Latest / CEOs and ABCs / Kipp Bodnar (CMO Hubspot) A Conversation on: How to Leverage Your Time More Effectively at Work and at Home #050

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Kipp Bodnar (CMO Hubspot) A Conversation on: How to Leverage Your Time More Effectively at Work and at Home #050 · CEOs and ABCs

• 0:00
  Kevin Rice: Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs today. My guest is Kip Bodnar. Kip Bodnar joined HubSpot, running the company blog. Five years later, he was chief Marketing Officer, helping grow the company by 20 times and helping define an entire category of marketing along the way. But while his career was accelerating, something else was happening at home. This is a conversation about what ambition can build, what it can cost, and what it means to stay present when the world and your industry is changing faster than ever. Welcome to CEOs and ABCs. Real stories from execs who lead at work and show up at home. Career moves, parenting wins and fails, and everything in between. I'm your host, Kevin Rice. Here's today's episode. Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs today. My guest is Kip Bodnar, the Chief marketing officer of HubSpot. Kip, thank you so much for being here.
• 0:51
  Kipp Bodnar: Hey, Kevin, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
• 0:54
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. So I found an interview of you from, like, 10 years ago where you were, your son was like, 8 months old, and you were talking about kind of balance and presence, and when you're with your son, the phone goes away, computer goes away. Now, 10 years later, as the company leading has grown by 20 times, your role is elevated and your son is now older. Has that philosophy been able to survive the last 10 years?
• 1:25
  Kipp Bodnar: Well, that's a really good question. I think it's largely survived the last 10 years, but I think we are in an unprecedented time of technology and change in this new AI era. And it's just created, I think, a new set of demands that just didn't exist before, you know, candidly. And I think that's been the hardest part, where the world is changing so fast that, like, you might have a major breakthrough at, like, 7pm on a Wednesday night. And. And you have to balance that. Thankfully, it doesn't happen every Wednesday night, but, like, there are times where you're just like, oh, I have to, like, go spend 30 minutes dealing with something that none of us thought was going to happen, you know, today, which is kind of insane.
• 2:11
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, that totally makes sense. The other night, this was kind of after my kids went to bed, but I had, like, a moment of inspiration, and I worked for, like, three hours. And normally I don't work that late at night. I shut my computer off and I try to focus on getting good sleep, but I just had some ideas coming through, and I had to just open my computer and start working it through, and it came out with some really good ideas. So like when you kind of get that moment of inspiration, kind of got
• 2:35
  Kipp Bodnar: to take it, you got, you got to do it. Right.
• 2:37
  Kevin Rice: Have things gotten harder or easier as your son's gotten older and kind of, you know, how your role as a father kind of changes? I feel like kids in the earliest ages are really attached to mom and then as they get to like 5, 6, 7, they really start to shift. Because your son is about 10. Right. So over the last few years I imagine he's really wanted to spend more time with you.
• 3:00
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah, my son is about. Will be 11 soon. Holy cow. And Bo has autism and special needs. And he's amazing. He's the most amazing, curious boy in the entire world. And he's like a boy's boy because he's into cars and water slides and all the things that you would expect almost 11 year old boy to be into. And so I think it's harder because, you know, when you. Anybody who's like neuro atypical, I think they have different challenges as they're getting older and I think have a more dynamic life in terms of needs and ebbs and flows of what they need. But at the same time, yeah, he just wants to like go to the pool or you know, go to, you know, water park or do whatever. Do whatever like a normal 11, 11 year old would do all at the same time. So it's quite a balancing act. But it's been a blast. And every year gets a little better, which I think is fun. Yeah.
• 4:00
  Kevin Rice: And different. Right. Like it just kind of like with the seasons, things change and you know, I've got a two and a half year old and so the way I spend time with him is just kind of wandering around the property and just kind of doing whatever he wants to do versus I've got a almost 7 year old and 10 year old and they're very active. Like they always want to be doing activities. And so it's just kind of like things naturally evolve as the kids grow up. And what I found was like it was a lot easier for me to be present as they got older versus when they were younger. Because if we're just wandering around the property, it's so easy to let my mind drift back to work. And so I'd be like reading a bedtime story and I'd be preparing for my next leadership meeting. How are you when it comes to compartmentalizing and context switching and staying focused or present on whether you're at work or you're at home?
• 4:52
  Kipp Bodnar: I think that's an interesting observation that you just gave around. Like, it's been a little easier. They get older. I think that's true also because, like, as children get older, your job, at least my perspective is your job is to, like, teach them autonomy and independence and life skills and all of those things. And, like, look, when you're teaching a kid to do the laundry and empty the dishwasher, you're just like, I think, more focused and locked in, you know, like, there's stakes. It's like, oh, I don't want to clean up three plates that get dropped in the unloading of the dishwasher. So I need to make sure that I am very clear, locked in, helpful of that process happening, you know? So I think that, to me, is the big difference. As you are talking about, like, core life skills, you know, it's easier to focus on the moment when you're, like, fishing or doing something that is, like, very much, like, takes all of your focus, which I think is kind of germane to the point you were making. Right.
• 5:48
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. Earlier you mentioned the world is changing so quickly. And one of the things I've been really interested in asking a lot of executives on this podcast is like, as technology is evolving, the skills of the future are evolving. How does that translate to what you are thinking about, like, how you spend time with your son, what you're teaching him? Values, skills. What's going to be important as your son gets older to, you know, in the future versus, like, what? The skills that were important for you when you were embarking on your career.
• 6:19
  Kipp Bodnar: The tact I'm taking, whether it is the right tact or not, you, you, you know, you never know until hindsight is that the more you're in a period of change, I think the more important it is to look at the things that have not changed, right? The things that are the constants, the foundational elements of, you know, whether it be the human existence, being a kid, being a parent, whatever that is, you know, kindness. Can you be kind and respectful to other people? Can you learn to do something? And can you focus on that thing enough to not just learn how to do it, but get better, a little better at doing it every week or two? And I think those things are universal. Right. I don't think it matters how much our world changes or what technology we have or don't have. It is just fundamental to human existence. And I think that's my job to focus on those things that I think are the foundational building blocks of life.
• 7:13
  Kevin Rice: That makes sense. Yeah. I think resilience, grit, overcoming adversity. Those are the things I'm really trying to focus on working on with my kids. And, like, coming up with little missions or exercises or activities I try to be very intentional about. Here's the values I want to work on maybe this month or this quarter, because I still think in terms of quarters and come up with little missions of, like, okay, we're going to work on resilience this week, and here's some things that we can do together.
• 7:42
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah, I don't want to like this. My wife, Kimberly, is fantastic at this. She is, I think, the best person I've ever met at just really helping build resilience and skills and, like, doing it in a way that feels natural, which is hard, which is just like, hey, I have expectations of you. You should have expectations of yourself. And, like, this is just what we do, you know? And, you know, we remember to take our backpack to school. We. There are. There are things that we. That we do. And whether you're doing those activities or not, sometimes just like communicating clear expectations is way more powerful than anybody gives it credit for.
• 8:23
  Kevin Rice: Sure. That's something I get tripped up on, to be honest. Fairly often. Right. I end up doing things for my kids that they should be doing for themselves just because I know I can do it quicker or running up.
• 8:35
  Kipp Bodnar: It happens to everybody, doesn't it?
• 8:38
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, absolutely. But then again, when I think about my career, that's not really something that I struggled with in my career. Like, if I was managing teams, I could hold expectations, hold them accountable or responsible, and I wouldn't dip down the leadership pipeline and do things for them. I don't know why that was so different for me, but in my career, I could maintain boundaries and hold expectations, and then with my kids, I just, like, fall apart.
• 9:03
  Kipp Bodnar: I find life most often to be, you know, pretty counterintuitive. Right. And in the. The biggest way to help them is to not help them in the moment and as much and help them build skills and build resilience and all of those things. It's just, like, it's not human nature. Right. Like, most valuable things are not, like, extensual, instinctual. You have to go counter to your instincts. And at the same time, there are times when kids need help. Right. You know, like, there are times when you're like, oh, I know that you've had a really tough and long day, and I want to help you with this thing. And that the lesson you learn in that moment is that that child Learns in that moment, I think is like, oh, yeah, it feels good when somebody helps me when I need it. And I need to know what needing help feels like. Right. And I shouldn't need help all the time because I'm a good, smart, capable person. But I need help sometimes. Like we all do.
• 9:56
  Kevin Rice: Right. Otherwise, you're kind of teaching them learned helplessness.
• 10:00
  Kipp Bodnar: Exactly.
• 10:01
  Kevin Rice: So, Kip, you've had an incredible career and run at HubSpot, right? When you joined the company, you were running the blog, and then within five years, you were promoted to the Chief Marketing officer. Tell us a little bit about kind of behind the scenes. Like, what's something that maybe you understand about career growth and advancement today that you were still trying to figure out back then?
• 10:27
  Kipp Bodnar: I think the biggest thing if you're out there trying to build your career is that there are a couple of things. One, you can work really hard on the wrong thing and get nowhere. That's a very important thing. It's like what you choose to work on and spend your time on is far more important than how you spend the time, which is, I think, overlooked by most people. I think there are a lot of people who have a life plan and a career plan and want to achieve things. It's like, I don't know, I never really had that. My. My job was to learn and solve problems, and I don't think I realized in the moment how important. Just like, if you can learn and you can out learn the other people around you, you will be successful. And if you can't outlearn the other people around you, you're probably going to be less successful than them, and that's okay. But that's like kind of the stakes we all live in.
• 11:20
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, let's talk about that kind of focusing on the right things, because I've seen that as a theme. Some of the articles and podcasts you've done and you've talked about kind of focusing on, like, the three to five things that produce an outsized, you know, 10x result. What are some of those things that you're focused on right now in your role at HubSpot that are creating, like, a disproportionate result?
• 11:40
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah, I think there are a few things. One, we're in a period of crazy technology change, which means the cool thing about my job as a marketer is that change, if you take advantage of that change quickly, you can normally get outsized results. So, you know, if you go to a new advertising platform, like the ChatGPT ads that came out this year. If you're an early advertiser, you can probably have much better results than an advertiser will on that platform, say, five years from now. Right. And so first of all, that's understanding where these trends are and following them quickly. Like that's one really important way. The second thing is like understanding how technology is changing consumer behavior. This doesn't matter if you're a marketer or a head of sales CEO. Everybody's gotta know the changing consumer behavior landscape. I just find that a lot of people aren't intellectually honest with themselves about it. It's easy to dismiss. It's like, oh, it's just a few people use this computer usage and thing. Or these few people use Claude code. Not that many. It's all of these things where you're. No, no, it's actually way more than you think. And it's changing how people do things in a very radical way. And if you are not open and honest with yourself about that, then you can't provide the right product or service to those people who are now, you know, kind of living and working in a different way.
• 13:04
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, that first mover advantage. Right. Being ahead of the curve, starting to see where the trends are going.
• 13:09
  Kipp Bodnar: And then.
• 13:10
  Kevin Rice: So if I think back to like, you know, my earliest days when I was starting my career, it was kind of like there was Salesforce and then HubSpot came out as a challenger. And HubSpot came out and really defined and owned inbound marketing before everybody started to grasp the concept. Right. So that was a big part of the overall success of the company.
• 13:30
  Kipp Bodnar: We created a category called inbound marketing and needed to find a different momentum and point of view to bring the market through. Because when you're challenging and a challenger brand, you kind of have to have a highly differentiated message.
• 13:43
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. So as you're identifying the things to be focusing on that create bigger outsized results, can you give us an example of maybe something you realized wasn't very high leveraging?
• 13:55
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah. So the kind of lead in here is around. We did this thing called ML Marketing HubSpot for a long time. Then AI came along and pretty much disrupted it and it didn't work as well as used to. And in fact, we lost a ton of traffic, like 100 plus million visits over the course of a year. And in that period of time, you know, I essentially had to build a whole new way of doing marketing, new framework that we could, could take to market ourselves. And spent the last year writing a book. It's called Loop Please go Everybody go check it out. If you want to learn anything about marketing or growing a business in this AI world, but basically created a loop, this framework called Loop, that's a four step framework that's all about how you do marketing with AI technology as well as how you deliver marketing that works to a consumer base that's now fully adopted AI and really change their behavior in this new AI world.
• 14:50
  Kevin Rice: So I want to come back to Loop because I'm really excited to read it. And one of the things I really like to do is kind of think about like as I'm learning in my career, like, how can those lessons translate back home? So if we think about this concept of creating outsized results, high leverage activities, like what's the parenting equivalent of that? What are the two or three things that you do with your son that you think have an outsized impact on his growth or maybe your relationship and connection with him?
• 15:19
  Kipp Bodnar: I think, I think that's a really good question. Right. And I think what you're describing is kind of the antithesis of what I'd call like parenting guilt. You know, where parenting guilt is, as I understand it, is people who just feel guilty for not spending every week waking moment that they can with their children and feel like they're not helping them enough or not supporting them enough or not developing them enough, which by itself I believe to be like this really terrible self fulfilling prophecy, right? Because if you think that about yourself, that's going to pass through your child and it's going to create like a really bad dynamic. So the antithesis of that is, wow, I'm not going to feel guilty if there's, you know, work I gotta do or something that that's come up. But it means that the time I spend has to be really impactful. And those are things like riding a bike, showing you how to fish, you know, teaching you to swim. Like, and I try every day to have like a real like high impact moment of like, hey, we're checking on a skill we're doing or we're gonna sit down and do homework. Because there's a really important part of the curriculum that's coming up, right? It kind of ebbs and flows day to day, week to week. But I think that is most important and I think the other thing that really matters is like, I don't know. I've met, I've, I've been fortunate, Kevin. I have seen the world. I have learned that, you know, people are far more alike than they are different. And the biggest thing of people I'VE met who are really well adjusted and great people versus not. It's like they had good parents and their parents believed in them and were proud of them. And at the end of the day, I think it's also just really important. It's like, hey, I love you. I'm proud of you. You did a great job today. I know it was hard. I think just being as simple as, just like acknowledging that very frequently just makes it true over time, you know, doesn't make it true once, but if you do it almost every day for a person's life, it becomes true.
• 17:23
  Kevin Rice: Adds up. Yeah. I like your point about giving yourself grace. Right. If you're reflecting, like, I have Mrs. All the time and, you know, I have to give myself some grace and then I reflect on it and I sometimes have to repair and tell my kids that I messed up and dad's not perfect, but I'm going to try better. And then I. I like your point about. You know what I like intentionality, right? Like being intentional with your time. Because presence is one point of it, but the other is like making sure that the time is valuable, not just kind of rolling into it and being in default mode. Does that come naturally for you? Because it didn't for me. I had to, like, really think about how am I going to spend time with my kids tonight, on Saturday, on Sunday, like, in the moments that I did have with them, I had to plan ahead. Or for you, is that just kind of like in the spur of the moment?
• 18:10
  Kipp Bodnar: They really should like, give you an instruction manual when you're a parent, right? Like, you know, like, I don't think, I don't think a lot of this is instinctual to, to hardly anybody. And if it's instinctual to you, like, good, good for you. Like, I'm, I'm jealous of you. But at the same time, I think what really matters here is that again, you learn. That's kind of the theme of a lot of the conversation today. And it's like, no, it wasn't instinctual or normal to me, but I feel like I got better at it every week, month, year. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I do think it gets a little easier as your child gets older because there's certain life milestones, right? There are certain ages you learn to ride a bike, there's certain ages that you develop certain skills. And so you can say, oh, you know, my child's eight. It's really important at eight that they, you know, do these handful of things and so I think that enables you to be more intentional over time too. Yeah.
• 19:09
  Kevin Rice: As my kids have gotten more into the activities I like to enjoy, it's been a lot easier. Okay, we're going to go surfing this afternoon. We're going to go bike riding. We're going to go mountain biking now. And so that's kind of allowed us to get into a little bit of a better flow versus just like playing with action figures on the ground. I did it.
• 19:28
  Kipp Bodnar: I mean, but hey, both are great. Both are great. Right. But obviously if there's a togetherness that comes with like a shared passion.
• 19:37
  Kevin Rice: Right.
• 19:38
  Kipp Bodnar: And I think that's what you're getting at. And anytime that there's like, you can have that unique bond, I think it's just makes everything else a little easier. Yeah.
• 19:46
  Kevin Rice: So this will seem a little on the nose, but I'm going to ask the question anyways. Do you think that becoming a father made you a better leader at work in your role as an executive?
• 19:59
  Kipp Bodnar: I think being a parent makes you a better person, which, yeah, of course, then makes you a better executive or better leader. I always think back, I'm like, how did I waste so much time before being a parent? You know, like, I, like, I should have like solved a lot of the world's great problems because I was clearly not using my time well enough then, you know. But I think parenting is a daily reaffirmation of teaching and empathy and patience and trying to communicate very clearly and calmly. And those are all the things it takes to be really good at leading anyone, whether it's my case, a 10, almost 11 year old, or 10 years out of college, really successful marketer, like, all of those traits are classics. They're foundations.
• 20:56
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. I spent a lot of time working on this book concept where it's translating leadership skills and business frameworks and systems into parenting. Because that was the only thing that really worked for me is I was coming from, you know, working 80 hours a week, traveling 50% of the time to. I became a single father at the beginning of 2020 and I was raising a three and a half year old and a four week old by myself. And all of a sudden I had to figure out, okay, how do I do all of this? And none of it came naturally to me. So I had to really look at what have I learned in my career and how can I translate that over? And that's actually kind of what the book I've written is about. But I also found some things that were really counterproductive. Right. Like at work, I was hyper focused on outputs and productivity and efficiency. And then when I came home, if I didn't very intentionally take that hat off and put on my dad hat, I found that I was really struggling. Like, for example, I supposed to be playing with my kids and I'd look over and like, the dishes are piling up and I would stop playing with them and I go. Because I needed to be productive. It's just like it was ingrained into me. How do you switch from executive mode to dad mode as you're moving from work to home life?
• 22:13
  Kipp Bodnar: I think, isn't that just really hard? First of all, I can't imagine ever being in the situation you were in and having two young kids and having to figure it out all by yourself. That's hard. So you have my utmost admiration, first of all. Second of all, I don't think it comes natural to anybody. Like you said, it didn't come naturally. It's like, who does this come natural to? And it's like, it's also like, I don't know how we as people, as humans have gotten obsessed with, like, how something happens versus, like, that it did happen. Like, I don't know. I don't care if it came naturally to you, me, or anybody else. It came to you, which is really all that matters because now you have that perspective and can serve your kids in the way that they need. But I think that the way you described it is like, being intentional and like, wearing different hats. I think to me, my articulation of that experience is that you cannot be. Have the same priorities, show up the same way everywhere. It's really hard. And that seems weird because it's like, oh, wait, I'm being a bunch of different versions of myself. No, but like you're emphasizing and de. Emphasizing different versions of yourself. Right. Like, I think your productivity example was a great one. It's like, if you're all about productivity 24 7, then, like, you're probably going to miss a huge aspect of parenthood and what you need to instill in your children, but also, just like, general appreciation of life and perspective too. And so I think everything you said is true. I just also think it's true for ourselves, not just our children and how we show up as a parent.
• 23:50
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. So HubSpot, like I mentioned earlier, like, starting as a challenger brand, I always saw it as a very ambitious company, like defining a category and stuff. And then speaking with you and seeing some of your podcasts, I see you as a very ambitious person too. Right. Have you had periods where your ambition cost you something personally, or maybe personally you decided to say no to something and then you felt like that cost you in your career? Like, how do you see the trade off and sacrifice between career and personal life and family?
• 24:22
  Kipp Bodnar: So it's a really tough and hard question, I think. I definitely think there were times of my life where I probably was not as family focused as I could have been and should have been. Part of it is, like, I'm just somebody who gets lost. It's less ambition. I don't know if ambition is even the right word. It's like, I just get consumed with problems and just like, the figuring out of things, you know, and the puzzles of things. And there's definitely times where, like, I got lost in those, or I was trying to show up for others more than. Than I probably needed to, and that was definitely hard. And I feel like I probably missed some very early time with my son that I probably would. Would have benefited from, like, getting to all these lessons that you and I are talking about faster, right? I think it probably delayed, like, the realizations and everything that you and I have talked about faster from happening faster, which is probably like, the biggest, like, if I had a redo, like, knowing everything I knew now, like, just how I would show up and how, like, I understand the world and what it. The role of being a parent actually means. I want my son to know that, like, people work and you can make a difference in the world and all of those things. Like, that's super, super, super important. But at the same time, I want him to know that, like, I'm here for him and he's. He is a core priority of my life. And I think it's really hard to balance that, I think, especially as a young parent, a parent of young kids. And then over time, I think you learn and get. Get better able to balance it, if that makes any sense.
• 26:14
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, no, that's great. And my intention is not to just make you feel parental guilt here.
• 26:20
  Kipp Bodnar: No, I'm not somebody who does feel parental guilt, for better and for worse. But it's more just like reflection. And I think reflection is helpful, right?
• 26:27
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, absolutely. Have you had, like, professional opportunities that you've had to pass on to protect parenting time?
• 26:35
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah, I mean, I'm divorced, and I have my son every other week, and I have a lovely new wife, Kimberly, an amazing stepdaughter. And the week I have boa, I just say no to everything else, you know, I mean, I already only have half my time, so like, there are countless things that I could have done or, you know, maybe in some ways needed to do. And, like. And there are. There are a handful every year that I have to do because schedules are immovable and there's things you have to do, but anything that's not essential, I just say no to. And so that's lots of projects, opportunity, you know, more than you could ever count, hundreds of them, but I would not do it any differently.
• 27:22
  Kevin Rice: Amazing. Hi, Kevin here. If you're enjoying this conversation and you know someone else who's working to grow in their career while staying present at home, I'd really love it if you could share this episode with them. It's one of the best ways you can help us and help more leaders build their careers in a way that they're proud of without missing the moments that matter most. So HubSpot, like we talked about, really defined the concept of inbound marketing. And now, as I read the premise for your new book, you're kind of saying that, like, AI broke that playbook. Before you tell us what the playbook is, what's it like to see this concept that you had a big part in defining and building kind of completely be dismantled in favor of something brand new? Like, how are you experiencing this? Of, like, I helped define this category, and now it's completely changed.
• 28:15
  Kipp Bodnar: I think I have a weird personality in that, like, I've never really liked looking back, and I've always liked looking forward. And that comes with a bunch of good things and a bunch of really terrible things, candidly, and makes you less reflective and introspective and probably slows, you know, personal growth in some ways. But it makes you really intellectually honest because you're not, like, tied to any. Like, I don't have any identity tied to my past. You know, like, my identity is kind of tight wrapped up in who I am and in the here and now and. Or who I want to become. And I think that's, you know, for better or worse, different than a lot of people. And so for me, I was probably the first person to be like, oh, the world has changed. And part of it is because, like, I just live my life by, like, logic and first principles in a way that's probably unhealthy in some ways. But, like, I was just like, hey, this inbound marketing thing, it came about the very first thing I remember. Ryan Halligan, who kind of along with Dharmesh Shaw, came up with inbound marketing, said to me, it's like, hey, the Internet changed the way People shopped and bought and now businesses need to market to them differently. Like it was the first, first thing and it's like you just swap out Internet with AI and you're like, oh, AI has changed the way people shop and bought. Businesses now need to market to them differently. It's pretty logical that you're like, oh yeah, need to do some different things in this new world.
• 29:47
  Kevin Rice: You said that you don't feel like you're the kind of person that has your identity tied up into maybe like your current title. And I'm extracting a little bit there. If you lost your job tomorrow and you were no longer the CMO of HubSpot, how would that identity change? Like, it wouldn't. Like, would it affect you? I know it. For me it was like I sold my company and then all of a sudden people wouldn't return my calls or something. Or like I wasn't being invited on stage to speak anymore. Like my sense of importance changed. Like how, theoretically, I'm just kind of curious, like, how tied do you think you are to your like, position and title?
• 30:27
  Kipp Bodnar: That's a really interesting question. I think there are a few things about it. I think humans have to have purpose, right? And purpose is what leads us to live a healthy, well adjusted life. And right now my purpose is to be a dad, to be a great husband, to be a great son, but also to be the chief marketing officer at HubSpot. And if that happened, if it wasn't that, tomorrow I'd have to go find some new purpose, right? And it would probably feel weird and not great in the most immediate term, but I would, I don't know how much I would internalize it because I'd be so obsessed with needing to have clarity of purpose and a clarity of how I wanted to spend my time, to have the impact that I wanted to have. And you know, I think a lot of people talk about retirement and all this stuff. It's like, I don't know that, like I'll ever quote, unquote, retire. I'll just have, you know, different ways I spend my times towards different purposes and hopefully, you know, be able to help people in different ways, right? At the same time, I do this podcast called Marketing. It's the grain. And I'm the son of two amazing teachers and I would, you know, I would just go and teach people in the interim, right? Like, you know, there's nothing stops you from learning and teaching people every day. And so I would do that and that would probably be fulfilling in some level. In the short term, yeah.
• 31:58
  Kevin Rice: I tried retirement for about two years, and it was fun for a while. The thing that changed for me wasn't like getting bored. It was actually the realization that ties back to something you said earlier about you wanting your kids to see you be productive and build something. And I spent two years. My kids were now old enough to realize I wasn't going off to work when I was working 80 hours a week. They were still pretty young. They don't remember that. And I had this moment of clarity where I realized I learned my work ethic from my own father. Seeing him work very hard for a career that he was passionate about. And he became very, like, well known and respected in his industry. And I thought, what if I spend the next 10 years just surfing and playing golf? What's that going to teach my kids? They're going to think that everything just comes to you. And that's one of my biggest fears, is like, raising entitled children who don't know how to take care of themselves. And so I. I did what a lot of people do, and I started this podcast and I started writing on a. I started writing a book. And that's given me a sense of purpose. So I can relate to, like, kind of how you said you would adjust to a transition. Not saying that any transition is coming.
• 33:07
  Kipp Bodnar: No, no, no. I mean, I'm. No, not at all. But more. But I think it's a very helpful thought exercise, and I think, what if I was somebody listening to this? I think you've walked us through some very helpful thought exercises in terms of how you focus on your children, how you spend time effectively, what your purpose would look like if parts of your life were to change. You know, especially if you had a big, big job as part of your identity. How does that change you? Right. You know, and I, My. My general advice on this is, like, I don't think of myself as, like, Kit Bodna, Chief Marketing Officer, HubSpot. I think of myself as Kip Bodnar, and I do marketing. Like, that's the thing I do in the world. And I don't care if, you know, a friend's small business needs some help or if I'm doing it at HubSpot or anywhere in between. That's my job, my purpose in the world. And I'm gonna have lots of different jobs or elements around that.
• 34:08
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. If you had to define kind of your purpose in the world in one or two sentences, what would it be?
• 34:14
  Kipp Bodnar: That's a really, really hard question. One I probably have not Spent enough time thinking about. I think my purpose in the world is to learn things and explain them differently to people. I think that's like, I'm not great at any one thing, but I am really good at learning things and simplifying them and distilling them in a really valuable way way and in a way that gets people to appreciate them and care about them. And so it's like, yeah, that's doing marketing now. Like, maybe that's like, I write a cookbook in a decade. Maybe that's like, I have a YouTube channel for whatever hobby I have at the time. Like, that can manifest in a bunch of different ways. And I think all of those ways are equally valuable.
• 35:02
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. Well, speaking of learning something and teaching something, you have a new book coming out. We've talked a little bit about it, but I want to hear lots more about it. With all of your other priorities and what we talked about being ruthlessly prioritizing, why did you feel like you needed to write this book right now?
• 35:21
  Kipp Bodnar: Goes back to what. So the book's called Loop Out, Learn Out, Market, Outgrow, and why the heck would you. First of all, why the heck would you write a book? Aren't books dying? Is one of the conversations I had with myself about all this. And I wrote this with one of my friends and peers, Kieran Flanagan, and we had a whole debate, like, do we really want to do this? It's like, is this like. And the reason I did was kind of goes back to, like, the learning and teaching something. 1. I felt like over the last couple of years since, you know, ChatGPT kind of ushered in this new AI era, I felt like I'd learned a bunch and had, like, seen the changing world of marketing and maybe, like, had a little bit of a glimpse into what I thought the future was going to be and what it was going to look like that I could maybe share with people. And at the same time, I don't know about you. I just get a lot of emails and a lot of DMs from people I don't know, but they're like, hey, this is like your job. My CEO is yelling at me and is like, he or she wants me to do. Do new AI marketing, or our business isn't growing the way it is. Like, what do we need to do? The stuff I was doing just doesn't work. Like, there would be all flavors of those emails. And so a little bit of a selfishness. Like, I wanted one thing to be able to point everybody to, and it's like, here's your answer to all of those questions. And instead of me having like a 30 minute call with you to answer these questions, I'm gonna spend hundreds and hundreds of hours and months and months and months to give you the most thoughtful version of what I would tell you. And hopefully it is really helpful.
• 36:54
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, well, and you're, you're teaching them to fish versus, you know, giving them dinner for one night.
• 37:00
  Kipp Bodnar: Exactly, exactly. You know, you don't, you don't want to use me as like a fast life line, you know, like learn, learn the fundamentals.
• 37:07
  Kevin Rice: And I haven't had a chance to read it because it's out next week, but I've, you know, read what's available about it. But it seems like kind of the argument behind the book is that the past marketing playbook is broken. Right. And something is changing. So what's broken about how we've done marketing for the last, you know, 10 years?
• 37:24
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah. If you look at marketing really for the last 20 years, it was, hey, I put some content on the Internet, people search for it in Google, they find my website and they come back and small percentage of them buy my products. And that happened Google search, it happened in Google Ads. Then it kind of moved to social media, but a similar thing. It's like, I have something to say and people are gonna discover it. Like, I am old enough to remember when I looked for something on Google, there was no relevant answer. Right. You'd be like, wait a second, I just looked through all these links and I couldn't find anything. So clearly what happened is companies took advantage of that, like asymmetry and started creating really great, valuable stuff. And that's allowed companies to grow really successfully for like the last 20 years of business and marketing. And now you can just ask a chat bot anything you want and get all the answers and basically all the knowledge of human history instantly at your fingertips. And when that's the case, like, you don't need to go hunt and peck through some links and everything. And it allows you to get much more personalized insights than just like reading a bunch of articles that you may or may not be familiar with who's written them. And so that is a massive shift. And that means it's much harder now to get people to your website. But wow, it's much easier to personalize your marketing because AI can help you really scale real personalized messages and help you get way better insights on your customers and your audience than ever before. Like, you can run a really remarkable research project on your ideal customer profile now in, like, 10 minutes, where it would have taken you, like 10 days before. And so we kind of just wanted to go through and, and share all the paradigms that had shifted and try to give people a clear framework and playbook to take advantage of them.
• 39:19
  Kevin Rice: And so the playbook, I assume, is kind of tied to the concept of loop.
• 39:24
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah. So basically what we talked about in the book, Kevin, is that the old marketing funnel and sales funnel was this very linear funnel. People came to your website, they considered buying your product, some people bought that product or service, what have you, and then now it really looks like a loop. And what's different about this loop is that learning is the biggest competitive advantage. It's been a theme of the show that you and I have talked about so far today, and there are four stages to this, this framework. The first is, well, what's the story I'm trying to tell in the world? And how do I use all this new AI technology to express, which is the first step, all the things I want the world to know about my product or my company? Then the second step is tailor. And it's like, how do I actually take that story and how do I make it just for you, Kevin? You know, like, we have some great examples with website chat, email marketing, and ads and all these cool things that you can now deliver. These, like, very bespoke experiences that it feels like a human researched for hours and hours and wrote you this perfect email. I'm like, that's. That's pretty cool. And then the third step stage is amplify. And amplify is there's just new ways to get your message out into the world. You know, there's AI search engines, there's creators and influencers. The world of advertising has changed dramatically. So we kind of brush everybody up on the current playbook for actually getting your message out. And then the fourth stage of loop is all about evolving. And that's how do you take all this information and make changes in real time? Like, Kevin, I remember, like, and I imagine you remember when growing your business, like, oh, I do some marketing and sales stuff, and then I'll wait, you know, days, weeks, months to get all of the final data in and have an analyst look through it. Now it's like you can just ask AI, get a bunch of that back in real time and make decisions in the moment. And we want to help people understand how to do that in, in a way that actually scales and is valuable.
• 41:25
  Kevin Rice: Yeah, my company was a consulting company, like technology Consulting. We built applications, websites, CRM platforms for like, large retailers and restaurants. And we sold at the end of 2021. And part of me is very relieved that we exit at the end of 2021 because it's really exciting, but also creates a little bit of anxiety when I think of like, what would have happened if I would have still been running that over the last four years, five years, things would have changed so much dramatically. Like, I think about just like, because I was a president of it, so I went from sales, marketing operations down to project management, like very into like the granular details. And I just think about like, how the role of project managers change. Like, what, how would the software change, like, for HubSpot? Do people even log into HubSpot anymore? Or are they just accessing all their data through MCP and saying, run me this report and tell me how to adjust these campaigns. Like, how have things changed for your business and software when it comes to, like, the way your customers use that software? Yeah.
• 42:33
  Kipp Bodnar: So I think this is what's. Let me give everybody the crash course of what I think's happened to technology in 60 seconds. What happened is, you know, Kevin, for your company, like the head of sales, head of marketing, head of IT would hire you or a HubSpot or anybody from a product or services perspective and bring them in now and you'd have your service agreement. Now, AI and AI tokens are this very variable cost. And so it's become more centralized. So normally whoever is responsible for technology at a company is kind of making that decision and saying, like, hey, you know, we're, we're a OpenAI shop, an anthropic shop, a Microsoft shop, a Google shop, what have you. And then there are specialized teams that need specialized tools on top of that. And so if you're a sales and marketing person, for example, you're probably going to use something like HubSpot. And what we've seen is you might have your really technical people. So like your ops person, maybe your head of technology, what have you, they're probably going to use HubSpot through what's called a command line interface or a connector with Claude code or Codex, something like that. Right. And they're going to manipulate and scale the work through that. But if you're a frontline sales rep or marketer, you're probably going into HubSpot, you're using our Breeze assistant, you're using our agents with inside that user experience. And that is very different than using HubSpot felt like a year ago or two years ago. But it's still a little bit more similar to using traditional software than what those more technical folks are doing and where they're integrating maybe HubSpot with all the other internal systems through something like a cloud Nowadays.
• 44:17
  Kevin Rice: I have a small newsletter. It's on Beehive. I don't even log into Beehive. I just pull everything through the mc. Yeah, exactly.
• 44:25
  Kipp Bodnar: Yeah. Shout Out Tyler and the BI Team, they're great. But, like, I think that's okay. I think that's good.
• 44:33
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. It's just a new way of interfacing with it. But I also think about, you know, a simple report where I'm looking at cohorts of like, you know, subscribers that have grown from last week to the week before to the week before that, and saying, like, okay, are open rates changing week over week based on these subscriber cohorts? That would have taken me a huge amount of work to export and run pivot tables and figure out that. And now it's like, I get that answer in 30 seconds.
• 44:59
  Kipp Bodnar: It's wild. Yeah. I think there's two things that's happened in this world of technology. Kind of rote tasks that used to be really arduous, like what you just described. And like, this is a report that if you're doing this thing should be easy and it feels hard, like, that has gotten way easier. And now some things are possible that previously weren't possible. Right. I can I go into, like, Bri, I went into Bree's assistant in HubSpot, like last week, and I was able to get a detailed artifact, custom artifact, made of my email marketing performance by every single email marketer on my team. And not just like their opens or clicks, but like literally all of the email diagnostics, who has the best unsubscribe rates, all of these things. And it's like, that would have literally been impossible a couple years ago, and that is insane to me.
• 45:46
  Kevin Rice: What did you and Kieran learn while writing this book that maybe, like, you didn't understand or realize when you first started?
• 45:53
  Kipp Bodnar: One that you need to know something really, really well to explain it simply, which I knew but didn't know. I think it really, really, really got. Got hit home in that. And I think we had a lot of arguments, a lot of debates because we were trying to write something that was both on the frontier but timeless, and that's a really hard thing to do. And so you're trying to figure out, like, what is the level of abstraction, like, of the people who've read the book so far, there's probably been, I don't know, 20, 30. But it's one of the things I've asked them is like, does it. Will this be relevant in a couple years? And they're like, yeah, actually, I think you all did a good job. And I was like, well, good, because that was, like, one of the things we focused on. But it was really, really hard because you want it to be practical and helpful and detailed, but you don't want it to be so practical and detailed that it's, like, obsolete very quickly. And that's something that's really hard with this, like, physical thing that's printed versus, you know, a webpage that you can change anytime you want.
• 46:54
  Kevin Rice: Yeah. If you were talking to another CMO and you had 30 seconds to explain to them, like, why this book is important for them to read, because I assume that's the audience, right? Marketers, executives, even probably marketing managers, like, what would you tell them?
• 47:08
  Kipp Bodnar: I would tell them the world of marketing has been disruptive more than any other discipline in business. And we've written a book in loop that gives you the framework, the practical prompting guidelines, tactics to actually take advantage of the framework. And we've woven them all together with really helpful stories so that they stick in your head. You know, that it's not just like, oh, it's not like some, like, college textbook. It's like, oh, I understand how to relate my marketing measurement because of Jesse at the Savannah Bananas and how he really thought how baseball should work and how fans should experience sports. And I think that is really valuable.
• 47:49
  Kevin Rice: Awesome. So 20 years from now, when your son's, you know, an adult himself, what do you hope your son says, you know, you cared about the most? You know, when he looks back on his upbringing and. And thinks about his relationship with you?
• 48:04
  Kipp Bodnar: Well, look, I think the theme of the show today is about learning. And I hope that he tells me I taught him stuff and he has a good foundation of, like, how to learn and how to be kind and respectful to others. Because, like, if you have those things, you're going to be a happy, healthy adult. And that's all I could ever want for my son, or all any of us could ever want for our children, I hope.
• 48:28
  Kevin Rice: Amazing.
• 48:28
  Kipp Bodnar: It's been a great convo, man. I appreciate you.
• 48:30
  Kevin Rice: If you've enjoyed this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. CEOs and ABCs is all about helping you grow in your career and show up at home. We have many more amazing guests coming up, so tap, follow, and stay tuned.