Company: Growth Machine
Owners: Nora Schlesinger
Year Started: 2017
Employees: 26 – 49
In this episode of An Agency Story, we dive into an unconventional path to agency ownership with Nora Schlesinger, CEO of Growth Machine—a boutique SEO and content marketing agency. But here’s the twist: Nora didn’t start this business. She took the reins in a surprising turn of events, proving that leadership isn’t always about building from scratch—it’s about stepping up when the opportunity arises. Nora’s story is anything but typical. From working with Slipknot’s manager in the music industry to launching a successful baking blog, her career took unexpected turns before she landed a job at Growth Machine—when it was still an unknown company without a website. She became the first full-time hire, built systems, and later found herself handed the CEO title when the founder decided to step away. In this episode, we discuss a number of insights to include:
- The real challenges of inheriting a business—and why it’s not as easy as it sounds.
- The sales nightmare she walked into and how she rebuilt the entire process.
- The balance of trust and legalities within a partnership
Plus, hear the “business end” of an unforgettable keyword research project Growth Machine ever worked on (hint: it involves Dude Wipes and some truly bizarre Google searches). Enjoy the story!
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I’m your host, Russel. How do you go from the manager of a well known heavy metal band, to a baking blogger, to saying yes to a seemingly shady offer and turn that into becoming an owner of an SEO agency? In this episode, I sit down with Norah Schlesinger, CEO of Growth Machine, a boutique SEO and content marketing agency where she shares her unlikely path to be where she is today. Every agency has a failed salesperson story and Growth Machine’s story is no different. Even Nora herself found difficulties in succeeding the original founder of the company. I really do enjoy this conversation as we discuss some great topics regarding how to balance trust and contracts among agency partners, the perils of avoiding key components of your business such as sales and financials and much more. Be sure to listen all the way to the end where we discuss some curious searches people make related to a popular consumer brand client. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Nora Schlesinger with Growth Machine. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Nora.
Nora:
Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Russel:
I tried to add the the, but apparently it used to be The Growth Machine or you’ve got conflicted. What’s the story?
Nora:
It was never The Growth Machine. The business used to be registered in Texas and that’s because our founder was in Texas and I’m not the founder, which is a huge curveball. I know for, for your show, so I’ll get more into that in a minute. But one of the reasons we moved it from Texas is because there was another Texas based business called The Growth Machine. That was just very difficult for the Texas, you know, secretary of state or whatever it was to, to manage. They would like continually apply our taxes year after year. This happened for years and years. They would apply our taxes. They would apply our whatever, you know, there were all kinds of documents to file and things to like, keep our registration active and in good standing. And it would all be put under this other company’s registration. As far as I know, this company was no longer actively doing business. Boring, but important stuff. They just could never get it right. It’s one of the many just sort of fun aspects of running a business that you never really anticipate having to spend time working on.
Russel:
I can imagine, I mean, taxes and all that stuff is painful enough, right? We don’t need to have any extra pain along those lines. No good deed goes unpunished. No good business goes unpunished from the government’s perspective anyway. Dropping curveballs, and you were only one minute in, dropping curveballs. I love it.
Nora:
I like to keep you on your toes.
Russel:
Please do. Not hard to do. I’d love to hear what Growth Machine does and who do you do it for, and then we’ll get to all the other good stuff.
Nora:
Growth Machine is an SEO focused content marketing boutique. We call ourselves a boutique because number one, we’re very small. Number two, we’re very focused. We do do other types of content, you know, marketing related content primarily, but our sort of the heart of the business is, and always has been, SEO focused long form content. We work in pretty much any industry. We’re a very process oriented business. Our process is built so that it works with any industry. We just have to like plug in the right inputs, but we have a soft spot for female owned, led, and focused businesses. The reason for that is that we’re an all female team. We really love working with brands where we’re either the target customer or we can just relate to our the marketing team that we’re working in partnership with, um, and we feel a personal connection to the project in that way. That’s us.
Russel:
There you are. I love an agency with a cause, and I’m sure we’ll, we’ll get in a lot more into how that helps you within the business and is your focal point. But before we talk all this agency stuff, I want to hear about young Nora. What were her dreams? And we’ll see how close she got.
Nora:
This is a pretty winding road. When I was a kid, I actually wanted to be an actor and filmmaker. I didn’t get very close.
Russel:
We can draw some correlations, but, but go ahead.
Nora:
I think in my mind, it’s not very close, but I think from an outside perspective, I would, I would agree with you that there’s a lot of overlapping skill sets there. I had a lot of, um, training, in musical theater as a kid and adolescent, but I ended up going to college for liberal arts. But as far as my career planning, I was still revolving around performing arts, but I wanted to do it on the business side. I started my career in the music industry. My very first job, this was actually while I was still in college, I worked for, um, Slipknot’s manager.
Russel:
Like the band, like Slipknot? What?
Nora:
Slipknot is like a, like the death metal band, yeah. I worked for their manager for a couple of years, then I switched over to working for their merch company. It was like a sort of sister company, so that’s how I got the job. As soon as I graduated and I’ll be honest, it was a tough industry to be in as a young woman.
Russel:
I’m sure.
Nora:
I wasn’t prepared. There was no, this was like, I’m old, so this was like pre me too and all that. I could just see that it was going to be a tough road ahead and it wasn’t worth it. I pivoted to marketing, primarily because I had a cousin who set me up with a headhunter, you know, I need a new job. The headhunter kind of, uh, had some marketing opportunities available. First I worked in FinTech, the parking industry, and then, uh, brand strategy consulting. From there I decided, you know, I, in order to continue moving forward in my career, I needed to go get an MBA. I did that while I was working as a consultant, so I didn’t sleep for like three and a half years.
Russel:
I was going to say what, that, uh. I tried for a hard minute and this was back when I was in the Air Force to get my master’s while I was also working full time. I just didn’t want to go back to school, I don’t think either, but man, that was, that had to be tough.
Nora:
It was very tough. It was really good training for both running a company, which you expect it to be, and being a parent, which I wasn’t at that time. But the idea of being able to multitask, being able to, um, keep, multiple types of demands at the forefront and keep track of everything, um, running on very little sleep. I was writing like papers and studying for exams, like in the airport because I was not a consultant that traveled full time, but I, I did do a fair amount of travel. Studying in planes, trains and automobiles and hotel rooms and airports and things like that. You just take it one day at a time. It was really good training for doing hard things later in my life. In my personal life and professional life.
Russel:
I was going to say, you basically just dropped and said an MBA is parenting training. Maybe this is an angle that they’re not advertising enough for MBAs out there.
Nora:
I would say the evening weekend MBA on top of working a full time job is definitely parenting training for sure. Just getting used to that feeling of like, you’re never not on call, like you’re never not doing something. You always have like a chore or responsibility in front of you. That’s really grueling. I felt like when I did have, especially when my second child was born and you have absolutely zero breathing room in your life. I was running a company on top of it. I kind of was able to go back to that muscle memory of when I was working a pretty demanding job and going to a pretty demanding MBA program. I was like, okay, I’ve done this before. I had to dig deep, but I did have a sort of schema for being able to survive it. But it was a great program. I’m so glad I did it. It just took over all of my personal life and all of the wiggle room in my life. When I was done though, I had all this free time on my hands for the first time in three and a half years. I literally did not know what to do with it. I had been, um, baking a lot for my like study groups and things like that, so I started a baking blog. This is relevant cause I actually continue to grow and nurture this blog. I learned SEO by just doing it. I certainly learned content by just doing it, um, and figuring it out and making all the mistakes and teaching myself. Watching YouTube videos and doing online courses and things like that. When my first son was born, um, this was a couple years after I finished my MBA, so I’d been blogging for a few years and I’d really built it up to a pretty respectable level of traffic. I realized that the consulting life was just not the life that I wanted as a parent. I left with no job lined up, you know, no backup job and started doing content creation both for myself, for my blog, which was monetized by that point, and then also as a white label freelancer. I worked with some pretty big brands at the time. I really was grateful for the opportunity and, and for this revenue stream but I absolutely hated to be a solopreneur. This left me with this sort of quandary where I was like, I love what I’m doing, but I hate doing it for myself and I loved working remotely. I knew that, having worked remotely, um, as part of my consulting job and then as a freelancer. I went on this website, it’s still around, I think, called weworkremotely.com. I was just looking for like any content or marketing job. I found this listing from this company that like, didn’t even have a website at the time and had no social presence. I can’t even remember, it was like marketing assistant manager. It was like way below my pay grade I applied for it and I got the the call and I eventually got the job. The company was Growth Machine. I was the first full time hire at the time, it was the founder working out of a coffee shop and managing like, this ragtag band of freelancers. I was hired. I talked my way into a bigger job than I think he was planning to hire for. I came in to handle basically everything from the time the contract is signed, like throughout the life cycle of the relationship with the client. I am a very like type a sort of systems oriented person.
Russel:
Hold on. I’m just going to have to pause you there because you’ve, you’ve so eloquently got us all the way to this origin story and, and you’ve now connected the curve ball, but we got some things we got to go back and, and break down here a little bit. So a baking blog. Does it still exist?
Nora:
It does.
Russel:
Okay. You still keep up with it?
Nora:
I don’t, no. I haven’t had time. When the pandemic hit when everyone came home, suddenly I lost a lot of my unstructured time. It suddenly became very structured and filled, um, so I didn’t really, I was really struggling to keep it up. That was in 2020. Then in’21, I took over Growth Machine as CEO, and then I really didn’t have any time. I’ve updated it two or three times in the past, like five years. But it is still live.
Russel:
That’s fair. Everyone’s on the edge of their seat. What’s it called?
Nora:
It’s called acleanbake.com. It’s like a pun on a clean break. My whole blogging origin story is on my site, but the short version is I had some health issues that required me to make some pretty significant dietary changes. I knew that if I didn’t, like, fully commit and hold myself accountable, I would not be able to maintain this challenging diet. It was an elimination diet, which are really tricky, to stick to. And so I had to make a clean break but it’s a baking focused blog, so it’s a pun, I love a pun. It’s called A Clean Bake.
Russel:
I love it. There’s some book out there. I’m not going to remember the name of it, but the whole concept, I think it’s even like a class they teach it either Wharton or Harvard somewhere out there out East.
Nora:
Some of the B list schools, you know.
Russel:
Yeah. Some school that I would have never gotten into. They talk about how important it is, like, to get wins and if you can find a win in all quadrants of your life or kind of a multifaceted win, that’s the way to go. Constantly find where you can do one thing and win multiple places. This sounds like you’re growing yourself professionally. You’re solving a creative endeavor and you’re helping your health all in one swoop. You got to love something like that.
Nora:
it worked out well. I was fortunate that I was in a good position to be able to cook. I was a halfway decent home-cook at the time and a lifelong baker. I was in the position to be developing these recipes to keep myself on track and moving back toward a better state of health. I also loved photography. Started taking pictures of my recipes and putting them up on the internet. It did really well for a while, when I was investing the right amount of time and energy into it. But I just haven’t had that to, to commit for a really long time, unfortunately.
Russel:
It’s totally fair. Then the other thing we gotta go back and talk about is how you got, how you found Growth Machine. Man, you must’ve really been lonely. The way you describe this is like, right, it’s this business in a dark, dark alley and you know, it’s in a shady part of town.
Nora:
It sounds a lot sketchier than it felt at the time.
Russel:
From a digital perspective, that’s what it sounds like. No website or anything like that. You’re like, all right, I’ll do it. But, uh, man, was that your best option?
Nora:
No, I think it was the thing that gave me the flexibility that I wanted. I actually remember that at the time I was working for a pretty well known, whole food kind of, not Whole Foods, the brand, but like a consumer packaged goods company that focuses on unprocessed whole foods. It was very aligned with my personal brand at the time. They had offered me the job as head of their test kitchen. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I had been doing a lot of recipe development for them, but I wasn’t, I’m not a food scientist. I never went to culinary school. I don’t understand food science beyond things that I’ve just Googled. I felt very out of my depth. I did a little soul searching and it also would have required me to be in the office, which at the time was like the norm, and I didn’t want to deal with that, quite frankly. I really wanted a remote job and I was looking at all these jobs that were just kind of like, they were very like rigid and they just didn’t seem very fun. This seemed interesting and, and the stakes were super low because it was like a remote job, like I, I wasn’t like beholden to anyone. It was like just this side of like a back of the napkin, like employment agreement, you know? I was like, I’ll just quit. The other thing I remember too was, he couldn’t afford to pay me what I needed and so we made a deal that I would only work four days a week. So I had one extra day to work on my blog. It was pretty appealing at the time. I could work remotely. I could be home. I could pick up my son every day at five o’clock and I wasn’t going to have to deal with traveling. All the things that were important to me at the time. I was like, look, the money’s green. The job sounds interesting. There’s a lot of growth potential here. There’s a lot of creativity potential here. I can come in and make an impact and I like know how to do that. So as, as sketchy as I made it sound, it was actually a great opportunity.
Russel:
Makes a lot more sense. Sounds like a really smart decision now that you went into that part of it. Not to say we, we know the, we know how it plays out a little bit at least, or we’ll find out more about how it plays out, so it was really smart decision on your part, but okay. All right. Now we’re back up, caught up to speed. You’ve got this job, first full time employee, uh, kind of upstart agency. How did you come to run the show?
Nora:
The founder and I worked together really, really well. This was just dumb luck that our skill sets and personalities, um, not to say, you know, there was never any conflict or anything, but like we communicated well, our skill sets and personalities were very complimentary in that he had skills that were more my weakness and vice versa. It was very serendipitous. We worked together running the agency, I was the COO up until 20, uh, I guess 2020. Then in, I want to say like spring of 2020. It was like a couple months into sort of the lockdown, so it would have been like late spring, early summer. He came to me and he was like, I’ve had it. I’m done. I don’t want to run this anymore. I want you to run it. I was like, what now? To be honest, I never really aspired to like fully running a company. I loved being a COO. Especially like this was not, this was his baby. This was not my baby in the same way. I didn’t have the same vision for it that he did. What I did do well was run the day to day and what he hated most was running the day to day. That was sort of the rationale for him stepping down. And good for him for recognizing this, but he had no interest in running an agency, in like, the nitty gritty of day to day problem solving and scaling and just all the, it can be a slog sometimes. Sometimes I find it to be a slog, but I generally enjoy that kind of like, process, day to day, one day at a time, build a little, build a little, build a little, kind of thing.
Russel:
Share more about, I mean, I got two big questions in my mind. We’ll start one at a time here. What was the negotiation or kind of just the process of that power transfer from maybe the admin side or how did you negotiate this just taking over? What did that look like from that side of things?
Nora:
It’s funny cuz, um, there was no negotiation. It was like so smooth. There was no power struggle or anything like that. I remember that there were two things that I was like adamant about. I said, yes I’ll take over, but I want nothing to do with sales and I want nothing to do with finance, so we need to put somebody else reliable in charge of those two, you know, departments. We had a sales guy at the time who was doing really well. I’m trying to think of like a diplomatic way to say this, but the truth is he was doing really well because the leads were coming in like 90 percent sold already. So all he was doing is giving them a little spiel, handing them a contract and then collecting his commission.
Russel:
There’s a terminology I’ve heard not too long ago that basically describes that and owners run into this kind of same process too a little bit, uh, referral reefer.
Nora:
That’s, yeah. I didn’t realize at the time that that was such an issue. I didn’t realize that that was something to even be looking out for. I thought, he’s a sales guy. He’s a good sales guy and an experienced and well paid sales guy. He must be good at sales. He wasn’t. He was good at closing stuff when it was already mostly closed. Like, I stink at sales, but I’m great at closing when it’s already 90 percent there. Eventually, he parted ways, uh, with us and I was left sort of having to rebuild the whole sales organization, which was like the number one thing that I didn’t want to do. To your original question though, there, there was actually like very little negotiation, shockingly little negotiation. We had a very strong working relationship. We still have a very strong relationship. There’s no bad blood or anything. I just use the past tense because we’re not working together anymore, um, on a day to day basis. But we had a very strong and very close working relationship. We trusted each other. We knew each other really well. My immediate concern was just like, here’s the stuff I don’t quite know how to do. We need to make sure someone, whether it’s me or someone else, knows how to do this and has a handle on it so that when you leave, there isn’t a huge gaping skillset hole in the business. We addressed that from the remainder of 2020, but it was like remarkably, minimal preparation. And it was like, fine, because I was still very, I was at that point, very involved in the business already, just not in sales or finance. Those are the two things we had to shore up a little bit and just get me familiar with and make sure that they were under control. Which they were and weren’t. They were until they weren’t. Ironically, those are the two things that I have been spending the majority of the last four years working on.
Russel:
Because you basically just got thrown in the hot seat effectively and didn’t get to work your way through that like a lot of owners get to when they’re just building a business from nothing. I can see where that can be certainly painful.
Nora:
It was a interesting experience. There were painful moments. It was a very steep learning curve. I was lucky to bring in a good friend of mine to handle some accounting and doing he prepares the PNL and stuff like that so I have a trusted person who backs me up on the finance side. I just started doing the tracking, the like revenue tracking projections, all that kind of stuff. I just started building spreadsheets and just like doing it in a way that made sense to me, whether or not it was like the best practice. At the time it felt like, well, I just need to understand it so I, I can have the visibility that I need into the business. I just kept building and digging into our historical like accounting records and things like that. I just kept building and building until we had the transparency that we needed into the financial side. Sales side was a different story.
Russel:
I’m going to put a pin in that and we’re going to come back to that because I think that’s a, that’s a pretty fun conversation. Was there a transaction that occurred here or was it he just sold the business for a dollar?
Nora:
No, I was just awarded some equity in exchange for taking over the CEO role at the time when he stepped down. A couple years later I ended up buying out his equity stake because the one sort of like, I guess you could call it the dramatic part of this was, at the time that he stepped down, he had intended to stay involved in the business at a high level, at like a, you know, board type level. That ended up not happening. He just sort of got wrapped up in his new, new skill set and new interest, and that was fine with me. I saw that that was where his passion was and that’s where he wanted to spend his time and so I wasn’t about to like dragging, kicking, and screaming into a meeting, you know, at Growth Machine. It happened very organically that he just stepped back, intended to, to step in periodically. And then it just never felt like the right time for him to step back in, in any capacity. After a couple of years of that, it really became clear that he wasn’t coming back. I approached him and I just was like, look, I’d really, I’d like to own this thing now because I’m running it by myself. He understood and agreed. That’s when the actual like transaction took place.
Russel:
So there was the eventually bill of sale, um, traditional transaction. Makes sense.
Nora:
That wasn’t until a couple of years later. Summer of 23, that happened.
Russel:
You mentioned a little bit but I did just want to highlight the underlying theme to make this whole thing work as well as it sounds like it has is this trust and level of relationship you had. I’ve heard no shortage of horror stories where, for all kinds of reasons, partnerships go wrong. Even when someone thinks they trust someone, they, they find out they couldn’t have, or didn’t, or just something goes awry. In hindsight, do you, do you think that was risky in any way, shape or form? Or were you just that confident in your, in the, in the trust you’d?
Nora:
No, it was extremely risky.
Russel:
Okay.
Nora:
But it turned out okay. I’m lucky that it turned out okay. I knew there was risk involved. I knew it was sort of the quick and dirty version of the way these things are supposed to happen, but that’s how I was hired. The just quick, like, here’s an email offering you the job. It was never a concern because I knew that the founder was a good person. He’s a good person. He will not screw me over intentionally. That never crossed my mind. We could have gotten a bunch of lawyers involved and we could have had this whole like protracted expensive thing. It didn’t feel necessary to either of us because we trust each other and we were we had worked so closely together for several years at that point that we both knew each other well enough. I think in another parallel universe, that could have been a terrible decision and I could be telling you a very, very different story and like outcome here. But I don’t regret it. I think I made the right decision at the time. And then, when the writing was on the wall about the future of his involvement, that’s when I approached him, um, and said hey, I think it’s time to make a big change, make, make an official change here and let me buy you out. He was totally open to that. It was like such a supportive conversation. It wasn’t like you aren’t involved. How dare you? You don’t deserve to own this business. I approached him with like, I see you’ve moved on and I’m really happy for you. But, um, at the same time, you know, I’m still here and I think this might make sense. He was like, yeah, I, I agree. I see where you’re coming from. It does make sense. It sounds like it’s what’s best for the business. Let’s do what’s best for the business. It was very collaborative and very respect driven all the way through. I couldn’t have asked for a better transaction.
Russel:
As you said, it worked out. It’s a fine line, right? As a person gives advice for living, you know, I’m a big believer in benefit of the doubt, trust and, and this whole idea. I’m just sitting here thinking like, I don’t know what I entirely advise here.
Nora:
I wouldn’t have advised me to do what I did, you can say it.
Russel:
No, no, and I don’t say that because, you know, there’s the Warren Buffett approach and he’s very much, you know, kind of like, hey, you know, do good, do business with good people. If you feel this need to end up in all this, contractual stuff, that’s probably actually a bad sign. I’m sitting here kind of thinking that, you know, that I don’t know that I advise otherwise per se, but maybe that just speaks to, I’d just ask a lot more verification questions to make sure that it is a truly good relationship, that there is truly a good level of trust. There’s no, no little seeds of, um, of, you know, that that’s not that and confirm that. I think it’s a, it’s a fair path and not to say it’s still not bears some risk, but there’s also a lot of opportunity and ease and expense and stuff like that that can be avoided as well. All that to say, I wouldn’t, I don’t know that I’d advise differently. I’m just sitting here thinking that.
Nora:
No, I think you make great points. I think that the interpersonal aspect of it was very situation specific. If I weren’t part of this relationship that we had where we were, we had so much respect for each other, we worked so well together and knew each other so well. We did have an ownership agreement. I did have a share of equity. We did have, like, some very, I would say, very limited legal involvement, just to make sure that the right documents were, existed. It wasn’t just a handshake agreement, but it was like as, as light on the legality as possible. What I would advise myself to do, and I think the hard lesson I learned, was to not take everything at face value. I mentioned the financial aspect and the sales aspect. The advice that I would give someone in my shoes would be to get more involved in the processes, especially in the processes you want the least to do with. Because it’s so, so very tempting to just be like, nope, I’m going to keep this at arm’s length because I have no interest in it. It scares me. It’s an unknown. Let somebody else handle it. But when you’re a small business, an agency or any kind of small business, I really believe that the owner has to have a lot of visibility, if not a full knowledge of like how to do every job. I say very honestly, I’ve done every single job at this company. Sometimes somewhat against my will, like I sold against, cause there was no one else to do it for a minute. I think that’s what has made me a good leader, a good decision maker, and an empathetic leader, because I’ve been in every single person’s shoes in some capacity. I think that that’s really important. That’s something that I had to play catch up on after I took over. I wish I had had more insight. I could have asked more questions and I could have clarified more processes and done a lot of the things that I ended up doing, but I had to do them retroactively instead of proactively. That made it a lot harder.
Russel:
You know what’s funny is it might seem like you’re unique in that sense, but the reality is exactly what you’re saying is a fair amount of owners out there that even started the business and they want, they sometimes approach that from the same perspective. Ah, screw the finance, I don’t want to deal with that. It doesn’t seem important. It seems administrative. It’s out of your wheelhouse, lots of reasons and I totally get and understand. But, as you’ve probably experienced, and that’s the lesson we can all take, is that it is important. You’ve got to get your hands in there and learn it. Even if you are going to eventually outsource it, you’ve still got to get your hands in there and learn it. Because it’s, it’s business and you’ve got to know every, aspect of business. Great takeaway no matter how you came to own or run your company. I want to get back to what you’re saying on the sales side, because that’s, you know, as you share has been an interesting journey and, and where your pain point started at. But I want to at least get to spend a little bit of time talking about how you’ve actually gone about and solved that and what that process has looked like for you.
Nora:
The sort of CliffsNotes version is I tried to manage sales for about two years and then I finally had to admit to myself that I had exhausted my very shallow knowledge base and had to bring someone in to manage sales and rebuild our sales process. I ended up hiring a fractional VP of sales earlier at the beginning of this year and it has totally changed our business. She is brilliant. She is so smart and capable and creative, and she has come in with her just incredible expertise and given us the gift of applying it to our business. She brought in a new sales rep. The reps that I had hired were not a great fit for what I was looking for or for our service or our culture. It was really a trifecta of that hiring on my part. It wasn’t that I thought they were fantastic. It’s that I didn’t really know how to hire for sales. Lindsay, who’s our VP of sales came and I, I managed to hire her well, and then she hired a new AE well, so we’ve had a very different year. Every agency has had a fairly tough year this year, but compared to my mindset this time last year. It’s like night and day. I see progress. I see how far we’ve come in the sort of foundational elements. We have a sales playbook now, we have an ICP. We didn’t even have an ICP defined prior to this year, I’m ashamed to say. We all kind of knew it intuitively, but we couldn’t communicate it to our sales people, so not only were they not a great fit for us, I don’t think we set them up. I don’t think they ever would have been hugely successful, um, cause I, I don’t think I hired well. Now we have all of these foundational elements. We have training materials. We have collateral that we didn’t have before, with process that we didn’t have before. We also have an exceptional AE now who has been so much more successful than previous salespeople have been, um, despite the tough market. She’s really doing a great job. It’s taken a long time and a lot of work, a lot of work to get to this point.
Russel:
It can be one of the harder parts about running an agency is, is moving beyond the referral and what that actually takes to set up and do, and it’s so much of that infrastructure and elements that you shared. I actually think you’ve done it in a relatively decent amount of time. The second you shared that you, I don’t want to say it’s a magic button per se, that you’ve, that you were able to bring in outside help to do this in a meaningful way. People are always looking for that. I’m still looking for the person that’s found a successful, like outsourced lead generation model. Cause everybody’s almost tried it at this point and it’s all failed. Kind of speaks to that magic button piece, but again, great, great work. One of the things just to bring home for the folks at home, just that’s baked into that is so often in our agency, we’re spending so much time on how we get work done that we’re not spending an equal or similar amount of time on, on like a lot of the things that you shared. No wonder we don’t have better results because we haven’t put that level of time and investment in it. I’m glad to see that’s worked out well for you. It’s a good, good case study there in that sense.
Nora:
Yeah, thank you. In retrospect, it is a very good case study, but there have been moments where I felt like I have no idea how I’m going to get my, you know, get us out of this. It sounds a lot easier than I think it felt like, you know, at certain points prior to bringing in the VP of sales. It’s felt like a totally different type of momentum this year, even when we’re having a tough time with lead generation. Everyone has a tough time with lead generation. I’m not saying we have it all figured out, but it feels like we are getting the momentum that I’ve been trying to build for the last couple of years and really not being able to sustain it until I brought in the right experts and the right, the right people with the right skillsets. And I do really mean the right people because it’s not just their skill sets. It’s the people themselves and their work style, their attitude, their, you know, the way that they fit into the, the company culture and into the team that has been really essential for their success as well, because that’s a huge part of who we are and how we work. It’s not just, you know, come to work, do a job. It’s really very team oriented and culture oriented. It just took a while to get there.
Russel:
I love the clarification there because it’s not actually a magic button in the end. It is many, many, many iterations and improvements and all of that combined I’m sure it gets you to the spot where, you know, where I think where you’re at is you have something to look forward to. You kind of know the path that you need to walk down it sounds like, and where some folks are kind of starting and they don’t, they don’t even know where the path is. That’s the starter work that is really hard. Great perspective there.
Nora:
It’s like when people say it took me 20 years to be an overnight success. You see people when they’re wildly successful and it feels like it happened overnight but it’s really been something they’ve been working on making mistakes and, and remitting their mistakes and learning from their mistakes and implementing new things and trying new things. That takes years, you know, to, to finally get to a point where it just clicks.
Russel:
All my years of experience and everything we went through in the business from beginning to sale. My net lesson is there is no easy money. Even if there’s an appearance of easy money, is not, and the only thing close you might even say easy money is just stealing it. But at least then you have a huge amount of risk in that standpoint so, so in the end, there is no easy money. How are you looking at the future of Growth Machine? What does that look like for you?
Nora:
The million dollar question. I wish I had all the answers. I wish I could say in one year, I want to be here, three years, five years, 10 years. I wish I had a clear plan for the next many years. Things are just changing so quickly. Things have changed so drastically in the last few years alone, that I found that I try not to over plan. Every year I make a, um, top three plan like business plan for the year. I set three goals or three priorities and every, everything we do, everything that we develop or anything we’re putting our energy toward has to ladder up to one of those goals. I’m still trying to figure out, for example, what the market’s going to look like in five years. Nobody knows, I think at this point, given the economic outlook that just market shifts and then AI. That’s been the elephant in the room, maybe this whole conversation is, how AI is affecting all agencies, but particularly us because we write content, you know, we’re a writing agency. I think that the key is going to be learning how to work with and around AI. That’s something we’ve been working on pretty much all year. There’s ways to incorporate AI into our business, some of which we’ve figured out, others we’re still working on so that it’s a competitive advantage for us. But there’s also ways to not use AI that gives us a competitive advantage and that I think is going to be like the, negatives. Not using AI is just as important as where to implement it. We’re, for example, very committed to continuing to use human writers, but our challenge for the next year is continuing to be able to develop our marketing strategy and our sales playbook to effectively communicate why it’s important to use human subject matter expert writers instead of the much cheaper AI options out there. I think continuing to stick to what we know works. We have a process that, that has really never failed us and it involves human writers and, and that’s an important component of our process. But I think really our sales and marketing is going to be the linchpin of our growth for the next couple of years because our process is sound. Our offerings are strong. Our team is amazing internally. We’re in really good shape to scale. It’s really just about how we’re communicating differently about who we are and what we do so that we’re making sure to stay isolated from the many agencies and tools and whatever who are just kind of popping up out of nowhere and saying like, we do great SEO content and they, they don’t, it’s just the barrier to entry is so low right now because of AI. That hopefully gives you an idea of why I don’t have a solid plan. It’s so iterative and I very intentionally don’t make really concrete plans for one, three, five, 10 years out, because I think that you run the risk of missing the forest through the trees if you are running a small business in a very competitive and, and oversaturated category like I am.
Russel:
This is what I always say, look, there’s no right or wrong answer when you think about the future. What I’ve always encouraged folks is, is as long as the business is moving in the direction that you want it for you and what you’re trying to achieve, that’s all that matters and it sounds like you’ve been able to do that. But I love just the intentionality that you’re sharing behind, it’s just not all gas, no brakes when we even think about growth, but it’s, it’s thinking more strategically, getting these foundations in and then these pillars, if you will of what you could even scale upon to begin with before we can even ask that question. I guess I just got one last big question for you, Nora. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Nora:
I think you’re going to hate my answer for this because I think it’s both.
Russel:
Impossible.
Nora:
Okay. I really believe it’s both and I have the data to back it up. I’m not just hedging.
Russel:
Ooh, a data driven answer. Let’s do this.
Nora:
I think there are certain personality traits that you’re born with that make you a good entrepreneur. Things like persistence, confidence, you know, risk tolerance, creativity. Wanting to do something different than the norm. You have to be really intrinsically motivated. That’s not something you learn. That’s something you are born with. The piece that I think is very unspoken is you have to have a certain degree of privilege to become an entrepreneur. You have to have education, you have to have often a support system. You have to have some startup cash most of the time, those are all things you’re born into. But on the other hand, you, that’s not the whole picture. Entrepreneurs are made when they, like, I grew up with two parents who were self employed. They ran their own business. My dad ran a medical practice. My mom was an attorney with her own practice. They weren’t just like going to an office and working for the man. I could see that it was possible to do your own thing and make your own professional fate. I have had role models through college and business school and things like that, that have shown me all the different ways you can make a career for yourself. Whether it’s working for someone else or, or building your own company. I have developed or been taught this, like, I don’t really have an I could never do that mindset. I certainly have an I don’t want to do that mindset. Everybody does. But when you know, things are necessary, a founder or a leader has to jump in and, and do what’s, what needs to be done. The example that I mentioned earlier was, there was a period where we didn’t have a salesperson. We were between salespeople so I just had to learn how to do the sales pitch and, and follow up and do all the whole sales process. It never occurred to me to stop and say, I could never do that. I just had to do it. And that’s something that I really do believe that you learn. That’s one of the ways that entrepreneurs are made. I think that people who are willing to get their hands dirty, you know, they’re not people who are like, oh, that’s someone else’s job. You have to be that to be an entrepreneur and you have to choose to be an entrepreneur every single day. Because it’s hard and you want to quit and when you’re building, it’s very unglamorous. I don’t have to tell you this, but you have to choose every day to do it again tomorrow. Every morning you wake up and you have to choose again to be an entrepreneur today. That’s not something you’re born with. That’s how entrepreneurs are made in my opinion. I really think it’s both.
Russel:
I love that. You got to choose every day to do this. And ultimately it’s okay to not choose it. That takes its own level of courage, but, but in order to make it work, I think that’s really great advice. You got to choose every day. Beautiful. If people want to know more about Growth Machine, where can they go?
Nora:
GrowthMachine.com is the best place to find us. You can, you know, go out to our social channels through our website, but all the information about who we are, how we work, what we do, it’s all on GrowthMachine.com. If you want to find me, I’m on LinkedIn. It’s a tough one. LinkedIn.com/NoraSchlesinger. If you can’t spell my name, number one, I don’t blame you, and number two, if you go to the team’s page on the Growth Machine website, there’s a link. If you look for my name, there’s a link to my LinkedIn. I love connecting with new people, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
Russel:
Wonderful. I’m going to give myself a pat on the back. I did not say”The” Growth Machine, and I also had to do number of exercises before we started the episode to get the name right. Practice makes perfect.
Nora:
You nailed it, you did it.
Russel:
Thank you so much, Nora, for coming on the show today. Dropping your curve ball, sharing your, your non standard path to ownership, but you know, a lesson in trust, a lesson in doing the hard things and a lesson in building and focusing on that sales infrastructure, so many wonderful insights and really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us.
Nora:
Thank you for having me.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Nora:
Something that’s really unforgettable is we once did work for a brand called Dude Wipes, which was like a, butt wipe, you know, like, uh, bathroom wipes.
Russel:
Oh yeah. I know dude wipes.
Nora:
The keyword research for that one had us just rolling on the floor. And we, once in a while, something will remind us of that. Me and the project manager who worked on that, we’ll just kind of like, look at each other and be like Dude Wipes and it’s just this like ridiculous inside joke because the keyword research was as hilarious as you might think.
Russel:
Give me some goldies from, you got any golden ones? I’m fascinated now.
Nora:
I don’t remember specifically but it was things like, you know, can I, like, wipe my butt too much? It was these goofball, like, you could picture sort of like a 20 something, like, guy in front of his computer being like, can I hurt myself by wiping too hard?
Russel:
Can I injure myself by way No, I can picture it all now. That makes total sense. This makes me think I’d be scared to work at Google because I just don’t know if I want to see all the searches that someone makes in about certain subjects.
Nora:
Truly shocked and sometimes really entertained, but sometimes we see stuff that we were just like, oh, I just wish I could unsee that. Some of the things people search for are wild, but that keeps the job interesting.
Russel:
There you go. Name of the game.
