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16. Ending Random Acts of Marketing with a Brand Operating System with Tanner Rankin · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  What's happening everybody? Welcome to Scrappy But Successful. It's a show where I sit down with your favorite consultants and we take a comedic route
• 0:52
  I think the lane that I've carved out has honestly been making the scrappy sophisticated with the operating system that we'll talk about, that my kind of
• 0:58
  Okay. Very nice, a foot in both worlds. Let's see if the data agrees with you, I think it will. But take me back to the beginning, where'd you grow up?
• 1:15
  No. So I grew up in Western New York, Buffalo area. So go Buffalo Bills. I grew up in a very kind of classic Americana family.
• 1:43
  you know, working your way up at a company and corporation, but realizing that there was a whole other world out there. The four hour work week by Tim Ferriss
• 2:25
  I like it. So you've got the side hustle going too. We're gonna talk a whole lot more about the Amazon of it all.
• 2:37
  No, complete opposite. I was full blown corporate robot. Let's go synergy and all that kind of thing. Please advise and all that.
• 3:27
  Okay, very nice. So you're probably a good student, good grades in high school and good grades in college?
• 3:57
  Yeah, the plan was all laid out. Go to business school, work your way up. Graduated with honors, but life throws curve balls once in a while.
• 4:07
  So my full time kind of fell out of the sky. I was doing the five to nine for a couple of years on Amazon and that was doing actually quite well.
• 9:39
  I love the self-awareness approach. It's so easy to bring on a consultant and say, you're an expert, go figure it out. Looking internally is key.
• 10:13
  I have in my travels in the SaaS world, but not as much in CPG or physical consumer goods. That world is driven more historic, brick and mortar.
• 10:56
  A strong e-commerce presence opens the door to strong retail presence. Is that where the stonewalling comes in?
• 11:08
  Yes. When you launch a brand, one of the first things you try to get going is your Amazon, your Shopify or WooCommerce, your direct to consumer site.
• 12:16
  So the football equivalent of a good running game opening up the passing game?
• 12:34
  The Amazon stuff was about 2008 up to about 2010. Then that led into the CMO role around 2011.
• 12:48
  2014 is when I started my own business.
• 12:58
  Source Approach is the name of my consultancy. That started in 2014. What I didn't realize was how important the source really was.
• 13:27
  On Amazon, I was almost a one man show. I had all the subject matter in my head - product, marketing, color psychology, sales. All of it.
• 14:25
  We needed a way to create a mainline pathway from the CEO's subject matter expertise into the brains of our partners or teammates at any given moment.
• 15:55
  For your own marketing at this time, are you doing anything low budget? Anything super scrappy to get your own marketing out there?
• 16:07
  I was leveraging SEO and conversion rate optimization fundamentals. But my real early growth came from an IP attorney referral relationship.
• 17:11
  The IP attorney had a really strong foundation in the entrepreneurial world. Entrepreneurs were asking them for way more than just trademarks and patents.
• 19:35
  I get random business ideas all the time from my circle of influence. I'm constantly fighting the gut feeling of, I should do something about this.
• 20:16
  Yeah, it's kind of the fun but also kind of the bad thing - entrepreneur ADD. Oh, that's such a good idea, I should do that. I could knock it out in a weekend.
• 20:46
  Tell me about the first version of the brand operating system.
• 20:49
  Spreadsheets. The first version was picking the brain of the CEO - asking questions he'd never really thought about from a marketing slant.
• 21:19
  What are the 16 core human desires this thing tackles? What pains does it alleviate? We put these in a hierarchy of importance for our agency partners to use.
• 22:22
  So people say brand is something your customers own, not you. You're actually spreadsheeting this and quantifying it. That's the hook.
• 22:50
  If your goal is to scale your bottom line or grow your EBITDA margins, you have to quantify and qualify this stuff to operate efficiently as a brand.
• 24:25
  Referazon was about a problem I kept bumping into around 2014-2015 on Amazon - driving external traffic via influencers and having no easy way to manage it.
• 25:21
  There's a 23 to one ROI on Amazon influencer marketing. But I kept bumping my head because there was no easy way to do it. So we built the software.
• 26:21
  The fake it till you make it moment: on Amazon, success was perceived as the end all be all. But the real work was off-Amazon - color psychology, CRO, all of that.
• 29:38
  You don't want to forge ahead in a market doing things that don't meet customer expectations. You have to meet minimum viable effort for the competitive bar.
• 30:44
  An ideal client is a resource startup wanting to avoid mistakes and launch fast, or a direct-to-consumer brand looking to scale and break through plateaus.
• 31:43
  I was selling survival gear on Amazon. Man vs. Wild, Survivorman - those shows were really big and I was living it on weekends with camping and wilderness time.
• 33:06
  I have a log cabin in upstate New York. I'd go out into the wilderness on our acreage and stay overnight with minimum tools and no shelter.
• 33:59
  Monday through Friday I'm in a suit. Friday afternoon through Sunday it's flannel, chainsaw, tractor, side by side. Full woodsman mode.
• 34:24
  Behind me is source approach blue lighting. My philosophy is: if you're selling products, you have to increase perceived value.
• 36:23
  Just one big giant monitor. You'd think there's a huge command center, but really it's just the one. Behind the curtain is a bit Wizard of Oz.
• 37:12
  Zero business cards. It's a QR code away with my phone. I went heavy into business cards in 2014 but they've gone the way of the dinosaur.
• 38:47
  If I have to paste text into an email in a different font, I drop it into Notepad and then pull it back into Gmail to make it uniform.
• 39:49
  Inbox zero. I'm plugged in. Slack zero everything. No assistants - just a really dialed-in prioritization system.
• 41:00
  Typically no exclamation points. But I will meet the energy of the people I'm talking to. It's an empathetic approach to communication.
• 41:53
  Please advise, circle back, table it - so many things wrong with all of those. They're thinly veiled and nobody knows when we're actually going to untable it.
• 43:00
  If I'm hit with a please advise, I'll type a response and then delete it and then go another route. Take the high road as Obi-Wan Kenobi would have you do.
• 43:36
  Texts over voicemails. Quick and efficient. Though I'll meet the situation with empathy when needed - voicemails do have their place.
• 44:18
  I'm a deep Google user - Google to-do list for personal tasks. For client work, I use a project management software called UpBase.
• 45:01
  A lot of my big wins happen right around summertime. I head up to a vacation home in the Thousand Islands, get out on the water, reflect and celebrate.
• 45:58
  KPIs depend on the client. For growth and acquisition plays it's EBITDA. For plateau-busting it's customer acquisition cost, LTV, and average order value.
• 46:27
  On the Amazon side it's total advertising cost of sale and return on ad spend. But generally - operating efficiently and making growth predictable and repeatable.
• 47:25
  Client success is meeting and exceeding their goals - not just monetarily, but in a way they enjoy, learning something truly new that enriches their business.
• 48:53
  Thanks for listening. You can learn more at sourceapproach.com, referazon.com, or brandsourceos.com.
• 49:05
  Tanner, thank you so much for coming on, man. I had a blast.
• 49:10
  Thanks for the opportunity, it was wonderful.