Latest / Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching] / 28. Building a Business That Doesn't Run Through You with Shay Prosser

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28. Building a Business That Doesn't Run Through You with Shay Prosser · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  Welcome to Scrappy But Successful where we find out if consultants are successful because they're sophisticated or scrappy
• 0:05
  I'm Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple Consulting Firm, helping small businesses become more data-driven
• 0:08
  Fun fact: there are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way galaxy
• 0:10
  Today I'm joined by Shay Prosser, founder of North 12 Partners
• 0:13
  She works with CEOs running companies between $1M and $20M in revenue who are growing and learning to operate
• 0:16
  Shay, we know you're successful, but do you fall more on the sophisticated or scrappy side?
• 0:18
  I would love to say sophisticated, but I'm going to go definitely scrappy
• 0:21
  I've run zero dollar marketing budgets and gotten things done by clawing my way through things
• 0:23
  I try not to do that all the time, but having scrappiness has been helpful in my career
• 0:26
  Zero dollar marketing budgets are very scrappy and sometimes you've just got to do it
• 0:28
  I worked as a channel partner and had to get all my money through channel partners
• 0:31
  The scrappy way to go about it often ends up being sophisticated because you learn so much
• 0:33
  You're like, holy crap, we can do that for zero dollars. It's a fun forcing function to actually learn scrappy
• 0:36
  When you've run your own business, that dollar is a lot, especially in the startup phase
• 0:38
  The transition from scrappy to sophisticated is fun, but there's a way to appear sophisticated
• 0:41
  While knowing that deep down inside, you're pretty darn scrappy
• 0:43
  Take me back to the beginning. Where did you grow up? Did you have entrepreneurs in the family?
• 0:46
  I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and my parents and grandparents ran a truck rental
• 0:48
  My grandpa had bought it as a service station, and I grew up underneath the accounting desk
• 0:51
  My mom and grandmother were bookkeepers, so family business is not foreign to me
• 0:53
  I traveled all over the world from there. My parents sold the business when I was about 12
• 0:56
  Got to see that transition. Everybody thought my dad was unemployed or that he was in the mafia
• 0:58
  Nobody understood that when you sell a business, you kind of don't know what to do for a second
• 1:01
  You maybe need a minute after 15 years of growing something. We let them think he was in the mafia
• 1:03
  I've started my own businesses and worked for big companies, so I've got the breadth of experience
• 1:06
  I can talk big corporate speak, but I also know what it's like when your parents are trying to make payroll
• 1:08
  And trying to grow a business. So it's a lot of different experiences
• 1:11
  In family business, especially with alleged mafia ties, you get that breadth of experience
• 1:13
  I mean, he wasn't in the mafia, but I used it to my advantage in high school
• 1:16
  Would you play that card for teachers or for boyfriends? "Hey, just so you know, that's my dad"
• 1:18
  You know, either sold a business or he's independently wealthy through means we don't know
• 1:21
  He was in the trucking business. You do the math. If my poor dad hears this, he'll be like, what?
• 1:23
  What is transportation really? I love it though. You got to have fun with it
• 1:26
  Did you start a lemonade stand? Are you selling candy at school or anything like that?
• 1:28
  No, but my parents did offer to give me my money for college that they'd saved to start a business
• 1:31
  This was the early nineties, and I didn't really know what that looked like
• 1:33
  I hadn't seen people who'd started a business and I didn't have an idea, so I went to college
• 1:36
  I went to grow up a little bit. NC State was a lot of fun
• 1:38
  I got a degree and then went on to meet a lot of people, but I think that early confidence
• 1:41
  That my parents had, confidence in my entrepreneurial spirit, but also they recognized I do things differently
• 1:43
  I might not take the exact path that somebody else is going to take. It was a confidence builder
• 1:46
  When I did start a business, I left and started my first business after leaving Microsoft
• 1:48
  I was doing events for them. They laid off our entire division when I was like 24 years old
• 1:51
  I was running large scale events for Microsoft all over the Southeast
• 1:53
  They needed to lay off the entire marketing departments across field marketing across the country
• 1:56
  But then they figured out that they lost a lot of skill sets and that they needed to hire us back
• 1:58
  I got hired back as a consultant making more on a part-time basis than I'd made in my full-time salary
• 2:01
  That's where I started to learn about talent decisions and some that aren't as smart as they seem
• 2:03
  Talk about value for what you're worth at that point too. That's pretty incredible. You're what, mid-twenties at that point?
• 2:06
  I was in my early twenties. I think I left there when I was like 24, 25
• 2:08
  They decided that they only wanted people with MBAs. I didn't have one. I haven't gotten one
• 2:11
  I feel like I've got an experiential MBA. But I know there's a value in formal ones
• 2:13
  They said they only wanted people with MBAs and at least 10 years experience. Well, I was 24, 25 years old
• 2:16
  I worked for them for a few years, didn't have an MBA or 10 years experience, but hey, got to go back
• 2:18
  Supporting the team. A couple people did have MBAs and got the new jobs, but they realized they didn't have the support
• 2:21
  They didn't have that kind of, to your point, the scrappiness. They were like, hold up. Who's the person
• 2:23
  Who's going to run 10 miles running a 3,000 person event, running through a convention center
• 2:26
  In the back halls, getting to know the caterers, and going to make sure that everything gets delivered on time
• 2:28
  So they're like, I think we need her back. I came back, did it, and it was fun
• 2:31
  Was this a business or were you just brought on as a 1099 contractor kind of thing for Microsoft?
• 2:33
  I did start it as a business. I thought I would do it for other people and I did it for another few clients
• 2:36
  And then I realized that that wasn't the side of events that I liked
• 2:38
  I liked running corporate events, but I liked doing them from the standpoint I could run them from end to end
• 2:41
  When I was at Microsoft, I was doing everything from working with the internal team to figure out why we were doing the event
• 2:43
  What we were doing, laying out the day, laying out the format, and doing all of the marketing for it
• 2:46
  And running the budget. So really doing end-to-end strategy and event management
• 2:48
  What I found on the other end was I was just getting the tactical logistical piece
• 2:51
  Not involved in the why was it happening, what content were we providing, and that didn't fill up what I liked to do
• 2:53
  And it didn't fit what I was really good at too. Finding out how many shrimp we need on the shrimp platter
• 2:56
  Was piece of it. That's not what I really was really good at at the end of the day
• 2:58
  So I did that for about a year in addition to having another job. And it was good learning
• 3:01
  It was good learning about what you are really good at and what you really don't like to do either
• 3:03
  That's what you don't want is so important, especially at that time too
• 3:06
  Credit to you for finding out both of those things. Because most twenty something year olds probably had no idea
• 3:08
  What they liked or what they did like. I was good at analytics. I was like, all right, I can do math
• 3:11
  I don't know. I don't know what to do with that, but shout out to you
• 3:13
  But now let's fast forward today. We'll jump throughout the timeline a bit here
• 3:16
  What you do today is very strategic. Obviously you have execution partners that actually go execute
• 3:18
  Tell us a little bit about today and how you started North 12
• 3:21
  Yeah, so I left an organization as chief marketing officer actually over membership and marketing
• 3:23
  I realized when I made that transition that marketing was changing a lot and strategy was changing a lot
• 3:26
  This was about a year and a half ago. I've had other businesses in between and worked really for all sizes of business
• 3:28
  But I really looked at where I thought things were missing was that go to market strategy
• 3:31
  You know, I work with data and you work with marketing data. And if you don't know how to interpret that
• 3:33
  And have the proper ways of thinking about it. Data is just data
• 3:36
  So I love where you and I've worked together and the intersection of why are you collecting that
• 3:38
  And what do you need it to do for you? And how is it supporting your true go-to-market strategy?
• 3:41
  That's the perfect setup. You use your data wisely and make sure you have a strategy for using it
• 3:43
  I think the two of us can help them with anything that involves strategy and data
• 3:46
  So promoting really good decision making within businesses. You can find me at North12Partners.com or Shea Prosser
• 3:48
  I'm always open for a conversation to see how you can be more strategic and smart in building business