gold standard rating.

29:36That probably sounds confusing to you. I'm sharing my screen as I go through this. I've never seen the spreadsheet. No, I'm joking. It would be more obvious to the listener. But this way, just make sure that we are being very quantitative to the approach because I am a believer of ensuring that the right people are in the right seats and if they aren't the right people, we need to know that sooner rather than later and make the difficult decisions. It's a two-way decision as well. It might be difficult in the moment for someone to leave the business because it wasn't the right fit, but I like to think that it's rare that that will happen and they'll look back on that in three, five years' time and say that was a mistake.

30:15I think it's usually quite mutual. I think we've always been quite good as a business of bringing objectivity to people process since we've started. And it'd be interesting to hear maybe drop in the comments if everybody watching and listening would like us to do a deeper dive into our hiring process because we've hired 70 people probably over the last two years, which is obviously a lot of volume relative to most econ brands so um we definitely weren't perfect at it we've iterated on the process reps so yeah reps but we've we've built scorecards we've built rating systems we've built management processes and a lot of business operations in the background those agency episodes don't tend to do quite as well though so unless people really want it we're not going to bother yeah the but bringing objectivity to people feels uncomfortable at first it feels it feels strange but i think it brings clarity and certainty to it to an individual and and that's on a person by person level but i even think that on a progression level as well when you can very clearly see why am i not getting promoted what what's what are those bands what do i need to do to move up the business you get the right behavior if you can provide that certainty exactly it removes all subjectivity and i think it's it's the best way of like really isolating what the core constraint is in that person progressing at that given time and then as a result you can build a much more tailored improvement plan for how they can improve in those areas like i know like looking into these buckets cognitive ability emotional intelligence drive and ownership culture pillars and then skill set those five buckets that you know there's an area there's at least one of those buckets that that we would all need further work and support in but without trying to quantify it down to its core it's very difficult to identify what that looks like so we are actually going to share this we we've got a more in-depth one for our team that we just there's there's some sensitive information we can't share as part of that but we are we're actually going to give away this cs incubator scorecard template which um essentially is the you know if you're on board and creative strategist the the scoring mechanism and process that you can use to quantify the performance of those creative strategies during that onboarding?

32:42This question just comes to the top of mind, right? Just quickly. Go on, sorry. So comment down below, CS Incubator, and we will send you over the template. Sorry, Gary, I'll plug. Yeah, do that. And then let us know if you do want us to go into more depth on people processes. I think it's where we are. We are good at it, I think, comparatively to a lot of businesses. And we can certainly do another episode on that. I was going to ask a bit of like an ad hoc question. Obviously, you've spent a lot of time with new starters, CS, generally roles that have maybe been in e-com brands or other agencies.

33:22What are the big three reasons you feel like people leave other companies that you've seen over the last 12 months? manager is is one of the top ones so like someone may actually love the business but i hate their manager and i think that's such a big problem yeah so many organizations exactly so that's the thing like you you know you really need to be ensuring that everyone that is sat in a management seat like they they hold a lot of responsibility and like if they're not empowering their team to do the best work or they or there's friction there you need to know about that soon because you may have a great business with a great culture but that individual would be enough for the person to leave i read a really really good book which i'm which we're giving to all of our senior management team over christmas called trillion dollar coach which i think is an amazing book on management uh it's bill campbell who used to be an executive coach to eric schmidt uh all the Google C-suite, Steve Jobs.

34:22He used to be CEO of Intuit, the QuickBooks holding company, I think. That's the connection. But he's a sports coach. He's all about coaching, management. And I really like the, there's a phrase in there that just stuck with me. It's like, your title makes you a manager, but your people make you a leader. I just think that's such a powerful frame for managers. If you're in a management seat in the business, It's like the concept that you accrue leadership over time, which I just think is a really lovely frame for that. Yeah, I love that. I'm excited to read that, actually. Have you read it? Yeah, I've read it a couple of times over the last three weeks.

35:01I've read it twice. It's so good. It's all about, I think coaching is a really important subset of management. It plays a lot into what we've just talked about. And it's a really detailed, quite human look into coaching, not not it's not all outcome outcome outcome it's a lot about relationship it's a lot about building psychological safety how you do that functionally through soft skills the way you give people attention on calls the way you don't dive into meetings and spend time getting to know what they've been doing and building personal relationships before work relationships it's just a really holistic look at at that yeah yeah it's you could say that about like so many different things like even sales yeah you know it's like some of the core fundamentals of of you know building relationships and sales as well isn't it yeah so managers one managers one um second one is progression so that's another reason i see people leave the business because they they haven't given a clear line of sight of why of where they can progress their role into which is why it's super super important that we have clear development roadmaps for everyone within the business so they know where they're growing to and they know how they can grow into that position.

36:13Because yeah, without that, there's obviously high likelihood that they feel like they've reached the ceiling if they haven't been told otherwise and as a result might leave, which is why I think role progression frameworks are really, really important. Like a lot of companies hide these from the team so they're not actually team facing, whereas we're of the belief that it should be completely transparent um up to the point of like you know department leads yeah all the way up um i think it's important that people have the right mindset around what drives progression as well because that can often be bad learned behavior from previous businesses it's like progress progression is business impact business impact equals personal progression it's like a cycle beyond just your day-to-day responsibility that you're there to do as a role yeah um three you got a third it's really difficult the third one they're definitely the top two i i would i'd probably say it comes down to company culture like if i was to like centralize it so that i'd say like the the big thing with company culture maybe is like work life balance and not necessarily putting personal happiness first i know it's a model that some companies like accept where they just like we have high employee churn and that's okay because it's it fits the model um they look after their best staff but um i would say you know and there are some people that that have that grit and they they uh they want to work in a way that they can progress quicker and work much harder as a result of that but i'd say yeah that that cut that culture piece is is is big and maybe we lost sight of that at some point uh over you know a couple of years ago and we've learned that mistake um by not putting personal happiness first because i do think that genuinely like by creating some form of balance or um empathy for the people but and it sounds obvious empathy in space cognitive space for that individual they are actually going to be doing much better work anyway yeah i agree agree especially in creative roles i think maybe even more so um i think a lot of that those those issues are very common in in e-commerce brands that are going they're trying to do those like bigger steps in growth because you have to i think we've talked about it before it's it's you have to become a good at the business operations and that requires a very different skill set to drive in growth and revenue and I think it needs a lot of time and attention and intention to make that happen if that's the route you want to go and you want to be going for a big exit and you need to build that org chart out.

38:59Yeah, I was listening to a podcast the other day this guy who'd done a lot of coaching with some of the biggest CEOs during that big tech boom in Silicon Valley and one thing you see about like young CEOs that have been able to stay and grow with these huge unicorn companies. Blitzscaling is what it's called. Blitzscaling, yeah. When they add like thousands of headcount in a very short period of time. You see this a lot where CEOs are outgrowing very quickly in those organizations and there's some form of coup from a board perspective or new CEO comes in or they decide to step down from a CEO.

39:47But those that have remained in those seats, and I think of like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg as an example of this, Jeff Bezos, like the obvious ones, they were very intentional about upskilling themselves in like soft skill leadership management, which I think is when you're a very technical CEO or someone that doesn't necessarily have those people skills that come naturally to you, it's a really important thing to think about. and I do see that in DTC founders a lot of the time, like, you know, where they've potentially come from and where they could spend more time to build better retention and be able to build great teams because, like, you know, the team is what is going to drive the impact, essentially.

40:27Yeah, I interestingly saw a graph that plotted, it was four different, it was wage progression across combined skill set and the two skills were people skills and maths. and it so it was low people skills high maths low maths high people high people high maths and i've missed one but not important obviously the top was high both like that was like exponential the bottom was was low people high high technical i guess is what you'd call that which i think is really interesting that had the slowest rate of progression in wage it's like being super technical but not having the scoff skill set yeah it was actually beaten by high soft skills low technical which i just thought doesn't surprise me it doesn't mean today in in it kind of does in the world in the world of like tech ai development like that being in just such a big industry it did surprise me a little bit but it plays into that fact that like those soft people skills are such an important it's almost like putting a ceiling you could the technical can only take you so far because you you can you won't be able to effectively multiply through bringing more people on the journey with you which is thought was just really interesting who read that last yesterday would you say like a high agency individual like sits more on which which side of that graph would you say that i mean i know it's it it will be a hybrid of the two of them but i because that comes to mind like where where you would plot a high agency um individual on something like that?

42:06I think both. Like that probably is the... I think that's the top. You're good at both. Because I think relationships are so important, whether that's negotiation, whether that's internal management, whether that's hiring. Persuasion. Persuasion. If you can just build things, it's like there's a limit to that because like you have to do distribution you have to there's so many things that i think uh multipliers of that almost i guess that's the way to maybe think about it's like it's a multiplying function on on the on the baseline skill set yeah that then allows you to achieve much more much greater multiples of impact yeah i forgot who it was but this aligns with um this this female founder was talking about that she was saying like you know sexism in the workplace and how the discrepancy between male salaries and female salaries she thinks one of the most significant reasons for that today isn't necessarily because of sexism it's actually because men are men from a uh soft skill perspective are much more aggressive in asking and more confident in asking for more money and that's normally when companies would give in and give them the rise it's agreeableness yeah yeah it's like a it's a there's a but i'm sure everybody will have will have um yeah i think that's the general aggregates aggregated like variation in trends by gender but i'm i can think you can always think of examples of of of females who are super driven super successful that book that trend and how that's in certainly people that i've come across that shows that there's it's not and they are often on the sort of like really aggressive progression paths that um yeah it's a generalization yeah but i've seen that before it's probably more common 100 cool anyway back to anything else do you want to go for on the creator i think this is that's that's pretty much everything that i wanted to to go through today just like a very top level view of how we approach creative strategist onboarding um i'm going to share as I say comment down below CS incubator and we'll share the quantitative scoring matrix that we use for CS roles uh anything on your side I think just the final shout on that is we're going to be recording a lot of that content with the view of hopefully releasing it to the public market as perhaps the the UK's leading creative strategy course later this year so keep an eye out for that more info to come and if there's any follow-ups uh that people want us to go in some more depth on creative strategy people, just please drop a comment below, but otherwise, all good.

44:52And yeah, I mean, if you're young, you're hungry, passionate about e-commerce and creative strategy, which I know there are a lot of people that listen to this that are, definitely hit the link below. Have a look at the landing page if it makes sense to you. We'd love you to apply. Yeah, perfect. Cool. See you on the next episode.

45:17Go on!