Latest / Found-HER with Kimberley Hiebert / The Lipstick Effect

Transcript

The Lipstick Effect · Found-HER with Kimberley Hiebert

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hey besties, we're back again today with another guest, and I'm really excited because we're gonna take a little bit of a turn.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh today um I have on uh Ashley Boyce, who is the CEO and founder, co-founder of Zero Collective.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is a handbag membership club.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna get into that in a minute, but you know, Ashley's more than a CEO and a co-founder of a handbag membership club.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: She has a wealth of experience as a CMO, as a founder in other businesses that she's exited.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: She's worked in large, large CPG, D2C brands, and she just brings a wealth of information around marketing as well as her own experience as an entrepreneur, a mom, and all the other things.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really excited.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Ashley, welcome to Found Her.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for having me.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so excited to be here.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we were just chatting offline as we always do, and I always think, oh, I should press record when we first start.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: You were having too much fun.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Such great conversation.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I really want to bring this to our listeners because, like I said before, the marketing piece right now, marketing is the top of mind for everybody, should be for every business all the time.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is the one area though that people refuse to spend in.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the last thing they want to spend in.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, no, I know.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's also the first thing that you know any investor or banking is asking you, you know, what are you spending?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And blah, blah, blah.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's it's the easiest thing to spend.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's also the easiest thing to cut, right?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: When you think about that.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: I call it a gym membership.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like when times are tough, that's the first thing that goes is the gym membership.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: That is it, and so funny because I I worked in Beauty.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Gym is the first thing to go, lipstick is the last.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: So people are still spending on the lipstick, but they're maybe not spending in the gym.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I love it.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So Ashley, share, share with us, give us a little bit of a snapshot into who you are and kind of a little bit of your journey, if you will, as a founder and how that shifted and shaped you.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's start there.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So um, again, first of all, thank you so much for having me.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so excited to be here and to sort of talk about my experience, which I think is is, you know, many of us have gone through these many seasons of our career.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you told me even five years ago I'd be where I am today, I would have been like, oh, absolutely not.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning that I spent, you know, the vast majority of my career working for a large uh CPG organization.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I was working at Unilever.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us what Unilever is for those that don't?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so Unilever is one of the world's largest personal care foods CPG company.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um the businesses that I worked on, I was leading our Dove business in Canada.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: I worked on Dove Men.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: I've worked on Axe, I've worked on Degree, I've worked on Vaseline, I've worked on Q-tips, which I don't believe is owned by them anymore.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: I've worked on new brands that have been incubated.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was part of the foundational team that launched the baby dove in the US.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so always sort of really grew up and wanted to work in sort of like a marketing-led organization.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Unilever is is one of the best in class in that.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a really lovely, wonderful place to work.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I worked, um, I worked for them both in Canada and then I was in the US and New York, working out of their New Jersey office for about eight years, doing product development, global campaign strategy.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you have a you have a keep you in my back pocket.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say, yeah, I've been busy working in beauty strategy.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then I came back in towards the end of 2017, 2018.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was pregnant with my first son, who's eight now.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I went off on Mat Leave.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was so fortunate that Unilever was able to move back here.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I had a beautiful Canadian Mat Leave, which was wonderful.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Went back and I was in the US, it's a little rough.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my when I would hear my colleagues, like they we they didn't even replace people, like there was no contract work.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: You'd go out for four months, you know, your baby is maybe not even sleep trained and you're coming back.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: All the same.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I think about that in Canada, even you know, as I think about entrepreneurs trying to think about starting families, and it's really hard because, and I won't say that this is a a pro of the US um sort of maternity and you know, um parent parental support care system there, but people are back to work much earlier.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: So there are a lot of support services for very young babies.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we don't have that here.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: So there really aren't here.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you think about trying to start a family as a young entrepreneur and thinking about what are the support options that I have, most daycare.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: And now we're doing a bit of a uh, you know, uh we're veering off course.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: But like that's a really hard thing to even think about when you're sort of a young entrepreneur.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I was lucky with my first son.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was back here.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I had my you know, uh, Canadian Mat Leave.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: I went back, I I ran uh the deodorants category free and lever for about nine months.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Then I ran skin cleansing.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Then I had my second son, and he was born COVID Eve.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So he was born March 9th, 2020.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so just ushered in COVID, and then you know, the world went into this really obviously difficult place for many people.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: But what you and I, you know, Kimberly were talking about offline was what that allowed me to do on Mat Leave was actually start to reconnect with a whole bunch of different people that I hadn't been connected with since I came back to Canada.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the connection that I had um with my co-founder of the next business, which I ended up leaving Unilever for, was something that probably I would not have initiated if it hadn't been for COVID.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: So was on my next Matt Leave, went back to Unilever, but eventually in 2021 left Unilever to go and found a direct-to-consumer e-commerce personalized fragrance company.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So what we had sort of discovered myself and my former co-founder was it's a really difficult category to shop fragrance.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it was particularly difficult in COVID when you're buying online, you were wearing masks in store.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no universe in which you could how do you smell fragrance?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a technology someone needs to get behind.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's what we we actually we start, we like started out to solve that problem.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we were a personalized AI recommendation engine.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea that if you could give us enough data, we built uh an algorithm, then this was you know before AI was, you know, answering my emails for me, creating a personalized recommendation with fragrances that we developed.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: So that was really the problem we set out to solve.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so I did that for the last sort of four years, and I was running that business, which was adjacent through our exit to a personalized skincare business.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: So this idea that skincare is another hard category to shop.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's also it's expensive to get wrong, right?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's very few skincare products that, and actually, you could think about expensive as being two things.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: One being like how much it actually costs.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other one being if you mess up something on your face and your skin gets irritated or agitated or you break out, like that, you only have one of those, right?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so like the risk there is pretty high too.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of what we were doing at that point in time was really using AI to try and create better product recommendations, better products for people.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Before I left and I've been in this role now 10 months at running Zero Collective, which is Canada's first handbag membership club.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, this idea that a, you know, we really started Zero with this idea that Canadians deserve better and more access to things that they want without a ton of commitment.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so with Zero, what you can do is you can come and you can apply to be a member, you can rent handbags on a 30-day basis.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: After 30 days, you can decide you want to swap something up, or if you're really loving the bag that you're renting, you can keep it and your membership just renews.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a great way to get access to high-end, beautiful, hard-to-find designer bags that are having to shell out money in the thousands.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great way, and I know we were talking about this earlier, to try out things that are an example of your personal style or trying to figure out does this thing I maybe want to spend money on fit into my personal life?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great way to get something great for a vacation or uh an event.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, an event, yeah.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so we sort of exist to complement, you know, your own personal style.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a lot of research now that shows how important personal branding is, particularly in a professional organization.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of our members tend to be working women who, you know, are are really looking at ways to continue to build their own personal brand.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been doing this now for about 10 months, and it's um it's just been really, really amazing.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, there are I'm trying to I'm trying to gr draw a thread through all of your experience.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, what comes to mind for me is that you have grown brands from incubator, right?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: To market.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: So from it's like baby, infancy, into market.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what and so I'm gonna just kind of pick on that thread through all that.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I've kind of come back to the handbag thing.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or I'll I'll actually I'll start with this with the personal brand.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing, right?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's for the for the ladies that are listening.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: I have been going to events, networking, big networking events now for the last like it's diligently in my calendar.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh an expense line on my PL.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I go to events in Eastern Canada, I go to events in Western Canada because I'm kind of in the middle.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I'm trying to I'm trying to grow my franchise brand across Canada in in three specific low provinces.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: I now have a signature look when I go to these events.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: When I go to uh any event, everybody recognizes me instantly and there's a trend.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And now when you start to see the media back, there's a personal brand look connection that comes with me.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it is the it's the hot pink, whatever it is, it's a pink, it's either a pink dress, but it's shoes.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I think of one item, right?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Shoes and or a purse, a handbag.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always looking for one, but I don't want to buy one.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I like this idea.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna dive deep into your collective, but on that personal brand thing, ladies, when you're going to the events, find a piece like a bag or a shoe that stands out and make that your kind of signature so that when you go and you start going to these events two to three times, people are like, I'm looking forward to seeing what handbag she has this time, or I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of shoes she has this time, kind of thing, right?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes that connection.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I would cycle, yeah.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna jump on your membership.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I was gonna say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna we'll do the membership in a second.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing I would say about what you've hit on the the nail you've hit on the head is I actually will pick something purposely a bit the the the term I use, but it's not the right one, is peacocking, meaning like I want someone to notice me for something.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it it's a really easy way to start a conversation with someone.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: To say, oh my goodness, what an interesting bag, what an interesting pair of shoes.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of a sudden, if you think about, you know, the the art of conversation, you've created an opening for someone.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not, it's not an introduction, it's not any of these things that can feel a bit forced.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I usually try to pick something if I'm going to, to your point, Kimberly, like I have to go to a lot of events.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And if I'm gonna go to an event, I want to pick something that could be a really good conversation starter that I can then pivot into.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you do?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: What do I do?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: How could we maybe service and help each other?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and and that's a really, really easy way.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's non-committal, right?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a compliment.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's usually pretty easy to get a good conversation started with something like that.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I love that.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I love that piece.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't a personal branding episode, but all there's always that when we're building brands.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say right now is the most challenging?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're starting a baby brand, it's 10 months old, you said, right?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've been here 10 months, we're just two years old, but I still think still babies.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: We're just in we're toddlers, right?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're still learning to walk, you know, maybe we're still at the founding all the things, right?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're still visible focused on getting visibility, correct?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right, memberships, all that kind of stuff.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so what would you say to somebody that's starting out maybe a year or two in?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: What is the what is the struggle that you've experienced personally?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe something common across the brands that you've worked with that still rings true today because everybody thinks marketing is so different because of AI.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: But tell me what, yeah, what do you, what do you, what are your thoughts on that?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it's so funny because like I I think I and I I'm a big fan of AI.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's so many amazing things that AI can do to unlock potential with us as you know, in our time and how we spend it, particularly when it comes to things that are administrative.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think the thing that has always been consistent in my career and the thing that I always tried to, you know, strive to do for all of my businesses is create a really, really memorable experience.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so memorability can be as impactful as some of the amazing Dove campaigns I've worked on.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: It can also be as simple as I know someone and one of my members is getting married this month and there's a bag she wants.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the minute it became available, I sent her a note.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so how you think about what memorability means in creating experiences for people, that to me is really what you know marketing and creating branding is really about, right?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Everything else out there.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's a that's a beautiful sound bite.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Just that yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like just if we can sit there for a minute, a minute, uh, just because I want to slow that down because it's so creating memories, the experience, the customer experience and creating a memory, it's like how does somebody feel your brand or feel your product before they uh experience it.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what really good marketing and really good branding does, right?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: The reason you choose something, you use something is because how it makes you feel if you are choosing it for the brand, right?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you think about, you know, the universe that we live in, especially, you know, going back to my days at Unweaver, I think about skin cleansing.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of really wonderful brands out there that are, you know, the generic brands that are the store label brands, and they maybe work just as well or good, do you know, do good enough job.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you choose to spend more on a brand that, you know, you you could argue is the job being done so much better by that brand?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that you choose it because it makes you feel a certain way by making that choice, by using it, whatever other things that that business is doing.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so to me, that's what I spent a lot of my time thinking about is how we create memorable experiences.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the one thing people get wrong in small businesses is thinking that in anything you're gonna do, you have to be all in on it rather than what is the MVP that we're gonna try, like your minimum viable product to prove out something that's gonna be the thing that helps better establish yourself as a brand and what you want to stand for and enhances whatever your customer experience is gonna be.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: So would you say, I think that's great valuable information.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Would you say it's best to like just pick the one thing, try that, figure that out instead of like applying like the whole like go all in on all the things?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that because marketing can be.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to go on in on all the things.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Just pick one thing, like you said, your MVP, figure out what that and how you can do it.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: What I think about is every month I have a series of tests that I want to run.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I start every month being like, what is the thing that I'm gonna run and how I'm gonna know that it's gonna know that it's successful?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because I would also say, as a small business and any entrepreneurs, if you do 10 things at once, how are you gonna know which thing is actually working for you?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's you're not gonna know the thing that adds incrementality, you're not gonna know the thing that ends up like benefiting you.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so I come up with a variety of hypotheses, what I'm gonna test, what is the way I'm gonna test it, and then how do we continue and actually like go and execute that?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then what's the measurability of that?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because I would also say I don't do anything I can't measure.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's the other thing I want to talk about into marketing, right?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is being able to measure your outputs.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: This has become, this has become really important, I know for me in the last three years as we've uh learned the language of our uh potential franchise candidate.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, when we started marketing across, let's say three provinces, we're getting there was way too much, it was way too broad.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: We have way too much, we don't know what's what's what's working in what area.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's too many levers that are going.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so we had to draw it all back.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it feels like you're going backwards when you do that.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, but we want to go everywhere.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: But you do have to get really like what are the things we're measuring?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Start small, get really targeted.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's where we found then we make progress, and we're like, oh, now we can measure that.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now we can take that and move that to the next step and the next step.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I love, I love that you reinforce that.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think you can measure everything.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think you need to be investing to measure everything.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's stuff as simple as, you know, I was talking to my team and saying, like, we don't do enough like customer surveys to just go back and say, Well, how did you hear about us?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Or what do you like about us?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think we all want to get to this idea of precision.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a big difference between precision and accuracy.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: So precision is like how close are you to the exact right number versus accuracy is are you in the ballpark?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're able to get some sort of accurate data to make decisions, it doesn't need to be precise.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Do you need to know if your NPS is eight or seven?
• 17:04
  unknown: Yeah.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Probably make the same decisions if it's eight or seven.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: You'd make a big difference if it was 10 versus zero.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's where this idea of if you can get as close to accurate as possible, you're in a better place and trying to get everything to be precise.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Precise.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Got that.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so um, what conversations do you think business owners, small business owners need to be having in the marketing landscape right now that aren't happening enough?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say that my my biggest sort of like, you know, coming out of working at a really big company, working for a really small company, I think we often feel like we need to go the agency route when it comes to bringing on someone to help us, which like the reality is most of us are not media buyers, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're not searched by I and I will say that myself, I'm not a CRM specialist.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do I know how to, you know, give feedback on an email?
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, but I'm not, you know, going to be someone who's creating the automations.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think that there is a real opportunity, and I see this frankly in some of the startup communities that I'm in, for us really to be sharing who are our most trusted freelancers and contractors, because an agency is there to make money based on a retainer basis.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I work with some great agencies, so this isn't a knock against them, but they're not really set up for small businesses like ours.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I'm constantly looking for is like the trusted recommendations for different specialists.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I, because I, for the most part, as a small business, you're not hiring marketing people full-time.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: You probably don't need a full-time growth person, you probably don't need a full-time lifecycle marketing person.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: But do you need those people to help create the right engines for you and help create the right optimizations and the right reporting?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so, to me, the big opportunity and what I love about the universe that we live in today is we are living in a very fractional economy, meaning there are so many incredibly talented professionals who can bring their point of view and their connections and their insights.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, what I want to see more of is business owners talking about how am I building my marketing infrastructure across individuals that are not myself, and then what tools am I using, et cetera.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because most things, you know, most tools, most apps, most agencies, you know, large are developed for larger scale companies rather than what do you do to your point when you're in this like, you know, zero to one, one to five, what five to ten.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is what you need at zero to one is very different than you need at five to ten, is very different than you need from 10 to 20.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you think about like what needs to scale with you?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when do you make the decisions to say, well, I'm gonna change my infrastructure because I am now not at a place where this supports me.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, I love that because this is exactly the space that we're in.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um we talk about uh franchise marketing is very complex because I'm marketing for two businesses, right?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: I have my actual franchise uh and and they have their own marketing needs, and then I'm recruiting for franchise candidates, and I have my own marketing needs.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we have two big marketing engines and lots of things to track, and there's lots of tech behind it, but also a lot and and there's always this like you know, we need to hire a marketing team, uh, and we just don't have the budget.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have the budget for that.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we build that marketing infrastructure?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's literally what the conversations we're having right now so that we can manage and then bring in a specialist or two to support some of the areas.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I love this conversation because especially in those startups, like you said, maybe to the zero for us, it'll be like zero.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're at six, but ten up to ten franchise partners, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: We we can do we have enough infrastructure with that, so we don't want to add in a director yet of marketing.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, how can we best set us up?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I love the conversation.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: I love that that was a recommendation, and I do believe for founders right now, the conversation is you know, you being involved in building some of this stuff because you're closest to the vision, the decision maker, and you need to know a little bit because if you I know there's this whole like get the experts to do the things, but then when you're the founder, when those experts leave and you're left with a big gap, and if it's the engine of your business and you don't know how to fill the gap, then you're fucked, pardon the language.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I love that.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and it's but it's also like to your point, how do you hire for that?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually, I think, the thing that founders need to get a bit better for.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's maybe not doing the doing, it's knowing who's gonna be the right people to come in and do it.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you ask the right questions?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because I would also say, you know, and I say this as a marketer, marketers are very good at marketing themselves.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's a lot of jargon, there's a lot of you know, things that people say in an interview, right?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, how do you know how to to your like if if actually your value as a founder is making sure that none of your dollars or your time is wasted, right?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Either on hiring the wrong people or not do or doing something that could be done by someone else better, how do you how do you help like figure out those decisions?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think like I've seen good.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: The good founders have gotten smart enough in any given topic to know when they are not the average.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, what would you say personally has been your biggest challenge in as you've evolved?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like you said at the beginning, you said, you know, did I think this is where I would be five years ago?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I've I mean I have those moments a lot where I'm like, holy shit.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like we just went and went uh faced the dragons, like in May.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: We did a Dragon Sten uh and uh it was it was I'm hoping it'll get aired this fall.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was it was spectacular to be able to present our business and business vision in front of six of the most iconic Canadian entrepreneurs and the for that experience alone.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but at the same time, three years ago, five or five years ago, uh, I would that was not on my bingo card.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was recovering from cancer.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: We had retired and sold everything.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: There, you know what I mean?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I say that to you, when you say that, like I didn't think I'd be here five in five years.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: What is the biggest, yeah, what is the the shift for you personally that you've gone through in the these years?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: I would say it is a couple of things.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think the first one is a very, you know, knowing who the audience of of this is, it's a very female thing, which is like imposter syndrome, right?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Can I do this?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've done the thing I've been doing for so long out of my career where I was working at a big organization.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: And feeling like a lot of my identity was tied to that, right?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was was was tied to the business that I, you know, was working on for a long time.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and feeling like, can I really do this?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm not an entrepreneur.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been an entrepreneur.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like that was, you know, this idea that now I can say that and I'm a founder and I'm working in a startup and a small business, that was so, to your point, it was never on my bingo guard.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was not something that I necessarily knew that I wanted to do.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think many of us struggle with that a little bit, um, especially when it's something that it's it is our own idea.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think women have a harder time pitching themselves, even if they're passionate about something, even if they think this is, you know, the thing that is gonna be solving a major customer problem, that it's gonna, it's gonna alleviate so many issues.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: We do have that issue.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like we often get in our own way on that side.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so, like, I would say, like, to me, that's you know, I think the first thing.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think the other thing um that I find that I found is, and I, you know, I've talked about this a little bit, is I do think being an entrepreneur can be a bit lonely and it can be a bit hard.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't give enough credit to this idea of what it takes to build mostly alone.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: And even if you're building, you're building alone, it can feel you know, like you a lot of the weight sits on you from a decision-making point of view.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: It can feel like your problems are not the same.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, my husband and I come home, we talked about he he works at um a larger bank.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so he comes home and he's like, our CRM system is launch is delayed.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, you know, I had this, I gotta fix a leak somewhere.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's it's a very, very different sort of scale of problem that we're solving when we think about you know our two businesses, and it can feel lonely.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think it um it can also feel hard if you're building with somebody because building with there's joint accountability, but you know, joint problem solving at the same time.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the other thing that, you know, has been has been hard, you know what I mean, has been hard for me is also, and it's now what was maybe a weakness when I started my like my entrepreneurship journey that now I'm trying to pivot was if you work for a large company, you're not doing a lot of the doing.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: You got a lot of people that do the doing for you, right?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: You got agencies, and and frankly, like they don't want you doing the doing.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: They more they want other people doing it.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, pivoting to this idea that I was placing a purchase order or I am paying an invoice or I am, you know, to be the only recruiter that's hiring someone, that's a really, really different mentality than when you have this.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: What I didn't realize when I worked at a larger company, which is the safety net of resources around you.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was something that was really hard to adjust to.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I find myself, um, and this is for sort of any business leader, is I talk a lot about now how I balance working in the business versus working on the business on the business.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because working in the business keeps the business running.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Working on the business is the only thing that's going to grow the business, which at the end of the day is what we all need to do.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so that part and figuring out that balance and what other resources do I need, and what other systems do I need so I stop being in and start being more on?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: That is something that I have found personally a challenge over the last at least like three to four months in the role I'm in as we've continued to scale.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that's a really good point.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly where a lot of my listeners, myself, find ourselves, especially in this, you know, three to five year range, right?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is how do you balance working in the business and working on the business?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because at the beginning, sometimes you need both.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be in both.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I know people that are on the mountaintop say, get out of the business, be the leader of the business.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like sometimes that's a little bit, that's um, that's a little like rose-colored glasses.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: You've already climbed the hill, you forgot what it's like to be in that messy middle part and making those decisions.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: So uh thanks for bringing that up.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, Ashley, our time is really quickly running, believe it or not.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: I knew this was gonna be a good conversation.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you're a great conversationalist.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: I love this.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, where can people find more?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where can they find out about Zero Collective?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: We will make sure to put the links in when the episode airs, but uh tell us on air how where can people find more about the handbag membership?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And um yeah, where can people kind of for you?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you can always find me on LinkedIn, uh A S H L E Y B-O-Y-C-E.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but our business is uh zerocollective.ca.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you can find us there if you're interested in learning more.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: You can apply for membership.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to follow us on Instagram or on TikTok, we're at join zero collective.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and yeah, it's just it's a really exciting time, hopefully.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: For uh we we find summer is a really fun season as people are venturing out more, doing more vacations, going to more events.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a really good time if you want to explore your own personal style and think about expanding out um your wardrobe in a way that doesn't, you know, cost thousands of dollars.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, thank you so much for sharing some of your wisdom and your new uh project or your new adventure.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: And um, yeah, I hope we cross paths in some events in Eastern Canada.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: I hope we do too.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: We'll have to connect after you have to tell me when you're gonna be here.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, thanks again for being on Found Her.