98. Four Ps and a T. Why time matters in marketing

Mark Larwood
00:00:00

When I joined, there was nobody and I just had lots of time to talk to myself. But very quickly recruited in, senior people knew what they're doing.

I think over time I've felt like the whole world was on my shoulders and half an hour later, let alone a year later, you barely remember those things. So I think perspective is really, really important.

If AI can take away the mundane, the everyday, the war and stuff, then I that should unleash a whole load of creativity and focus on purpose.

Dom Hawes
00:00:42

Hello, you are tuned in to the.

Dom Hawes
00:00:43

Unicorny marketing show and I am Dom Hawes, your host. Now today, team unicorny is bringing you a very special conversation that I think is both eye opening and refreshingly counterintuitive.

My guest, Mark Larwood, is a marketing veteran with over 25 years experience both in business to business technology and telecoms. He has had an incredible journey, which he's going to tell you about himself in just a few minutes.

But what I think is fascinating about this conversation is that while so much of modern business and marketing seems to focus on immediacy and speed, in this conversation, Mark makes a very compelling case for the power of patience. And our industry particularly seems to prize instantaneous results, quick returns.

But Mark argues that slowing down, reassessing and having the patience to let activities mature, well, that can be the ultimate competitive advantage. And I think that's a very refreshing perspective because we all seem to equate faster with better these days.

Now in this episode, we're also going to look at how Mark and his team are using artificial intelligence to handle increasing pace of business.

But surprisingly, given what I've just said, not as a way to rush outcomes, but as a way to free up time so they can get involved in deeper, more creative work, well, that's enough for me. Let's now go straight to the studio and meet Mark.

Mark Larwood
00:02:14

Hi Dom, nice to be here.

Dom Hawes
00:02:15

Well, I'm delighted.

Why don't we start by you telling us a little bit about your background, kind of how you started in your career and what's led you to your current role.

Mark Larwood
00:02:23

So I have about 25 years in b two B marketing. I don't feel like I'm old enough for that. But sadly, apparently I am mostly in technology, almost always in technology, actually.

I started off in a sort of small database company headquartered out of Silicon Valley 20 odd years ago. Worked through some small organizations and big organizations.

I worked with ATO's, worked with Philips, worked with O two, Telefonica and latterly Virgin Media zero two.

Also worked for a small sms aggregator back in the day, which was responsible for, I think, or partly responsible for delivering crazy frog back in the late noughties. And that was a fun time. And now I'm at cloud clever, which is an acquisitive cloud IT telecoms provider.

We're building a business really from scratch by acquiring a number of expert businesses in their space, basically fab.

Dom Hawes
00:03:15

Well, we're going to get stuck into the acquiring bit of that, I think, later and look at some of the implications for marketers. But you mentioned you've been in the business now just over 20 years and the change has been extraordinary.

What are some of the most significant changes that you've seen in business and marketing during that period?

Mark Larwood
00:03:30

Back to my day one at this database company back in 1999, I was stuffing envelopes with press releases on my first day. I don't think we do that anymore. That's exactly where I started. Well, there you go. We have lots in common.

I think the way we communicate now is very different. It's very instant, and I think that's both a positive and a negative really, isn't it?

I often think about the instant message that we all rely on every day.

And I think a lot of people equate instant message to instant response as well, and that patience has disappeared over time to respond to everything now. We want everything now. I think that's a big change across every industry, just in society in general, not just in a marketing space.

But I think for us as marketers, that's had a real impact in being able to engage people, get to know our customers and really, really drive outcomes really for our businesses. So it's a massive change. And of course, all of the technology that sits behind that has changed incredibly over time.

We're working in a different way now. We're all much more remote, much more mobile than we were when I started work 99.

I think the Internet was something that was in a corner, and now it's pervasive, it's everywhere. We're connected to it all the time, much to our detriment in some respects, I think.

Dom Hawes
00:04:46

But generally, I think it's interesting. You mentioned the immediacy of media these days and immediacy of the way that we work, which is very different than it was then.

I was in a startup in 99, in an Internet startup, but even that wasn't very digital. Everything took a long time.

And you could do your own Google SEO back then because it was a simple algorithm and there are pros and cons, of course, of the pace of business, speeding up. And I think you mentioned, particularly in marketing, that things happen a lot faster.

Now, when we spoke on the call, on the introductory call before this, we spent a lot of time talking about the importance of taking time and the importance of patience.

And I thought that was a really good theme for us to explore in today's podcast, because there's a large expectation that just about everything is instant these days. But actually, the way we market, the way we try and influence people doesn't work that way.

Talk to me a little bit about the importance of patience in marketing and professional life.

Mark Larwood
00:05:46

It's hard, right? I think we've got conflicting demands from across a business.

We all have shareholders, investors, CEO's, senior, people that want to see returns immediately or think they want to see returns immediately. I think the best marketers know that youre building something. It does take time.

I think the important thing to do is to recognize that not everybodys on the same page. And you need to balance both that short term demand, that short term drive for immediate results alongside that long term piece.

Its not an either or in any business, really, but it is about the balance of that short term versus that long term, I think, generally speaking.

Dom Hawes
00:06:29

Raoul yeah, well, talk about that balance, the long and the short, I think a little bit later. One of the other things about being able to produce things a lot quicker, of course, is you can create a lot more in the same space of time.

And I think one of the challenges that we have as marketers is the sheer volume of work that we're expected to get through. AI can kind of help with that a little bit.

How do you and your team prioritize, therefore, because we can do so much, which bits you're going to concentrate on?

Mark Larwood
00:06:58

I think it's ruthless prioritization regularly, right. Let's not set a plan and stick to it for nine months and not review where we are with those. And I think I stick really close to my team.

We talk every day, every couple of days. We're constantly reflecting on what we're driving forward.

I've worked in some corporate organizations where you wouldn't talk to people for quite some time, and before you know it, you've kind of diverged. I think what's important is that you have a plan and yes, you stick to it, but you're more flexible and can move left, right, whatever.

It's far easier to to turn a boat when it's just left the harbor than it is when it's 2000 miles on its route to the wrong place.

Dom Hawes
00:07:39

Raoul but also, I think that's a function of scale. Right.

So when you're working in enterprise, the rhythm of business is slower because more people are involved, whereas you're involved in an aggressive scale up. At the moment, it's a bit nimbler, probably more entrepreneurial. How does that affect the type of work that you do?

Mark Larwood
00:07:54

I think it affects the type of work that we do, but also affects how we work as a team. The people in my team are, for now, there's senior people who we've recruited because they know what they're doing.

They can take a problem and they can solutionize against it and deliver to.

Dom Hawes
00:08:12

That in a scale up or a more aggressive company. Your team profile, I'm guessing, is going to be different.

Mark Larwood
00:08:17

We've recruited senior people, really, who know their job, have significant experience, and therefore can hit the ground running from day one. What I'm coaching some of those people on the is you don't have to do all the work. There's an ecosystem around us.

We've got agencies we work with, we've got freelancers we can work with other people in the business who can do some of the heavy lifting.

Your role is to coordinate, facilitate, enable us to do, to your point, deliver more content, create more campaigns, deliver more into market, and therefore lift our brand awareness, salience, whatever you want to call it, and really drive our business forward. We're starting from, or when I joined starting from zero, we had no customers, no revenue, no businesses, no staff.

There were just four or five of us sitting around in a room saying, let's go and acquire some businesses. When that happened, all of a sudden the floodgates of work kind of came along.

And then prioritizing and navigating through complexities of different cultures, different organizations, different strategies, different geographies, different customer bases. We had a really clear view of what the businesses you want to acquire looked like and broadly delivered against that.

But of course, once you actually get under the hood, things are very different and people and personalities come into play, and the challenges of dealing with that very quickly came to the surface. So I think that kind of drove some of the things we were working on and the pace at which we could work.

Dom Hawes
00:09:47

When you're on an acquisition trail and you're bringing lots of businesses in, I think that generally skews you towards short term because the volume of work to go through, all the due diligence to get those businesses in, to think about integrating, to deal with some of the issues you've talked about, mean you don't have the luxury of thinking very long term, which I think is why people go through cycles of acquire, consolidate, acquire, consolidate. Now, it is possible to do both at the same time, I think, but it's a very different discipline.

Mark Larwood
00:10:13

Yeah, we had to do both at the same time because we didn't have that foundation on which to bring in the first acquisitions. Say the foundation of our business is built on the three businesses we brought in, but they're very different.

So we have to find a way to find the best of each and then bring the cloud clever kind of personality and approach onto that.

And I think that's where the complication and the fun actually is in working out how that work is that cerebral sort of challenge that I think marketers tend to enjoy.

Dom Hawes
00:10:45

I'm going to move on from timing in just a minute, but I was so captured by the concept that sometimes we need to be more patient.

Can you think of an example from your own experience where allowing more time led to a better outcome than it would have done by, you know, rushing into something maybe earlier in your career.

Mark Larwood
00:11:03

Rather than here I go back ten years to when I sort of first realized that actually always looking at the short term and being focused on that kind of, that immediate need just brought, even actually brought more chaos rather than less chaos to what you were trying to do, because everybody was always sort of trying to run really, really quickly to deliver against a quarterly target.

At that point, I was working for a large multinational technology company who remained nameless, but there was this really massive focus on short term demand generation, lead generation, and less on that kind of longer term brand build and nurture. I think partly that comes from working for an organization which already had a strong brand.

But there was importance, to me, at least, and to actually, the rest of the team, to build credibility for what that business was and could do and actually shift the mindset slightly in the audience in terms of what they saw us as. It's incredibly important to focus both on that long and short in any organization, really.

Dom Hawes
00:12:04

It's challenging, though, as you say, in enterprise, particularly us public companies, where there's so much pressure quarter on quarter, to deliver numbers.

We all know that you get that call from the sales team four days before the end of quarter with a big discount if they can squeeze you into their numbers, and that drives behavior all the way through the organization. But equally, if.

If you're an owner manager, or a principal or an SME, you may not feel that you have the resource or the luxury to market for the long term, but we all know that what you're talking about, the trust, the reputation, the brand, those things are multipliers of short term activity. They're not distractions like for enterprise. They've already got their systems for kind of an SME type person.

Can you sort of help frame for them why that long term is so important and how they might go around thinking about committing time and resource to.

Mark Larwood
00:12:56

I've always said that the long term will very soon become your short term, and you haven't got at least an eye on that.

And maybe it's only 25, 30, 40% of effort, but at least do something which will put you in a better place in six months, twelve months time, when you're having the exact same conversation, there are cycles to everything. There's an annual plan.

But January or April or July, whenever the start of the year comes around really quickly again, you have the same conversations. If you're not in a better place from one year to the next, or from one quarter to the next, I feel we're not doing our jobs as marketers.

Frankly, it's hard, but I think delivering against that short term need, matching it to a longer term. Three things I can do this quarter which will put me in a better place for next quarter, is all it needs to be.

Dom Hawes
00:13:41

Raoul, I think particularly now where the markets are still really hard, especially in tech or anything related to tech, the funding hasn't completely dried up, but slightly dried up the institutional funding that was driving all of the activity, everyone's still very nervous about spending money, and that translates to sales, both to service providers like us, but also to vendors. And it's very tempting in those circumstances to get that dig in mentality. We'll just go 1ft at a time.

So I think that idea of what three things can I do? This course that will help drive next, is a very useful way of tying today to the future.

Maybe let's move on to talk about the acquisition and the integration side, because I'm really interested in that because of my own background. And it's a lot of, I think a lot of our listeners, our audience exists in organizations where they've been through.

Either they've been acquired or their business is acquiring. You've done multiple acquisitions now. Cloud. Clever.

From a marketer's point of view, what are some of the biggest challenges that you face with integration?

Mark Larwood
00:14:41

I think culture. Well, the fact we have four different CRM systems for a marketer is really challenging.

Dom Hawes
00:14:49

It is pretty hard.

Mark Larwood
00:14:50

Data tracking becomes quite an investment of time than new. We have people specifically looking at data and spreadsheets all the time to tell us where our business is going.

But I wouldn't underestimate the importance of culture and how different people's expectations are and bringing people on a journey. We very quickly had to paint a picture of what cloud clever was.

What cloud clever wants to be, for a point initially, of not actually really having a cloud clever.

It was an idea and a concept and a vision, and we were looking for the component parts from that, which would be the businesses that built that and the people that sit within those organizations.

I think you can't, you can't over communicate, you can't over focus on the people within a business and how they're feeling and how deal with the fears they might have about what the future holds, but also paint that picture of where we're going and why we're going there and why we feel that there is a really strong fit with the markets that we're targeting. The businesses we acquired are SME's. They don't really have a great focus on marketing or other core sort of functions either, really.

Finance and HR, they're sort of side of desk activities for people. You build a scale, I think we're at a nice scale at the moment. We're not a corporate organization and we're not a 5 million pound startup either.

So we've got that ability to have those centralized functions which we've invested in to help deliver value into those businesses that we've acquired, but actually bring some uniformity across things as well.

Dom Hawes
00:16:21

How do you get the balance on centralizing? Because the more you centralize, theoretically, the less agile you become.

At the point where you interface with a customer, the less you centralize, the more chaotic your organization.

And there's a balance, and we've been trying to chart it on this podcast with a slightly more modern organizational design where you're decentralizing as much of the decision making as possible, but trying to centralize those things that make you have a unique identity. How are you thinking about those sorts of challenges?

Mark Larwood
00:16:54

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I don't think there's one answer for every organization. I can tell you a little bit about what we've done.

We've identified that things like finance, HR, centralized functions because they are a service that can be provided in a way that suits those organizations that are part of the group. Marketing, I suppose, is a little bit more of a. Could be centralized, could be localized, depending on how you see things.

When, I mean, the strategy that was defined in the cloud. Clever kind of thesis, if you like, was we will centralize marketing.

And then Steve, our CEO, went out to find himself a marketing director to implement that. So I didn't have a choice in that. But I believe it is the right thing for us to do because I think we get that economy of scale.

We can also have the expertise, specific expertise that these organizations can't have. They played at marketing.

They had people who were nominally marketeers alongside a product role, a commercial role, something other else, irrespective of whether you opt what you opt to centralize, what's really important is then having the processes and relationships and communication structures in place that that works.

So I've always prided myself and the teams I have on our ability to talk commercial, talk sales language, you know, really build relationships with sales team and help educate the sales team in that kind of back to that longer term. Things do take time.

You can't come to me in four days before the end of quarter and say, let's go to this event because I think I'm going to build some business off it. You're really not.

And it's having those honest conversations and driving people towards things which will work across all of those timeframes that you've got.

Dom Hawes
00:18:34

Really, Raoul, what we're seeing in enterprise, and I get that you're scaling, so it's slightly different, is we're seeing core function in marketing being centralized. And that's where the sense of excellence movement, if you like, comes from.

But they're pushing out in large organizations where they've got field marketing teams, they're pushing out some of the decision making and some of the localization out to the local teams.

I think one of the challenges I have with the concept of centralization is people start to believe that marketing is a back office function or that it is a service to the business rather than being the business.

And depending on your belief in marketing, mine is it's the process of taking a business product or service to market, and it involves everything that there is in the business. It's one of the core functions as defined by the great Michael Porter.

As long as fellow executives understand the importance and the role of marketing in going from concept to customer, then I think it can work really well. Centrally, how do you manage the demands, though? You've mentioned the sales teams. They have to think a lot shorter term.

In many cases, salespeople eat what they kill. They're commission led. So how do you manage, we're back to the long and short.

How do you manage the demands of satisfying salespeople short term with the desire to build that long term systemized go to market.

Mark Larwood
00:19:53

I think it's trust in that investing in the long term will reap the rewards that we need. The challenge that you have in a brand new business which is being brought together, you don't have that history, you don't have that knowledge.

And in our business, we don't yet have that data which says our conversion rates are this, our lead cycles are this. Have a feeling. And actually our lead cycles are about six to nine months. Prove it. I can't because I haven't got the data, but I know that's the case.

There's nothing I can do today, frankly, to impact this month, this quarter. I can help you get some business across the line by helping you talk to customers in the right way, make the case.

I can help you in that, but I can't bring any new pipeline in tomorrow, which will close probably even in the next six months. There's exceptions to that, but generally I'm not going to do that.

Most of what I'm doing will be focused on six to nine months, generally speaking, and then within that, over time, that nine months today becomes two months in seven months time.

It's not a hard concept to comprehend, but I think it's working with salespeople and the rest of the business to illustrate that what we are doing here is investing in something that will one day be the short term.

Dom Hawes
00:21:07

Seven months goes like that.

Mark Larwood
00:21:08

Tell me about it.

Dom Hawes
00:21:09

Ok, so here we go. I'm building a picture of an organization that's moving really quickly.

You're working very closely with your sales teams, but you don't yet have enough corporate experience to have all of those benchmarks sorted. But I'm guessing you're working to a management system. So you're either trying to establish KPI's or OKRs explanations of those in the show notes.

As a marketer, how are you thinking about building that management system? Are you using any of these frameworks.

Mark Larwood
00:21:33

In terms of systems, platforms? We're investing in CRM, marketing, automation, all those platforms.

We're investing in billing and all those things probably, which these individual businesses wouldn't be able to do at their level, but we can. So that's the advantage of centralizing some functions and having that kind of slightly larger scale.

We can invest in those things so the platforms will be in place. Brilliant. It's the processes that sit behind that and the ways people work and behaviors, which is the hard piece.

And that's very much what we're focused on understanding that and how people work within it.

Personally, I see OKRs as things which are there to steer the business, drive the business, do things slightly differently, or change and transform, which we're all about transformation now. We're transforming various businesses, but alongside that we've got BaU. I've got digital marketing happening, I've got lead gen happening.

Not really part of the OKRs that we're managing. We've got KPI's against those things.

New business don't really know what's going to work well with the sales teams we've got or in the markets that we're approaching. So there's a lot of test and learn and we've got KPI's, but we're not holding ourselves with a noose around our necks towards those really more of.

Dom Hawes
00:22:45

A constant improvement approach rather than this is the level that we must reach.

Mark Larwood
00:22:49

Else investment is important, but we're not measuring that over a month, a quarter. We're measuring that over 1824 months.

Dom Hawes
00:22:56

Exactly. We can't measure it over the short term anyway. And anyone that thinks you can is mad. Well, you mentioned transformation.

There's a very different mindset when you're doing what you're doing, which is aggressive scaling and building a bigger unit.

I mean, the vision is going to be really important, but transforming the mindset of the units that come inside is really hard sometimes, because too much into areas you don't want to talk about, then let me know. But I've been through it too.

When you acquire lots of businesses, you import all the various different cultures, and we talked about that very briefly earlier, but you also sometimes important intransigence to transform to a different system. You mentioned you've still got four CRMs, for example.

How do you think, given that innovation, in my opinion, is the responsibility of the marketing department, how does a marketer help the organization change mindset to adopt some of these principles that the center needs in order to achieve the vision?

Mark Larwood
00:23:58

I mean, it sounds a bit trite, but I think it comes down to communication and understanding and making sure that you're painting that picture of why we're doing certain things, why we're structuring the business in the way we are, why we believe there is a real opportunity for us and what that future looks like and the role that people have within that. I don't think there's anything more complicated than that. Communication and actually transparency. We talked about OKRs a couple of minutes ago.

Those are transparent. Anybody can see what my okrs are, what my team's okrs are, and vice versa. They can see what's happening in operations in it.

They can see what Steve, our CEO's okrs of if they like. You can see how all these things interact and how what one person in my team is doing relates to what somebody else is doing.

I think it's really important to have that transparency across everything and people understand where they are, where they're going, where we're going and what their role is in that.

Dom Hawes
00:24:56

That's one of the things I really like about okrs.

If they're implemented well, when you have that transparency that anyone in the organization can not just see what the vision is, but how you're going to achieve it and how every person in that organization contributes to the success of it, which I don't think you get if you just have a KPI focus.

Mark Larwood
00:25:12

If you focus on KPI's and even personal objectives, they can be based on what an individual thinks they need to do and not necessarily navigate back. You're relying too much on the management structure, I think, to control that. I think OKR and OKRs aren't top down. Right.

It's a group wide kind of two way conversation to establish what those are, I think within reason. But I think if you do them well, yes, I agree, they kind of work. If you do them badly, they become a kind of too rigid, too focused.

And I think that's where I mentioned sort of having other KPI's which are as important the OKRs are to.

I think, okay, it should be longer term, steer the business, transform the business and not about what I am achieving this quarter, whereas the KPI's are probably more short term. Maybe that's the way to balance that short term and long term is the OKR versus KPI's.

Dom Hawes
00:26:04

I'm learning something here today. We don't use okRs.

I'd love to, but I know it's a massive commitment of time and effort to get them in place, particularly if it's going to be done properly. But I'm always accused by my team of being too short because we are largely KPI led.

So I think what I haven't done, and it comes back to what you were just saying about communication, is I haven't communicated too much about the long term. I know what the vision is and I know what the strategy is and all this, but I haven't communicated that. I don't think effectively enough.

But OKrs might be a way of doing that. Are they something that you've used in the past? Or is that OKRs and that whole structure new to you in this role?

Mark Larwood
00:26:39

It's new to me, yeah. It's something that was very strongly supported by Steve and Rob. Who are you two founders of our business?

Dom Hawes
00:26:47

What I'm learning, actually, is that this may be a way to build long and short of it into the very DNA of your business that, as you said, by definition, OKR is looking more to the long term. And KPI's are very much about. Actually, if we're honest, they're about what have we just done? They're not even about the future. So. Okay.

There's a good learning for you. Unicorn is if anyone's got experience of using OKRs and KPI's together, I'd love to talk to you. You can find me on LinkedIn. I am Dom horse.

Let's just talk very quickly before we bring this to an end, mark, about team building.

Because in the environment you're in, which is extraordinarily fast paced, when growth happens like that, actually identifying how you're going to build a team into the future is really hard because a lot of it, I guess, is going to be dictated by who gets acquired and the skills they bring in and the direction. Because you may shape shift a little bit as you go down the acquisition trail. How do you think about planning team at the moment? Or don't you?

Do you have to be a little bit opportunistic and reactive?

Mark Larwood
00:27:48

I think if I went back 15 months when I started the business, the team I've got at the moment probably wouldn't be quite as it is, but be pretty close. Right. I knew that I needed to recruit senior people. It's taken some time.

It's only the last three or four weeks, maybe two months, that I would say actually I've got. My core team were good. When I joined there was nobody and I just had lots of time to talk to myself.

But very quickly recruited in senior people know what they're doing. To your point about agility around. Well, I think you alluded to agility around recruitment.

I think if I think back to January this year, I was recruiting four new roles.

And I think when I recruited the fourth person, it's probably different if had that been the first person with me, because based on the skills and capabilities which came in, then shaped how I looked, I was looking for all four simultaneously. But it was quite an agile, fluid process I was going through to recruit.

So it looks very different to hat if somebody else had come through the door first, perhaps, but I'm really happy with the team. I've got really well experienced people who are doing some great things now it's a case of. Right, we've got that foundation.

I think the next phase of evolution can probably be a little bit more predictable.

Dom Hawes
00:29:07

So basically you knew exactly the functions and the roles that you needed to have fulfilled. Different people had different skill sets, so as you went on, you were basically looking to recruit those that you were missing.

So you had to redefine some of the roles.

Mark Larwood
00:29:21

I wouldn't say I redefined the roles, but I think it was just like maybe some of the skills that people had within it. Right. You know, for example, I've recruited content manager.

Whether that was somebody who was able to write or to manage content, I wasn't really sure. I've got somebody who can do both, so I didn't need to worry about writing so much elsewhere.

It's things like that, which is we always put 1000 bullet points on a job spec. Right. You never fulfill all of them. There's a course that you want to fill and there's some gaps. So filter the gap is, I guess, where I got to.

Dom Hawes
00:29:56

Yeah, because in large organizations, I think sometimes, or more established, I should say, rather than large, sometimes where you have a person who is really good, you end up building the role around the person rather than the other way around. But when you start with a blank sheet of paper, you know, there's a bunch of capability you need to fill.

Certainly at the beginning, it's a bit like building the business, actually.

You know, in our business, I know I knew that I wanted to be able to have certain capabilities in the business, so I needed apr company in a particular vertical market. And as you go on, we filled in gaps.

I would say when you start out, you buy what you can and then you buy what you need and then you buy what you want. That sort of progression as you go. And maybe that's the same when you're trying to build a team from scratch. Maybe.

So I guess it's kind of hard to attract talent into a brand new startup that doesn't really have any history. Or maybe I'm wrong.

Mark Larwood
00:30:52

I think I found some roles harder than others in the roles I thought would be hardest. Turned out to be the easiest in some respects is more people for a certain role than there were for others.

I think people bought into the vision when I put too fine a point, I think people bought into me and what I was able to tell them, they bought into the rest of the organization and bought into the vision that we've got got.

And I think one of the things that everybody, when I've talked to them after coming in, every single one of them has said what they love about working with cloud clever, is the ownership, the autonomy and the ability to shape things. They've also talked about it's hard work and things change, but they're all enjoying it. I'm pretty sure they're all enjoying it.

They tell me they are.

Dom Hawes
00:31:41

It takes a particular mindset that you've just hit on it. I mean, autonomy and the ability to help write the agenda or should come with an acceptance that what you think is normal is going to change.

You mentioned the change word now, and I've certainly seen that ourselves, like, oh, Dom changed his mind all the time. I don't. We've got a shape shift as we go. The vision always remains the same, but how you go about getting there sometimes changes.

And I think that, you know, when you're in a rapidly scaling company, the people that come and join the team need to accept that change is going to be very frequent.

Mark Larwood
00:32:14

I think that's right. And people have to accept that change is very good reason we won't always get it right.

But if nine times out of ten, eight times out of ten, we change for the better, then that's a good trajectory. Right?

Dom Hawes
00:32:27

If you could give one piece of advice to businesses who are either about to scale quickly or who are in the middle of it right now, or even maybe to your younger self when you were in one of your previous roles, knowing what you now know, what do you think that might be?

Mark Larwood
00:32:43

I don't think I can restrict it to one thing, to be honest.

Dom Hawes
00:32:45

Dom, give us more than one thing, then that's fine.

Mark Larwood
00:32:49

I think in times of stress or uncertainty or confusion, or whatever it is, sit back, relax, take some time, go for a walk, whatever it is, and just think through before acting or before deciding on something that sounds like something was going to happen right now.

But I think generally just sit back and take the time to reflect on change, on direction, and make sure that, I think, test whatever you come up with against. How am I going to feel about this in ten minutes a year? Ten years? How important is this, really?

That's the piece of advice I give to myself personally, because I think over time I've felt like the whole world was on my shoulders half an hour later, let alone a year later. You barely remember those things. So I think perspective is really, really important. Really, really important.

Dom Hawes
00:33:42

I think that's really good advice.

Mark Larwood
00:33:44

And I've talked a lot about the long, the short, but at the end of the day, I kind of feel like there's only now, right? There's only now.

And this is personal business, I think just be present, think about today, what you can achieve today, which, yes, will affect the long term. And be present, right. Tell your kids to put their phones down, talk to them, things like that.

Dom Hawes
00:34:07

William, what excites you most about the future, both personally and in the industry you're in?

Mark Larwood
00:34:13

So I can't really answer this question without mentioning AI. AI is something that I'm sure everybody says, and it's something that really excites and puts the fear of God in me at the same time as well.

But I think what's important is what, what AI enables us to do, the people, right.

If AI can take away the mundane, the everyday, the boring stuff, then that should unleash a whole load of creativity and focus on purpose or make things a little bit more exciting, even more exciting than they are anyway, right? Give us the ability to do new things.

I'm really interested in what our industries, us as individuals, the marketing profession can do for good, for society in general, personally, professionally, whatever it is, marketing is.

Dom Hawes
00:35:04

A force for good. And AI, I think can help us in that. It makes us more efficient, it makes us more effective.

Anything that does that means we're probably reducing our footprint. It means we're probably wasting less of people's time and getting our messages, maybe delivered more.

Mark Larwood
00:35:21

As long as we don't use that time, it's freed up to doom scroll on TikTok or whatever. I'm happy. Let's use it for productivity.

Dom Hawes
00:35:28

Unless you're doom scrolling unicorny content, of.

Mark Larwood
00:35:30

Course, in which case that is not doom scrolling though.

Dom Hawes
00:35:32

Dom, what parting thoughts do you have for unicorners on the importance of time and patience, particularly for those who are facing similar challenges or who may be feeling stressed in their careers?

Mark Larwood
00:35:42

Yeah, I think acknowledge that it's hard. I think balancing those short term goals, long term goals, it really isn't an either or. Youve got to do both.

And I think finding the right balance for your particular reality, whats happening in your business, in your life, whatever is really, really important.

But whatever you decide, I think take people along that journey with you, have that transparency, that focus, that understanding and communication to make sure that others around you understand where youre trying to get to and that they are part of that journey and part of that future as well.

Dom Hawes
00:36:18

Thank you very much indeed, Mark.

Now, if Unicorn is, you may not want unicorners to get in touch with you, but if people want to get in touch with you or find out more how they go about doing that.

Mark Larwood
00:36:25

I'm always delighted to talk to fellow marketers, or others for that matter. Find me on LinkedIn. I'm Mark Larwood. Simply that.

Dom Hawes
00:36:33

Well, huge thank you to Mark for taking the time to come and speak to us today. And by the way, thank you to you too for taking the time to watch or listen to this episode.

We understand that your time is precious and you are probably very judicious about where you spend it, so thank you for spending it with us. Now, if you want to talk to me about any of the content that you've seen or heard today, you can find me on LinkedIn.

And there's a link to my profile, by the way, on the show notes today, which you can find at unicorny Dot co dot UK or in the show notes just below. If you're watching this on YouTube and if you did like the content and you want more, please give us a thumbs up or subscribe.

And if you're feeling really kind, I.

Dom Hawes
00:37:12

Mean really kind, I'd love you to.

Dom Hawes
00:37:14

Write us a review. But that is all for today. Thank you again and we will see you next week.