Show Notes

TheNextCMO’s latest podcast is with Scott Millen the co-founder and managing director at 2Fish company. Scott started 2Fish company back in 2011 and works closely with client partners to help them solve marketing problems. This podcast discusses the importance of building relationships with your clients, tips for marketers to get the most out of their agency relationship, how to adjust your marketing plans during a pandemic, and how Scott was the first customer of Plannuh! 

Useful links

• Scott Finlow - https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmillen/
  
• 2 Fish Company - https://2fishco.com
• Related Article: https://2fishco.com/what-does-marketing-agency-do/
• For info about Plannuh's marketing planning software, check out our site

Kelsey Krapf 0:00
Welcome to the official podcast of the next cmo hosted by Plannuh. The next cmo is a thought leadership podcast for those that are CMOS or want to become one. My name is Kelsey Krapf and I am the senior marketing manager.

Peter Mahoney 0:15
And I'm Peter Mahoney and I'm the founder and CEO of planet and welcome to the next cmo.

Kelsey Krapf 0:39
For this week, we are honored to have Scott Mellon, the CO-Founder and Managing Director at two fish company as our guest. Scott started to fish company back in 2011, and works closely with climb partners to build relationships that allow them to solve marketing problems and get great results to fish as a full service marketing agency and just so happens to be planted first customer. How are you doing today, Scott?

Scott Millen 1:04
Pretty good. I don't

Peter Mahoney 1:05
know if you knew that. Do you know you were actually the first

Scott Millen 1:08
that was that was a revelation. Yeah. Early.

Peter Mahoney 1:11
Yeah, you were you were early but you were literally the first one. You know, back in the in the early days you don't want to admit that you're the first test the hit. Here's the first one. We didn't want to let john we say yeah, you're an early one. But you you were actually the first one so you saw us from the very beginning. Wow. Yeah. And I remember

Scott Millen 1:30
talking to in the car driving back from something my wife was driving and we were coming back and I think I had you on speakerphone. She says I don't know who that is. But they sound smart. Ah, so what is this guy who's got a really good idea and I think it's gonna work.

Peter Mahoney 1:44
Excellent. Well, from their from those suspicious beginnings. See what happened. It's It's amazing. But I thought it would be really great to have you on the podcast because I always look at you as great we were just joking before on you. You've got the Midwestern perspective, right the middle of the country, you've got this, you know, broad understanding of what's going on in the planet, or at least the United States version of it in marketing. And so it'd be great if you could start by just setting the table and help you help people to understand a little bit about your background into fish and what the agency has done.

Unknown Speaker 2:23
Well, I hate to burst the bubble of anybody who's going to school to become a marketing leader, but I have a BFA in drawing and printmaking from Calvin College here in beautiful Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is Calvin University. And then I, you know, I couldn't paint for a living is what it came down to. But I had a graphic that I had a graphic design background, same time, so I kind of that's how I kind of got going. I saw the world in graphic design terms, even though the fine art that I produced was kind of from that personal perspective and then I eventually found myself in a creative director role at a marketing agency after having been at design firms for a number of years. I really think that's where my education truly kicked into high gear. So, one, liberal arts is the way to go team, and two, you can learn a lot on the job.

Peter Mahoney 3:23
That's absolutely true. And it's interesting, I've got my youngest of three is just about to embark on her college education. And, you know, also all of them went through sort of a liberal arts education and I'm a big fan of that. Its college is about learning how to learn because everything changes so significantly after you get into the world and obviously, there are some professions that are different, you know, if you're, if you're going to be a brain surgeon, then you probably should learn the specifics of that. Not on the job. Right. You never know what the first ones did right? The first one's kind of figured it out. Sure.

Unknown Speaker 4:06
Well, and I would say that what we do now versus what I was doing 10 years ago or even 1516 years ago, very different related tangentially, but very different from what we were doing that at the time that was kind of learning but you're always learning on the job. I mean, look how fast our skill sets are changing. We could how fast the needs of the marketplace is are transforming. You got to keep up.

Kelsey Krapf 4:36
Is that what inspired you to create the agency in the first place, you know, marketing, evolving and your passion in graphic design?

Unknown Speaker 4:45
Yeah, no, you know, it's interesting, the company that I was working for prior to this, and the guy that I worked for Johnson ASCII. He such a great guy. We had a really successful thing going down in Kalamazoo. In 2008, I just killed that company. In the end, it was just, it was so rough back then. So when it came when he decided he was going to shut it down, I was working with him to buy the organization. They decided to shut it down. I decided I was done working for people. At that point, I had figured out a lot. I knew that one of the reasons that we should have shut down or changed the business model a little bit sooner was that we have way too much overhead and we could have done a lot more had we had a smaller core team with a lot of people working outside. So that's how I started to fish. We started out of the basement. Hooray for basements. And I worked with contract creatives. For the first three years, we had a five-year plan. Somewhere around year three or four I knew that we'd probably achieve breakaway and it turned out was right So that was good news and then that's when we started hiring people and there's that tipping point, you know, where you're working with all contracts and then you realize that those expenses could be lowered by hiring people even with benefits. So that's where we started really hitting it. That was what 2015 16 something like that.

Peter Mahoney 6:21
So you have to tell me the origin of the name to fish where there has to be a story there.

Unknown Speaker 6:29
sure there's there's two stories. One in the when I was in high school, I was part of a marketing team for the high school theater productions. And we did seussical when I was that did you do?

Peter Mahoney 6:45
Okay, I thought it was a Dr. Seuss. One fish two fish. No,

Unknown Speaker 6:50
no, we were coming up with names or riffing on names and and and somebody I think I threw out like to fish company. It's better than Three Dog Night which tells you how old I am. But those are reruns even when I was a teenager. And we laughed. We thought that was a great one. But really, it's about the creative process to fish company. So there's this. There's this Rockstar, motivational speaker, who was getting a crowd all worked up one day. And his entourage came to him and said, Hey, great news. Very popular. People love you. We forgot about catering. And he's like, not a problem. We can solve this. And so he finds somebody in front of the crowd. He says, Hey, kid, what do you get? The kid says I got two fish. And he says, great, Hey, kid, other kid points to another person. Well, you got he's got five loaves, this is great. He gives the fish and the loaves to his team. He says, just distribute this gonna be cool. Don't worry about it. And everybody was fed. And sure that's a Bible story. But what's really interesting in that moment was That Rockstar motivational speaker worked with the crowd to come up with a plan to solve the particularly creative need and that's, that's what we try to do is we try to work with the people that we're serving and, and use all the resources available. Do a little bamboozlement and see what the results are when we work together to solve a problem.

Peter Mahoney 8:28
That's great. And there's a little magic in the middle to that comes from you guys. Right?

Scott Millen 8:31
Yes, sparkle.

Peter Mahoney 8:32
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that. If there is such thing as a typical to fish client, so what what are your customers look like today?

Unknown Speaker 8:40
You know, we've, we've been in kind of a season of transition. I don't know if COVID is helping or not, but we have typically worked with medical device. West Michigan's kind of a medical device hub to a certain degree. I've had a lot of experience almost a couple decades now working with medical device companies in the area. And then we have worked with manufacturing headed towards automotive, and the nonprofit. What's really interesting about them as almost all of these folks that we work with these marketing managers, the CMOS, they are deeply underwater. They are almost always way overwhelmed by their workload, and they are usually handed inadequate resources to pull that off. So we try and help them figure it out from that perspective, and we often start with clients like just knocking out PowerPoints, which I know a lot of people think isn't sexy, and you're right. PowerPoints are not the most attractive things in the world, but they meet needs, they solve problems, and if we can knock out a bunch of those for people. That's a great way to kind of get started with clients.

Peter Mahoney 9:58
Yeah, that's great. I think that makes a ton of sense and an interesting parallel, there's, you know, we're in the Boston area, we have a whole bunch of medical technology companies, both biotech, but also medical device. In fact, I've got two friends who are in the entrepreneurs in the medical device space, so I'll have to have them look you up as they go. Actually, one of them just raised a pretty big investment round. So maybe he needs something to do with that money. We'll, we'll see how that goes. That goes, that's that's great. It tell us a little bit about the you know, how you've seen I mean, obviously, we're seeing a pretty significant change in, in in pandemic times. And it's hard to tell sort of what what inning we are in, in the pandemic at this point. But have you seen things change from sort of the beginning that the shock and awe part in the beginning from sort of where we are now and how do you think it's gonna, it's going to trend What are your clients doing a little differently based on the world that's happening? Right now,

Unknown Speaker 11:01
well, they're doing exactly what I thought they would do. It's just that the the timeline is definitely expanded more than than I expected or planned. But if I had planned that right, I would be just, you know, wallowing in, in cash. So can't have everything but right away we knew that we needed to be in triage mode. So almost all of our clients were desperate for help with PR and triage work trying to get out the message. So what we were trying to do with them was get on top of what their messages communicate out what how they're, how they're interacting with people what their plans were, and we spent the first three weeks I think, just hustling so we work in overtime, those first three weeks and then every communicated out and I would say the other shoe dropped and it got very quiet very quickly. What we were helping our clients do a long time. The way was remember that they need to continue to tell their stories like. It's interesting that marketing and sales budgets often take the first hit when organizations are suffering. And those two budgets are the very last thing you should ever cut. If you're a sales organization, you need to keep selling. So you're shooting yourself in the foot if you're going to reduce your sales force. And likewise, if what you're doing requires marketing communication, which by the way, everything that everyone does, does require that and you should not stop that behavior. You can reduce it or change it or modify it, but you shouldn't go silent. And so we've experienced a couple of people who went silent and then went permanently silent. And then we're seeing a lot of research and activity where people are starting to understate And that this is a much larger window of time than we anticipated and they still have to keep doing that work.

Peter Mahoney 13:07
So I imagine that especially because you've got some clients in the healthcare space that they're just changes in lots of different directions, right? Some people obviously if you have a business that's servicing consumers in an in a way that needs them to be all together like a restaurant or something like that, then they were really unfortunate, in really directly impacted in a negative way. But obviously, some people in the medical technology world or related fields actually saw pretty big. Either they saw growth or just change, right, because I had to deal with everything happening quickly and differently. Did any of your clients experience that?

Scott Millen 13:50
No, not not, not really.

Unknown Speaker 13:54
Remember what happened was PP organizations really experienced that exponential growth. But other organizations, let's say like a Stryker here in Kalamazoo, I think they've, they've kind of maintained, but they've also had some struggles because budgets are now constrained. We had a lot of health care providers who were rushed into the scene and had to be available. And then at least here, kind of in the Midwest, those emergency rooms didn't fill to the level we never really hit those capacity numbers. So now healthcare systems are facing layoffs. And that means that available budgets are curtailed, which means spending is curtailed. So really rapid expansion and contraction, followed by a slow expansion is what I think a medical is is facing. Still not a reason to stop marketing, but, but it's definitely I think it's a struggle point four for a lot of medical devices and a lot of healthcare systems.

Peter Mahoney 15:00
Yes, it's interesting. And we were chatting earlier to the, the other. The other industry that's going through some pretty big changes right now as higher ed, I just went through, right. In fact, they're, they're dealing with some of this stuff with. There's a lot of turbulence, but they're also dealing with this with lots of creative marketing communications, which is kind of interesting. So my, my youngest daughter is about to enter her freshman year in college, and she's in, you know, the class of COVID 2020. So she graduated high school in the middle of this thing, which was pain and she is now trying to enter college and they just pushed the college from in person just last week to a to a virtual thing. But one of the things that they did, which I think is really important, as you said, You don't just even though they're going through some, you know, unexpected expenses. Now, they went through this process and said, Hey, we're going to reach out to all these incoming students and they sent them this really quickly. rate of care package with lots of stuff to say, Hey, we want you to feel like you're part of this on-campus experience. But they obviously had to really rapidly turn around in within a week figure out that hey, I guess you're not coming to campus. But let me send you a little bit of the campus experience home so that you can feel like you're connected in some way.

Unknown Speaker 16:21
Yeah. I think the biggest change that we've we've seen is and this has been going on for a long time, but the amount of time to turn creative in campaigning is shortening by the minute. So we have to move so quickly now to message out. I remember when I first started, we're using Ruby lift and block out and photostats. So that makes me ancient but we had like months to work on brochures, you know, it took weeks to get the photography done. And now we're you know, we're we're running out and grabbing images and posting them And building campaigns around that same day. But then that was a lot of times. That's a tremendous challenge. And I think it's a tremendous strain on creative people. But it's also really fun.

Peter Mahoney 17:11
Yeah, it is pretty dynamic, I guess, is a way to think about it. Yeah, one of the things that I, I wanted to hear from you, especially because you work with a lot of clients and have for many years, I'm a big believer that, that good client, as well as good agencies are what creates good work. And in bad clients with great agencies can produce bad work. And I'd love to understand what you think sort of the elements of of, of success, what are the key elements that a client needs to do to get the best work out of their agency partnerships.

Unknown Speaker 17:56
I think it's there's two things. First of all, The agency needs to work really, really hard to establish a relationship. And I'm not talking a business relationship or a transactional relationship. I'm talking about a human-to-human, heartfelt friendship like relationship. Because within that context, trust is built. And when a client trusts its agency, it can be magical. And it can be worthwhile. And that relationship can withstand fights, and disagreements and successes all together, but when there isn't that relationship when it is only transactional, nobody enjoys it. Nobody is having fun. And no good results will come out of that you might be able to do something for somebody for a certain period of time, but we've learned over the years. Like if we feel like we're in a transactional relationship, we're going to work Hard to see if we can turn that into a relational one. But if it's not, there have only been a few times in my career, but I've said, hey, that's not working out. We're probably just not the right people for you. But I would say CMOS, you really want to go golfing with your agency, you really want to hang out and watch a movie and eat popcorn. We, for years had clients cohabitate with us. So we had offices set aside for clients and they would come in two, three times a week, hang out all day, do their work, work with us. Get to know our team, we got to know their team. When that looks and feels seamless. There's a risk you're right, that relationship may make things sticky from time to time for both sides, but it's so rewarding. Mm hmm.

Kelsey Krapf 19:52
I think that translates a lot into marketing too, and realizing you're marketing to people that are human. They're passionate. They've fears and I think if you bring this, you know, the psychographics and the marketing and you really create that relationship with the audience. That's how you get through to people. Because at the end of the day, we're all just people. And I think that's, that's the power you have as a marketer as an agent. And I love what you said about, you know, building that relationship creating that trust, because if you don't, it's just that transactional business that just serves a value and gets a paycheck in which, you know, it's not that relationship you're looking for. Yeah, you

Peter Mahoney 20:29
also you also need trust to tell the client that they're being stupid.

Unknown Speaker 20:33
Well, right. Yeah, exactly. And we've had times like that, right. And, again, my wife and family, they've all been pulled into this way too much. But there'll be times when I've been on the phone with the client. And it will has gotten elevated, you know, a little bit of shouty going on, and the kids are like who's dead yell again. She's like, Oh, no, that's just the client. Don't worry about it. Their friends. They have to work through the problem together and man I love those kind of working relationships.

Peter Mahoney 21:03
Yeah, it makes a huge difference. I can tell you, in my experience some of the some of the best relationships I've had that like this with agencies or when people will tell you the truth, right, that they'll tell you that, you know what, that's really a bad idea. Yeah. And, and, and they'll say why, and they'll process it through with you. But part of part of what I think makes a great client is is being willing to listen to the expertise. And you can challenge and actually you should, and I think it all comes back to that sense of, of a relationship where you earn the right to have that kind of dialogue. But that makes a huge difference. Because otherwise you're just going to get this surface level kind of thing. And you're going to take in just what people tell you without really understanding some of the motivations under underneath it. And yeah, that seems to make a huge difference. When you get those trusting relationships,

Scott Millen 22:02
now they're great.

Kelsey Krapf 22:03
Scott, one question for you is what has been your most memorable campaign that you've been involved in? Speaking of, you know, relationships, trust and, you know, making sure to look at the audience.

Unknown Speaker 22:16
Oh, you know, there's been a few over the years, all for different reasons. I remember, years and years ago, when I was at the prior agency, we we helped launch a very expensive medical device into the marketplace. sight unseen. It was expensive to build. They only had like 10 prototypes, but they were selling to hospital systems all over the United States. And so it was long time ago, we built an interactive, so we went and we filmed this thing and 360 you know, 360 turntable stuff. It went up and down early interactive days, but we basically made the virtual device and then built an entire marketing team. campaign around it then we were allowed to come into the sales meeting and do sales training on the marketing here's how you're gonna sell based on tools alone you don't have you don't actually have a product and we came out of that meeting I think the spend was about $500,000 they sold 20 million in their first three months on products sight unseen. That was exciting, fun

Kelsey Krapf 23:27
investment.

Peter Mahoney 23:28
That is pretty exciting. Yeah, that's it that is a great return on investment. Absolutely. That that makes it and it's a great example of how you know great creative marketing can really drive business outcomes like that because if there's trying to solve for a problem, right they have an expensive to manufacture and not a lot of stuff that they can stick in front of the customers and they have to find a way to communicate the value and you guys did it. What about the other the other side is there are there's some campaigns that you wish you could forget

Unknown Speaker 24:02
No, you know, I don't think we've produced any clunkers. I will say that there are probably

Peter Mahoney 24:07
some clients you could wish but you don't have to name.

Unknown Speaker 24:11
I there's nothing that I think, Wow, that was awful. Um, but there have been times when things didn't launch the way that we thought they would have. However, great relationships have always allowed us to be able to rescue that effort in a way, right? So it's, we've had to recalibrate for sure. A number of times. But I love that too. Like, oh, that didn't work. And I would say, that happens almost on a daily basis. Now with digital, right? You're going to, we're going to float some stuff out. And we're going to see what the data says and what the crowd says. And Gosh, it's amazing. Now we can pivot within 24 hours. You know, used to have to wait weeks or months. Do you remember the conference? sessions with clients, we'd be like, now listen, here's your three-year plan. Yeah, we're gonna start out, you're really not going to know how effective we are for at least the first six months. But just trust us.

Peter Mahoney 25:12
Yeah. And it's interesting because I think there are the rapid pace of digital certainly has some benefits where you can optimize things in real-time. But sometimes people use it in it as an excuse to shy away from the strategic questions. Because the reality is that sometimes things take longer, and you need a longer perspective, and without the ability to sort of look forward and say, What are my strategic objectives I'm trying to achieve? You know, it may be that it's really the difference between transactional marketers and strategic marketers. They've got to play nicely together. But if you're trying to build a brand, over, that takes time, right and in you need to think about how all these campaigns fit together and how it's going to add up into something that's actually going to be meaningful over a long period of time. And, and I think a lot of people get away from that, because they're so focused on the literally minute-by-minute optimization, you can do you forget the quarter by quarter or year by year kind of optimization need you need to make. So keeping that broad perspective, I think is really critical.

Unknown Speaker 26:27
You know, we lose a lot of pitches based on our strategic approach, because people are so focused on on tacticals right now. But we remain committed to the strategic approach tactics only work if they're part of a strategy. Tactics could be successful, isolated for a small period of time. But unless you know what you're going to do next, you know, you're shooting into the dark. So we just won some business based on a strategic approach. You know, client, a nonprofit was going to go to an online group of people who create digital messaging for nonprofits. You know, all comers low cost. And what we were able to do is, is go in and make a proposal and say, here's who we think you are. His is what we understand your market to be. This is the game plan we would utilize to get you where you need to go within the next three years. Well, they like the sound of that versus the Hey, every message that you're using is just as likely to be used by another agency like yours in another state.

Peter Mahoney 27:39
Yeah, absolutely. I think the I think people are really searching for that strategic direction and a lot of ways Scott and it's hard to keep the right kind of perspective because again, you get so dragged down into the, into the details. It's it's funny when we, we spend a lot of time it planet helping companies create a much broader view of their plans. And it's interesting because a lot of people don't have the ability to really articulate what their strategic goals are, or what their strategy is. Right. So one of the things, yeah, one of the things I'll ask people when we're bringing onboard new customers, as I'll say, well, what's your marketing strategy? And they'll they'll either, you know, give me a blank stare sometimes or where, you know, they don't know in in it's because that they haven't picked a deliberate approach. There may be a de facto thing that they're doing, but it's not really by design in the reality is that you might make a very different set of decisions based on your business goals and based on your strategy that may be different. Like you said, you know, this one nonprofit may have a very different strategy. versus a second one, you know it, they may have a more of a localized community engagement strategy versus a broad brand building or a digital transactional strategy. And and you have to understand what what your goals are and in what strategy you're you're going to employ to try to achieve those goals to build the right kind of campaigns that actually makes sense. And that's, that's why creating this long term view and creating a long term plan for people is really meaningful. So I suspect that they're going to be very happy in the next couple of years as they start to see the strategic benefit of the engagement with to fish so that's exciting.

Unknown Speaker 29:43
It is it is a plug for planet here. So what I love about the tool that you guys built and what continue to refine is that we think like this, right? So we want to make sure our clients are thinking about what their goals are. And lo and behold, here's a tool that puts goals at the top of the And then assigns budgets to those goals and those tactics and the strategies, that's exactly how we function. It's exactly how you should function. So now when it when it when we work with new clients, we're able to take that budget, align everything and a couple of different visuals and help them understand how we're spending their money to achieve their goals. Not too many, not too many systems out there doing that.

Peter Mahoney 30:26
Yeah, that's, that's great. And I and I know that that's been really differentiating for you. So we want to tell everyone in the world but not everyone, because I think it's a it's a great differentiated approach for for to fish now, because I think it really highlights how you think strategically about your clients. And it's great that I think we're really aligned in the way that we, we think, and in that approach that we used to build planner is, as you said, it's designed to make People think about what are the objectives they're trying to achieve? How am I allocating my resources to achieve those? What does success look like? Right? So so it's really interesting. A lot of people don't, especially because they've been used to, they've been on the hamster wheel of just doing stuff. They don't know to what end, right? Why are you doing this stuff? What is what are you supposed to get out of it? What does success look like? And if you can do a better job defining what are my business objectives? What are the success metrics that can tell me whether I'm doing a good job or not? So I can figure out whether to optimize and how does that compare against other people? So one of the things that I think you as an as an agency and planet as a company that we both have this perspective, where we look across lots of different marketers in one of the things that people value from us, is that perspective, right? They would like to know how are they doing? Right? So what What am my peers doing? That is different from me that might deliver a different or better result as an example. And that's that's one of the things that you know, we're trying to build in I know you bring to your business is that expertise that you can bring to try to solve your client's problems?

Unknown Speaker 32:19
You know, tactics are almost universal, the tools that we're all using, always they're very consistent. Whether you're a nonprofit or a fortune 500 tool sets are pretty consistent. The differentiating factor almost always is strategy. How are we going to do this? What is the end goal? What do we hope to achieve? We noticed almost always CMOS better underwater, they just don't have the capacity to even think in that space. So what we try to do is provide a little bit of breathing room. Let's stand back, Let's relax. I know we want to deliver it in 30 minutes, but give us a week. You know, And get some perspective and when that starts to happen, they feel happier because they've, they've got a plan, they know how to execute against it, and then we stick to a plan. You know, just keep running the play is what I always tell people, Hey, I know you want to change things up, let's run the play. If it fails, we'll know what went wrong. And we can we can go at it again.

Peter Mahoney 33:22
And again, that that's the kind of thing you can tell a client when you've built some trust, right? And, and, and they should be able to it's a two way street, obviously. So they, they if they have that right kind of relationship can say to you that you know, either I really like this and you believe it. I don't like it. It's not working for me or I'm scared or confused. You know, whatever it is, right? Sometimes it's actually helpful right to be able to say, I don't know and, and I know been spending a lot of time in the CMO seat. Sometimes you just don't know. It's it can be scary. Right, because you're responsible for delivering all these results, you're responsible for managing a lot of resources, a lot of people and a lot of money in a lot of cases and who knows, right? It's you may be dealing with the middle of a pandemic, right? How How do you deal with all this? So having a set of trusted advisors that you can go to, I think is extremely valuable and I certainly think that Scott know, knowing you and your firm and what you've done for other people, I think you'd be certainly a pretty safe great place for a lot of people to go to so

Scott Millen 34:39
so that team, yeah, absolutely. We're gonna help you out.

Peter Mahoney 34:43
So before Kelsey asked her last question, because she always asked the same last question. She's predictable like that. We should just ask you, so if people want to learn more about to fish, which we recommend very highly, of course. How would they go about finding more information? Scott,

Unknown Speaker 35:03
you can always go to our website at 2fishco.com. That's the number two si es h co.com. Maybe if you look at the bottom of the screen, it'll be a graphic there.

Peter Mahoney 35:14
Yeah, I think we'll probably work that out. Yeah. lowered, we will, we will, we will make sure there are, there are links to, to, to fish to fishes website in the in the show notes in the podcast when you hear it. So you can just click on the little linky thing and you'll get what you need. And, and anyway, Kelsey, I know you have your last question, though.

Kelsey Krapf 35:34
predictable question. What advice would you know, give to CMOS and those aspiring to be one.

Unknown Speaker 35:41
I would say, relax and listen to everyone around you. You're you're in, you're in a place where you're headed to a place where you're the one that's going to be making the decisions. But by soaking in all of the experience and know how of the people around you. You're gonna be able formulate and build your own approach. If you listen only to yourself, you're headed for a really tough career. Take it all in.

Peter Mahoney 36:12
You got two ears in one mouth, right? It's not what they say.

Unknown Speaker 36:15
I say that from experience. I'm allowed mouth. I talked over people for a long time.

Scott Millen 36:21
You know, I was young and dumb.

Unknown Speaker 36:25
But I had enough people in my life to tell me to shut up and listen. And that's those. Those two sentences have been instrumental in turning me around and helping me understand that everybody has wisdom that you can build on.

Peter Mahoney 36:39
Scott, it's been really great to have you today. Thanks for sharing your insights your experience, and we really do appreciate the relationship that we've had with to fish we've learned a lot about you guys really have appreciated you all as people and I and I couldn't recommend your agency to people For more highly so again check them out at to fish co.com and Kelsey, why don't you take us home.

Kelsey Krapf 37:07
Thanks so much Scott. Again, really appreciate it and so glad you push strategy in your work. It's super important so you can learn more about 2 Fish Company in the podcast notes below and make sure to follow the next cmo and Plannuh on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email them to thenextcmo@plannuh.com. Have a great day, everyone.

Peter Mahoney 37:30
Thanks, Scott.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai