83. Inspiration from outside: six sigma, side hustles and yoga studios

Dom Hawes:
00:03

You're listening to unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome back to our holiday pod. We may have a strawberry daiquiri in one hand, but we're not letting the quality slip one little bit. But we are trying to take a slightly different tack. Now, you've probably heard me say in the past that I would rather eat my own trousers than do a what we can learn from yoga podcast. Well, this holiday, I'm eating my cords. We're talking with Sandra Vollrath, base operational marketer turned yoga studio owner. And in part one of this part, we established her credentials by hearing about her background in marketing and particularly tech. Then we got into how she opened her yoga studio and was enabled to enact the four P's.

Dom Hawes:
00:47

And there were some good lessons in there for us all, I think even at the enterprise level of marketing. Today, we're going to press Sandra for more learnings that we can take out of her experience, both as a marketer and as an entrepreneur. And we're going to apply those to our lives in b two b marketing. So ease your deck chairs back a notch and let's pick up the story with Sandra in the studio right now. Well, Sandra, something that you pointed out to me after the show last time is that you're six sigma belted. So as well as having two master's degrees, you are also a ninja of six. It's pretty. Can't probably say you're a ninja of six sigma. It's probably some kind of horrible crime. I'm going to get the six Sigma police onto me.

Dom Hawes:
01:30

But you are six sigma belted, so you know all about project management and constant improvement and all that kind of stuff. I think today what we're going to do is we're going to do a holiday episode because our unicorns are now lying on the beach with their earbuds in. The question I want to discuss with you at the moment is what aren't people going to miss while they're on holiday? And you reminded me about being six sigma, because when I asked you that question, I framed it in that way. You said that when people come to you around CRM, there are. You used a phrase, seven wastes. Explain that to me.

Sandra Vollrath:
02:01

Yeah. So when we go into a business as consultants, marketing, operations consultants, and they come to us with, oh, we need a CRM, or whatever their feeling and pain points are, and they come up with the idea that they need a CRM, what we first do and what everyone should do, that's buying a big, expensive piece of technology is to stop everything you do and assess what you have. And it's sometimes easier said than done. And that's why lean Six Sigma is so useful and powerful, because it gives you a really nice strategic framework of approaching and looking at seven areas of waste that you find in. Well, lean six sigma started in manufacturing, but in our case, we look at it. Of course, from where can we find waste in marketing departments and marketing teams.

Sandra Vollrath:
02:52

So the seven areas of waste we most see in marketing departments are underused systems, brand risk, strategy, misalignment, unnecessary meetings, interruptions, manual reporting and lag or waiting for approvals. Every time you go in and you do a process analysis or an audit in a marketing department, you will almost certainly come across those seven areas of waste.

Dom Hawes:
03:22

And those are the things I think people aren't going to miss while they are they?

Sandra Vollrath:
03:25

No, hopefully not that.

Dom Hawes:
03:26

And the boss is a twat. Obviously, we all have those, but let's look at those a little bit. What do you mean by brand risk? What's that all about?

Sandra Vollrath:
03:33

So, for instance, if you have multiple stakeholders talking to the team and giving different messages, essentially, I'm keeping it very broad here.

Dom Hawes:
03:42

Yeah, sure.

Sandra Vollrath:
03:42

It could be that when these team members then write emails, that one team member writes an email in a certain tone and voice and brand tone and voice and another team member uses a different one, and that's a risk to your brand. It's more a feeling of when this message goes out to the market that all of a sudden you sound completely different depending on which team members send you the email or even used the wrong logo. Okay, there we come to the system. So where do you pull your logo from? Do you have a process in place and possibly even a system in place that makes sure that every time you pull a logo into an email, it is the correct and currently approved logo? Maybe, maybe not.

Sandra Vollrath:
04:26

I mean, if we're honest, you know, how often did I go on someone I worked for's website and pulled a logo off there and downloaded it onto my laptop and then used to it and email? It happens all the time. And if we deny that, I think we're very wrong because it happens and it happens nowadays. So that's brand risk. It's often messaging from the top, not having SLA's in place. So several level agreements in terms of what are we going to use consistently? No governance in place, no tech in place that makes sure that people know where to go to find their logos.

Dom Hawes:
05:03

So as you walked up into the studio today. You walked past my day jobs logo and it's the wrong one.

Sandra Vollrath:
05:09

There we go.

Dom Hawes:
05:10

I haven't updated it. It involves spending money, actually, at the b two b ignite show. My co host on the show, Rachel Fairli, opened with Sarah Robb and they talked about a brand. They busted five midsum brand and one of them was about guidelines, which plays into this brand risk area. And they came up with, I hope I'm gonna get this right, but they're writing a book at the moment. It's gonna be in that book. They came up with a. A very novel approach to brand guidelines because the problem is no one reads them right. Doesn't matter how many we produce. Agencies like my ex agencies produce these big, thick manuals that no one ever reads. And everything must be identical and the same and it's doomed to fail before it starts.

Dom Hawes:
05:49

So they came up with the idea of having recipes, brand recipes, where for each instance or each execution, you have a number of assets that you can use. And it's like a recipe. So you know that if you're doing an email, the recipe is this logo, that tone of voice, this sentence lengthen. And I thought it was a really cool way of doing it. Certainly very easy to understand. So if unicorn as you are looking at brand risk, you're lying on the beach thinking about this. Don't stress. Rachel Fairleigh and Sarah Robb have the answer. Let's think about unnecessary meetings, because I don't think that's going to give anyone answer while they're on holiday. But when you get back to work, there's nothing more annoying, is there?

Sandra Vollrath:
06:26

And it happens all the time and across the board. And even though I think maybe particularly after Covid, we got a lot better saying no to certain meetings. But still, as a team member that is invited to a meeting, you may not always feel in a position to say, I actually don't feel I need to be in this meeting. Right, but do you really need to be there? Does legal or whoever else you're inviting to your team meeting always have to be there, even if it's ten minutes? If ten people sit in a ten minute meeting, right, then it's wasted time if they don't need to be there. So that's basically that unnecessary meetings really thinking about, do you really need this meeting? And what else can we change? And being a little more rigorous about.

Dom Hawes:
07:12

The approach, another one that really resonates with me is this waiting for approval thing, the lag. And we see it actually a lot between agencies and clients. I might say as well that an agency is put under pressure to produce a piece of work by a certain deadline, and then it then disappears into a void for two, three or so weeks, and we then get beaten for missing a go live deadline when actually the assets aren't yet approved. It's endemic, isn't it, that.

Sandra Vollrath:
07:40

Yeah. Although we do see it most in that agency client relationship. It seems to be heavily featured in there. They're waiting for approvals. And particularly if you don't have a system, and I'm not even saying you need a piece of software to regulate it, although it can really help, especially if you are running a very big business and a very complex marketing department. But even with a manual process as such in place, if it's not in place and you don't know who is approving when or what if there's no SLA in place. So a service level agreement that says in this has to be approved in 24 hours, 48 hours max, and then putting sanctions in place if it doesn't happen. Controversial, maybe, yes, but very, you know, useful and powerful.

Dom Hawes:
08:31

I'm borderline psychopath. I'm actually prone to violence, so I want to hear sanctions.

Sandra Vollrath:
08:35

Hey, I didn't say violence. I'm a yogi. What are you talking about? Could be you need to sit through an hour of meditation.

Dom Hawes:
08:42

Right, I see.

Sandra Vollrath:
08:43

No violence needed.

Dom Hawes:
08:45

It might calm me down. I like that. What else aren't we going to miss while we're on holiday?

Sandra Vollrath:
08:50

I honestly think people are not going to miss the complexity that technology and processes bring to their marketing that they're trying to shape into a strategic business function. I think everybody needs to relax a little bit and maybe think about a business that you can set up yourself and run for five years. Whatever it is. That's my topic.

Dom Hawes:
09:15

Unless you work at Selby Anderson, you're not allowed to do a side hustle.

Sandra Vollrath:
09:18

No, exactly. Yeah. Like I said, I think I've never learned more than in running my own business for five years. Granted, there was a pandemic, so there were some challenges there to overcome.

Dom Hawes:
09:29

Actually, if anyone that worked in our agency group did want to do a side hustle for exactly the reasons that you've outlined, as long as it wasn't competitive or distracting, I think I would support it. Because the lessons you learn are, as you say, invaluable.

Sandra Vollrath:
09:43

Absolutely. If I had to close my business tomorrow, which luckily I don't, but if I had to, then I would still say it was worth every minute and every penny. I've put into it, because no MBA would give me the experience that I have gained, and I use it every day in the business and outside the business as well.

Dom Hawes:
10:05

So I've been involved in startups since the year 2000. And actually I had a stint in the mid eighties where I was trying to do my own thing. And the one in the mid eighties didn't work. And the business I tried to run in 2001 didn't work, and in 2012 I had a business failure too. But you learn a lot through those. And in this country, people looking to go, oh my God, don't go near that person, their business didn't work, whereas in other countries they god, imagine how much that person must know about how not to run a business.

Sandra Vollrath:
10:33

Yeah, I don't know what to say to that because this is my first business that I've run. You know, I didn't have the benefit.

Dom Hawes:
10:41

Well, I didn't have the benefit, actually. When I started of being a trained marketer, I was 18 years old. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea about cash flow or accounts. And when I had my wobble with the second business, I went away and I bought a book called accounting for non accountants. And I learned how to do accounting because I just, I wouldn't ever see myself in a situation where I didn't understand numbers. And that's been, that's kind of been a feature of my life. And what I love about the concept of the side hustle is you're inviting people to get more commercial in their day to day work by experiencing it themselves.

Sandra Vollrath:
11:13

I do wonder sometimes that nature nurture thing, whether some people are naturally more entrepreneurial than others. And maybe that is the case. But the second best way, if you're not a natural entrepreneur, I think the second best way to learn all about what it takes to run a business, to take your products to market, to learn about your customers, to create value, to maybe create a business that eventually you could sell, that is so valuable that you could exit with money at the end of it, if that's what you want to do, is to run your own business.

Dom Hawes:
11:50

So while you're on your beach there, unicornists start dreaming of the side hustle. We'll be back. For those of you playing close attention, you will recall during the introduction of part one of this pod that I mentioned my belief in an entrepreneurial approach to marketing. The side hustle thing can be a really good idea. It's like a dojo or training area to put into practise everything you've learned about marketing, but perhaps you can't do in your real big day job. The advantage of transferring your learning to the small scale is that you can see how it all works. You can see that it all works. Like Sandra, you've got to think about place. You've got to know your product inside out. You've got to really get to know your customers and you've got to understand what makes them tick.

Dom Hawes:
12:42

You've got to understand how to price what you're selling. And then you've got to be able to promote it in a way that doesn't require your full time attention. Then what you do is reapply all of that back to your day job. The entrepreneur is always trying to get these basics right. Otherwise you don't, you just don't have a business. We like to think entrepreneurship is some kind of Tesla moment. It's Richard Branson building a balloon holidaying company. It's Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone. It's not what it is. Entrepreneurship is about taking a business successfully to market, which, by the way, is where we got to on our definition of marketing. So by being more entrepreneurial, we become better marketers.

Dom Hawes:
13:21

I think the trick at the enterprise level is to forget that you're part of a large company and instead imagine the marketing department is the company. You're the entrepreneur leading it. So what would you do? Have you got the marketing basics right? Will your company survive? I think that's a really good mindset to take. Anyway, let's get back to business. Sandra. We're taking a look at the things we think people aren't going to miss while they're on holiday. But holidays, like films, come to an end and they have to come back to work. And as people start thinking about going back, tell us what you think they should be thinking about and what they should be doing differently.

Sandra Vollrath:
13:57

Selfishly, I would suggest everybody, this is what I say to my students very regularly. And if some of my students will listen to the podcast, which I know they will, so the message is always, once a day you need to make time for movement and once a day you need to make time for stillness. And that's the message.

Dom Hawes:
14:15

Very nice. And you define it. Do you define a time of day for it or.

Sandra Vollrath:
14:19

I personally don't. I think you can move and be still whenever you feel it is time to do so, but just making sure that you do it.

Dom Hawes:
14:28

So things to do when you get back one is make time for yourself and for stillness and for a bit of movement. When you say movement, we're talking yogic movement.

Sandra Vollrath:
14:37

Yeah.

Dom Hawes:
14:38

Stretch movement.

Sandra Vollrath:
14:38

In my case, it's yoga. Yes. And in my case, it is overwhelmingly gentle yoga and slow yoga, particularly if you have an ageing body, which we all have, what day you are born, you're ageing. Gentle, slow stretches. Yes, it's good.

Dom Hawes:
14:55

Okay. So there's the antidote to a stressed out marketer, but unfortunately, when you get back, you are going to have to do some marketing too. We're constantly being told as marketers, we need to be think, or think more strategically. How can we help marketers do that when they get back to work?

Sandra Vollrath:
15:11

I truly believe that marketing needs to be a strategic business function, supporting business objectives by creating value and increasing profits. And that doesn't matter whether it's a BDE or a b, two C or a big or small environment. It's the same function that marketers should be fully aware of a marketing that marketing needs to hold, in my opinion. So what does that mean? It means, yes, let's be more strategic in approaching how we learn about the products that we are supporting with our marketing, going into learning about the products breadth and depth about all the products that you're responsible for, knowing your customers pain points. And it sounds very cliche, but it is so true. And I know this from the yoga studio.

Sandra Vollrath:
16:04

Once I knew the pain points in and out, and I could speak the language that my customers speak, it became so much easier to market the product, the yoga classes and the studio itself, and to build the brand. So it all hangs together. Once I knew what they needed very well and understood their pain points very well, then the message became better, then they got more attracted. And so you have that upward spiral of positive energy into your marketing by having that understanding.

Dom Hawes:
16:33

So what I'm hearing is one, get sales level knowledge of your product, like get really good at the product. Why? It's great, what the benefits are, the problems it's going to solve. I think it's quite easy sometimes as marketers to get lost in the work that we do, the daily work that we do, and lose sight of the fact that actually it's all about the product.

Sandra Vollrath:
16:54

Yeah, it's an interesting point you're making. So if we step away from yoga a little bit and go back to Bentley, and when I was doing product marketing for microstation, when I started, I really didn't have, and I had been at Bentley Systems for a long time and still they handed me product marketing for microstation. And I didn't really have a good understanding of 3D CAD right. I was a marketer not an engineer. So even talking internally to the product managers and to the developers didn't give me the insight that speaking to somebody who was using it gave me that's the person you need to focus on, not the people that develop the product and that know the product in and out. They still only know it from the business's point of view.

Sandra Vollrath:
17:41

You have to go to the other side of the table and look at it.

Dom Hawes:
17:44

Customers.

Sandra Vollrath:
17:44

Yes.

Dom Hawes:
17:45

So that's my second takeaway from where we've got to on immediate get back to speak to customers. So our cadence at the moment is once a day we're going to move and take time for ourselves. We're continuously going to improve our product knowledge. How often should we be at speaking to customers?

Sandra Vollrath:
18:00

As often as you can and whether that is on the phone. I have spoken to marketers that have sat alongside their sales team, their bdrs, and actually got to speak to prospects or sit with customer services. I know CEO's that have sat with the customer service department just listening to the pain points and I think that is a really good way of doing it because once you know what's bad and you give them the perception of listening to their problems, they may also open up with, okay, and here's what you could do better. How invaluable is that?

Dom Hawes:
18:35

Yeah, well, don't let the CEO be on the telephone though. That will be a disaster listening. Unless you call Timpson, of course.

Sandra Vollrath:
18:42

Yeah, of course.

Dom Hawes:
18:43

But now he's too busy in the house of lords now to be doing that kind of stuff. I'm going to add one if I might. I was thinking about as you were explaining like product and customers and I did it today myself funnily enough. So we have a very smart group financial controller at work, Matthew Carleton. And I was talking to him about our business and the insight actually that you get from your finance team because they do see things differently. And we ended up just having a very open session saying, look, okay, Matthew, you're me, what should I do? I think that opened a question to your finance team. Okay, so hey, I'm the CMO, you're the CFO. What should I do? For me that's very cleansing.

Dom Hawes:
19:19

It doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing, but it's a very open way of asking for someone else's opinion. And I think that sometimes different stakeholders in the business can give you really good insight.

Sandra Vollrath:
19:29

Yeah, I completely agree and I think you've had it a few times on this podcast as well, where your guests have pointed that out. It is so important in a small business. I'm everyone, I'm the CFO and the CMO and I am the chief product officer and chief customer officer almost. That gives me an advantage because I can look at it from different lenses and I put my finance hat on and think about cash flow and value and creating financial value in the business. And then I put my marketing hat on and think about that. And then I put my customer service hat on and say, actually we had a couple of complaints, not that we ever get any, but let's say we did. We had a couple of complaints about whatever.

Sandra Vollrath:
20:14

And you get a more holistic picture going back to yoga, thinking holistically, it really does. That's where marketing can add value. You're the person to go around, ask everyone these questions and what can you do with the answers you get?

Dom Hawes:
20:30

So this is a variance. I mean, leadership by walking around is out of vogue at the moment. But I think not just, I mean what the implication of that is, you're just being seen. But I think as you walk around, you're speaking to people, you're making relationships and you're taking insight from your team when you come back to work, unicornists walk around, have conversations, make relationships, speak to people, spend more time moving, thinking and speaking to people than you do behind your screen. Well, I have to tell you, I am bloody glad we did that. I now feel like I do. Just after I've done yoga or anything form of exercise, I feel more relaxed. I've got clarity about what I'm going to do next and I feel more flexible. Except in this case, it's my mind rather than my body.

Dom Hawes:
21:19

So I feel more flexible about how to learn, about how to become a better marketer. Reassuringly, it does all seem to come back to outside in marketing. Whether you're running a yoga studio or a multinational or a startup or a scale up, you have to know who your customers are and what their pain is. Then you take that outside knowledge and you bring it into the business and shape your offering to solve your customers pain. But of course, it doesnt need to be so binary, so polar. By that I mean your learning doesnt just have to come from your customer into your business. The entrepreneurial approach shows that each one of the many hats required of the entrepreneur are all valuable learning points. So every aspect of the business, from finance to product development can teach us something.

Dom Hawes:
22:03

Combine that with a habit of movement and you've got a recipe for success. Get out there, walk the halls, meet other people in your organisation from different departments and ask them stuff. What would they do in your shoes? What are they hearing from customers? What's causing them pain? But I'm going to bring it back to the main point of this exercise. It's got nothing to do with yoga, it's got everything to do with marketing and being an entrepreneur. Are they one on the same thing? If not, I think they're pretty close. If you accept that a good entrepreneur is an ace at taking their business to market, then we all need to act like good entrepreneurs. I've met a tonne of marketers on this part and I think it's fair to say they represent the best in the business.

Dom Hawes:
22:46

What I noticed about all of them, they act like entrepreneurs. I'm not talking about crazy moments of genius. I don't mean they're all weirdly single minded, I'm not even going to mention money. I don't think any of that stuff is what makes an entrepreneur. What I see among them is excellence at the basics of taking their business to market. And that's what entrepreneurship is all about. And it's what, by the way, marketing is all about. So I would argue they're pretty much one and the same thing. And that's why to be an effective marketer, it's a really good thing to act and think like an entrepreneur. And on that note, I dropped the mic right into my pina colada because it's time to get back to the business of being on holiday. Hopefully that's what you're doing right now.

Dom Hawes:
23:28

If not, I hope you have a great summer break or are planning to get away, maybe in September when the schools go back. Either way, I look forward to catching up with you next time. Until then, please make sure you tick the subscribe option in your podcast feed. It is the easiest way to grow the show and the bigger we get, the better we get. The more guests, the more insight. Generally, the more unique unicornunus, the more you. I can't even say it, the more unicorniness we get. Finally, till next time, you have been listening to unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.