2042 – Strategies for Targeting High-Impact Growth Opportunities with Winston Francois’ Jason Shafton

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1:05With us right now, it's Jason Shafton. Jason, you are the founder and CEO of Winston Francois. Winston Francois is found on the web at, it's, actually, you have a special website. It's wf.team. And for listeners of the podcast, make sure you put a slash pod on there. And then, you know, again, that'll be a great landing page for you to follow along. But it's wonderful to have you, Jason. I'd love to hear kind of what Winston Francois does and your impact in the world. Yeah, thanks for having me, Josh. So Winston Francois is a growth consultancy. We help companies figure out how to grow everything from growth strategy and partnering with the founder, CEO of the organization to and through helping lead and manage the team of internal and external employees, operators, vendors to put together a growth and marketing strategy and execute on it.

2:03we take a little bit of a different approach to your kind of traditional management consultant or agency in that we like to get our hands dirty. We work alongside the team. And by the time we've kind of done the job we were hired to do, I like to say we follow by the campground rule. We leave it better than we found it. So put you in a position to grow your business and scale it really successfully, even if we're no longer helping. Lest someone not realize the impact you've been able to have in the world. Some of your clients include Adobe, Uber, Kajabi, Google, Disney. I think folks have heard of some of those companies, some of them.

2:43Yeah, we've been very fortunate to work with some amazing brands. The team has decades and decades of experience across all the big tech companies, as well as lots of exciting high growth startups. So it's a lot of fun to get to help even companies you've never heard of figure out how to grow. And probably my favorite thing about doing this is solving hard problems and unlocking new growth channels for businesses and helping them get to that next phase, whether it's raising capital or just hitting a revenue or a customer milestone that they've been chasing after. So growth can come from many different ways.

3:23Do you mind maybe just giving us a quick 101 on what's working well in growth right now? And again, I understand that different clients are going to need different strategies, but are there any best practices that you think are maybe a little bit more universal? Yes, there definitely are. I have three questions I like to ask business owners and entrepreneurs to help them refine their thinking and really get to a growth and marketing strategy that takes a first principles approach. So those three questions are, what are we selling? Who is it for? Why should they care? That's the essence of this, you know, being able to communicate effectively about the value that your product or service brings, and why it's why and how it's different, and being really, really specific about who you're targeting, who you're trying to talk to, and understanding your product.

4:23Marketing and growth don't work unless you have a great product, so you've got to start there. And then understanding who you're selling it to and who the customer is is just as important as the product itself. And then coming up with an effective message, something that highlights the functional and aspirational reasons to believe in your product or service, your brand, will help drive home the message to that specific customer and get them to say, yes, I want this thing in my life. Another way to think about it, I worked at Google a long time, and our internal marketing mantra was, know the user, know the magic, connect the two.

5:04So that's a super simple way to think about it. And then tactically speaking, the things that are best practices today really revolve around understanding where people spend all of their time and attention. So anything that you do when you build a product or service, you need to have a great kind of web presence, something that works really well on mobile devices. There's a practice called conversion rate optimization. So if you're trying to get people to transact with you online, whether that's to book something at a physical location or buy something e-commerce online, you want to make it really easy and frictionless for somebody to do that.

5:39And then when you think about how you get eyeballs and people to show up at your front door, it's a combination of organic traffic, word of mouth, referrals, people looking for you because they heard about you, and doing a really good job of paying for advertising in the right places where your audience is likely to show up. So a lot of the web is covered by Google and MetaAds, but maybe your niche, people are really active on Reddit. So there's a subreddit that's just for you. So you need to go and explore how you'd advertise there. Those are just kind of quick things. But think about it holistically and first principles.

6:10What am I selling? Who is it for? Why should they care? And then think about how you can show up in a way that's differentiated and in the right place at the right time. No, certainly. Regarding, and again, most of your companies, do you mind maybe sharing just a little bit about the experience? Obviously, we mentioned some big brands. Are you working primarily in kind of a more of a B2C world? Or do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about your industry experience? Absolutely. So we work across industries, categories, and business models with B2B companies and consumer businesses. The fundamentals I just described when it comes to marketing don't really change.

6:52The customer changes and how you reach them might change. But the underlying, you know, selling something to a specific audience with the right message in the right place at the right time, that is consistent across business models and industries. So a more direct way to answer the question is I have a background where I've worked a lot with health and wellness technology companies and startups. So we work with a lot of consumer and B2B healthcare and wellness tech companies. We've also worked with a lot of kind of B2B SaaS, you know, software companies that are selling software and services around that software.

7:27But we also have done a tremendous amount of work in D2C, e-commerce, fintech, property technology, retail. And the team has deep experience at kind of cross categories across business models. So we like to think about it as a Swiss army knife that you can bring in to solve whatever the problem is when it comes to growth and marketing. And we're pretty agnostic in terms of industry or business model. Yeah. When you begin engagement with clients, do you see holdovers from previous strategies that you find yourself saying, yeah, that's not really working really well. And I think you've got the evidence to support that.

8:13Are there any maybe practices that you see marketers doing or maybe gurus advocating for that kind of makes you cringe or makes you say, yeah, I don't really recommend that anymore? I don't love the term growth hacker because I think it implies that there's just kind of this willy-nilly, we're just chipping away, hacking at this, trying to figure it out. I like the concept of a growth experimentation program. There's a framework called RICE I really like, reach, impact, confidence, ease. And the underlying premise is that you have hypotheses about things you'd like to test that will drive your growth.

8:50And you want to stack rank those things based on how much reach they'll have, how much impact they'll have, your confidence that they'll be successful and the ease to do them. That's one area is just let's not hack our growth. Let's come up with a strategy and a bunch of experiments we want to run and then feed back what we learn into that kind of growth experimentation framework. And similarly, I hear lots of folks talk about, you know, advertising and brand marketing, PR comms, getting lots of awareness and exposure, also without the level of criticality or discipline and rigor to measure the results.

9:24So there's the spray and pray of I'm just going to do a bunch of stuff and hopefully some of it will work. And the classic, you know, adage, you know, I know that 50 % of my marketing works. I just don't know which 50%. And I think for us, it's all about measurability and understanding. For the companies spending lots of money across many different ad channels, we often will help them implement multi-touch attributions so you can understand what those awareness campaigns are doing, as well as the kind of demand capture at the bottom of the funnel and get a more complete picture that tells you, like, just because we can see on a last-touch basis that this Google ad converted somebody to a customer, That doesn't mean that the billboard that they saw or the TV ad or the ad on Instagram didn't influence them in that journey to ultimately purchase.

10:14And so that's a big part of really driving home the point of measurement. And for a lot of companies we walk into, they just don't have a good discipline around data analytics reporting and understanding where they're investing. Well, I know PR can sometimes be one of those ones that you have to be quite deliberate if you're looking to look at, you know, return on investment from PR efforts, because sometimes it is. It's just it's very general market softening. And any any ideas around better tracking on, again, some efforts like public relations and media visibility or, you know, stuff that, you know, may not be direct response?

10:53Yeah, there's a ton of platforms out there now that will help you understand the awareness metrics. So you appeared in these outlets, so you got this many earned media impressions. Oftentimes, you can look at web traffic as a proxy for kind of getting more coverage because your traffic will spike when people start hearing about you in the press and they start searching. And so then they come to your website. and then of course those multi-touch models I mentioned which are more complicated and require a lot of signal to be effective so if you're a small business that's not really applicable but for small businesses that are doing things with PR you know oftentimes you'll pay a PR agency or retainer and you know they'll go off and they'll pitch media outlets and you'll get a few hits and then you don't know what happens after that so I like to work with kind of PR operators solo practitioners that are just going to really get to know my business and me and tell my story for the founder CEO of that business.

11:48And then they're going to come back and say, hey, we got these hits. This is all the outreach we did. Here's the spreadsheet of everything we're doing. Here's the amount of impressions that those outlets that we got coverage in gets us. Here's what our strategy should be for going forward. And here are the kind of tentpole moments, product launches, features, releases, major investment, you know, rounds of financing. These are things that we can get coverage about. A lot of people forget that people don't want to write about you just because you think your business is special. So you have to have something to say, something newsworthy.

12:19And that's the important part with PR. And those newsworthy moments should coincide with a more integrated marketing approach. We're not just going to do a press release and pitch a couple outlets. We're also going to run ads and we're going to update our website. We're going to do a promotion. So this is a big campaign that when all of those things are happening in in tandem and in kind of sync together, then you see a lift in the business that you can point to like, hey, this stuff is working all together. And we're not going to just do one little kind of tactical thing on the PR channel. I want to point out something that I find kind of interesting.

12:52Jason, I love your cadence and your vocal tonality. And it's kind of funny because as I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, you were the VP of marketing for Headspace. yep and i and i don't believe i'm the only one who picks up on the the tone of your voice like yeah i i feel i i have high trust in the words that you're saying and i feel calm and reassuring andy puddacombe is the og of uh of speaking in a in a beautiful way so i i i take it as a high high praise if if you got that at all so thanks okay so winston francis uh is is uh again your website, or it's wf.team forward slash pod. And so for someone that's listening to us, maybe they're doing some research on Winston Francois.

13:40So now they're listening to our conversation, and they're considering whether or not you would make a great marketing partner for them. Who would be kind of in that sweet spot where, you know, they're kind of perfect for you. They're maybe not too early, not too off in left field, not too far down the road. But again, if you're working with companies like Disney, I suspect you've worked with some of the biggest and Google, also a large company. Yeah. Yeah. I think for anybody who has some really tricky growth problems they're trying to solve and is probably doing, you know, at least seven figures in revenue, our sweet spot tends to be companies that are doing five to 10 or more million in annual revenue, top line.

14:28The reason for that is we have a team of really experienced operators across every growth and marketing discipline. They've got 10, 15 plus years of experience. We don't offshore to a$5 an hour person in the Philippines. We are working with the best folks that have come from these great companies that I've worked for prior to starting this business. And so as a result, we're not the cheapest solution. I like to say to people, you can get fast and good and cheap. You pick two, right? Yeah. We are fast and good, but we are not cheap. So I think it's really for somebody who's looking to up their growth game and hire experts that already have solved these same problems before, as opposed to kind of growth hacking or trying to figure it out.

15:12The idea is that we would come in and having seen the same problem set before, be able to provide immediate solutions and support for a combination of what we like to call quick wins and then more strategic programs, initiatives that we can put in place. So if you're doing, you know, 5, 10 million plus in revenue, you've, you maybe your marketing leader just left or you don't really have a marketing function and you need somebody to help you stand one up. That's where we come in and we can provide that strategic level of leadership and support as well as execution hands-on keyboard resources to do the work, build the process, build the team and the function.

15:44And a lot of our clients we've worked with, we actually help them hire internal resources to replace us. So we'll help them find full-time team members that can kind of carry that work forward once we've set a great foundation. Tell me about, you have a podcast. It's called Frank Growth. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So Frank Growth came out of a realization that I had with my wife, actually, that oftentimes there are silent partners in entrepreneurship that don't really get the spotlight, the attention, or the recognition for what they've done to enable the entrepreneur to succeed.

16:20So we have a podcast called Frank Growth that is all about the intersection of personal and professional growth when it comes to growing a business, growing a family, growing a partnership. We interview couples that one or both of whom are entrepreneurs and have built a successful business. And we kind of dive into what it has taken to get to that success, as well as what has happened behind the scenes in navigating family and children so that that business can succeed in spite of the fact that it's really, really hard to grow both a company and be in a successful relationship, partnership and raise kids.

17:00I love it. Your website, again, wf.team. To our friend that's listening, you've got a great blog here. You're a good follow on social media, particularly LinkedIn. Do you mind maybe just sharing kind of next steps or resources that you'd recommend to our friend that's been listening to our conversation? Absolutely. So I mentioned a few things. One is this growth experimentation framework called RICE. You can look that up. In fact, I think we have a free worksheet on our website, wf.team slash RICE, R-I-C-E, and you can download that and that'll help you prioritize your growth experiments. If you want to get in touch with me, set up a meeting, learn more about how Winston Francois can help you, you can visit wf.team slash pod, P-O-D, and we will be happy to set up a free discovery consultation, learn more about your business, see if there's ways that we can be helpful.

17:51And you can find me on social media at Jason Shafton or Winston Francois at WF Does Growth. All right, Jason Shafton, again, founder and CEO of Winston Francois, WF.team forward slash pod. It's been great. Thank you so much for joining us, Jason. Thank you.

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