High Agency

MO DHALIWAL

[00:00:00] Welcome to High Agency, where we ignite conversations that drive change and spark momentum towards transformative action and professional mastery.  It's easy to forget how much change we've seen in less than two short decades.  Since the early 2000s, digital ad spending skyrocketed from $36 billion to over half a trillion dollars, approximately $600 billion globally.  Our economy is driven by massive factors that didn't even exist 10 or 12 years ago.  The rise of data-driven marketing has seen 91% of organizations reporting its importance to their business.  Meanwhile, the gig economy has exploded with almost half of U.S. workers participating through their main or supplemental income streams.  The role of marketers, and especially those in leadership or executive roles, has grown, diversified, and fragmented as the role and mandate of marketing as a business function has become exponentially complex, alongside the technological and cultural shifts that we've seen over the course of many years.  So enter Christine Pilkington, founder and CEO of Crisp Media, a Vancouver-based firm specializing in fractional CMO services, with a career spanning collaborations with major brands like BMW, MINI, Indigo, and Chevrolet, as well as top Canadian media outlets such as Maclean's and City TV.  Christine brings a wealth of experience to the table.  Christine's journey led from her early days as a project manager with Blast Radius in the early 2000s to her current role as a fractional CMO.  And in that time, her roles have spanned everything from project management and delivery to digital product development and ad tech, giving her a diverse range of technical and leadership skills.  Christine's got some insights into how the marketing landscape has evolved, emphasizing the shift towards digital strategies, data-driven decision-making, and the integration of marketing technology.  So let's explore the transformative power of fractional CMOs and get some insight into the future of marketing and the evolving role of marketing leaders in the ever-accelerating business environment.  Welcome to High Agency with Christine Pilkington.  Christine Pilkington.  Thanks for having me.  Yeah, thanks for coming.  Yeah.  So I'd mentioned earlier when we were talking that I felt some parallels in your background of how you kind of transformed your career and your career transition from a number of different spaces.  But in my research and, you know, creeping around on the internet and your LinkedIn profile, what I could see was that you had started early career in project management.  And, you know, that too with Blast Radius, which was a digital agency before digital agencies were even a thing.  And then that naturally led towards lots of tech development.  And then it gradually shifted into marketing.  So that's just the very, very broad view.  But I'd love to hear about your background and where it kind of all started for you and how you arrived at the point of being a fractional CMO.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:03:08] Wow. Okay.  So I actually started at a time where the web was actually just taking off.  And in fact, my very first interview, the two people who had interviewed me had not even seen what a website was.  That's how.  And I actually, it was funny because I'd been researching the company and they happened to have a website.  This is in the mid nineties, right?  And I had, I was fresh out of school, university.  I had gone to a library.  I printed off, printed off their website because it was all on one page.  And there it was on a dot matrix printer, all folded up.  You know, I'm, I'm hoping I, I'm not the only one who knows what this is.  So all folded up.  I had the, you know, the sides all ripped off with those holes, right?  And it was in a folder.  And I was explaining to, you know, they said, what, what questions do you have?  And I said, well, I'm really interested in the fact that you have this website.  It shows that you're going somewhere.  Tell me about it.  And they looked at me blankly and they said, Oh, that was mentioned last week in our meeting.  I have no idea what that is.  And then I said, Oh, that's funny.  Here it is.  And I showed them a paper version of their website.  And so it must've been really, really weird early days. Yeah.  So what was really interesting about that job as it relates to this, I was actually, because they then dubbed me as being a pretty technical person, even though it was an English major.  I got a lot of leeway for all of these different, really interesting projects because they were trying to disrupt the, um, the legal reference publishing space.  And they were rolling out all of these digital projects at the time.  And they were like, 'You look like someone who knows what they're doing.'  And so they started involving me in all those things.  And then that's how I realized, because I was a production editor coordinating the production of, um, publications and I liked tech.  And then I realized that I could combine those two things and become a project manager.  So then that's what I did.  And I mean, we shared on LinkedIn and you saw on LinkedIn, I, um, I then became a project coordinator for an ISP, uh, realizing I didn't really want to get into, um, like networks and infrastructure, and then made a pivot into, um, into digital.  And it was a really exciting time because what you had were brands that were, were really exploring the space, some very interesting projects happening.  For example, many was just launching.  You mentioned many in my, um, my background, many was launching in Canada and they didn't have a car configurator when they started.  That's how early it was.  Right.  So my team was responsible for making that so that you could actually, um, design your car on the fly on, on a website.  There wasn't even technology that wasn't able to even do that, uh, on the interface level at the time.  So then just fast forward, I had the real distinct pleasure of working with some like Uber smart people, people who have had storied careers, like they've gone on into R&D and Google and things like this.  All of that very excitingly was happening in Vancouver and, and Toronto and in, in Canada.  So we were really part of that.  And then, um, landed at Rogers media, combining that background in content and tech.  Um, and then realizing, because this is now coming like this is 15 years ago.  When I left Rogers, realizing that there was an opportunity around, um, mobile was, you know, smartphones were coming, uh, WordPress, anyone could build a website at this point.  And with social, anyone could amplify what they were doing online.  So I was like, that's what I wanted to do.  So I launched a digital publisher.  Um, I, I was actually, um, the publisher of Vancouver mom.ca for many years.  I just sold that, uh, a couple of years ago.  And then along the way people, I just kind of was there when things were happening, happening.  And so people would say, Oh, you know, one of our advertisers was saying, Oh, this thing about Instagram, that looks really, we need to do that.  Can you tell us what we should be doing?  And so I would, or, um, you know, we, I had another client in, uh, Destination Canada who were, uh, they were launching a very complex content marketing program, um, with the advent, I think it was, with Canada's 150th anniversary or a hundred.  My math is wrong, but anyway, uhm, and did that and then landed here where there was an opportunity, uhm, like just, and we're going to talk about it in a moment, just so much noise with marketing.  And there was a real opportunity for, um, clarifying what marketing is in organizations.  Uhm, that was this moment.  And then with, um, COVID happening, all of a sudden, this idea of having these, these, uh, distributed teams, teams that didn't have to be full-time in offices.  It made it much more appealing for businesses to, uh, hire somebody who could just come in and be a part-time leader in the marketing team.  Yeah.  So yeah, that's me.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:08:07] I mean, the, the marketing side is kind of interesting though, because, um, there's aspects of your story that I actually thought were unique to mine.  And now I'm realizing that maybe it's common to a lot of marketers because to some extent you wind up gravitating towards that role, um, because that role needs, needs people that can make shit happen.  And as a marketer and a good one, you'd kind of tend to be the make shit happen person.  Right.  But trajectory wise, actually mine was very similar.  Um, I started off in like it and networking, uh, very technical, found it super boring.  Uh, went into software development more on like the front end side, quite by accident.  I fell into advertising later because, you know, I was interested in audiences and users and people, and kind of, you know, shaping that side of the conversation.  So I completely left tech and went completely to the advertising side.  And for me, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was like, you know, early 2010, um, when we were like, you know, 1% of the way into this exponential boom with devices and social and the rest of it, uh, that I was looking around and thinking, okay, you know, maybe there's a way to like combine some of the, you know, technology and development and advertising background into, into something.  Um, and we quite by accident started, started Skyrocket as an agency then.  Um, but I think, you know, people that can do a lot of problem solving that um thrive in ambiguity and, and complexity and see that as something that's you know a curious challenge rather than being immediately overwhelmed and paralyzed by it.  I think those people tend to gravitate towards marketing if we if we looked at it.  Um and then there's I'd say another order of skills and experience required to say I'm going to gravitate from marketing into a fractional marketing and especially at some sort of executive or leadership level.  So just to lay down some definitions and really understand it because it's a pretty fascinating space.  Um, can you unpack fractional marketing and what your role is today as a fractional CMO?  What does it mean?  What is fractionality?

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:10:08] So fraction, uh, most people are aware of the, the idea of, um, fraction, like fractionality, if that's even a word, as it applies to property.  That's actually, um, you know, the first time I ever heard of fractional was with respect to property.  So you, I mean, it's quite common in Whistler, for example, for you to be able to buy one eighth of a house and then you use it for one eighth of the time and you share it with um, seven other people.  That's quite, uh, so, um, if you take that concept and you translate that over to people, um, it's, it's taking one fifth, one eighth, or a fraction of their time in order to, uh, as opposed to full-time in order to provide that function to you.  The, so the first time I had actually seen it, I was like, oh, I'm going to go buy one eighth of a house.  So, um, so the first time I had actually seen that applied to a, uh, person was with respect to, um, it actually, she was, uh, it was in a CFO financial environment.  That's actually quite a common way.  You have a lot of startups that need to raise money, but they can't actually afford a full-time CFO and nor do they really need a full-time CFO.  So they hire somebody on a fractional basis.  So the big difference between say an agency and a fractional resource is that fractional resource is internal to the company.  So we often talk about ourselves as being chameleons where we'll go in and we will have email addresses, I'm currently on the website, like an About page as a CMO for several businesses right now.  So you're fully embedded.  Yeah, totally fully embedded.  And what that means is not only does the internal team perceive us as being part of the team.  I say that like, we know we're being successful if we're being invited to a company barbecue, right?  Uh, so part of the team and, but it also means, especially as a CMO that you're, um, privy to internal information that I don't think an agency would necessarily have.  So that's one core thing.  The other thing is, is that, you know, I sort of stumbled upon this because I was a, um, marketing director for somebody who was actually doing fractional CMO work, even though that's not what she called it.  And I also previous to that was doing ads.  And, and running digital, like, like meta ads before it was Meta.  And, um, and I was really frustrated with being very sort of low on that chain where the decisions downstream of the strategy.  Exactly.  That's exactly it.  That's downstream of the strategy.  So I really wanted to be where the action was, and, um, and start to make really strategic decisions.  And because I've been in business for so long, I really am driven about understanding businesses and growing business.  Right.  And that actually, you know, I've been in business for so long.  I've been in business for, you know, I've been sort of first-arı investing in all different types of And I can tell you, as an consumer, there are like three factors, um, that promote profit easily in terms of looking at what I'm looking at.  It's, it's, it's, it's, it's procedure, it's, and it's, it's structured where a buyer knows depending on the, you know, what's the percentage of the product they're going to sell, because a lot of our clients are sort of what they want to sell.  So that we take that strategy and that practice to create processes that are great.  Long can be really frustrating because of just how the decision-making process works, so yeah, that's what I would say.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:13:29] So, I mean, I can see why it's lucrative to the business right?  Of well, we don't need um executive leadership level talent year round, so we're going to get it at those pivotal moments that we need and we have somebody on speed dial that we can call to you know help with major problem solving or or major decisions.  Um, so how it's lucrative to your clients that makes complete sense to me.  But why was it attractive to you?  Like why do this over being in-house somewhere where you can potentially make a big impact and go really deep with your engagement?  Like why was it interesting to you?

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:14:05] Yeah, because um, you know maybe this is overshare but I actually just discovered I have ADHD right?  And what that really means is wait, what's the smile?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:14:16] Yeah, me too.  You do yeah well.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:14:17] A lot of executives and a lot of entrepreneurs have ADHD, and you were talking about like just going here and there and there, that's actually a like a part of it, right?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:14:25] And um, the other reason I was smiling was I don't know, but on some level, just imagine that you're like a unique and beautiful snowflake, yeah?  And just increasingly, I'm realizing that you know we're just uh animals with patterns and there's you know a billion people that fit the same pattern that I do, yeah, yeah, like we're twins, this is what you're saying, yeah.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:14:43] So, but I don't think you need to know what's the difference between the two, I don't think you  need to know what's the difference between the two because you know i don't necessarily have adhd to do this it's just that i i just you know this is how i landed in that i actually would find it brutally boring to be doing one thing with one client and you know i i would think that the engagement might last for two years and then i'd have to be like out right um and in fact a lot of the people that come and work for us they're the same like if i think about some of the junior folk that are working with us they would be fresh out of school relegated working at some huge enterprise just like pushing buttons to post onto social media and  doing that day in and day out that is incredibly boring to a lot of people whereas um you know that the uh the people that are working with us fresh out of school they actually get to work on so many different things and such a quick amount of and learn so many things on a very rapid way that's really exciting to people and if you translate that all the way up to the executive level it's no different right and um i just love it people i love um solving businesses i love i've got this innate curiosity about the world and um why why you know why focus on just one why not just do 10 or whatever it is right yeah yeah um so as a fractional cmo

MO DHALIWAL

[00:16:04] um you know i guess the parallels with agency life is that you get to parachute in to a diverse spectrum of industries and businesses um and that's actually similar thing at skyrocket as well where you know we have the choice and it's come up multiple times of you know all the best business advice is always like you know pick your niche and what's the thing you're going to specialize on and we just had never had any interest in being like a food and beverage agency or like a hospitality agency or something like that because i feel like as soon as you're a quote-unquote expert in one domain all that really means is that you  Just knowing some of that inside knowledge and the patterns really well, but then you're repeating those patterns everywhere so what we decided to do instead was to kind of maintain this horizontal view to say that we want to work with clients that are at some point in transition and they need a breakthrough of some sort.  And when you're looking for breakthrough thinking, you're actually really benefited by having diverse perspectives right like there's been plenty of meetings where I might you know repeat to a client that's working in VR something that we had talked about with a client that's working in apparel.  Right, but there's that diversion perspective and that outside thinking that helps break open some of those ideas.  But when you're working across industries and with so many different types of companies, what are like emergent patterns that you see?  Like, what are the challenges that people have not in growing the business right because those I think some of them are understandable and those are varied right?  But in creating the change, like when you know what to do or when you feel like you're on to a solution, what are the patterns you've seen, actually now enacting that change and getting things to move in the right

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:17:44] Direction, yeah, so I we took so when it comes to marketing, and I'm gonna take a couple steps back.  Marketing is really fragmented as a profession; you talked about it earlier.  Lots of noise, and it's it's challenging for people who are fresh out of school and then moving on their marketing career.  They get to a certain point, and at some point, if they can't bridge the business component of it - meaning how a business operates, how a business grows, how a CEO thinks - and making that attachment of marketing and business, and how marketing is driving business; there's a plateau.  Therefore, many many marketing professionals.  right so what happens is is that you have a CEO who's reaching and we're trying to rely on the these even a seemingly senior marketing person like a marketing director and they actually can't understand why there's a disconnect in the conversation right but the fact is is that this marketer their domain is in marketing their domain isn't ironically isn't in business operations business growth and things like this and so when clients come to us they are trying to solve and figure out like they're like i've got four people on my marketing team that disconnect there's a disconnect and also because it's in flight they  Don't want to mess around with it because they don't want to make the wrong mistake we're talking about people's careers, lives things like and and it can be to some extent high stakes depending on what the the company is trying to achieve so you're talking about patterns one thing that we bring to it is that extra perspective and because we see almost beyond the marketing realm we see things like organizational structure, operations, and how does the marketing team bolt into a company's operational structure, the technology, martech but even how you know one great example is you know crms touch the customer and because  Everybody cares about the customer.  Everybody in an organization cares about the customer.  The CRM is vitally important to decide how, like that's a cross-function decision, even though the marketing team or maybe the sales team is typically responsible for deciding and managing the company's operations, and how does the marketing team bolt into a company's operations?  And how does the marketing team, or maybe the sales team, is typically responsible for managing the CRM?  So um if the person just as an example can't figure out how to you know doesn't really understand how that that uh that conundrum that I just  said they're going to have a very limited rollout of how that CRM can operate when that CRM could potentially have a lot more power within the organization to make a lot of uh key decisions so you know um a lot of the things we do are organization redesign um deciding like you know this person we need to promote this person they're relegated to this role we actually should be leveraging their their skill to do this and a lot of clients they don't even know that that role even exists because they don't live in the marketing space right so that's what I'm seeing it's a lot of that it's a lot of um filling in the blanks on the business

MO DHALIWAL

[00:20:57] and the business side for the marketing team, and that doing that translation of business for the marketing team, yeah yeah no, that broad view that you're describing, I mean it's something that I talk um a lot about what's going on in the business with my team, which is this idea of being a T-shaped individual, yeah where of course you need a specialization somewhere because we need to know where your expertise lies and where we can you know uniquely rely on you um but you need to couple with that a really broad view and be able to touch a lot of different areas because that's the only way to contextualize your work, yeah um but  When you talk about bridging that gap, so you know we've also worked with plenty of leadership teams where they're in the internal marketing department, soon you know senior, junior doesn't matter um but they'll be working in that in that domain and they're trying to figure out how to get that domain increase their relevance to actually growing the business and make an impact, you know overall.  But when you come in in a fractional role um how do you bridge that gap like it's still a little bit different than having an office and just you know being like down the hall yeah the rest of the leadership team right so there's relationships.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:22:08] There, there's sort of ongoing and ongoing engagement and there's a sort of intimacy where you develop a shorthand um and that tends to obviously accelerate your work together and your understanding of things so how do you bridge that gap yeah so it's a little bit easier now because of the distributed team component so you were talking about down the hall in many organizations we work with there is no down the hall right so we, we i appear and participate in the um company interactions um like anybody else would so that that is one thing but so we so I'm onboarding a new client right now they're in this industrial space they  Have an office in Mississauga, and many of their team members are in Ontario; they've got a team down in Sao Paulo as well, and then they're trying to grow in the Middle East too, so there's a lot of going on.  And um, one of the things that I just set out to is just even meeting everybody like, that's a thing, like just meeting and and finding out what everybody does.  The other thing is, is that if the CEO actually doesn't trust me and have, um, and there's a bit of earning of trust that has to happen there; but if they aren't, um, going to defer or have have meaningful conversations about the direction of marketing, and give me some level of authority.  Then it's actually not going to work, to be honest.  Because otherwise, they should just hire a junior person to do all of all of that work.  Why hire a senior person to do it if they're just going to dictate everything right?  And I think in going to that if the CEO is bought into that, that is actually how it how it works quite successfully, actually.  I want to go back to something you said about the T-shaped marketer, yeah um.  I agree with you that everybody should have um, you know, knowledge areas uh and yet what's really interesting is is that our team is coming in and they are staunch generalists in how they approach their work so um you  know some people have come and they've come up this digital track and now what we're trying to do uh is in in one individual on our team is we're trying to grow her on the communication side right so more more of that side the non-traditional the non-digital i'm going to say the non-traditional digital side that's what i was going to say the non-digital side try to trying to grow that because for them to get into um like executive levels they're going to have to understand all of that so i think there's it's not that i'm disagreeing with what you said i actually think it's possible to advance into a career and stay general

MO DHALIWAL

[00:24:49] Provided that you're open to learning, um, you know, like even at a certain point, certain, all aspects of the marketing, yeah well I mean look there's lots of uh thinking right now that's basically saying that you know the future is going to be ruled by generalists, yeah um the availability of information just the sheer abundance of things means that we're probably going to need people that can put together a lot of different components rapidly rather than turning to someone with expertise in one area right yeah that expertise is becoming abundant and highly highly available um just out of curiosity as you were talking  About digital, it just occurred to me why do we still call it digital?

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:25:33] You know, it's weird.  I was actually wondering this very same thing two weeks ago when did we start calling it digital?  Like, because I was like, 'We used to call it multimedia'  and then at one point, when did we start calling it digital and I don't actually know why we still call it that, yeah, I mean it's an odd one.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:25:53] And to a large extent, I would say especially when you think about advertising spend, um, sure it's not out of home or sponsorships there's other categories but digital is just...  you know, it's just marketing and advertising to some extent, I mean, you know it's  The center of everything that intersects in any meaningful way.  Uh, if you see a massive billboard somewhere, chances are it might have a website address or a QR code on it.  Right?  Yeah, everything is converging; is converging through it.  Uh, yet we still give it this weird name as if it's...  you know, alien in some ways.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:26:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's an odd one.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:26:24] Um, so what do you see as the big changes coming?  Like people are coming into marketing; people are coming into roles in companies and dealing with the shifts that are happening and seem to be accelerating right?  And you know, as someone who...  I've mentored, uh, I think a lot of people coming  Out of like UBC's uh solder school of business, and the thing that I used to see there that was right you know quite interesting to me is, you get these kids that were um, you know, sitting at the crossroads of psychology and marketing for some reason, yeah we have a couple, yeah, and it would come up all the time where you could see that they had somehow gravitated towards this, and the question was like, how do you do that?  And I was like, I'm not sure whether to major in psychology or marketing, they're both interesting to me, nine times out of ten I was like going to psychology right really, yeah, because I said the marketing stuff I feel there's.  A lot of change coming there's some principles that are fundamental for sure, but my belief was that if you can figure out the human behavior side of it and get really intimate yourself with understanding what shapes people, um how our decisions are made, what guides those decisions as fundamentals, that then the frameworks, the tools, the experience will come anyway.  I don't think anybody ever even hires somebody who might have majored in marketing and assumes that they're gonna be able to do anything right, uh without having a lot of experience and actually being in the trenches for a little while, so my  Nudge was always to say, 'you know, check out the psychology side and see if that isn't a better foray before you then actually enter the market as as a marketer, um, and that was just you know, I think my experience and where I saw some benefit, but for anybody that's entering the marketplace now, for anybody that's young and interested in this world of shaping consumer behavior, of building communications, and experiences that connect people with the value they're trying to receive, what would your advice to them be?

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:28:33] What are the changes that you're seeing today for young people or just in marketing in general?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:28:39] I think both.  Like, one yeah, for young people of somebody who's coming in, yeah.  And then second to that is what are the big changes you're seeing in the realm in general, yeah.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:28:48] So I talked about how my own background is in English; I'm an English major, I'm like the least on-paper technical person on the planet, you know.  And um, I actually think having been an English major, to your point about um being a psychology like pursuing areas of psychology, um reading and you know reading literature, it actually you know forces your brain to actually have to analyze how do these characters, um behave?  I actually just read this book, uh Stolen Focus. Have you?  heard of it, no, so the guy, oh gosh, what's his name like?  You know anyway.  The author is basically saying that it's just all about how technology has constructed constricted our ability to focus and in it he talks about, and I'm going to butcher all of it, but he talks about how people who read develop a certain way of thinking, about more empathy because they can ex, they can imagine how characters would behave, and then they can translate that into real life, right?  Yeah, so, so if you think about even though I'm an English major and, and, so then you think, okay, I've perhaps taken that skill and become a curious, more curious person, in terms.  Of empathy and understanding human behavior, that's something to apply into marketing.  So, even though it there isn't a direct path to what I'm doing, you can see how there'd be influence in terms of making me a um a person who might be successful in what I do.  Um, I have uh uh teenagers so I know a lot of people graduating from school.  We have people who are um, you know, even young on our school like in our company that we hire and um, I do believe that if you can um explore areas that aren't rigid, like play a little bit, it makes you a richer person, it makes you a more interesting person to hire, and it brings that perspective.  Into into the mix, into any team you were saying earlier just about diversity of thought and different perspectives one of the things we really tap into at Crisp is us having this hive mind right it's really important for us to have different perspectives um on you know just how people see the world but also different skill sets so you know we're we're doing this podcast and things like this so it might actually happen where a client might be looking for a podcast but that could but the team that's been assigned doesn't has never done that but there are people within our team that we can tap that could potentially be doing that.  Whether it's a podcast implementing a HubSpot rollout or what, have what, have you, so diversity and thought is really important, and so, yeah, I would say even in my own daughter; she's in art school right now, and she has so many wide interests, and I'm like, just do that, learn actually how to be a creative person, learn how to be a curious person, and then figure out what you want to do, because that that is a really good foundation.  Now, on the whole business side of it, one thing, um, I've been thinking about, and we've been talking; I've been talking about how archaic I am, right?  So, when I graduated from university, I was either going  To be an editor, or I was going to go into communications because that's what an English person does like a person and at the time I was reflecting on this, just this past week, communications as a profession was so simple, like seemingly so simple.  If I look back at it, there was none of this you know digital marketing stuff, none of that um no influencers to have to deal with, no social media to have to deal with and it was, you know, press releases, writing copy for certain things, that's what that job was.  So, fast forward now 25 years later, everything has just gotten worse, really more complicated.  It's been very challenging for um uh.  Small business leaders to figure out how to untangle um, marketing and so in a way, what we're working on is how to actually codify marketing for businesses like what is the almost operating system that a that a business should use in order to operate their marketing team.  I think those things those parameters are going to start to be defined a little bit more clearly um as as we're uh as just just in terms of survival around um all of the other like complexity that's facing marketing um marketers today and executives today, yeah yeah i can i can see that a lot um because I would say for pretty much every client we've worked with

MO DHALIWAL

[00:33:28] When we pull back the covers and look at how things were being done, or what they were trying to do, you see reinvention of the wheel constantly.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:33:36] Yeah, like um, actually one of our clients just did, like they hired us and then we gave them the process, and then they said, 'Damn it, we just did we used to do this four years ago.'  But in our knowledge transfer, we forgot how to do this, and so it's so frustrating that we're just doing what you know.  They valued what we did, but it was just so frustrating that they were reinventing the wheel.  Right?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:33:58] It would be like, I'm sure in your experience, like how many companies have you looked at or gone into?  How many different ways have you seen them you know present like a customer persona, yeah just is a real pleasure, um I think I'm one of those people right in the middle of the world, yeah dangerous thing to do in the wild west sometimes, um I'm not sure if you're familiar with EOS like the, yeah real, yeah, yeah.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:34:13] I take a lot of inspiration from EOS, yeah, yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:34:16] So what you're describing, I mean it's interesting to me to think about because, um, there's best practices, there's principles out there but it hasn't, I don't think anybody's quite like battle hardened it yet and put it into a basic framework, and I think sometimes there's  A fear around that because um I find that especially in creative spaces sometimes people fear discipline because they think it's going to be limiting, and my artist today has thought about like that and not going to be limited.  An argument for frameworks and best practices is always that actually if you take the basics, the mundane stuff, and develop a discipline around it, it actually opens up the amount of space that you have for creativity right so that your creativity isn't trying to solve the basics of a marketing framework or a campaign yeah it's actually spent on solving the human problem which is how do we make something.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:35:01] Emotionally engaging in some meaningful way that communicates our value 100% I agree with that, so it you know customers or businesses are even trying to figure out how to start projects like marketing projects.  I mean what I mean by that is they'll have many, many, many ideas floating about and yet they don't know how to initiate a project to make it an actual thing.  Right?  So there's this frustration that happens because they have all these great ideas but they actually can't advance anything forward.  And I mean maybe this is perhaps my project management background coming in right?  But if they actually had a process, a clear  Process on how to identify an idea and prioritize an idea, filter out bad ideas, they would actually be more successful to your point in terms of creating being being able to focus more on creating something right but because they're missing that that operational component so many things die on the line right, or they'll muster up the courage to take the risk and then there'll be some sort of like spray-and-pray initiative yeah, and then feel burned by it or not get the results or after live with the trauma of that for many months or years and then try again but largely in the same way mm-hmm so you know can we talk about.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:36:29] A couple of scenarios like, I really want to hear about some instances what are some of the things that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen that you've seen yeah where you were in a situation or went into a company and we're able to create the alignment put the frameworks in place and actually deliver growth and what were the I guess attributes or characteristics of that environment where it didn't allow you to be successful of that same environment or a different one yeah I mean this is actually a really small

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:37:02] Business example, um, so, uh, during COVID we were working with you know, uh, a company in Rossland, BC, and her business was largely powered by tourism, of course.  During COVID, everything was, uh, was, you know, shut down.  So she was, she's, it was, uh, she's a kitchen supply company, or, you know, very similar to Gourmet Warehouse, where you buy gourmet, um, supplies and so on.  On some level, her business was booming because that's what everybody was doing making bread during COVID.  But it was very limited to her, uh, local uh market because she really wasn't digitized; like, she didn't have a real website, um, or, she did, but it wasn't, um, it wasn't.  Enabled for that, yeah, exactly.  And so, we just even go in there and um be very intimate about what she was trying to accomplish and having very good honest conversations and then going through the foundational things we were talking about codification and like, just foundational marketing things with her.  So, identifying even a very small business like this, right?  Who are you trying to target?  The person you're trying to target online is not the same person you're trying to target in your store.  We have to be able to reach people in Ontario and we have to be able to convey a brand and credibility when they come online.  so um being very clear about that being really clear about her even her logo she didn't even have a meaningful logo because she never needed to have one so going about and clarifying the brand um you know talking about the uh how her website had to be optimized it wasn't even just like the design of the website but actually just loading all of her products into the website she had thousands of products that weren't available for shopping on the website um even so how her so this is where the marketing hat crosses into some operational things even how she originally had put her inventory into her um into her system wasn't  Enabled for online because they were only enabled for somebody internal, so she had to go about and rename all of those things, so that...  and then ultimately helping her figure out um promotional strategies like Google ads and whatnot to be able to get eyeballs onto the website, and then um identifying the resource that she should hire in order to be able to operate the entire thing um on a consistent basis right.  She was asking me things too like I guess she used to scoop ice cream every every uh like you know summer and she hated doing it like she hated it, but because we were um you know forming this relationship she was asking  As a business advisor, not just as a marketing advisor, is this something that she should keep doing?  Like um, it wasn't profitable; she really found it difficult.  So I worked through how she would even um stop doing that right um.  I don't have the stats right in my head right now, but I know we not only set her up for phenomenal growth on her online market like her online business - I'd say it was at least a hundred times like it in terms of her growth.  She has a repeatable model in order to be able to secure like continually generate that revenue; she has somebody on the team who can do that on an operational basis without her.  Having to think about it and now what she's thinking because she's somebody who's getting ready for retirement, she's actually thinking about how she could be exiting out of that company and what it means to sell a bricks-and-mortar company versus an online company, and maybe even selling those two things as a separate entities.  So in terms of, um, quantifiable value, pretty seismic shift in thinking, yeah, exactly, exactly.  And so that's what I mean in terms of: You could hire a marketer and yet if you hire a CMO they are uh at least a good CMO would be able to think holistically about the way marketing should be functioning within.  That business, right?  Um, and so you know we'll often say because the fractional the cost of a fractional marketer is not um astronomical, right?  If otherwise you just hire like an in-house, right?  So if you put the cost of a very junior person, like call it somebody who's two two years out of school, and you know the salary of that person versus a this fractional marketing stack that we do, the cost is about the same as maybe a little bit, a tiny bit more for our services.  But because we have that senior level or a CMO would have that senior level thinking to bring to the table, the impact of those dollars goes further, exactly.  Just goes a lot further, so um, yeah, that's that.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:41:55] So, has there been a situation, uh, and that's a great success story, and I love the fact that it's a small business because you know, 100% growth in a small business, I mean, that's like life-changing, destiny-changing stuff.  Um, but has there been a scenario where you haven't been set up for success, yeah?  Where you were disempowered, and how do you negotiate that?  Because you can be like the best change maker in the world, but to some extent, you know, the soil has to be viable as well to grow things right, yeah.  And yeah, so you know, what was the situation where you weren't set up for success, and how?  Did you deal with it, yeah?

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:42:28] So, there are customers that want to um outsource their marketing forever because they don't want to be in the marketing business; they want to focus on their core business and they don't want to do marketing.  And those are our forever clients, right?  But there are clients that actually have a marketing problem, and they like we're hired to be fired, is what I say, right?  So, they want us to come in and fix it and that might be a year, maybe two years, and then they want us to leave.  Sometimes those problems are not going to be solved; it's too chaotic for an external person, rather a contractor.  or a fractional person to solve so um i'll give you an example we have a we had a client they were in the um they they did programs right but they had like four core businesses or four core channels that had four different programs with four totally different targets um and had a very high amount of content that needed to be produced and a lot of um just a lot of uh operational marketing operational things to be um to be looked after on top of that the leadership was a bit fragmented like um you know everybody had a lot of opinions and they were and the leaders of those four business units were all kind of being jockeying for their  own thing that they wanted right, mm-hmm.  So there are some cases where and this is actually true of even fractional market, fractional financial services um offerings that sometimes it makes sense you actually do need somebody internal yeah, right or more senior person internal or even just somebody doing the work on the day-to-day invest in that uh, more so I think part of it depends on the situation.  It also might depend on um if the leader of the company isn't isn't um um giving faith into the the the senior marketing advice if they want to be too involved then it's not going to work yeah, so I had I'll give you an example, I  Had this other client, and we're still working with them today; um, he really didn't believe in that his Google ads were working, like he really, really didn't believe it.  And I kept saying, 'Listen, you're getting eight times your return on these ads!  Like, I don't even know; most people would be happy with three, right?  You're getting eight, but I guess he couldn't reconcile the numbers, and so he would keep coming to these meetings and he would keep coming to these meetings with this ad agency.  And I'd say, 'Say, you know why?  Why are you here?'  So after about several months of doing that, he finally said, 'Oh, Christine, I'm so frustrated.'  With these ads, like they’re not working and I said, well, you know I’m so frustrated with these meetings.  And I said, you have to just stop coming to the meetings, just stop coming to the meetings.  And he's, and I said, I'm efficiently kicking you out of these meetings.  So thankfully, he said, okay, fine, I'm not going to come.  And then he stopped coming, and he's like, so much better.  But had he been the guy who was like, no, I don’t trust that this is the process is gonna um, you know that we’re gonna see a return or he wasn’t trusting that process.  And I’ve had clients like that.  I've had clients dictate copy to me on like, typing.  copy like over you know um exactly what i that is not gonna work yeah yeah yeah no it takes a lot of um well i mean i think there's there's some amount of like leadership maturity there as well if you've hired and brought in the skills uh to do a particular job then you've got to trust that they're gonna do it yeah absolutely well and we're really lucky because um a lot of our clients come to us at the point where they've just they've had it right like they've actually had um we're bringing on a new client right now and they're in agriculture and he's gone through that um super expensive marketing manager he's gone through him  Doing it himself, he's gone through trying to learn all these things and he's reached the point where he realizes that he's not the best person to do it and nor nor is he not the best person to do it, but he's also doesn't have the time and it's not his job function to do it.  So um oftentimes we're already at that place um a person who googles 'fractional cmo canada'  as their search term, and then finds us that's where they're usually at.  Um because typically the conversation works like this: they have this issue with marketing; they go to their networking business circle, there's their like mastermind group; they say oh my gosh I'm  having this problem and then someone will say have you heard of fractional marketing or fractional cmo and then they'll say yeah yes or no and then they'll find us and then that's they're typically already at that journey what's the um i guess my last question for you um what are you most excited about next really oh yeah so it you know we were talking about this codification of marketing and it kind of kind of yet under outgrow traditionalnal marketing and the the old way uh doing what our of our roles as k pie was to say shorter more technical terms um and be the best as possible so i've actually POLITICAL it as well Heszel  And they don't know what they're doing.  I'm very kind of like big-Forestry, like some kind of operating system for our clients or anybody to be able to, to refer around how a team should be structured, how to, um, you know, how to operate a healthy marketing team, how to do that.  That is really, really exciting.  And I think if I think about what we're offering on a, on a, um, you know, the value that we bring to our clients, that's what we're doing.  We just haven't figured out the book yet, you know?  Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:48:22] Yeah.  Yeah.  That's, that's a lot.  Um, but why is it exciting?  Like, what's, what's the opportunity you see in it?

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:48:27] Um, I think there's a lot of pain out there to be honest, frustration.  And, um, a lot of clients, they don't realize that, or a lot of business owners out there don't realize that they actually have, um, access to something like that, but also that the answer isn't, I don't want to say that it's simple, um, because it is a complex answer, but, um, with some basic practices, they actually, they can get there to a harmonious, um, harmoniously operating marketing team.  Have you heard high agency before?  Yeah.  You asked me this and I, you asked me to think about it.  So what does that mean?  I actually have no idea.  And I didn't Google and I didn't, I didn't find, I didn't find out.  And I did ask one person, and, and it's escaping me what he suggested it was, but, um, I actually don't know what it means.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:49:23] Okay.  That's all right.  Um, so the reason why we call the podcast 'high agency'  is it's this phrase that just kind of came up recently, but it's describing a behavior like agency for people, where you are operating in a way that you've got control and you can make decisions for yourself.  High agency people are those that tend to believe that their destinies are in their own control and that they're not just at the effect of the world that they're able to shape and affect the world around them.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:49:52] Right, it's like growth.  It's like growth mindset, but as, as it relates to how you operate in the world.  Action.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Action.  Yeah.  Cool.  Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:50:00] We thought it was pretty cool.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:50:01] Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:50:01] We liked, you know, did you print these things out?

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:50:05] We think it's pretty cool.  Did you come up with that phrase or did you hear and adopt that phrase?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:50:10] No, I heard the phrase, uh, and then we adopted it, uh, because I'm very much a believer that, you know, good artists copy, but great artists steal.  Yeah.  Um, so I was like, we're going to steal.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:50:20] Can we, uh, can we just talk about that for a second?  So I was, um, really upset.  Like, I'm like, why, why would they make school in such a way where you can't copy things?  Right.  Like in collaborate, you actually get punished for that.  And I remember, um, I was at the art gallery and they, I have, at the time, my kids were really small and they had these, um, days where, whoops, these, these days where kids could, um, just interact with art.  And so they had this piece of craft paper that was on the floor and there must've been, I don't know.  30 feet in length, 40 feet in length.  And then they had various, um, material on this piece of craft paper. Right.  So if you were walking the length, you'd see like pipe cleaners, paper cups, like little foam circles, whatever.  And it was honestly a visual of innovation, um, because you could see how maybe you'd have disparate material over here.  And then somebody started like poking pipe cleaners into this Styrofoam circle.  And then somebody over here took that concept and then attached it to this.  And then by the end, it was this completely evolved process because the person had seen what they had seen right beside each other.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And built on it.  Yeah.  Cool.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:51:37] Well, thanks for coming in, Christine.

CHRISTINE PILKINGTON

[00:51:38] Thank you for having me.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:51:40] Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about that was high-agency, like, and subscribe, and we will see you next time.

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