We recently interviewed Drew Neisser for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Drew and here’s what we discussed-
1. Finding your industry niche and maneuvering through a crisis
2. The importance of building a collective understanding of your company
3. Inspiration for developing Renegade’s CATS (Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful, Scientific) framework
4. How to determine the true value of your content
5. The importance of the client in marketing
6. How to stand out as a brand in a competitive market
From running an experiential guerilla agency to leading a cutting-edge strategy firm – in this podcast, we hear about Drew Neisser’s journey at Renegade and starting CMO huddles.
About our host:
Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by the means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.
About our guest:
Drew Neisser is the founder of Renegade, the award-winning strategic boutique for B2B innovators, and CMO Huddles, the fast-growing community of B2B CMOs. Drew is uniquely wired as both a writer and strategist. He has helped dozens of CMOs build unbeatable brands and told the stories of over 450 marketing CATS via his top-rated podcast, Renegade Marketers Unite, his live streaming show, Renegade Marketers Live, and his column for Ad Age.
The Podcast – The Artfulness of Value Exchange in Marketing- Drew Neisser
Table of Contents
The Intro!
Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda. I’m the creative director at Outgrow.co. And for this month, we are going to interview Drew Naiser, who is the founder and CEO of Renegade, the savvy B2B marketing agency. That’s been helping CMOs to cut through since 1996.
Thanks for joining us, Drew.
Drew Neisser: Uh, thanks for having me. I love your show.
The Rapid Fire Round!
Saksham Sharda: So Drew, we’re going to start with a rapid fire round just to break the ice. You get three passes in case you don’t want to answer the question. You can just say pass, but try to keep your answers to one word or one sentence only.
Drew Neisser: You got it.
Saksham Sharda: All right. So the first one, at what age do you want to retire?
Drew Neisser: Never.
Saksham Sharda: What is something that people often get wrong about you?
Drew Neisser: That I’m really relaxed.
Saksham Sharda: How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?
Drew Neisser: In 16 minutes,
Saksham Sharda: The most embarrassing moment of your life?
Drew Neisser: Jumping from a boat to a dock, but I missed the dock and fell in and then had to change my clothes that night and left underwear in a Bush.
Saksham Sharda: Okay. That was very detailed. I see.
Saksham Sharda: Fill in the blank. An upcoming marketing trend is ____________.
Drew Neisser: An upcoming marketing trend is VCs and PEs discovering that brand matters.
Saksham Sharda: The city in which the best kiss of your life happened?
Drew Neisser: New York City.
Saksham Sharda: Okay. Pick one, Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey
Drew Neisser: Jack Dorsey, two jobs, eight hours a day. Eat. Come on, give me a break.
Saksham Sharda: The first movie that comes to your mind when I say the word ambition,
Drew Neisser: Benjamin Franklin documentary.
Saksham Sharda: Oh, I haven’t seen that. I’m going to, okay. When did you last cry and why?
Drew Neisser: I cry all the time. The last time was probably the movie Coda.
Saksham Sharda: Ah, I haven’t seen it, but it just won the Oscar right.
Drew Neisser: Brilliant movie. And just really sweet.
Saksham Sharda: What advice would you give to your younger self?
Drew Neisser: Uh, don’t put all your eggs in one giant client basket.
Saksham Sharda: Biggest mistake of your career.
Drew Neisser: Probably the same. Putting all the eggs into one client basket. 70% of our business was from one client. No matter what I tried to do, it kept happening.
Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?
Drew Neisser: Uh, lots of sports play racket sports mainly.
Saksham Sharda: Hmm. A habit of yours that you hate
Drew Neisser: Checking Email more than three times a day.
Saksham Sharda: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life?
Drew Neisser: How to respond to a crisis.
Saksham Sharda: Okay. And the last question, your favorite Netflix show
Drew Neisser: During the pandemic, my wife and I decided we couldn’t go anywhere. So we used Netflix as our travel show. So all the international shows. We went to Paris with Call my Agent, Spain, with Money Heist, Israel with Fauda and just, I could keep going.
The Big Questions!
Saksham Sharda: Mm-hmm, okay. Okay, Fair. Well, that’s the end of the rapid fire round. And now we go to the longer questions and I’m interested in how you actually respond to a crisis. Tell us more about that.
Drew Neisser: So, I’ve had several in my career and I think it sort of speaks to a sense of resilience. I’ll give you an example, in 2020, uh, when the pandemic began, I wasn’t sure gee what’s gonna happen to our agency. Um, we’ve been through these before. So my habit now is just assume it’s worse for everyone else. And so that’s, I started reaching out to Chief Marketing Officers in March and by April we started something called CMO huddles. Now, it’s a business that’s as big as Renegade. Uh, and sort of, this is one of the reasons why I don’t need to retire is that I can keep doing this for a long time.
Saksham Sharda: Hmm. So your approach to a crisis is to understand that everyone has a crisis and that kind of normalizes it in a sense.
Drew Nasser: Yeah.
Drew Neisser: So the key is just, just to sort of get outta yourself and sort of say, okay, I don’t know what’s gonna happen to us, but I do know that I can help other people. And, that was sort of when I, when I started reaching out to CMOs and said, how are you doing? And I said, well, my God, we’re having to deal with the office shutdown. We don’t have the ability to run our business remotely. We don’t know if our customers are gonna pay. So we just started troubleshooting all of those issues. And by bringing a group of people together, we met actually 55 times, over a four month, five month period. There were so many issues to sort of address. And it just reminded me. I mean, similarly, I learned that after nine 11 and learned that after, uh, several other things that when you start to see and you really, things are bad, it’s just gonna be worse for other people. And, and if you focus on helping, you’re probably gonna come out of it okay. And you won’t know where you’re gonna come out of it, but you’ll come out of it.
Saksham Sharda: Mm-hmm okay. And how did you come up with the idea of starting CMO huddles anyway, was it from this crisis thing or was there other factors involved in starting something like this?
Drew Neisser: Yeah, there were other factors and you’re quite perceptive. So, uh, a good friend of mine, Pete Kranik had founded the CMO club. Our agency had actually built, done the logo. I’d been part of it for 12 years on March 2nd, 2020, he sold it to Salesforce. And, that just felt like to me, weird, for one and, and two, knowing all the CMOs, I thought particularly B2B CMOs could probably use a different kind of help than the Club was prepared to offer them. So I just saw a window as well. And even we went into sort, we’ll call it a beta test. Although I didn’t really know it as a beta test, it was like, I think I can help folks let’s call it. CMO huddles. Let’s see where it goes. And about three months into it, uh, the CMOs were saying, Drew this is a big idea. This is how you should structure it. This is how you know, the various services that you should provide and they really provided the guidance to get, you know, to get us. So by October 1st we could launch it as a business in 2020.
Saksham Sharda: Okay. And how has Renegade’s mission changed over the years since you founded it in 1993. And how does like CMO huddle kind of play into that?
Drew Neisser: Yeah, it’s interesting. So we’ve all always had this logo of a saw and our mission or purpose, if you will, has always been about cutting through how you cut through has changed a lot. Uh, we started as a guerilla marketing agency and helped a lot of giant firms figure out different ways of engaging and creating sort of unique brand experiences. And that was really good into 2008 when the economy crashed and people just stopped spending money on experiential marketing. So we made a major pivot, and we were doing something called social media before it was called social media. So we said, all right, we’re going all in on that. And that was pretty good for a few years and then realize, well, social’s really part of content. Content’s bigger. We wanna keep moving towards the front of the brand. And ultimately where we are today is, you know, the real way to cut through is strategically and focus on strategy and brand. And so we’ve moved from this, experiential guerilla firm to a sort of leading edge strategy firm, kind of with a, with an evolution of the market, all with the same goal, we’re still trying to help marketers cut through. But we become a lot more focused in terms of the deliverables and CMO huddles fuels Renegade in that, you know, we keep getting smarter about the challenges that CMOs face, having God, I think we’ve done over now, uh, literally hundreds of huddles, um, with hundreds of CMOs and, and that just keeps informing our practice.
Saksham Sharda: So the flexibility, I guess, that Renegade has embraced over the years with it’s changing nature is something that might also, I guess at times, lead to a crisis, if you back the wrong trend at some point, and then how do you handle that?
Drew Neisser: Yeah, it’s true. And again, this is sort of that moment where I talked about earlier, the bill sort of ability to sort of responding to a crisis and, and pivot if needed. I mean, in, in 2008, what happened was, first of all, I started Renegade with Dentsu. We had a big parent company and we started to get Panasonic business. That was our main reason for being with Dentsu. We grew that business up. It was huge, we were their second largest vendor. Then it was clear they were gonna be leaving over a certain period of time for a number of reasons. It was 70% of our business! And I couldn’t write a business plan based on losing that account. So I went to Dentsu and said, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with Renegade, but I’d rather go it alone. Why don’t you give me some, you know, let me buy you out so to speak. And let’s see what happens. You know, we really had a very tough time, uh, in 2008, but it was, we had to jettison a lot of businesses and ultimately what saved us was focus at that point is getting rid of some of the businesses and just focusing on social and content. That led to me starting to interview CMOs, and I’ve interviewed over 500 now, and that’s been a continuous source of learning and knowledge and ability to sort of stay what’s on their minds, how to, how to pivot, help, you know, led to writing two books. And, anyway, all of it comes back to when you a crisis, figure out, you know, how you can make a difference, how you can help.
Saksham Sharda: Hmm. And do you think this pivoting is something that’s going to exponentially increase as we enter a much faster paced marketing sphere in the future? Cause like I assume everything is increasing exponentially. So the next thing would be the next leaders would be who can really you pivot really fast to transactions.
Drew Neisser: Yeah and I’m at two minds of this because I honestly think that, you know, if I were advising an agency right now, I would, you know, where would you wanna be? And you know, you really wanna try to find a place where you’re the best at some kind of vertical and horizontal access, right? The type of business that you are, you know, the services that you provide in the industries you serve and you find an intersection there where you own it, like you are the best content agency for healthcare, for example, I mean that’s a positioning and it’s likely that’s a 10 year, 15 year run. You don’t wanna get like if you were just an agency that, for example, did we just do six sense implementations for healthcare? That’d be a problem because that technology could go away. So, you know, you wanna give yourself focus ideally as an agency, vertical and horizontal, but not so narrow that it could be gone in five years
Saksham Sharda: And could you give an example of someone who’s managed to do that a little, according to what you’re saying?
Drew Neisser: You know, it’s hard. I mean, I think if you look at healthcare agencies in general and I mentioned, they’ve been doing very well. I mean, caus that’s a segment that just keeps growing and growing. And I now know that there are, I can’t name them, but there are healthcare that just do social or healthcare agencies that just do digital. I’m less inclined to sort of worry about the services that you provide as opposed to what for whom you provide them. Cuz that’s where the expertise lies in the industries.
Saksham Sharda: So well we read your blog series about C.A.T.S, Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful Scientific framework for you on your website. Would you like to talk more about that? Tell us about cats.
Drew Neisser: Sure. So this came out after I wrote my first book, which was called the CMOs periodic table and it featured 64 interviews with chief marketing officers. The people started asking me Drew, so I can’t get to 64, break it down. What are the traits of the most successful CMOs? And so I started thinking about that and came up with C.A.T.S, which stands for Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful and Scientific. Then, as I got to my second book, it actually became the framework for the whole book. It’s a framework that I road tested with CMOs for a couple years. The blog post that you saw was a precursor to the book. And if you follow that thing all, if you don’t have a great strategy and like if you don’t dare to be to distinct forget about execution. So you’re only gonna be as good as your strategy. I’m afraid that we did some research and this is why I wrote the book is that B2B marketing had gotten ridiculously complicated, but not more effective. You start to boil that down and you say, well, why isn’t it more effective? And you ask CMOs, okay, what, is your product or service distinct in the marketplace? And 60% say, yeah, well, and then we say, is your marketing distinct? 40% said, yeah. And say, wait, that’s a huge gap. That’s just wrong. That’s just patently wrong. It is the job of the marketer to help differentiate, distinguish or create a unique brand. So, that takes courage and a lot of, and that’s when you have the courage to say, no, we can’t say that. And that, and that when you have the courage to say, we’re going to be a color that isn’t every other, everybody else’s color. When you have the courage to say, we’re gonna talk differently internally and externally, we’re gonna be different. Ideally, we’re gonna be unique. That takes courage and not every, you know, marketer has the courage to butt against, Sometimes the CEO, sometimes the board of directors, sometimes others who are just saying demand, demand, demand, just, just buy another Google Ad. So that’s courage that we can get to artful. I’m happy to keep going or pause.
Saksham Sharda: Please do. Okay. So
Drew Neisser: Great. So you have the courage to create this unique positioning right now you’ve gotta artfully. And the, one of the interesting things about being a chief marketing officer is you can’t do it alone. I mean, you can’t even try to do alone. You could come up day one, walk in there with a brilliant idea and it won’t happen because you have to build the is sort of a collective understanding of the company. And so the first thing I recommend to CMOs do and have it in the book is do a employee survey. It’s so easy. It’s so basic and just sort of ask them, are they proud of working at the company? Would they recommend the company and ask ’em for four words to describe the brand and you just, it’s amazing what they deliver. And then you can say, Hey, thank you for your input, wherever you end up with your unique strategy.
Drew Neisser: So artfulness is not just a creative ability to think about design and words. Those are important. It’s also of artfulness and being able to bring the organization together around a common purpose and, and that’s again, takes the courage to have an interesting distinctive one. And then it takes artfulness to rally everybody around it. And that’s good. Those two things are really good. Building blocks. Agencies love those two cause agencies, the liver courage and artfulness in their sleep. The next part, I think it makes it kind of interesting is thoughtfulness in that we live in this give to get economy where if you do stuff, if you deliver value in every single thing, if marketing is an exchange of value, then chances are you’re really gonna be helpful and considered. And this is more important than ever now that you know, people are doing their own journeys, they’re buying without any interaction with a salesperson, even in B2B.
Drew Neisser: And so thoughtfulness is key. And I mean, but what I mean by that is what could you do for a prospect or a customer or an employee that will help them in their life, whether it’s their work life or their home life. Okay, all of those things are good, really good and can go really far, but you still lose. If you don’t have the scientific method, if you don’t have some metrics to back you up. And so in the last three chapters of the book, I talk about this, measure what matters cause most of ’em have too many metrics, but they don’t have employee customer prospect and brand metrics. Um, automate attentively basically. And B2B, the tech stacks are taking up 20, 25% of budget. That’s a joke to me, get it down to 10. And then lastly the best part of our business is an opportunity to experiment. So we talk about testing to triumph and I love that. And as that’s where, if you can build a culture of, of experimentation as a chief marketing officer, you could become the CEO of the company.
Saksham Sharda: And, and what, where did you get the ideas for all of this from? So what were the inspirational source material for writing about C.A.T.S?
Drew Neisser: So almost all of it are the interviews that I’ve been doing. I mentioned it in 2008, when we made that pivot, I said, okay, we’re gonna be experts in social and content. And to do that, we’re gonna be practitioners. So, I started, I said, I’m gonna write an article every week. Well, you can’t write an article every week unless you have a source material for that. So I start cause I’m just not that creative. I started interviewing CMOs and I’m now well over 500. I look at every interview that I do as a case history. And so, I don’t always know, didn’t know that when I was doing an interview, you know, three years ago with Jeff Perkins about what he was doing at, Park mobile, that that was gonna become part of the book, uh, under the, uh, you know, experimentation and building a culture of experimentation. But, uh, it was great that I had done that interview cause I was doing all the homework. I just wasn’t sure where, uh, where it was gonna apply.
Saksham Sharda: And what is the count with one article per week? Is it still one article per week or have you increased or how do you get yourself to write in the first place?
Drew Neisser: Okay. So, um, first I committed to it and then, did and you know, it used to take me four hours and that was all, I would give myself to write a thousand word article. That was what I gave myself to do. Now I, and then I did that for one year for sure. 52 articles that the first year now it’s, probably fewer like, because my podcast sort of produces articles really easily, because we take the podcast, we shorten it down to a Q and A, a shorter version of it goes into adage and we’re doing two of those. I mean, maybe I’m doing one or two a month now, for a while. It was, it was, yeah. You know, I’ve got a podcast, I’ve got a live streaming show, we’ve got Renegade and we’ve got CMO huddles, something has to give
Saksham Sharda: Okay. So how do you determine how value will the content or any content is to the client’s time? When do you know it’s good enough, for example.
Drew Neisser: You know, I love that question and, and I’m turn it around because there’s no shortage of content, right? We there’s so much content out there. And so to me, what’s happened is, you hear this expression, digital fatigue in, that sort of creeped in and people started calling it Zoom fatigue, then they realized, no, this is bigger. We’re just tired of being online. So the bar for quality content went up. So the way I look at it, every piece of content that I produce or we produce is meant for a very singular audience of chief marketing officers, will they get value out of it? And if they won’t get value out of it, if, if I don’t think they will, then we won’t run it. Similarly, for anybody creating content, if you know your target audience, but I always say like, would you send this to your CEO? Would you have them read this? Cause if they would find value out of it, then chances are the rest of your target will. So you just have to raise the bar. Uh, I think now, because there is so much content and I look at our shows and constantly question, and this is why you have to do homework before you do the interview. And I don’t everybody I talk to, I don’t do a podcast with cuz I don’t think there’s a story that’s going to be distinctive enough or that I’ll be able to suck out and say, okay, here’s three things that I learned from this episode.
Saksham Sharda: And how do you think like, uh, could you tell us more about talk about customers if at all, do they have a role in marketing?
Drew Neisser: Oh my God. Yes, of course they do. I mean, yeah, they are everything and, and you know, there’s, there’s no doubt there’s a partnership. I mean the best work that, that we’ve done over the years, for the most part, I would say nine out of 10 times with the best clients, the ones who sort of understood their role, your role, but could push you to say, well, that’s pretty good, but can you do better? And you know, I like this, but I don’t like this. And have you talked to, you know, show this to another one of our customers and get some input on it. So I, I totally welcome and in, you know, if a long career in marketing, it’s like there, you know, as the old saying goes, clients get the work that they deserve. And we’ve worked with some just amazing clients who really do push us, push us in the right way.
Saksham Sharda: And what’s some of the best business advice you have ever go from a client or from someone I dunno.
Drew Neisser: You know, part of it is, is something that I probably not always listen, but you know, anytime anybody’s at focus, I would pause, and this is just part of me being kind of interested in lots of things and being a little A.D.D as I often forget to focus. So, uh, that’s probably always been the best advice anybody’s ever said. You know, you’re doing too much as an agency, you might be doing too much or individually you might be trying to do too much. So, focus is your friend.
Saksham Sharda: Hmm. And what, I guess this is something that has come up in a podcast quite a lot, that a little bit of attention deficiency kind of helps in this world, is this internet of click baiting and everything. What do you think about that?
Drew Neisser: Is it?
Saksham Sharda: I know you said it’s a liability, but do you also think it’s, uh, the opposite of a liability sometimes?
Drew Neisser: Yeah. I mean, I’m with, so Peter Shanken has done a whole thing on this and how ADHD really made a huge difference in his life and how he was able to. And I think I’ve, I actually interviewed him and I saw what his situation it’s far worse than mine. Um, the answer is yes, in, in that, when I do actually focus on something, I get lost and I have to apologize for being late to meetings all the time, because that happens to me, but I am only apologizing slightly because when I get in the zone, I’m in it and I’m accomplishing something and feeling really good about it. So if I’m 10 minutes late to, now hopefully it’s not for a podcast interview where a CMOs waiting for me, but, you know, so there is the good side of it. You know, the bad side of it is that you’re checking your email too many times. The bad side of it is it look a squirrel. You know, you get distracted. And again, if the opposite of focus is distraction, that’s the battle that, uh, that I think we all face to one degree or another.
Saksham Sharda: So speaking of really getting into something and enjoying it, tell us the biggest, the question is business accomplishment, but I’m just gonna say biggest accomplishment this year. It doesn’t have to be business related, could be a meeting you went into and you really liked it. I dunno,
Drew Neisser: Uh, business that’s the biggest accomplishment. Well, um, probably, you know, we just surpassed a hundred subscribers at, CMO huddles, um, which was a milestone, of ours and, and an exciting moment, that sort of both was kind of proof of concept and proof that we had something really exciting going here. So that, yeah, I would say that was probably, the bell ringer so far this year.
Saksham Sharda: Okay. Well, congratulations. And we saw your mascot, Louie, on Renegade’s leadership team. Clearly, he’s doing a great job. What would you like to say to your canine readership?
Drew Neisser: Oh my gosh. Yes. It’s funny. He’s right here. Right now sleeping, just beside me, coaching me along the way, you know, it’s a dog eat dog world, but, uh, you know, be good and seek out those treats
Saksham Sharda: So what’s with cats and dogs?
Drew Neisser: You know, look, I’m an animal lover. It’s uh, what, again, I tell you. But what’s funny about it is, well, we all love our animals. Right. And there’s a certain way of, if, if you can get people to see things in things that they like and appreciate, it’s just that much more memorable. Right. And, and then, so the, the cats thing is it’s like, what, wait, what, it’s a little bit, why are you talking about marketing theory and cats? And to me that’s sort of part of the story.
Saksham Sharda: Yeah. I think Product Hunt and entire marketing is around cats. Like if you go to their website, it’s like cats everywhere. Uh, but so rarely the question then is drew, are you a cat person or a dog person?
Drew Neisser: You know, I both, it’s it. I think, I don’t think, see why you need to have a choice. We had both for years.
Saksham Sharda: We should have put that in the rapid fire round and made you pick one, and then there’d be like a PR disaster somewhere. Okay, are there any mistakes you’ve made that you don’t want any other marketers to make?
Drew Neisser: Oh, God, I’ve made so many mistakes. You know, I’m really tired of making mistakes. Yeah, let’s see. We fired two multinational clients within a three month period. I think probably we should have only fired one of them or spaced it out a little bit. That would be one, we were just a little too quick to say. Yeah. I don’t think there’s a culture match here. There probably were times where, we maybe underinvested in certain opportunities as they were, as they were coming up. I would say that a mistake, if you really wanna grow your company fast, sometimes I think I probably wasn’t as tough as I could have, should have been. And that, again, it depends on where you wanna end up.
Saksham Sharda: And so when you fired the two clients, I guess there was a crisis situation, but you know how to deal with those after having well, you know,
Drew Neisser: Look, I mean, you know, you’re only as good as your clients. And if you have clients that are really wearing your team down and you’re not making any money on them, no matter how good the brand name or frankly, how good the work that you are doing for them is you’re gonna either, something’s gonna break, right. Because why are you doing work for a client that you’re not making any money on? And, and two, why are your employees miserable working on that client? You either have to fix the relationship and, and confront the client on it, or, or you do have to walk away. Um, and it’s just painful when you do it, cuz you, you, you should have a plan B. Right? Okay. Well, maybe you do it when you win another client. Right. You just plan it out. Don’t just get rid of it. When. It’s like you’ve got the 10th complaint about how the client treated one employer.
Saksham Sharda: Actually I was actually listening to one of your podcasts in which you were talking about, I think your guest was talking about how small and medium businesses have an advantage that they can have 24/7 customer support, as compared to enterprises who would really get drowned if they offered 24/7 customer support. So how do you think small and medium businesses should go about interacting with clients? Like what should be something and advice about?
Drew Neisser: Well, so I, it’s so interesting cause I’m listening to what’s the book, it’s called Free Time and I’m fascinated by this notion that a small business, particularly one where you own the company yourself, that you can set up a company that works for you. And in other words, and you could say, we don’t do customer service on the weekends. Right? You could do that as a small business and we say, but here’s how, we have an online something or other to do it. So I feel like a small business gives you an advantage in a lot of ways and that you can define the parameters, whereas a large business in a medium sized business, the marketplace kind of defines it. Right. And you can make that part of your personality. It’s just harder with bigger businesses because if everybody has 24/7 customer support and you don’t, um, that that’s a problem. I mean, imagine an airline that didn’t have 24/7 customer support. Yeah. That would be bad. Right. So, anyway, I think the interesting part of being an entrepreneur right now is not necessarily saying, gee, I want to get from five people to a thousand people, but how do I create a five, 10 person company that every employee is getting its really feeling good about their contribution and maybe they’re only working four days a week
Saksham Sharda: And, the last question, what would you be doing if not this
Drew Neisser: Well, my third book is going to be on Benjamin Franklin. But it will be from a very funky angle and I would love to be talking to seventh graders about this remarkable human being, but strengths and weaknesses, cause he was really a true human being. I mean he had lots of flaws, but, and sort of get them excited about the possibility of what one individual could accomplish in their lifetime. And that would probably be me.
Saksham Sharda: So you’re writing the next Hamilton
Drew Neisser: Well kinda, but also more importantly than writing it is just, that gives me permission to go to classrooms and talk about this individual in a way that frankly, I don’t even think the documentary that I’m, that I’m watching on, Burns really gets at what, which is cause he was, he accomplished so much, but the inspiration that is there to be found in his story is, um, I think might be a little lost right now in that documentary and, and I think we need inspiration right now.
Saksham Sharda: And earlier you said you were listening to a book about something, so you’re listening to books, so you’re doing audio books a lot.
Drew Neisser: Oh, oh I do. I listen, I listen to a lot of books. Yeah. And right now could be anything, but I’m obsessed with, well, part of, it’s not this, that for one of the things I know about CMOs is that they’re all time constrained. Most of us are time constrained. So I’ve really been focused lately on how we can be more effective without spending more time. Right. Sort of changing this formula. So I’ve, this is the third book that I’ve listened to in the last month on just on time management, energy management and, and finding ways of getting things done without putting in 90 hours a week.
Saksham Sharda: And where do you go on a hunt for these books?
Drew Neisser: So they usually come recommended or it sort of becomes a series like all a I’ll be listening to one and they’ll recommend another or I’ll talk to someone about it. And so, you know, I was talking to someone at Franklin Covey, for example, they’re an expert in this area and they recommended a book, uh, that I, so, you know, that’s the book I listened to and then discovered this other one because Dory Clark mentioned it.
Saksham Sharda: Mm-hmm and then last, last question is you said you’re gonna have a 10 minute coffee break after this. So do you actually just drink coffee for 10 minutes doing absolutely nothing. So is that like a meditative thing?
Drew Neisser: No, no, no, no, no. So Renegade and when we went virtual pretty much right away and is, have no plans to go back to physical offices, but one of the ways that we stay together is that, and we used to do this twice a week, but now we, we do it once a week is we have a coffee break. Um, and we just, you know, we chat it’s it’s water cooler conversation, get our beverage of choice and uh, hang out and find out. And because our folks are spread out now, not just around the city, but outside the country, it’s kind of fun. Oh, what’s happening in Ireland. What’s happening in Copenhagen. And so we sort of get today in, in international news plus, uh, you know, just hearing what’s happening in people’s lives.
Let’s Conclude!
Saksham Sharda: Okay. Well, thanks everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s market of the month that was Drew Nasser, who is the founder and CEO of Renegade, the savvy B2B marketing agency that’s been helping CMOs cut through since 1996. Thanks for joining us Drew.
Drew Neisser: Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for doing this show. It’s great.
Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.
