Company: Two Octobers
Owners: Kris Skavish and Nico Brooks
Year Started: 2010
Employees: 11 – 25
In this episode of An Agency Story, hosts dive into the journey of Kris Skavish and Nico Brooks, co-founders of Two Octobers—a marketing agency that brings clarity to complex marketing and analytics challenges for businesses of all sizes. This episode provides an inspiring look into how two individuals with complementary skills and shared values came together to redefine marketing for small and medium businesses, focusing on empowering teams and fostering meaningful growth.
The conversation traces Kris and Nico’s paths to entrepreneurship, revealing surprising twists like Kris’s initial aversion to entrepreneurship, having grown up in a family of business owners, and Nico’s creative beginnings as a furniture maker with a passion for logic and design. Together, they discovered an untapped opportunity to bring big-agency tools and strategies to small businesses—a mission that led to the founding of Two Octobers. From their analytical approaches to project management to their emphasis on fostering a supportive and empowering work culture, the duo offers a roadmap for running a values-driven agency.
Listeners will be captivated by anecdotes about early client pitches that fell on deaf ears, humorous lessons learned from working in venture-backed companies, and the story behind their agency’s unique name. Kris and Nico also discuss the profound impact of becoming a certified B Corporation, leading to initiatives like their U.S. Department of Labor-certified apprenticeship program designed to address diversity gaps in the marketing industry. Their efforts not only build a stronger agency but also create meaningful opportunities for underrepresented talent, a win-win for their team and their clients.
With insights into the future of marketing amidst evolving challenges like AI and data privacy, this episode is packed with actionable advice for agencies navigating today’s rapidly changing landscape. And don’t miss the lighthearted tradition of “pie versus cake,” which has sparked creativity and camaraderie at Two Octobers in the form of an ambitious—and delicious—four-layer pie-cake hybrid.
Tune in to hear how Kris and Nico are building a business that balances data-driven excellence with a people-first approach, leaving listeners with the question: how can your agency embody both innovation and humanity in its mission?
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Show Transcript
[00:00:00] 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.
[00:00:35] Russel: Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I’m your host Russel.
[00:00:44] Russel: In this episode, we are joined by Chris Skavish and Nico Brooks co-founders of Two Octobers, a forward thinking marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado.
[00:00:53] Russel: Listen, as they share their journey from vowing, never to follow in their entrepreneurial parents’ footsteps to building an agency [00:01:00] that brings clarity to the complex world of marketing and analytics for businesses of all sizes.
[00:01:05] Russel: Learn how they have fostered a unique team culture rooted in empowerment, analytical rigor, and a drive to make a difference, including becoming a certified B corporation.
[00:01:15] Russel: Tune in to hear Chris and Nico’s inspiring story and discover how two Octobers is transforming marketing, one data mess at a time.
[00:01:22] Russel: Enjoy the story.
[00:01:24] Russel: Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Kris Skavish and Nico Brooks with Two Octobers with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today.
[00:01:31] Kris: It’s great to be here.
[00:01:32] Nico: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:32] Russel: My pleasure. Look forward to a great conversation, but if you don’t mind, start us off. What does Two Octobers do and who do you do it for?
[00:01:39] Kris: Two Octobers demystifies marketing analytics and performance marketing for marketing teams, uh, ranging from B2B businesses, nonprofits, universities, B2C, all kinds of businesses. We love helping, um, solve complex problems and make marketing teams smarter in the process.
[00:01:59] Russel: I don’t [00:02:00] think anybody would complain about getting made smarter. Sounds like a good business and model that you have put together. We’ll certainly spend a lot more time talking about all the amazing things that you’ve created. But before we get there, I want to hear about young Kris and Nico and what they thought they wanted to be when they grew up.
[00:02:17] Kris: I was actually raised in a family of entrepreneurs. My parents started their own business because they wanted to work together in. When I was in high school, they started a desktop publishing business. This is when, uh, we were moving from like typesetting and things like that. You could do it on the computer and they could do, um, interesting things for small businesses.
[00:02:37] Kris: They did a series of other businesses, um, and, uh, had various levels of success with that. I was like, you know what? I am never going to be an entrepreneur. That seems like a lot of work to run your own business. When I entered the workforce, I started out working in interactive multimedia.
[00:02:54] Kris: I did various software jobs in, um, startup software companies, venture backed [00:03:00] software companies in the Denver area. I did project management and product management and things like that. I enjoyed that work. Then I met Nico.
[00:03:08] Russel: All right, Nico. What was young Nico thinking?
[00:03:10] Nico: For a long time, I wanted to be an architect. I do think it suits my personality, but my favorite uncle was an architect. I ended up doing, becoming a furniture maker, which was reasonably related to architecture. Fiddling around with computers was my hobby so I really came into marketing sideways.
[00:03:27] Nico: I actually studied math and did furniture making. In the nineties started building websites and realized that people needed to be able to find them. A few leaps from there to here.
[00:03:38] Russel: Wow. In some ways you might say there’s not a correlation, but you, really sounds like you have a creative plus technical mind mix and you’ve found different avenues to even building furniture.
[00:03:47] Russel: I see a lot of parallels that makes total sense as to where you’re at today. At some point along the line, sounds like you guys met. What is that origin story for Two Octobers? How did this come to be?
[00:03:57] Kris: Why don’t you tell that, Nico?
[00:03:58] Nico: We worked in a job together [00:04:00] at a different company. The company that we were working for was called Local Matters and it was really the, it’s sort of funny to say, but it was the premier provider of digital platforms for directory publishers and directory publishers were mostly Yellow Pages companies.
[00:04:17] Nico: Which is funny to think about today. We’re sort of like Yellow Pages. That sounds like, isn’t that what the dinosaurs used to find stuff? But at the time there was a perceived opportunity for Yellow Pages to play a role in local search. Kris was the, really the product manager for the platform that these yellow pages companies used and I was hired to help develop search strategies, uh, local search strategies that they, the yellow pages companies could, could sell to people.
[00:04:42] Nico: We worked really closely together in complimentary roles. We had very compatible styles. I’m sure we’ll talk about this more, but just, just really, I don’t know, the way that we manage our teams is really complimentary in terms of really trying to get people to like, have a really collaborative spirit and, [00:05:00] and, and, um, empowering versus controlling, which I think is, is, uh, continues to be sort of how we see leading people. At the same time, uh, the writing was kind of on the wall for our clients and we were out there trying to help them help businesses, specifically local businesses, market themselves.
[00:05:20] Nico: We were developing these strategies and were getting in front of these yellow pages, executives around the world and saying, here’s how you can help your customers get more business via digital. They were kind of like, okay, we want to go to the golf course and cash in on our 60 percent margins, which was sort of what they were used to in the Yellow Pages biz. We were developing these great strategies for helping local businesses so really complimentary working style, huge opportunity in helping businesses market themselves.
[00:05:52] Nico: At that time, agencies really mostly served bigger businesses in digital. We started 15 years ago and, [00:06:00] um, we, we were like, it doesn’t, doesn’t have to be that way. You can provide offerings to small and medium businesses and help them too.
[00:06:08] Russel: Was there like a happy hour event where, you know, I don’t know, a couple of glasses of wine or something like just the idea of like, hey, let’s go do this together? What was that very specific moment where the idea itself even came up?
[00:06:18] Nico: I’m going to say two things. One was that we, so we had a, a client that owned most of the Yellow Pages in Europe. We put together this dog and pony show for them, or I don’t know if it was a dog and pony show. Really it was like, again, these guys, they were, they had a very, and they weren’t mostly guys, wore suits and again, played golf and were used to big margins. That was all going away.
[00:06:42] Nico: We go to this fancy conference room in London and we’d prepared this whole presentation explaining to them how people are finding local businesses and how they need to evolve. It would be like trying to explain space travel to kangaroos or something. They were just like, this sounds [00:07:00] really complicated.
[00:07:00] Nico: I think back like, we were jazz. We were excited and, and we just felt like it was falling on deaf ears. I guess that was definitely a formative moment. The other one that I would mention was this company we were working for was venture backed and we are both very analytical people and kind of, maybe a little too honest for the venture backed world.
[00:07:22] Nico: We were preparing these forecasts for the business and, and our, our CEO was, we were going to get in front of our investors and, and he’s sort of like, this number in the lower right, could you change that to like 25 million? But it’s not 25 million. That’s not how spreadsheets work. I think it was that sort of combination of opportunity and like this, this is not our world. We like building value for people. We don’t like making up numbers.
[00:07:47] Russel: That’s always my joke of just, if I’m faking a phone call of just 20 million, not enough. It’s a mockery of the, the, some of that venture capital world you speak to.
[00:07:55] Kris: Just to add a little bit to that, I think that is also the origin story of our [00:08:00] name. It was one October that we started talking about building a business together, and it was the next October that we decided to go ahead with it. That’s where the, where the name comes from.
[00:08:09] Russel: Ah, there you go. This is what I always love about a naming story. You can never actually guess what is behind the name, but I love something that, uh, very, very meaningful and applies to, to your story.
[00:08:19] Russel: You started to do a business. What was your initial offering? Is that different than how you describe what your product and service is today?
[00:08:25] Kris: One thing that’s really interesting about the initial days there is that Nico had worked in an agency before, and had worked at a software company that sold software to agencies. I had never worked at an agency before. Also, the services that we started offering, which were SEO and SEM, I had never done those before either.
[00:08:44] Kris: He taught me all of that stuff and those are the services that we started with, with customers. We had a really nice, um, soft landing from our previous employers who gave us a little bit of contract work, continuing to do the product management kind of stuff that [00:09:00] we had been doing, and that was great. But we started out with those SEM and SEO services through our contact base, selling those to them. There were some lean years, but after a couple years, we were able to hire another person, which was fun.
[00:09:13] Kris: We contracted with a white label client, uh, that became, really a big part of our growth over the next couple of years. It’s helping them do sophisticated paid search for their sophisticated clients, while they built out that digital side of their advertising, um, offering.
[00:09:32] Russel: Beautiful. You mentioned that hiring that first employee and talking with you previously, I know, I know team and just empowerment and some of these other things are very important to you.
[00:09:41] Russel: Is that how you started out the gate? Or was that a lesson learned because it was really different having a team in front of, as being an owner, or just tell us about that journey a little bit?
[00:09:50] Kris: The journey of, um, what it’s like to have, to go from managing people to owning the company and managing employees, that kind of thing?
[00:09:57] Russel: You asked the question better than I did. Very great [00:10:00] question.
[00:10:00] Kris: Managing a team and creating a good environment for people to work was really a core motivator of building a business together. We had really looked forward to the time that we could start hiring people. We hired somebody first with very little experience and helped train them up. That became a theme throughout the whole business is that we really enjoy hiring people at different stages of their career journey and, um, helping them acquire skill sets.
[00:10:26] Kris: Things like helping them acquire the skills to do the job well. That has been really a, one of the most fulfilling parts I think about owning the agency over these years is all of the people we’ve been able to work with and see grow in all of their individual ways. That’s really fun.
[00:10:41] Kris: One of the things we’ve always thought about is, you know, I have a philosophy that working at an agency is really exciting and fun and creative and feeds your curiosity and your learning, and it’s exhausting, right? It’s grinding. It’s hard to always be working with clients. It’s hard to always have to do something new.
[00:10:59] Kris: In our [00:11:00] working environment, I think it’s really important that we are thinking about how do we structure the company to lessen the burdens we’re putting on people. Every process you look at, is that process really adding value or just making it more time consuming and difficult to work with?
[00:11:15] Kris: How are you making sure to think about, um, I don’t know, things as mundane sounding as work life balance? How do we create systems that make sure that people aren’t overworked, that they have, you know, opportunity for learning and career growth, uh, and development in their day to day job? Those kinds of things I think are really important balance.
[00:11:35] Kris: It’s always been a part of how we’ve managed people and developed policies over time for how we wanted to run the business.
[00:11:42] Russel: We could do some really deep dive in there because I, there’s so many things that you shared that, that stood out, but, you know, one, I think just even recognizing upfront, I think this is maybe sometimes the experience a lot of folks go through is sometimes, and this is natural human behavior. We think other people will act and behave like us, and when we make a hire and we find out, [00:12:00] well, they don’t have as much experience per se or skills, it’s just a completely different scenario really of being an employee versus an owner.
[00:12:05] Russel: There’s 20 more things you said that I’d love to expand upon, but I guess just tell me more about, even just like in a specific element or two, when you talk about some of this nuance of creating a great work life balance environment and just some of the specific paths where some of these questions you’re asking yourself and thought processes have led you to.
[00:12:24] Kris: I want to give two examples. One of them I think is sort of boring, but I do think it’s unique to us. Because we’re both very analytically focused and sometimes I joke that my happy place is in a spreadsheet. We created early on this resource planning system that would allow us to, to take dozens of client projects and what our budget is coming in for them and how much we want to allocate to each person and a different number for each person depending on if they’re managing people or what their skill, their seniority level is and things like that. And do the planning every month to allocate everybody and [00:13:00] see where people are overloaded and then, um, switch those projects to somebody else or talk about how, um, work can be delegated to other people and things like that.
[00:13:09] Kris: Our work is very retainer based. There’s no, like, project planning, um, because what we need to do every month is optimizations. As long as we’re doing those optimizations, we’re doing the job, but that, um, method I think has been really useful at making sure that we’re not overloading people, knowing how many clients they have to deal with on a monthly basis. Being proactive about saying, hey, once you get to sort of touching 14, 15, 16 different clients in a month, your head is going to start to explode.
[00:13:41] Kris: How do we, uh, share the load amongst other people and make that an okay environment for you? That’s one example. The other example I think is more profound. One of the things that I think, um, really changed our culture and this happened sort of midway through our journey, is reading a book called Reinventing Organizations by [00:14:00] Frederick LaRue.
[00:14:00] Kris: We had always been progressive, I think, as you can hear in some of these policies and approaches to how we wanted to have employees, how we wanted to hire smart people and let them do good work without too much intervention. But this book really brought us to some ideas that were next level. There’s a couple concepts in there.
[00:14:19] Kris: One of them is around self management. The idea that why do we adopt by this hierarchical, format in organizations? Why do we have to be hierarchical? Why can’t we assume that we’re working with adults and human beings want to do good work?
[00:14:35] Kris: When you make that assumption and carry it out through all of your, um, policies around how you get work done, it sort of changes the game, right? I assume you’re here to do a good job, so let me help you do that and then you will do a good job. And how can I give you more authority, responsibility, authority for making your own best decisions without having to take them through some needless [00:15:00] hierarchy, of your manager and your manager and your manager?
[00:15:02] Kris: If you feel like you need a tool, to buy a tool to do your job well, and you’ve evaluated other options and you’ve consulted with your peers, go ahead and do that. That’s a terrific thing to do. You don’t need my approval to do that. We’ve gone through various stages of really being all in on trying to apply those things and not all in on trying to apply those things, but the concept of that still really, really resonates with how we think about managing people and letting them do their best work.
[00:15:31] Russel: Oh, man, that’s beautiful. I’m so glad you shared that. I adopted a very similar philosophy and it makes me think of, and I think a lot of larger companies and sometimes agencies as well, they want to solve by management and we get this idea of management tax which was not even coined that term, but it was a, in a previous interview I’d done.
[00:15:50] Russel: It’s just solve everything by hierarchy and management, but man, that gets expensive. What a great approach in, in creating armies of one kind of philosophy that you can be this autonomous [00:16:00] unit and how do we enable that, how do we create that environment that allows that?
[00:16:03] Russel: What a wonderful takeaway there. I could talk about that forever, but I’ll switch gears for a minute and I want to talk about your guys’s partnership. Are you guys the yin and yang style or are you guys very complimentary and you’ve had to kind of work around being symbiotic in that sense?
[00:16:17] Russel: What is your partnership dynamic look like?
[00:16:18] Nico: I would say we’re somewhere in between. I definitely don’t think yin and yang in the sense, like our, our styles are, I don’t know if they’re similar, but they are very complimentary. We’re both very analytical. We’re both very results oriented.
[00:16:33] Nico: We connected at our previous company because how we manage people is very similar. I would advise this to anybody thinking about a partnership is that this idea that, like, you know, if you, if you think about everything the same way, one of you is unnecessary, and I think that’s valid, but on the other hand, if you’re too different, there’s going to be stormy waters ahead.
[00:16:51] Nico: Our worldviews are very complimentary. I’ll mention another book that has been really influential to us and a lot of organizations, which [00:17:00] was Traction and the Traction Model, which we didn’t, we didn’t really adopt as an organization. When we originally went through it, we’re like, yeah, we already do most of this stuff. In a way it was affirming.
[00:17:11] Nico: There’s certainly some things in Traction that I think are super valuable in terms of a more sort of documented way of doing things. But one of the concepts in Traction is the idea that every organization needs an integrator and a visionary. The visionary is looking ahead, understanding the market, is really providing the direction for the business and the integrator is making everything work.
[00:17:37] Nico: These are roles, they don’t have to be people. There are organizations where both roles are in the same person. That doesn’t tend to work as well, but really that you need to think about the success of an organization requires both ingredients and very, it is very true that Kris fits the integrator role more naturally, and I fit the visionary role more naturally.
[00:17:58] Nico: I think just appreciating [00:18:00] that and, like where sometimes I’d be feeling like, how come she just doesn’t get it? If only she got it, we’d be doing better. But realizing that having her as a check and balance on, on me is really important, and hopefully she feels like I had some more value in a different way.
[00:18:16] Nico: I love that model. I don’t know that we need to say more. I think that’s a great place to leave it as just those two roles. We get along great. We bring different things, but not too different with this position.
[00:18:27] Russel: I liken it to my own partnership experience of appreciation is important, right? That helps build empathy when you are different and, and maybe don’t approach things the same way, but if we can appreciate what the other person brings to the table, that will, that will calm our nerves when we want to go right and they want to go left, but maybe we should go left.
[00:18:44] Russel: We didn’t use Traction or EOS. I wish I would have built in some of those elements in my partnership because that does help create that alignment that it’s not about individual ideas, but we’re going to force ourselves to say what’s the best for the business and, and then go carry that forward. That’s two great takeaways.
[00:18:59] Russel: Another [00:19:00] topic that I want to make sure that we get time to get to is, uh, and I imagine it’s very part and parcel to your approach to team, but very similar to us, you guys are a B Corp.
[00:19:08] Russel: Why was that an important thing for you to become? Tell us a little bit about that journey.
[00:19:12] Kris: We, uh, became exposed to the concept of B Corp when we went to a, an event in Colorado that Nico found. In the B, B Corp community it’s called a BLD event, Business Leadership Day event, and it was for people who were already B Corps and curious about it. When we went to this day long conference, we were just like, oh, my gosh, these are our people.
[00:19:35] Kris: It was other business people. I like talking about business, but they were talking about stuff that matters in business. How do you treat employees and how do you do right by the environment? How are we leaving the world a better place? I just hadn’t experienced a business community like that before.
[00:19:52] Kris: It just very much matched our values, um, and a lot of our practices that were already in place. It was a great [00:20:00] thing to be able to, uh, to go through the certification and just be able to, to demonstrate publicly I think what we had felt about ourselves internally, um, and be able to sort of prove it to a certain extent.
[00:20:11] Kris: While becoming certified and after becoming certified, really we have been motivated a lot by and encouraged a lot by some of the other people who are B Corps. It’s really inspiring when you get to know other B Corps, to hear all the different stories of how they apply B Corps principles to different areas of their business.
[00:20:31] Kris: It really just makes you try harder to be an even better business. One of the programs that I think we’re most proud of actually came about after we became a B Corp.
[00:20:41] Nico: One of the things, when you get B Corp certified, is you go through this thing, like it’s almost like the S. A. T. or something. It’s just all these different categories of questions and you’re rated, like you’re saying here are our practices and you’re getting scored and you have to score above a certain amount to be able to become a B [00:21:00] Corp.
[00:21:00] Nico: One of the areas that we, when we looked at ourselves, we were like, yeah, I don’t know, we’re not doing great, was in the diversity and inclusion and really the diversity of our staff.
[00:21:11] Nico: We were just looking at our practices and how can we do better. We started doing some of the, like, blind resumes and posting to different job boards and things that people had recommended we do to increase our reach when we were recruiting for new employees.
[00:21:27] Nico: The thing that we ran into is the fact that our industry is not very diverse. It’s a zero sum game is that, as an agency, it’s fairly common. You’re like, okay, well, we really need experienced people. We’re not equipped to bring on people from scratch and train them up on everything that we do.
[00:21:45] Nico: If you hire experienced people and there’s bias in the composition of people in your field, then it really is a zero sum game. You’re just hiring people away from other people. To really change the game, you have to change the composition of people in the field. We had that in our [00:22:00] mind.
[00:22:00] Nico: We’re just tackling that, like, we’re struggling with this problem. I ended up spending a holiday with a friend who, is , lives in Switzerland and is very involved in employment in Switzerland. She’s like, yeah, you guys are totally doing it wrong and explained the apprenticeship system to us. How in Switzerland employers, schools, and the workforce are all working in conjunction and coming up with solutions together. That was inspiring.
[00:22:27] Nico: We ended up building a digital marketing apprenticeship, which we ended up certifying through the U. S. Department of Labor. It’s really an amazing program, uh, and you get a lot of support. We got a lot of support at the state level. Colorado is a great state for apprenticeship. We have the Office of the Future of Work in Colorado that really exists to help businesses in Colorado develop apprenticeships, support you along the way. It’s been an amazing journey.
[00:22:53] Nico: We had this problem becoming B Corp certified. We did become certified before we developed the [00:23:00] apprenticeship program, but the process of certification just sort of left us feeling like we can do more. That is one of the things that’s so great about the B Corp community is that it just shifts your thinking to, we have this problem.
[00:23:11] Nico: How can we solve it in a way that’s good for our community? That’s good for our workers? That’s good for the environment? And seeing more opportunity than problems, which sounds kind of cliche. But as Kris said, when you hear the stories of other B Corps you’re like, you know, together, we can, we can do good stuff.
[00:23:28] Russel: I love it. Again, very similar philosophy. Yes, we can try to hire more, but we really have to solve this at the root level. We supported a lot of causes that did mentorship and tech programs and different things like that. I always love a root cause solution to any challenges that we perceive.
[00:23:43] Russel: I know this isn’t always the best way to, how would I say, like bring some along, but you know, generally speaking, it’s important when we have a community like this and some flaws of how powerful it can be, how beneficial it can be, not only from a business perspective, but also from all these other things that we can solve is, what’s in it for me?
[00:23:59] Russel: [00:24:00] If we can answer that a little bit, if we can just get them in the circle, then they’ll, as you kind of said, this osmosis. They’ll see the bigger picture and the light. Can you talk a little bit about more specifically about even something like this apprenticeship program and just the business boardroom benefits that, you know, how that’s affected your business?
[00:24:16] Kris: When we have and employ a diverse team, we can apply diverse solutions to diverse problems that reach the diverse audiences that advertisers really need to reach.
[00:24:29] Kris: A really specific example of that with our apprentices, so we’ve had two apprentices now, and one of them is a native Spanish speaker. We haven’t had a native Spanish speaker on our staff prior to that. She took a client, um, who, uh, is the Botanic Gardens in Denver here and said, you know, I think we ought to add a Spanish campaign to what we’re doing here.
[00:24:53] Kris: It’s not a major focus. It was not a specific request from the client, and I’m not sure anybody else working on the [00:25:00] account would have thought of that as one of their top five or 10 ideas. That’s something that really added value in a very specific way to that client project. I think, um, the client is grateful, and I’m certainly grateful to having her input on that.
[00:25:14] Russel: Perfect example answered very well. Even just make sense as you were kind of describing that, I feel like our whole ecosystem as a world really is, is niching, niching, niching, niching and how important and critical is just the story you shared that diversity is, and that is, we have to be able to understand what these niches are and look like to be able to maximize these opportunities.
[00:25:33] Russel: What a great way to go about that. Congrats on becoming a B Corp. As you were sharing Nico, I know that’s a process and it doesn’t just end when you get the certification, but it is an ongoing endeavor. Really appreciate you guys doing the hard work there.
[00:25:44] Russel: What is the vision and future for Two Octobers? What are we talking about 10 years from now?
[00:25:49] Kris: I’m so glad that we’ve got our resident visionary on the call here.
[00:25:52] Russel: This is your moment, Nico.
[00:25:54] Nico: As you know, 10 years in our world is, I mean, it is a really long time. I’m going to think more [00:26:00] in terms of five years just because, uh, the amount of change that we’ve seen, uh, I, I don’t want to predict. We’ve mentioned a number of times how analytical we are. We love spreadsheets.
[00:26:10] Nico: Where we felt like we have the most success with clients and the most impact is in bringing discipline and skills to bear against really data problems and how to get good data and how to make good use of data. How to get good data. We’re in a, an exciting but really challenging time because we, we’re getting data from everywhere and at the same time.
[00:26:35] Nico: We have issues with third party data versus first party data and what’s allowed via regulations and what’s safe and reasonable. In issues of consent and what we can collect and can’t collect. Those add a whole nother layer of challenges .That is just rolling up your sleeves and doing the work of figuring things out and getting data clean and getting it where in a place where it’s usable.
[00:26:58] Nico: We love doing that kind of stuff. We [00:27:00] love cleaning up those kinds of messes and, other people don’t so much. That is certainly a foundation, but the other part is how to activate that data in a way. That’s going to make a difference. We haven’t talked about this much, but, but one of the things that we developed along the way, and I do think this complimented and benefited from the apprenticeship program, is we’ve always been very sort of teaching and knowledge-sharing oriented, which is part of what made it possible for us to develop the apprenticeship program and why it resonated with us. But we ended up adding training as a service, uh, about five years ago, and in many of our engagements, we combine training with delivering services.
[00:27:38] Nico: To try to be a little more concise, the, the world ahead for marketing and for everybody is scary with the addition of AI, with all these privacy issues. Feels like every couple of weeks we hear about another giant data breach and that kind of stuff. Responsible use of data is becoming more and more important, but then there’s this whole fear of like, and if I don’t, my business is, may not [00:28:00] exist.
[00:28:00] Nico: Navigating that in the context of marketing. How do we collect data? How do we make use of it? How do we arrive at actionable decisions? It’s something that we’ve always been good at. That really is where our focus is today, specifically as it pertains to paid media and SEO and marketing analytics in general, things that we do for our clients.
[00:28:19] Nico: Certainly that’s where our strengths are. We’re not a billboard company, so we’re probably going to offer less value there. But I think that, that future, um, and turning that from a place of anxiety and fear to, um, helping bigger businesses figure out how they can turn that into really a profit center and a driver of business in the future.
[00:28:40] Russel: I don’t know why this was sticking out in my mind as you were explaining that, but right, I think it was, I think it was McDonald’s that had the 1 billion serve. My correlation to that to you was, you know, however number you want to call it, we’ll just say a thousand. 1000 data messes cleaned.
[00:28:52] Russel: Go from, from data mess to data clarity and organization and, and responsibility. That’s a great noble mission to be on. [00:29:00] Glad you’re out there doing the hard work to do that. As we wrap up here, just one last big question for each of you is, are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
[00:29:08] Kris: I’m going to have to say, given where I came from, that, that entrepreneurs are born. My sister turned into an entrepreneur. My parents were entrepreneurs. It just felt like it just was part of me. Now, you also have to be made because all business owners, uh, and particularly small business owners know, you got a lot of work on yourself, uh, to be a business owner.
[00:29:29] Kris: You got to make yourself, you got to put the effort into it, um, day in, day out, uh, to be, to be any good at it, so maybe it’s a little of both.
[00:29:36] Russel: I love that. What about you, Nico?
[00:29:38] Nico: I guess I’m in between two, like I, my parents are academics really. Business was kind of a dirty word in my family growing up. In that sense, I didn’t come by it that way. I don’t know. I’m sure you feel this. People say, and I think there’s truth to it, there is a little bit of like, I am not as good at working for somebody else as I am working for myself.
[00:29:57] Nico: I think I was a decent employee, but, but [00:30:00] I, I do thrive in, in being able to make decisions. For me personally, having Kris as a partner is, is kind of essential just because if I had to do all this alone, I, I just don’t think I would enjoy my life in the same way, but, um, I do, I do thrive on that.
[00:30:16] Nico: We also are just the type of people who like wearing a lot of hats. For some people that’s stressful. For us, kind of makes us excited to get out of bed in the morning.
[00:30:24] Russel: You’re in your element. Sounds like it. Crazy sometimes is the word people throw out there that all entrepreneurs have to be, but we gotta have a little bit of Maverick in us to, to pull this thing off. That’s the beauty of it.
[00:30:33] Russel: Wonderful thoughts there. If people want to know more about Two Octobers, where can they go?
[00:30:38] Kris: Come over to our website, TwoOctobers.com. Take a look at us on LinkedIn. Nico does a lot of, uh, posting on YouTube as well. Some instructional videos around how to use Google Analytics and Looker Studio better. Join us over there.
[00:30:53] Russel: Wonderful tools. All right, there you go, folks. No reason not to go check it out.
[00:30:57] Russel: Thank you so much, uh, to the both of you for taking the [00:31:00] time to share your wonderful story. As a fellow B Corp owner, I love the mission you’re on and just the, some of the things you talk about empowerment and self managing and just so many wonderful, great concepts and takeaways.
[00:31:11] Russel: Really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today.
[00:31:13] Kris: Thank you. This was fun.
[00:31:14] 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.
[00:31:38] 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.
[00:31:53] Nico: I, don’t even know where this originated, but it became an interview question, pie versus cake. We [00:32:00] ask it of everybody who, sort of in the interview process, they probably get asked, asked it multiple times. They have to talk about it on their, kind of when they get introduced to the team.
[00:32:09] Nico: We’ve had this and because we’re such, you know, analytical, um, freaks, of course we have this whole process of analyzing the data and understanding. I’m personally team pie and our team has been winning consistently over time. Won’t out Kris, but, uh, we had.
[00:32:24] Kris: I love cake. How can you not pick cake?
[00:32:27] Nico: All right, we won’t get into that argument again, but, um, you know, you can have pie every meal of the day. We mostly had a tradition where October 2nd, which just because we’re Two Octobers, October 2nd itself isn’t actually that specifically meaningful but because we’re Two Octobers we do a little get together with with employees, former employees clients and we usually have pie.
[00:32:48] Nico: One year, one of our employees, she made this layer cake, which was four layers of cake, different kinds of cake, with different kinds of pie in it. I just love the creativity. It is [00:33:00] who we are. It’s creative, but it also took a lot of engineering and execution to actually make it work.
[00:33:05] Nico: It’s hard to come up with four different kinds of pie and four different kinds of cake that all go together perfectly. That part wasn’t best, but, um, I love that image of the four layer by cake.
[00:33:14] Russel: Did it taste good?
[00:33:15] Kris: Some parts of it did.
[00:33:17] Nico: Yeah, if you had it layer by layer, she was thoughtful about that.
[00:33:20] Kris: An apple pie baked inside of a spice cake. That’s a good dessert.
[00:33:24] Russel: I’m intrigued. I’d try it. I follow a guy called Chef Reactions and he follows some really good recipes that people make and they follow some really weird ones. I would love for his commentary on the four layer p
