What you can learn from Nike and Starbucks' new CEOs

0:00Let's talk about what you can learn from the Starbucks and Nike CEOs. So did you know what happened here was Starbucks, when they fired the former consultant, who's the CEO, the CEO of Starbucks, right? He worked 19 years at McKinsey, which is a consulting company, big consulting company, right? And so Starbucks, then they replaced that person with the industry vet. So this person worked at Taco Bell. You know, this person was at Chipotle before, I believe, right? And so this person has 19 years of food and beverage experience, right? So industry vet. The stock pops 20 % once this person's hired.

0:29Now, when you move over to Nike, so Nike does the same thing. They fire a former consultant, right? 23 years at Bain. Okay, again, big consulting company. And they replaced with the industry vet. This guy worked 20 years at Nike. The stock pops 7%. So I think there's something to be said. I'm not poo-pooing on consultants. Maybe I am in this scenario. But at the end of the day, it's your, how much time have you spent in the trenches? And that is invaluable, right? There's just so many patterns that you see when you're in the trenches versus learning about theory or maybe helping like a bunch of different clients.

1:00But when you go deep on a company, When you have a lot of depth, you understand all the games to play. You understand all the patterns. You've picked up a lot of pattern recognition, especially after 20 years. That gives people a lot of confidence. And I think that's what you can learn from these two CEOs or the two new CEOs of Nike and Starbucks. Dude, I'm with you. I also hate not only how people hire all these consultants and think they know the answers to everything. I also hate how people hire all these execs from Harvard and Stanford and Yale and Princeton. And they're like, look how great they are with spreadsheets.

1:31Now, I've met a lot of amazing entrepreneurs and execs from these places, but just getting a Harvard MBA doesn't mean you know how to run a business. You can't be experienced over – or experience trumps having a degree from Ivy League in my opinion. Yeah, and that's why – you probably do the same thing, but we've hired people straight out of high school. We've hired people that maybe it wasn't like a prestigious college, but at the end of the day, they demonstrated that they can build something. and they've demonstrated that they have the ability to figure things out. And the curiosity, that goes a long way.

2:04Much more than someone that is, I think at least for me, being Eastern Asian, you're taught, oh yeah, you should go get a degree at Harvard. You should be a lawyer, doctor, engineer. But those things are all, it's because those roles make money, right? And because those roles are perceived to be safe. And those roles are badges of honor. But if you actually go a little deeper, you learn that, no, You go deep on what you like, and then you will push longer than most people would, and then you'll get what you deserve. So that's that.

2:55and see you on the other side. The real reason why so many brands have broken their DEI promises. So Eric, have you seen this article? It's on Ad Age. I've seen the, I didn't read the article. I saw the headline on Twitter. So pretty much what happened is a lot of the large corporations have DEI programs and they got letters from 13 states, specifically from the attorney generals. And the letter concluded companies that engaged in racial discrimination should and will face serious legal consequences. In other words, they're saying And treating people differently because of the color of their skin is unlawful.

3:28Yeah. And that's completely true. You and I are both people of color. And I remember back in the day, maybe four or five years ago, everyone was buying into the DEI, the ESG, all these mandates, right? Where it's like, oh, you need to hit a certain quota of this color of skin, this color of skin over here. But that's not what matters at the end of the day. What matters truly is merit, right? Not someone's immutable characteristics. just because you're Indian and just because I'm Chinese, it doesn't mean anything, right? What matters is how capable are you and what is your character? And I'm glad this is happening now.

4:01And Elon himself has even said it, right? And people might say, okay, Elon's white, whatever. But it's like, no, like if you're doing that, you're actually being racist to white people, right? And just because, you know, white people are the majority, that doesn't mean that's not racist. Like it is at the end of the day. So I'm for this. I don't know how you feel about this. in general, like I'm for, you know, again, equal opportunity and I want it to all be about merit. Yeah. So I don't think you and I in the United States, we're considered the minority, but in the overall world population, neither you or I are a minority.

4:32We're minorities in the United States. Yeah. There's only 20 million of us. How many of you? I don't know, but that's what I just said. We're both minorities. Cause I know we are, what is it called? A minority owned corporation. What is that called? Is it minority? There's some acronym for it, but some of the RFPs that we get, they ask if you're minority owned. And we are in theory. But I laugh at that because there's over 1.3 billion Indians in this world. I'm like, sure, we're really a minority. And we actually haven't got any contracts from it. But some of these people have programs. I'll give you a good example of this.

5:09And in the United States, Indians and Chinese, I don't think necessarily have the same issue as some of the other races, according to the stats, right? The quote unquote discrimination. Only 4.8 million. Indians? In the US, yes. You're only 25 % of us. There's 20 million of us. East Asian, yeah. Or one fourth of you. The way I look at it is, or let me actually back up here. We have this employee who's African-American. His name is Matt. Great guy. He's been promoted a lot, been with us for years. If we promoted him because of the color of his skin, he would be offended and upset. We haven't once promoted him because of the color of his skin.

5:52We actually don't care what color his skin is. We just care that he does an amazing job. And he does. So he deserves raises and promotions. If he does a terrible job, then we got an issue. And it should be black and white. It doesn't matter if your skin color is pink, brown, blue, yellow, you know, black. If someone's great, they should get paid. It doesn't matter what color of their skin, what gender they say they are. Great is great. Terrible is terrible. Dude, one of my technical partners I work with right now, he's gay. Like, I don't care at the end of the day. Like, if he does good work, he does good work, right?

6:27So none of that stuff matters. And people like to comment. I remember we've talked about this on the past, and people will comment on YouTube saying, haha, it's funny that you think it's merit. Like, this country is not about merit. it's like then how did all these people build these businesses on the back of you know of their great amazing teams but like they built these businesses from scratch right if it's not based on merit like you love him or hate him you look at elon okay wait he's got internet going around the world right now like satellites right uh he's sending rockets back and then he's like he's pioneered kind of this electric vehicle movement and again love him or hate him he's done some things you know what i mean online payments as well online payments yeah and by the way, he never had to do all these things.

7:05He never had to like take all his PayPal proceeds of like close to$200 million, dump it into SpaceX and dump it into Tesla and sleep on his, his friend's couch. Didn't have to do that, but he does it. And the Neuralink, I don't know if you've seen the videos of that. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Neuralink, like he's just doing things to try to move humanity forward. Right. But that is solely based on merit, not because anyone likes to hand him things. Right. Yep. So anyway, that's how we feel about this stuff. Yeah. And I do agree not promoting someone because of the color of their skin in the reverse way is also discrimination.

7:36Dude, and then same thing with you. So I remember there's executive assistants I had that there was one that was African-American. She's like, dude, if you did any of that DEI stuff on me, I would be pissed, right? Straight up told me that. And I'm like, whoa, I was like, oh, I thought it was like, I thought it was the flavor of the month at the time, right? And I was like, I was kind of all for it. But I had employees internally pushed back. It was ironically the people of color that pushed back on the DEI initiatives. And it was ironically that the people not of color that wanted the DEI initiatives.

8:04Huh? Yeah. Isn't that ironic? That is ironic. Yeah. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation that also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing.

8:36They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io slash hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there, and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. All right. So let's move over to YouTube extends shorts to three minutes. I think this one's interesting because you and I like these podcasts when it's only condensed to 60 seconds, I think we're not able to get our point out. But when we can wind up over three minutes, I find that the longer three to five minute clips that I posted, like LinkedIn, for example, those tend to perform better and you tend to build a deeper relationship with that person.

9:16And TikTok has been doing this already. I think it's 10 minutes for them. Yeah. I don't know the length for TikTok, but it's quite a bit longer than YouTube. Yeah. So I think this is great because especially for people like you and me, because we talk a lot of like, you know, we try to talk more to like companies. It's good for us. Yeah. It's too hard to say everything that you want within a minute. It's just you're not going in depth enough and corporations don't find it as valuable. Plus people don't remember you too. Like, sure, you might get a million views on something like that, but like you might get a pat on the back.

9:46I remember someone saw the Laurel Piano video with like the six or seven million views. And so I was like, I saw your clip, Eric. It's like, oh, a big wow. Right? Yeah. So, yeah. And then you have one. I think we should call this one out too. So there's been some drama playing out in the last couple of weeks. And by the way, I'm going to have to carry this a little bit because Neil's on two hours of sleep and I'm about to travel for 33 hours. So I'll be reversed. Wait, I thought you're canceling your flight today. No, no, no, no. We're not talking about that right now. Okay. No, I'm leaving at 5 p.m.

10:12today. Okay. so this drama has been playing out on Twitter over the last two three weeks or so and basically WordPress's founder Matt Mullenweg so he's he's the co-founder of Automatic which they own WordPress right he sued for attempted extortion so I'll give out what I know and you can fill in the blanks here but someone I had interviewed a couple months ago Jason Cohen he has a company called WP Engine which I think they do 400 million ARR right now and they built a great business on top of WordPress so what I've heard was that Matt Mullenweg again he controls the WordPress ecosystem he's basically trying to take a tax off of WP Engine saying hey like we should get something from what you make right because they're not making as much money and they're not doing as well from what I hear and I don't know if I was talking to you about this or maybe somebody else but that's what I've heard so you fill in your portion of this because I think what's happening right now is he's going down a downward spiral I've heard you know he's kind of had some issues himself like some personal issues.

11:10And I've heard that, you know, investors, you know, maybe aren't so happy with him right now. Again, this is all like I heard, right? So go ahead. So Matt Mullenwag, from my understanding, from what I read, he's also an investor in WP Engine. I didn't know that. Okay. And then eventually WP Engine took on private equity money. So the assumption here is that the company is majorly owned by private equity and has been for a while. I believe it's Silver Lake. And he really didn't have issues with WP Engine until recently, where he vocally said, hey, WP Engine doesn't really give back much to the community.

11:46He also doesn't like how Godaddy doesn't give much back to the community, but he's mentioning those two specifically, and he's mainly focusing on WP Engine. He's like, if you look at all the open source, because Automatic is open source, or WordPress is, he's like, if you look at WP Engine, they're not really committing, uh what is it not committing uh uh yeah committing much to the community uh-huh i'm so messed up right now giving back to the community giving back there you go yeah if you've ever built a website you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast that's where framer comes in and it totally changes the game framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes i recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours.

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14:06With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. so when you look at it he's just like all right this is not cool so eventually what he did is he blocked wp engine from wordpress so if you had a lot of plugins they couldn't get updated after a few days he reinstated it and he said what they're doing is not fair to the community you know what they should do is get a commercial license in other words that would make him money and you know wp engine sued him for slander at first i believe it was slander silver lake and then eventually they are suing him for attempted extortion he pretty much said straight up you know it's not cool unless they just want to pay for a commercial license which then benefits automatic which is a corporation that is for profit right and that's really all he's trying to do at least from the news articles that i'm seeing he's just trying to get him to pay more money for leveraging WordPress and making money.

15:16I think the big issue with the WordPress ecosystem and automatic, he's a great entrepreneur or he's done well. WordPress is on, you know, at the largest chunk of the internet, but he's done a terrible job building a company for controlling 42 % of the internet. And I haven't done as well as him. So I'm not trying to say I'm, I could do better, but for controlling 42 % of the internet, he should have had a big corporation like Shopify and he doesn't. And I think it's just mismanaged, very lax culture. Everything is remote. People do whatever they want. There's no pressure for them to get changes.

15:55Hence, a lot of the divisions don't promote. WP Engine should have been a business created by WordPress. It wasn't a business created by them. They've bought up a lot of other players in this space, like even WooCommerce. They just haven't done a good job of monetizing the WordPress ecosystem. And I really think the big issue with this business, because it's been around for a while, isn't the traffic, isn't the network effect, isn't the usage. It's the management and them not being aggressive enough to monetize. All right. That's a good place to end. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, read, subscribe and go to marketing school.io slash agency.

16:31If you want to learn more about the Agency Owners Association, where Neil and I will help you get more clients and grow your agency. Goodbye. Thank you.