How Many People Do CEOs Really Rely On in an Org?

0:00How many people do you think can CEOs truly count on in any organization? Okay, let's flip this a little bit. Neil's not a CEO, but you're co-founders, okay? How many people can founders truly count on in any organization? When you mean count on, are you talking about how many people can you work with directly to solve problems or - Let me give you an example. You know you can go to Mike Camo for anything, right? Yeah. How many of those do you have? My organization's small compared to like some of these large corporations. Answer the question. How many of you have? How many of you have?

0:3410 to 20, somewhere around there? That's a lot. So Jason Lemkin, and I can see that number, but Jason Lemkin, who founded EchoSign, sold it to Adobe. He said, even in the biggest company, CEOs often really only have two to three folks. They can utterly, totally count on 100%. Being one of those two to three can be really hard. By definition, you sort of get taken advantage of by being overloaded, but it's where career magic can happen. Yeah, I think if you're saying for any problem, I don't have 10 to 20 people that can solve any problem. I have more than two for sure. But if I have a marketing problem, I know I can go to Solo and he'll solve it.

1:14If I have a sales problem, I know I can go to Nick and he'll just figure it out. I have people who can solve problems for different things. And I also have some generalists. Both my CEO and my co-founder can solve most problems that are related to anything. Same with most of our managing directors. Most of them can solve any problem within their region that we have issues with. but I do believe a lot of that comes down to good recruiting and I think if you're like a Microsoft or Amazon or Adobe or Cisco you have way more than 10 to 20 because their organizations are so big just most people don't realize who those 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 are but who are you how many of these are you actively talking to a lot of times like throughout the week the 10 or 20 I'm actually talking to so for me it's like 4 or so so it's closer to Jason's number but it's not a big number at the end of the day.

2:03Yours will go bigger as your team size gets bigger but I'm just saying it's four for me right now and it's 10 to 20 for you right now. Jason is saying three, right? And I'm just saying we're sharing different experiences. Yeah, but let's look at it this way. How many people do you have in your organization? 50. All right, so you're roughly at 8 % or you are at 8%. Yep. I might call it one to 2%. Yeah, but I think what he's saying because he's had a big org too, right? And he's worked in big orgs. I still think there's some truth to what he's saying as well. It's like the three to five maybe that you can go, like to me, when I look at Mike Camo, I'm like, you can go to him for anything, right?

2:40Yeah. Literally anything. Maybe Golikson as well, right? How many of these, how many more? Like you mentioned, like for example, let's break this down a little bit. So you're managing directors, right? They're good at solving like their region or their specific problems. They can do more than their region though. But how many people do you have that are like Mike Camo? 10 plus

3:03so your managing directors are equal to Mike Camo yes I don't believe that they are they actually are better than him in many areas and weaker than him in other areas just like you have weaknesses and I have weaknesses but I'm just saying in general go to

3:21we can agree to disagree on this one but I tend to agree more with the Jason Lemkins of the world because it's also what kind of problems do you have at the stage of company you're at? Well, I mean, the stage of the company I'm at, I don't have too many problems from Mike Campbell. Mike Campbell's great in the startup environment. I'm saying he's not speaking from a startup environment, Jason Lemkin. He's speaking from like a mature company. Yeah, no, no. But what I'm getting at is when you're saying like Mike can solve all problems. In a more mature company, Mike actually can't solve as many problems as the managing director.

3:54But you get what I say. Let's say it's not Mike, right? But I'm just saying like Mike-ish in the early days, right? Yeah. Yeah. So like, I see where Jason's coming from. I see where you're coming from as well. But I think the one caveat is - It's just not a lot of people. It's not a lot of people. And the one caveat that I'll give you is we're a very top heavy organization. We have a very heavy payroll for senior people who are just really good at solving any problems. Yep. And when we look at most companies our size, we're bloated in that area, which reduces our margins, but that also makes it easier for us to rely on people.

4:28And we set it up that way so both Mike and I don't have to be the founder that's running the company. So by the way, guys, he sold his company to Adobe. And so he saw firsthand, like he stayed at Adobe for a while, like SVP level. He's speaking from Adobe level and also Echo Sign level as well. So, but also keep in mind, he's a SaaS company. But even this, you know, here's a devil's advocate. If you want to look at the counterpoint, Jason sold to Adobe. He was in a specific division. We've worked with so many different divisions of Adobe. A lot of them operate in silos. He does not have the experience of knowing how Adobe as a whole organization runs.

5:04He's within a bubble in Adobe for the product that they acquired. And I know this and I'm 100 % sure. You're not dealing with global problems in Adobe in every single division. Yeah, I think the thing is, we don't know how big EchoSign was. So he sold - EchoSign wasn't that big. because they sold for$100 million. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And he got put in a division. Yeah. Like, dude, I was in Adobe. I was in Brussels dealing with a private lunch put on by Adobe. There were some amazing A players there and there were some issues during the lunch. They solved it and they made things go seamless.

5:42And some of them run specific countries. And I'm like, I can see how this person's a badass. I think the point is, I don't want to belabor this because we don't have that much time left. I think the point is there's not a lot. There's not a lot. Percentage-wise, there's not a lot. You're looking at 1 % at scale max. Yeah, which is really small. My point is if you can find those people, my God, do everything you can to become, do what you can to protect them at all costs. Yes, but if you're a startup and you have a smaller organization headcount-wise like Eric, it should be a high percentage like you have.

6:16If not, that means you're doing a bad job in recruiting. Yep. So let's move over to this next one over here. What do you feel about ads? So, okay, here's the premise. Let me set this up. So there's an argument that ads will no longer be shown to humans. I saw that you put that in the spreadsheet. I just don't see it. Okay. So in the short term, you don't see it. I don't see it in the short term. Long term too, because it's also, what do you consider an ad? Okay. We're getting into like, we're getting to, okay, let's just go into this a little bit. So, Aravind Srinivas, so he's with perplexity.

6:52Now, his argument is that instead of showing ads to humans directly, advertisements would be targeted at AI agents that work on users' behalf. So, like, yes, we can say humans are still going to be looking at things, right? They're going to be consuming things. But I would say the argument here is that ads, there will be agent-only ads. There's still going to be human ads as well. Totally agree. I think that's how we probably both see it. And there'll be a repository where all these agents will go to, and then you got to market in there, and hopefully they pick yours. But I look at it as, let's take Justin Bieber, for example.

7:26If he's wearing Crocs or Champion, he made Champion popular again. He did? Yes. Champion started booming once Justin Bieber started wearing it. Same with Crocs. I didn't even know that. It's the Justin Bieber effect. Everyone's like, oh, my God, Justin Bieber's wearing Crocs. I got to buy Crocs now. And it caused Crocs to just explode in sales. But I look at that as a version of ads. That makes sense. Yeah. So I think, by the way, Perplexity just started launching the little related search. They're sponsored now. You see that? Yeah. But the problem with Perplexity is they don't have the volume.

7:59No. And I think it's a little too early to try to be monetizing it. I think it's a big mistake that they're making. They need to wait for the Trump administration to come and someone to just buy them out. Yep. Did you, how often, did you guys use AppLovin at all? We do use AppLovin. Oh, on a random side note, going back to perplexity, you know a lot of companies are using their stuff to train their own AI. That makes sense. I bet you it's happening everywhere. Yeah, because they get good answers. Yeah. Why would you not, right? So by the way, so this post from Jeremiah Prumer says that if you're looking for a reason to be skeptical about early success with AppLovin, this is it.

8:41So basically, they surveyed response for AppLovin buyers over here. And only 27 % of people that clicked an AppLovin ad reported that they discovered the brand via a mobile app or game, which is where AppLovin sponsors, right? 73 % of those buyers discovered the brand somewhere else, including 30 % coming from Meta. So this is just, this is like the reason to be skeptical. This is the devil's advocate, right? But that's not to say like people shouldn't be using it, especially if you're trying to, especially with D2C, right? With B2B, it's not going to work. And I look at marketing as first touch, middle touch, last touch, and everywhere in between.

9:18And you need to still get people to come back and buy. Whether you get them back from an email or another ad or influencer campaign, you're still getting them back to buy. And just because someone discovered the product through another channel doesn't mean that they would have bought if they didn't see the ad. And it also doesn't mean that they would have not bought if they didn't see the ad, right? It can go both ways. But this is why I think everyone needs to start doing multi-touch attribution, and that is going to be the future. And that goes back to what we said earlier in this podcast. Again, you can use Haas or HAUS, H-A-U-S, or HockeyStack would be another one.

9:53What else is there for good attribution? I don't know. Maybe just those two, because one's for B2B, one's for D2C. So we can end on this one. So Jason Cohen, who founded WP Engine. so this is why your NPS score is always lower than you think why do you think it is? because a lot of people don't give you feedback because they don't care and they're pissed off with you or also it's always lower than you think because customers who already churned aren't answering the quiz neither are the disengaged people to your point so it's double selection bias people say Apple has one of the highest NPS and I do think they have an amazing NPS score But I do believe when people report their NPS scores, it's higher than what it really is.

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12:51I don't look at NPS as what you should discount it by. I look at it as don't worry if that's a real number or not. But every time you're running NPS scores, you still have the selection bias issues. You still have the disengaged people that aren't really answering it. But your goal should be to improve that number each time. It better be going up. Exactly. So instead of looking at it's a 40 or 50 or 30 or 60 or whatever the number is, just look at it as a baseline and you want to keep improving from there. And that means directionally you're going in the right direction. I agree with that. Yeah, it should be growing because whatever, the score is the score at the end of the day.

13:27Anything else you want to cover? Yeah, I want to cover the worst change to Google's algorithm update over the years. Where's that one? It's second on my list. Go for it. You know, this is just a personal gripe. we get our clients really good rankings but over the years as I've been using Google a lot of their search results just aren't as good as they used to be and I think the main reason for that is they push heavier on brands than they ever did before and a lot of brands have mediocre responses to a lot of questions, queries because they don't specialize in that subject and I think it's a big mistake that they've made in their algorithm I'm not saying that they should discount brand.

14:14I think brands are important because they're less likely to create fake news and stuff like that. But at the same time, they need to have a better balance of really highlighting industry content from industry specialized sites like they do with local mom and pop SEO or local SEO. When you look at local SEO, a lot of mom and pops rank really well. The reason they rank really well isn't because they care about their business more than, let's say, a Starbucks or McDonald's. The board on Starbucks or McDonald's really do care about the business, so do the executives. The difference is the mom and pop usually has one business to deal with, the founder is there running it, and they will try to delight you and go above and beyond.

14:55That's hard to do at scale when you have as many locations as Starbucks or Subway or Walmart or any of them, right? and I know some of them are franchised like Subway but nonetheless, the mom and pops do really well and they get tons of reviews because they care and the founder and the people there are running it and they just want to delight you. You don't get the same thing when you go to a Starbucks. A lot of times you see messy floors or, you know. Starbucks sucks now. Yeah, but if it was a local coffee shop, you tell them like, oh, sorry, the floor's dirty. Let me clean the chairs. Like they try to go above and beyond to make you happy.

15:28A lot of the people at Starbucks, they don't even look at you or try to engage with you. They're just like, I'm just here for a paycheck. And those mom and pops have better ratings and they take up a lot of the local results. And I do believe that if Google implemented some of those same philosophies with their search results, you would have better results when people do searches. That's just my opinion. I look at the local pack as like, this is a product decision that they made, right? It's like pretty easy to see the signals, name, address, phone number, how many reviews are you getting, right?

15:57I think it's tougher for broader. Yeah. So from a product standpoint, it's just like, okay, this is what works for us. Let's just favor the brands. And sure, every once in a while, there'll be a whistleblower that calls out, like, oh, Forbes advisor or whatever, and then they get torched. But I think they found something that works the local pack, and they just stick with it. So sometimes it's just like, hey, let's not try to rock the boat too much until a chat GPT comes around. It's like, okay, code red. We got to do something. And that's when they start to innovate again. So again, I think we're going to see these five, six players.

16:27We're going to see a lot of healthy innovation. and it'll be good for you. It'll be good for me. And we'll see what happens. But that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. Go to the, go to marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And we'll see you tomorrow.