EP035 - Why do you need a story for your company with Brad Bogus
About the episode
This episode focuses on activism - why should companies have a mission or a vision for their future and frame a story around their product or offers? We dive deep into mission statements, corporate storytelling, and fractional leadership as well. To discuss, I have Brad Bogus with me, who is helping cannabis brands to push forward with fractional marketing leadership and storytelling.
About the guest
Brad is an activist, storyteller, and entrepreneur, inspired to be a purpose-driven leader making an impact for good. He has led teams from startups to publicly traded companies in the cannabis industry and beyond. He has 17 years of experience as a marketing and media leader, has launched multiple startups, and mentors founders to achieve success through storytelling and communications.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
The productivity of engaged employees who are inspired by your company's mission is 325% more than a merely satisfied employee.
Tech companies are product focused. But we don't need more products. So how do you differentiate yourself from other products? By adding a purpose or vision.
There's a constant movement against remote work. And the fact of the matter is that that's a death throw. That is not a trend reset because people like me will never consider an in-office job again; it's just off the table.
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Welcome everyone yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we will talk about fractional leadership. We will discuss how leaders can help companies in fractional roles and how we can implement long-term changes, even if we are there for the friction of our time. To discuss this, I have Brad Bogus, who is a fractional CMO for growing companies. Hi, Brad. How are you?
I'm great, Peter. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited about this call.
Thank you for joining. You quickly pulled out your professional voice. I love it. And your professional attitude. Thank you very much.
My background is in theater acting, so I can easily put on a mask whenever I need to.
I never met a CMO who was an actor before and theater actor not movie actor, right?
Yep. Right. I mean, I've done some stuff in small budget, independent film stuff, and I've even produced a number of different film projects, but my heart and my study all came from theater. Yeah.
This is amazing.
It's immensely helpful for my work, to be perfectly honest. But we can dig into that.
Obviously. Yes. Yeah. I actually, I thought that half of my leadership roles more connected towards psychology and therapy and the rest is more like a professional stuff, but I never thought about acting. That's also also insanely useful. This is not the prewritten podcast, but the first question is usually the same for everyone because this is about remote leadership and we are also discussing fractional leadership. What's your remote journey? I suppose you work remotely for most of the clients that you do. How you started? How, what's your journey in remote?
Yeah, it actually goes back over 10 years when I was an entrepreneur in Austin, Texas, I connected with sort of a purpose-driven entrepreneur named Ruben Cantu. And at the same time, the Mashable Social Good Summit was occurring in New York, and they sort of encouraged everybody in all these different cities to join in on the Social Good Summit, have versions of the summit in their own cities, but also livestream in the New York conversation. And the idea was to kickstart conversations about social entrepreneurism and the UN sustainable development goals and in a way that, you know, the outside of non-profit space could activate and engage. So how do you get businesses and for-profit entities to understand how to do social good and what social goods should we as a city decide to undertake? And at our summit in Austin unanimously for the most part everyone voted on wanting to impact climate change and air quality as a result of traffic congestion. So Austin had the most congested traffic of any city in the US at the time. Maybe still does because it was an extremely rapidly growing city that was previously a small college town. So they didn't have the infrastructure to handle the development that was occurring, and especially the population growth. And that caused massive traffic congestion, which meant bad air quality, smog, things that Austin had never dealt with before. So we decided to take on the initiative of reducing traffic by creating what was called a work from home day. Now, keep in mind, like now the paradigm is so different, it's work from home every day. Back then we were just trying to convince people to take one day where they would get all of their employees to work from home. And the idea being you contribute to reducing traffic congestion, which means increasing air quality, right? Like there's a very direct correlation there that your company can get involved in. And what the, the only way we could facilitate that occurring was by consulting with the business community at large partnering with entities like Google and Facebook, whom were all also had some stations in Austin. And so we facilitated all these different workshops and we were teaching people about Google productivity tools, about tools like Skype, because that was bigger than Zoom at the time.
Yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean?
There was no zoom 10 years ago.
That was No Zoom. That's right. Yeah. So, you know, we were using Skype or Google Hangouts and you know, every productivity tool that we could train people on. And then we got a number of bigger employers to sign a pledge that they would do work from home day. So we picked a day, we had everyone point their, you know, sort of projects towards that day. We eventually got the governor of Texas to declare officially Texas work from home day. And on that day we reduced traffic congestion by over 25%. It was something like we took 20 to 30,000 cars off the road, largest employers in Austin signed up to do it. We had news anchors working from home, and it was so novel to them. They were like, oh my God, I'm doing my spot from my couch right now wearing in my pajamas. And then they did a Skype call with me live. And like having an interview on the air at the time on TV that was conducted via Skype was like super weird and revolutionary, even though it seems so rote and repeat now. It's like every interview is done that way. But for some reason, like not having the production crew, there was like a big novel thing. So I did my TV interview from my living room talking to a reporter that was from her living room, and everyone's like, wow, this is so novel. And that's really where I got my start on it. But again, that was one day out of the year. It wasn't until Covid that I actually got to live a truly remote work lifestyle despite all of my advocacy over the following decade at every company that I was at to do so. Even my own companies by the way, like we weren't fully remote and we didn't do remote enough that we could have possibly just saved ourselves all the money on office space.
This is a amazing journey. First and second, and everything happened 10 years ago, right? It was like or almost like 10 years ago. And that time at it was, that was a super freaking novel thing as you said. Actually, I think no one would have pulled you back to become a C M O with that background. So.
That's right.
Theater act, right? Like theater acting plus social activism and work for profit, of course. Not of course, but kind of. Yeah. That's like, like one single-minded one road to being a cmo.
Right. Yeah, so I was in Austin for 11 years as an entrepreneur. I started up a number of businesses. I was running two agencies. They sort of sequentially, not concurrently, And after about 11 years, I just sort of got bored. You know, I kind of like had set out to do what I had set out to do. I wasn't trying to grow a huge agency and sell it to some major company, although we did go through a couple different acquisition opportunities. Unfortunately the two most promising ones fell through in the last minute as those things can often do. And so at that point I was like, yeah, okay, well you know, I don't need to be stuck to this thing, right? Just cuz I started it doesn't mean I'm stuck here forever. I can choose to do whatever I want, I have my own life, right? So I talked with the mentor. I was like, I don't know what to be when I grow up. He was like, make life easy on you. Pick one industry that you're really interested in and just focus your attention there. Find opportunities there that you can fit because you're more likely to find something you'll like and it'll make it easier on you cuz you can whittle down, you know, everything down to something. And so I picked the cannabis industry. Which I was super excited about because of a lot of reasons. But that sort of social activism side of me was the, the main draw. The war on drugs was devastating, it was racist, it was classist. It was sort of the crux of all of the social ills that we experienced here in the US and then we shipped that, we exported it all across the globe. In such ways that even some countries are extremely punitive about drugs. Like Thailand was really well known for executions of drug addiction, right? So like the war on drugs was so unbelievably unjust and awful for our society that the idea that we could actually like start an industry that could battle those ills was really exciting for me. As well as just, I knew a whole lot about it. I mean, you know, low-key I had been consuming cannabis for 10 years prior to that point in a very illegal state of Texas. So, you know, I had learned a lot about it. I believed in the medicinal power of the plant. I used it for focus and productivity and so anyway, getting into the cannabis industry allowed me to like, sort of focus on one place and then that's what led me out of Austin to Denver and then eventually the Bay Area of California. And now back to Denver again, where is where I focus all my professional attention now for the most part.
We are not connected through this industry, by the way, but I still want to make it really clear that I am, by the way, pro legal for every kind of drug. That's highly controversial idea. And I'm saying every, I mean every. Because it's a medical question and lifestyle question, not a crime or legal question, I think.
Right.
Second, I do believe, and by the way, it's not coincident. I think that we got connected because of the same mindset on this.
Indeed.
Yeah. And one other thing, because not all of the audience might know this, but in the US and I might be wrong, so correct me like around five or or six years when marijuana became a little bit more, more legal in certain states. Due to the activism that they did. So again, just reflecting back, yes. It was partially at least part of the kind of the social activism side from the communities around, right. But in Colorado was the first one, I guess.
Yep. Colorado, Oregon and Washington all opened up their recreational markets in 2014, but Colorado was the first to vote for it, so technically the first. And it's, it, it's been interesting. There's, so I think right now you, there's 23 or so states out of the 50 that have some level of legal marijuana program, there are eight or nine being propped up concurrently right now on top of that. So like, the tide is rapidly shifting. But in 2014 it was very, very revolutionary, if you will, and it was activism that started the industry. So, you know, in my summation, there would be a higher level of activists involved in this industry than in any other. And while marketing has been sort of my mainstay I have always been, as I mentioned about you know, this project in 2012, I've always been corporate social responsibility and social good minded. So in my opinion, You know, we've got plenty of nonprofits out there all fighting for donation dollars, but I just inherently understand that consumers are going to value a company more if that company is doing good for the world, right? If I know that my dollar is going to buy a product that is not damaging the planet, and in fact it's probably actually potentially helping the planet, as well as doing some level of give back to their community or to a certain, you know constituency of people like Black Americans who have been subjected to unbelievable overcriminalization for the entirety of America's existence, right? Like anytime that a company aligns with those things and puts purpose ahead of profit or maybe equal to profit, there's a a structure called triple bottom Line, right? And that's people, planet, and profit, right? When you equally prioritize those three things, and any business strategy and business plan, then I don't mean like, okay, here's our business plan, but then we're also doing this donation stuff. I mean, like, no intertwine what the business does with that purpose. A very easy example being Tom's shoes. You buy a pair of shoes, they give a pair of shoes to someone in need, right? It's like part of the business strategy, part of the foundation of how they work. When you do that, you make more money just simply you do better, right? Like there's data all up and down. All the research has been done on this. It's very clear. Employees produce more employees are happier, especially millennial and Gen Z employees are way more aligned to purpose than they are to profit and salary. So you'll find that nowadays people will take a less salaried position if the company stands for something, then they will get more money from a company that doesn't, that might be miserable. And I think that there's something really fundamental here that shouldn't be controversial. It's like what you said about drugs. It should not be a controversial statement because we have all the data in the world and plenty of countries who have actually led here that have proven this experiment out, that prohibition causes pain and providing a legal pathway to access and to help people in need to get off of addictive substances not by criminalizing those substances, but by giving them a pathway to recovery that those countries produce less addicts, right. And less drug problems and less crime and less homicides like across the board. It affects all of these things in a positive way. It shouldn't be controversial, but we are wired in a way that, that is incredibly controversial. Drugs equals bad. Like that's just the full stop in our brains. And that's the same thing I think with doing good, right? Like, sorry, go ahead.
Sorry to stop you, but we are wired that way because. Different types of purposes were more prevalent around us. Yeah. And our purpose is different now. So the, I dunno, the major thing was different when you were fighting for, let's say legalization or any kind of social issue, by the way, and I love that you mentioned, for example, the stats because again, part of my French, we don't need to wear the hippie shoes here. We can wear the practical shoes as well, because example, if the company most profits are generated by returning customers, kind of like the fact, right? It's always easier and cheaper to sell to existing customers twice third times, four times and more times. And bring them to loyalty program than find a new customer investing into outreach and yada. So why do people coming back to buy from you? Because they believe in the same shit that you do. So again, it's practical. Yes. You need to have a, a purpose, you need to have some sort of, like a belief system that you are standing for. Because that resonates with the customer. It can be cannabis industry with all the social aspects that you said. It can be, for example, Patagonia. Everyone knows that brand, for example, right? It can be, it can be the eco friendliness or planet, whatever, and everything. It just have to be your true non-hypocritical, really purpose system that you are trying to market. And you are selling that purpose. I mean, don't, I mean, don't get me wrong. That's part of your marketing. Right. And it always works better than a discount program. Sorry.
Honestly, this is why I take the marketing pathway because I'm a storyteller. Marketing is just one aspect of storytelling. I usually bring that storytelling outside of my lane of marketing, into sales, into pr, into internal culture documents, things like mission and vision, like brand statements that we are going to onboard new employees with as well as preach to our clients. And that's what I do. And so as a result of that, I tend to have an outsized influence when it relates to getting companies to invest in good, because I'm looking at it as a business proposition, I'm positioning it to them as a business proposition. I personally am looking at it as more than that. But when you're trying to sell an investor or a CEO on why we should put number of dollars towards something that isn't lead generation focused or customer acquisition focused. That's always a hard sell, but I can sell it a lot easier than if I was just doing a focus on corporate social responsibility or ESG at the company, which is not to say that I'm more powerful than those people. In fact, I know some professionals in the E S G and CSR space that are doing incredible work and make me question whether that's where I, my focus should be if I actually really believe in making an impact here. But, you know, when it comes to working with, where I've been a lot is lately is with B2B tech companies. They, they don't think we need to hire someone who is a C S R E S G professional. What they think is, we need to figure out why we would do that and how we're going to make that useful from a marketing and PR perspective, I can easily sell that. And I can bring the data to the table and say, what I'm telling you is not just fluffy emotional stuff. It's not just feel good stuff like productivity of engaged employees who are actually inspired by the mission of your company, 325% to an employee who is merely satisfied, which is to say they are a hundred percent productive, right? So you take any employee anywhere that is a hundred percent productive and you give them purpose, they will be 325% more productive. What's the impact that's gonna have on your bottom line or the lack of employee turnover because of that mission-driven purpose? The loyalty that you said repeat customers, word of mouth, right. Brand differentiation. All of these things are things that I see as you know, say consequences of doing good. And with the right intention, it has to be authentic, right? And that's where I can really sell course, how to make it authentic. Cuz I know how to speak the language, I know how to tell the story and I know who to give it to. So it, to me, marketing seems to be my way of influencing an organization towards good. But there are so many ways to do it and it kind of takes all of us because again, we're working against ingrained wiring that doing good is contrary to profit. Yes. That it's like taking profit and putting it in something that's not reinvestment into your company. And it's absolutely untrue and it's easy to debunk it other than in ingrained bias beliefs.
Totally. Totally. And I think it'll become even more and more popular by the way, especially now that we have AI systems that can do the work for us a little bit more. Yeah. I think people and companies will solve micro problems for microcom communities a little bit more. Yeah. And they can only work with those people around them if they do share the same beliefs. So and again, we don't need to wear the hippie shoes here. It's totally for profit because it helps us connect to the human element that I mean, sorry, but everyone believes in something. Let's talk a little bit more about the fractional here, because you are a fractional cmo. How can, and this is my main question, and I think everyone has the same question around fractional roles. How can you make an impact or influence the change, as you said if you are not there a hundred percent. Because I mean, let's face it, fractionally means that, that you are not a full-time, almost less like part-time.
Yep. Yeah, I'm a part-time executive is the easiest.
Yeah, yeah. Part-time executive. Yep. So how can you influence the change and how can you make an impact if you are not a hundred percent there with the company? I know it's a silly question, I'm throwing up the ball, but still It's a great question.
I think it's a great question. I think it's a question that that we should continually discuss because I think the question begs evaluation of the paradigm that preceded it, right?
So like, fractionals become a real hot buzzword. There are people who have been doing this for, you know, decades and decades and decades, right? So it's not exactly new or revolutionary. But when we think about the paradigm, like if I look at the six positions I've had prior to being a fractional executive most of which were VP of marketing or, you know otherwise CMO level positions, right? A lot of them were startups but When I look at my time spent on a full-time basis at a company there was all of the commuting, right? Which I pull out of the equation. There was all of the inefficiencies that occur in the office, right? Which is like, I have to get up to go get water. I gotta walk across the room, I have to get up to use the restroom, I have to walk across the room. Along the way, all sorts of people are going to grab my attention. It could be the CEO, it could be, you know, one of the entry level employees asking me for some advice and guidance, right? Sure. Like it could be any number of things. It could be someone just being like, Hey, I wanna show you this funny video. And everybody stops. Unless I'm like running to another meeting, everybody stops to take that time. Right? So add up all that time in your head too. And then there's the superfluous meetings, right? When I'm full-time, I, you know, I'm costing a company over $200,000 a year. It's my salary plus bonus plus benefits, right? When you, when you really put all that together, it's like two to two 50 a year and so companies feel the need to like utilize my every moment, you know what I mean? Like, I have to be flying all these places and I have to be in all these meetings that I actually really don't need to be a part of but yeah, you know, I'm there and they can grab me like, Hey Brad, we're about to go talk pricing strategy. We actually could love, you know, a thought or two from you if you don't mind. And now I'm in a meeting for two, three hours talking about pricing strategy, a fundamental business strategy thing, but ultimately not a marketing problem, right?
Yes.
And so, like most of my time gets absorbed into that shit and very little of it actually moving the needle. When I took stock of the amount of time I spent moving the needle at these positions, it was like 10 to 15 hours a week versus 40 to 60 hours a week, right? So in my head I was like, this is impractical. This whole situation doesn't make any sense. You're wasting your money to keep me uneffective. If I was able to reduce my cost to you And also my time to you and also retain my freedom and happiness during that time to maybe continue pursue other things or invest that time into spending time with my child, which is part of what I do now. I only work about 25 hours a week and I spend about 15 hours of my professional time raising my kid as well. And my wife and I sort of flip flopping that way. That's flexibility I could never have in a full-time job, of course. And it provides me happiness and freedom to be more focused and bring more of myself to my work so, Now I'm spending the same 10 to 15 hours a week with a company moving the needle, except I'm more focused, I'm happier, and we are more productive because they know my every hour costs, right? So they're not wasting my time. Instead, they're using me very intentionally and oddly, they're also appreciating my work more. I'm valued more for what I'm bringing to the table in this capacity than if I was full-time where they're like, well, you know, we're spending two 50 a year and we're only getting whatever that might be, right? Like there's all this head trash that gets in the way that causes a full-time executive oftentimes to just be ineffective. The other thing I'll mention is that even for full-time CMOs, I'm a secret weapon for them. A C M O can already be in place full-time, and there's still use for a fractional C M O because how are they gonna get additional things pushed across the table. Our bandwidth gets completely swallowed up. We're in all these meetings, bureaucracy, squashes our productivity and our innovation. So how do we get a big project from scratch over, over the finish line? We're really not, that's the answer. Or it's gonna take an extraordinary runtime, six, 12 months at least for any given project, but for 10, 15 hours a week, you can bring in a fractional C M O and have that person run point on new projects, new innovations, or you know, helping the team get one thing across the finish line at great effect. And then that full-time CMO gets to say, look at the benefit of how I'm running my department so I can be a secret weapon for them and not be wholly owned. And it's not my monkey and it's not my circus. I'm just, I'm just here to get the work done and to make a big impact. And so I think that situation makes more sense, not just to me, but to any business. Whether they have some, the money to spend on a full-time CMO or not, right? Like there's two different worlds where it makes sense. You can't afford a full-time CMO but you need that expert strategy and guidance and the ability to connect marketing strategy to company objectives. I can bring that to the table. A marketing manager, marketing director cannot. At the same token, if you have a C M O full-time who's already doing that, but they can't get certain major things across the finish line, I can come in and help as an assistant, like I said, a secret weapon to get those projects done. And in both of those worlds, a fractional CMO is extremely powerful in a way that a full-time CMO can never be.
Controversial question. Aren't you a small agency as a fractional CMO, . So usually because I also worked in fractional C M O engagements before, and usually what happens is that, okay, you can come in, you do the work, but do you have someone who can help with that as well? Like a smaller scale, like a design.
Like the tacticians who's gonna execute.
Yeah. Or for example, my wife is actually designer, for example, we usually work together on these totally small, small little roles because it just fucking makes sense.
My wife's a writer, so I'm right there with you.
Yeah. Works well. So same. Same. Right. And so aren't we and we always had this like well you shouldn't be putting everything into boxes, obviously, but, but aren't you a little bit more like a small boutique agency in that sense who has clients? Because I have a follow up question to that because you also work with multiple clients at the same time, right? Yep. As do other agencies, so, yep. So what do you if someone asks you this question, do you think it's more like a one person agency or something? This is how you would imagine it?
I love this question because this has actually been an active debate I've been having with other fractional executives and so like, here's the thing. I'm not the arbiter of definitions. What a fractional C M O means is up to the world to define. I have what I think it means and I follow that for myself and I might judge others based on that bias, but I don't expect that, like what I'm gonna say here should be the way it should go. This is just how I see it. I think they're two separate things, but I think there are a lot of agencies out there that call themselves fractional CMOs. And I think there are a lot of fractional CMOs that actually run agencies.
Yes.
And then I think there are actual fractional CMOs.
Right. So, and there are a lot of agencies who are actually not more than fractional CMOs.
Exactly. Right. They're just, you know, selling themselves differently. The way I look at it is this if I am running an agency, that's my business. If I'm a fractional CMO, you're my business. Even if it is for a fraction of a point, I'm an internal resource and that's my focus is to bring that to the table. And I have resources and network I can provide to that equation to get things executed. And I can still manage those resources, but I'm not managing them as an agency. I'm managing them as your business. This is the fundamental difference between an agency and a fractional C M O. I've run agencies, I've run small boutique agencies. I've grew my agency out to 16 people. I've worked with agencies that are hundreds of employees. It's a very different dynamic. What they are thinking about what they're trying to accomplish are different things. Now there are some overlap, right? I am still selling to other clients as I am working with my current clients, building my book of business. So my focus isn't entirely on just servicing, right? It also isn't still in keeping my workload and pipeline full. Should one client's engagement drop off, I'll need to bring on another one to keep my income steady. But when I am engaged with any given client, all I am thinking about is what do I need to do to get this ball across the finish line. And if I do that who I work with is neither here nor there. Like whether it's my wife that's doing some of the writing, or I have another writer that I'm farming out work to. I'm still gonna hold that person accountable from the brand. I'm not trying to keep an employee protected, right. As an agency, when my employee does bad work, I have to do some corrective work there, but like, I'm going to keep that person in my company and I'm going to have to work with that client to tell them why this person who wasn't doing the job is going to do the job now. I'm managing an employee while also representing my agency to a client. So my motivations my goals are just fundamentally in a different place than a fractional C M O and really this to me should be pretty simple. What is a C M O? It's an internal leader. What's a fractional CMO? An internal leader. The CMO part is still the most active part of that entire engagement. Fractional just means not full-time. That's it. Right. But everything else should be fundamentally aligned exactly as a CMO would be full-time.
Totally and the agency analogy, by the way, I think it can help for those who are not well initiated into working with the fractional leader, whether, if it's a CM O by the way of a or a COO or a C F O sometimes, by the way. So there are a lot of fractional leadership roles out there to understand how fractional people can work with multiple clients at the same time. And I do think that it's much more better to work with a fractional person who works within the same industry as you do.
Yes. I think almost every company has a lane they can drive in with their message that is, Maybe very similar because I mean, let's face it, you're both making granola bars, there's only so much difference in your message, right? Like if they're both vegan, gluten-free granola bars, but one is made by a hiker and another is made by a yoga enthusiast, like there's still something different there, even if it's the exact same value proposition, right? So finding, and...
just to tie back to the agency side, sorry, this is exactly, this is exactly why big brands go to agencies to make them differ from their similar competitors. Exactly. And just to, just to create a little bit of different sense of a story, different journey, different connection to a somewhat similar but different target.
When I said at the beginning of our call that I think theater has helped prepare me to be a marketer better than any marketing school can. This is part of where that value comes from. It's not just in the value of storytelling, but I'm an artist through and through. My work as an artist is about making people feel something, anything, whatever that needs to be. But how am I going to tell you something that will make you feel something and care about it enough to stop what you're doing right this moment and do what I want you to do. That to me is the fundamental challenge of marketing. And if you, if you try to broaden it to just like one singular concept, how do I stop you in the middle of your day to get you to do what I want you to do. The way to do that is to get you to care about something and to feel something. And that's the marketer's journey in my opinion. And that's a storyteller journey that is not a marketer taught skill in university programs. So my knowledge of storytelling, my knowledge of communication in a way that is authentic and affects human emotion and psychology comes directly from the theater as well as my understanding of customer profiles. So I do ideal customer profiles the way I would do what's called character profile work in theater. So if I get cast as a character, I get a script. I look at that script. It's only got so much information in it for me to determine who I am as a character. Sometimes almost no information. It might have no backed story or it might have a little backstory. In those instances, I still have to create a real backstory cuz otherwise I will be not believable on stage. I'll just be someone reading lines in public and we've all seen those actors before. But the really good actors, you know, the Gary Oldman's, the Gary Siinise, the Meryl Streeps, they so fundamentally understand their character that sometimes they don't know how to not be that character, and they get into the hearts and the minds of these people. They create these back stories that are real, that are specific, that they can latch onto and connect real emotions to and find some sort of relevance to. That's how I do an ideal customer profile and a buyer persona. It's not like your buyer is 25 to 35 and this is the role they have and they like golf. That's so surface level. All, all I'm gonna do is patronize somebody if I'm trying to talk to them on that level. But if I know in cannabis right now, a lot of cannabis products are trying to aim for what they call, in my opinion, a very offensive demographic term. The soccer mom, right? The soccer mom demographic is 25 to 45 years old. A white woman who drives a minivan, who has two to five kids who probably doesn't work shops at Whole Foods, right? Like there's this exact person that people conjure in their mind, and for some reason they think that's the ideal customer to always try to achieve with a cannabis product. And so they think about these like super, yeah, yeah. Believe it or not I mean, there are a lot of products out there that just gear towards the old stoners, but for the most part, people are trying to be more sophisticated and elevate the plant and elevate the normality and like destigmatize, right? And if you can get a soccer mom to smoke weed, you have officially Destigmatized and normalized weed. So that's where they aim towards. The problem is that the way that they think about this person is wrong. Them driving a minivan doesn't mean anything, right. That's just the vehicle they drive. They choose that because it's efficient, it's effective. They can put multiple kids in it, they can give 'em screens to watch or whatever. But all of that is speaking to a fundamental need, which is that their life is insane. They're jumping from one thing to the next. Especially if they're a working soccer mom, right? Like, and this person is not a mom, by the way. Always. It's also a dad. I am the soccer dad, I fit this demographic. And the point is that my, my life is crazy. There's noise. Kids are chaos. I'm shipping them from one thing to the next, from school to after school programs, to soccer fields. And when I get on that soccer field and I'm sitting down watching my kid play, that's maybe the only time in my day that I get to like, take a breath and stop and watch my kid and enjoy something. And just like not be in crazy chaos. That's the thing that we need to understand about this person fundamentally, that I would understand as a theater person trying to play that character. But that demographic information does not contain, and that's where marketers get totally run a ground when it comes to how to actually tell a story to this person.
I know. Who to blame for this. I c by the way, it's Nicole Kidman. So if you're listening, Nicole, this is, it's you...
I'm so excited to hear why it's Nicole Kidman.
Because of the scene in Eyes Wide Shot. Remember the scene? Have you seen the movie?
I saw it a long time ago. I can't, I can't conjure a specific scene.
Remember the scene which was kind of like the opening scene they were laying on the bed and so casually from the, I guess the next to the xanax bottle or something, they pick up a bottle from the medical cabinet, draws out the strain and the weed, rolls a cigarette and they just pass it through and that's it. Yeah. It was so casual. Yeah. That the kids were in school or whatever, they had kids in the movie.
Yep.
And they were, it, it was a moment for them, just for them. It was just two upper middle class people smoking joints. So that maybe that's why...
I think what's interesting about that scene and what marketers would miss, I feel from that scene is the moment they're sharing, being the most important part of that. And my wife in my life, we've got a two year old he's almost two and a half and our day is like, like, I'll give you an example of Friday, right? So Friday mornings, like I get up six 15, I take a shower or whatever to rush back into the room by 6 45 to wake up the baby, get him up, go play a little bit with him in the living room, change his diaper, change his clothes, get him into breakfast. Then I start my work day until he goes down for his nap. My wife is taking care of him all this time by the way, playing with him, taking him out for whatever adventures. And then after nap time, as soon as he wakes up, after I've eaten lunch, I'm on duty and I'm taking him out to go do something. Maybe take him to the skate park or whatever. My wife is working for the afternoon. By five or five 30 we get back home so that she can make dinner so that I can watch him in the other room so he's not distracting from dinner. So we don't, we we're almost never in the same space together hanging out, even though we both work from home and like are constantly swapping back and forth. And it's not until he goes down at like between seven 30 and 8:00 PM that we finally get any time together. And in that time we roll a joint, we go out on our patio and we smoke that joint. And maybe we get a little bit more work done in the night. Maybe we sit down together to watch a movie or something. But that moment is our connection moment. It is so important to us. And if you can speak to me about that, that is infinitely more important to me and more sold. Yes. Anything else? That's right. I'm, I'm your customer if you speak to me. And that's what, that's the thing about the soccer mom thing, right? This is where theater, in my opinion, brings me the most value in my career because I'm thinking about the, this like real emotional, psychological state always. There's nothing superficial about the work I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to speak to a demographic, and if that's all a company can do, my job then is to give them more language and more understanding of who those people are, whether it's a B2B or B2C project, right? Like I'm selling tech to other businesses, but humans are humans. We make decisions the same way emotionally, and then we justify them logically, right? So, Even when I'm talking to a supply chain manager of a major cultivation in the cannabis industry who needs to buy software. They're still a human that has emotions and their brain still operates the same way a brain works when you're not in work. We don't have a different function here. We're just bringing all of our shit with us everywhere we go. So I still have to figure out what is the pain point of that person's life I'm trying to solve. And not like with a feature. Not like, oh, my pain point is inefficient operations. That's not your pain point. Your pain point is probably like frustration from lack of time, frustration from lack of innovation, right? Like, these are things that you need and want. That's what I'm interested in. Like how you do what you do, your secret sauce, like the feature that you're working on that the other one's not working on. I don't give a shit about any of that. Your features don't matter. Anyone can build a feature. Your competitors can always build a feature that you've got and now you're the same. So, you know it's just not interesting.
Truly love it. Truly love it. How do you see the future in terms of work, for example? So what do you think, what happens in terms of the future of work?
Yeah I recently read an article that was extremely compelling, a lot of data science behind it and what it showed was that all predictions are bullshit. It's like, if you look at experts in what they predict in literally every field, every, like, whether it's fashion or the stock market, you will see their predictions based on what they see as trends and like trying to project a certain thing that's gonna continue to happen. And the divergence from reality to their predictions, it looks like a spinal cord with neurons. Just every prediction is off by anywhere from 30% to thousands of percents, right? I say that to say what I'm about to tell you is probably never gonna come true, but I will do my best to try to say, here's what I'm seeing right now, please. Because honestly, I could never have predicted three years ago that all of a sudden remote work would be the only kind of work for at least a period of time. A lot of people are trying to drag people back into the offices right now. And there's a constant movement against remote work. And the fact of the matter is that that's a death throw. That is not a trend reset because there are people like me now who absolutely will never consider an in-office job again, just off the table. If you want talent like me, and there are a lot of people like me, you have to be willing to engage in remote work. The thing that we have learned over the course of the last three years globally, I believe, but at the very least I can speak to my culture here in the US or the culture, I won't call it my culture is that family is of such importance and we've relearned that. I think we've, we have realized that even when working from home and it being distracting, having your kid in the other room, you're still always around with your kid and that means something. And families have been looking for this flexibility in their work life for so long. This is why unfortunately so many women leave the workplace is because there is no family support in the US for working parents. If you're lucky, you find an employer that will give you paid paternity and maternity leave. At least maternity leave. Paternity leave is even rarer. I've worked for a company that gave paid...
of 10, sorry, of 10 days. I'm just saying, I'm just like, right.
Yeah. Like the paternity leave I got from the company that paid for it was, Two or three weeks. And that was like really big. Like two or three weeks was nothing. It, I mean, if it flew by, this is a baby we're talking about, I still had no idea how to raise this baby. You leave the hospital and you're just sort of like, good luck. So working parents like myself have gotten a taste of the way it should be because like, honestly, this claw back to the office is the reason why I call it a death throw is because it's from a previous paradigm believing that you have to watch your employees be productive to know that they're productive. You have to be able to look over their shoulder and see their work to make sure they're not screwing around on Facebook, but what they're not doing is evaluating, am I using this employee's time effectively? Are they on Facebook because there's not really a whole lot else for them to do because they've already done what they needed to do. A lot of companies like to say, I don't care how many hours you work, whether it is 20 or 60, as long as you're getting the job done. But then in reality, they actually do care and they want to see you doing work over your shoulder in the office and I used to have a C E O who claims to be super progressive and you know, now is into remote work because Covid forced it, but before never would consider it. And would also say at the same time, as long as you get your work done, I don't care how much time you put in, so long as I feel like you're productive and I get to watch you be productive, it is such a mixed up, insane system. So I think we're not going back to that fully. I think there are a lot of companies that will, and some of them have huge buying power so like employees will find themselves obviously without choices and a lot of employees do wanna go back to the office. They do genuinely miss the comradery and all that. I think that's valuable, but I think that there's a lot of talent that won't be acquirable if that's a full requirement. And so I do think that the toothpaste is outta the tube. It's not going back in at this point as it relates to remote work. To what extent remote work is going to permeate our culture? Really impossible to say. Maybe 50 50. I don't know. It's as wild swing in the dark, right? Vulnerability and emotional security has become extremely important, and that's something that is very different from before.
Thank you for addressing that right away.
Yeah, no doubt. I mean I've always been the type of manager that, like in a one-on-one with the direct report when I am working full-time and running a team, everything's the safe space. You know what I'm saying is not being recorded. What I'm saying is not going to the c e o unless there's a specific thing that you need me to address with them. I'm happy to do it anonymously, but like, you know, I open that safe space up for my direct reports and oftentimes those direct reports hit me with. My dad just suddenly died and I can't pull out of the spiral, or I'm in a custody battle with my child over a really, really bad husband, right? Like, those things really affect them in the workplace. It, it makes them less productive. And if they don't have a way to work through those problems, they're not going to be the best employee. Fundamentally, this also should make sense, but a lot of people feel real like, eh, you're not supposed to talk about that at work. That has changed. Since Covid, if you're a manager and a leader and you're not ready for that conversation to happen on the drop of a hat without any expectation whatsoever in one of your one-on-ones or quarterly reports or quarterly reviews you better start learning how to address that problem because you have to be an empathetic leader moving forward. And this has been a steady trend, but again, COVID just really like kicked it into a hockey stick because of how workers have had to address the anxiety of our world. So many people feel society is crumbling around them and maybe they are seeing real signals of that occurring, in the US or otherwise. And so these anxieties, they have to let them out and we can't just make everyone go to therapy. So to a certain extent, if you're a manager and a leader, you kind of also have to be part therapist right now. There's too much anxiety in our world. I mean, especially with the layoffs happening right now, like these massive amounts of layoffs, which in my opinion are more a trend than they are a correction is something that's causing a lot of trauma and a lot of people, a lot of instability, a lot of fear. So in my opinion, moving forward, we're gonna have a much more open workplace, a much less walled off personal life from our work. And part of that is due to, I think, remote work and also just the stress and anxiety of a million people dying of a disease in our country that our country didn't really address very well. Some countries went into full lockdown. I had a friend who worked in Korea at the time. She couldn't never leave her apartment, not even to go out to a park. Like I could always go hike around in California out in a park or somewhere I could go to a a grocery store still. A lot of people could eat in restaurants. The whole thing was silly, this is like half ass not really doing anything. That caused us a lot of fear as people, like I was afraid to leave my house. I went from being an extreme extrovert to now having quite a bit of social anxiety when I go to a networking event. And that's part because of the disease. It's also part just because I've been at home for three years now. You know what I mean? So I think that's just gonna be a thing now. Right. And I think leaders have to prepare for emotional intelligence in a way that they've never had to before. It's a soft skill that they're not trained on ever. You don't learn it as an MBA maybe Now there are starting to be some courses and some programs that are really, really progressive, but like it's edge case at best. It's one of the things, you mentioned mentorship earlier. I, I've recently found myself doing emotional intelligence, leadership development with one of my clients. And it's been extremely valuable work. And it's not like I've got a background on this. I just have emotional intelligence and I believe in the power of vulnerability. And when I show up, vulnerably others open up and feel licensed to start digging into their vulnerabilities to get those obstacles out of the way. So I think that's gonna be the major, you know, if we're gonna talk about a five year curve, I think this like psychology and emotional intelligence portion of our work as managers and leaders is gonna become vitally important. And I think the managers that do it well are always going to be highly valued. And as we know, most people leave a job because of poor management and because of toxic management. So if you are a manager that can do this well, and if you are a company that invests in ensuring your managers do this well, you are a company that will reduce employee turnover and churn.
I loved everything that you said, but I want to address two things because I cannot hold myself. 1 is a toxic leadership part. I don't think that everyone understands what that means. And again, I view most of the things very simply. I guess toxicity means that you're not empathetic to the people that you're managing. That's it. Yep. Nothing else, nothing more. This is simply the lack of empathy and a hundred percent driven by operational excellence only, but not the empathy in it. That's one. And the second one is that, as you said, the toothpaste is out of the bottle. But I think what happened, it was super simple with the covid and, and the pandemic: work went home. And when work goes home all of your home shit that you have, which called life just simply affected the work because you suddenly blurred the lines physically between the office and your home. And now that we don't have the pandemic, now we are bringing sometimes home to the workplace and yeah, because the lines, when the lines are blurred, they're blurred forever, so it's not like you are rebuilding the wall or something. Sorry for the political reference, but yeah. You cannot do that shit.
Yeah. I mean, the wall was fake. The wall was the mirage. It was the emperor wearing no clothes, right? And that's the first time it's come down. This is the first time we saw through it and we're like, oh shit, that's not really a wall. That's a pane of glass. And that shit got shattered by Covid. It was arbitrary to begin with. I think it's silly even before the pandemic when I had a direct report and I was in the office with them, I still had pretty vulnerable and emotionally open one-on-ones because I made that safe space for them because I knew that wall was bullshit, but companies continued to operate like it wasn't. And so I've always been recognized by my direct reports as a great manager for this reason. They still to this day have relationships with me and still confide in me and ask me for advice. Like almost every employee I've ever worked with and managed, still has a relationship with me to this day. Who can say that about other managers? I certainly don't have those relationships with any of my managers or leaders, you know, for the most part. And I think it's just because that wall never existed really. It was just arbitrarily put up and employers had so much power that they could pretend like it was there and you had to play the game with them. But now that's not the case anymore and it's never going back up because we now were like, oh, that was just a pane of glass, wasn't it? That was just ego fragility right on, on the part of leaders and companies and we're seeing even now the entire VC sort of framework starting to fall apart because yes, all of it has been this and this insane system. It's unsustainable. Doesn't make sense. There's no common sense in it. Like if you are a VC firm that has invested in, you know, 999 companies that have failed and one that has succeeded, and that one covers the losses of the 999, are you a successful investor? Is that a successful or sustainable system? That's 999 livelihoods plus employees that went through flux and change and disappointment and trauma. Just because one unicorn was able to burst through the ceiling, that probably won't be profitable for 10 plus years. Like that, that system is not. That doesn't make any sense. Just a straight up, it's, it's completely nonsensical. So I think all of these things are sort of mirages that are starting to become apparent to us.
Sorry for running so long here with this show.
It's okay.
We talk so much. But I really enjoyed it. So again, thank you. Thank you for coming here. Where can people find you?
Well, what's funny is I killed all my social media, so really you can only find me on LinkedIn. I honestly, I was just done with Twitter and Facebook and Instagram poor company governance, poor data security and also like just a distraction not providing me any value in my life. So it's easy to find me. You can Google search me and hit my LinkedIn profile or you can go to my website at bradbogus.com and kind of see the crazy stuff I've done in the 17, 18 years I've been running my career. Some of the more edgy stuff I have to say about things. Right. Cuz I'm sort of a punk rocker, so, well, I'm not a sort of a, I've always been a punk rocker. I don't really care about boundaries as much as other people try to, at the very least, follow me on LinkedIn and you'll be entertained.
Thank you, man. Thank you. Yeah. Highly recommend to follow Brad. Again, thanks for coming.
Thanks for having me on, Peter. This has been a great conversation.
