I Took a Hike

Mark Friedman - Mastering Marketing and Navigating a Career Pivot

• Darren Mass/Mark Friedman • Season 2 • Episode 6

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Who knew a career pivot could lead to mastering the dynamic world of marketing? It worked for Brooklyn-born Mark Friedman. Step into our journey as we explore Mark’s thrilling transition from the gritty world of accounting to becoming a marketing maven after being asked to invest $3 million in a budding catalog company during the late 80s boom. An era where there was no room for the faint-hearted. Join us as he recounts his growth, the errors he made along the way, the lessons he learned, and the resurgence of catalogs in digital marketing.

The digital age brought with it identity resolution technology, and Mark found himself riding this wave of change. This technology, though a boon for tracking customer behavior, raises some serious eyebrows on data privacy. We delve into the changes in iOS and how it's become trickier to track customers, marking a pivotal shift in digital marketing. Mark also shares insights on how crucial it is to understand what a business can afford to spend on marketing and why a return on investment is key to survival, especially for small businesses. 

Our hike concludes with Mark’s transformation from a salaried employee to an entrepreneur. Hear how the power of networking led him to his first consulting gig in just two months. Our trail also takes us through Mark’s return to the corporate world with his dream role at Steve Madden. Plus, he reveals how his podcast, The Marketing Playbook, has helped him form connections with industry giants. We also discuss the critical role successful team-building plays in the grand scheme of things, emphasizing the importance of hiring individuals with complementary skills. So lace up your boots and join us on this enlightening journey!

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Speaker 1:

All right, mark Friedman, are you okay with being recorded on a podcast? Yes, sir. Well, there goes that liability. This is I Took a Hike. I'm your host, darren Mass, founder of Business Therapy Group and Parktime Wilderness Philosopher, here we step out of the boardrooms and home offices and into the great outdoors, where the hustle of entrepreneurship meets the rustle of nature. In this episode, we stride with Mark Friedman and e-commerce and marketing pro. Our topics include an impressive career with a major pivot, marketing strategies, the vital role of direct mail and networking the ever importance of networking. I was engaged with insight when I took a hike with Mark Friedman. It wasn't until I embarked on this podcast journey that I realized the impact of problem solving in nature. And now I would like to help you. I invite you or your team to join me on a hike and experience business therapy, all while on the trail. Visit itookahikecom for more information on our hiking therapy. So let's start off with Mark Friedman. You are a marketing professional one would say a guru. I don't know if you would say that, but I would say so based on your resume, or CV, as the cool kids call it. So why don't we start off with who you are a little bit personally and we'll get into the marketing world, sure.

Speaker 2:

So I live in Westfield with my wife. We have two kids, twins, boy and girl, man and woman, 29 years old. I grew up in Brooklyn, my wife grew up in Scotch Plains, which is how we wound up in Westfield. Very cool All right.

Speaker 1:

So pivoting forward grew up in Brooklyn. We came out to the Burbs. I guess we can call that the Burbs right, yes. So what was it that made you pivot to marketing?

Speaker 2:

Really was kind of more happenstance than anything. When I left public accounting I went to work for a startup catalog company. It was an apparel business all going to be done through catalog, and they hired me to be their controller. There were four of us in the company. I walked in the first day. They had been venture capital funded. They gave me a check for $3 million and said, hey, why don't you go invest this money for us? So wound up doing that and fast forward. Two years later we're still with the business. We had put our first catalog out. We were now $50 million in volume. That's pretty good growth. Yep, it was great. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

The.

Speaker 2:

ABC was happy. Well, yeah, at least at the beginning. And then they wanted to move the location of where our distribution center was down to Roanoke, virginia. We were up here in Patterson, new Jersey, and I didn't want to move Understandable. So they said, all right, well, we need some help in marketing. I'm like, okay, I don't know anything about marketing, but I can give that a try. So they were very gracious. They really wanted me to stay with the business and I wanted to stay as well. So I moved into catalog marketing, which was all about the concepts of how do you decide who to mail a catalog to which customers. It was all about segmentation and targeting.

Speaker 1:

Sorry, we just hit a muddy patch here on my favorite trail, the Watchong.

Speaker 2:

Trail. We've only had about six inches of rain in the last week.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's been crazy here on the northeast, so let's go back to that story. So, catalog marketing did you find excitement in the catalog industry?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know again, this is late 80s. So catalogs were booming, that was the market oh yeah, there was no digital. You know, internet wasn't. Al Gore didn't create the internet yet.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and, by the way, is it kind of not true? Yeah, I think we all know this. It was Darpanet and, yeah, he allowed Darpanet to continue with funding, but I don't know if he created the internet.

Speaker 2:

But what was nice? You know about that? It was something new for me. I never kind of thought of myself as creative. You know I was more of that analytical, you know, accounting side, but it gave me an opportunity to be a little bit creative and, more importantly, I was learning. I thought that was the best part of it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, on the job, learning is the best way to absorb knowledge. Making mistakes, you know. Learning from your failures.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know. Unfortunately, you know we're in such a society of immediate impact. Everything is fast, everything has to happen. Yesterday it's sometimes difficult to be able to get a job be compensated well, even you know, for kind of future value that you might bring. Everybody wants you to, you know. I guess I understand that they want you to be able to produce today for some media gratification.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Right, I had a boss. I worked at an electronics and appliance store once and I had this killer day. I think I sold like $10,000 worth of merch, which is a lot for a single salesperson in a single store High fives, pats on the back, etc. That's the first day I come in and it's a slow day. I'm under a thousand. I'm eating my lunch and my boss, andy, runs into the break room, starts screaming at me what are you doing? And I reminded him of the day I had and he said yeah, that was yesterday. What did you do for me today?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Important life lesson. Unfortunately, we're judged by what we do at the present moment, you know, and with the immediate gratification of everybody, and everything that kind of makes learning on the job a little more difficult. Absolutely All right. So you are in catalog marketing. Did you stay in catalog marketing for a while?

Speaker 2:

I did. I stayed with this company called Tweeds for nine years. We kind of back to your comment. You know that the private equity guys were happy. You know private equity guys want to have a return, they want to get it quickly. So while we had achieved $50 million, they wanted it to be much larger and we got pushed into doing some things and I think this happens a lot in business got pushed into doing some things that probably were not right for the brand Creating products, creating creative that was more mass so that you could grow, as opposed to catering to a niche that we were initially targeting.

Speaker 1:

So this is an interesting topic because this is pretty universal with any type of capital raise, whether it's PE, vc or any organization that's willing to give you a large sum of money. They want to dictate or steer the direction of the company, but sometimes they don't have the experience. So how do you deal with an investment party or partner when you know what they're going to say or do is the wrong approach?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's super hard and hopefully when those conversations develop, you've built some political capital or respect capital or just they understand that you know what you're talking about and they defer to you. You know. Look, the fact is they have you in place for a reason because these investment guys, their expertise is money and return on investment and capital and leverage and all those things. If you're part of the business, they have you for a reason. It's for your business acumen and knowing the market, knowing the competition and oftentimes, to your point, they don't allow those people to do what they're best at.

Speaker 1:

And it's important to understand as a small business owner. When you're going out for capital, especially with a big organization or a fund, it's not your company anymore, even if you think it is. Even if you maintain the CEO position, you still have to answer to the investment party or the guy Kyle who you now report to and he graduated from Stanford three weeks ago and he's your boss or he's asking you for your job description. It's not just about raising capital, it's about the whole process that you have to go through. Now. There's benefits to raising capital, of course, but you got to be aware of the pitfalls.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think that's what leads to hesitation by many entrepreneurs of selling their company Either. If you look at, often times the investment company that's buying in wants to keep the entrepreneur there because of their knowledge, but it's a very different working environment for that entrepreneur.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. What's funny is I have a friend who is asking me for investment advice when it comes to a capital raise. He had an interested PE partner and I told him the same thing. Only, instead of Kyle, I used the name Zach with an H. No offense to Zach's with H's Love the name, it's great. But I said some kid named Zach with an H. He's 23 years old, graduated from Stanford, started working for the company. He's going to ask you for your job description. And my buddy called me up three weeks later and he said do you have a crystal ball? I asked why he goes. A guy named Zach with an H, who's like 20 something years old, is asking me for my job description and I now report to him. No offense to any Zach with an H. Raising capital is a necessary evil sometimes, especially if you want to accelerate your company. But just be aware that you don't work for your company anymore. You don't work for yourself. With that being said, you are in catalog marketing. At what point did you pivot?

Speaker 2:

I've had a number of pivots in my career and I've been very lucky and some talk about well, I say it's lucky, some say, well, you make your own luck. I made that first pivot when I went from accounting into marketing, when I was with the catalog business. The second, more significant pivot was moving from catalog marketing into digital commerce. That happened in 2000. I went from a catalog business called the company store. We were manufacturing and selling through catalog down comforters and coats and fill around, fill around, right, yeah, still around, actually owned by Home Depot. I was recruited to go work at Brooks Brothers. They had, I guess, 2000,. They had a nascent e-commerce business. They were predominantly stores and they had a fairly large catalog business. They hired me as general manager of what they call direct to consumer. It was the catalog and the web. Then, shortly thereafter, I took over marketing for the stores that we had. That was really my first opportunity in digital.

Speaker 1:

That was your springboard into the more modern era of marketing.

Speaker 2:

Back to where I was saying about being lucky. I had a lot of catalog colleagues that really got left behind. They went on, continued to have good careers, but many of them had really wanted to make a pivot into digital and just didn't have the opportunity. Because, back to what we were saying before, a lot of companies they want experienced people doing things for themselves, For them. They don't want people to learn on the job anymore. That's right. In my case, they brought me because they had a big catalog business. I was able to use them to learn about digital.

Speaker 1:

Is catalogs still current? Is it still around? I mean, I know I do get catalogs, but what's the point?

Speaker 2:

The point is that catalogs are, first of all, to your question, they're still around. Number one, number two, I think they've actually had some kind of a renaissance Because you've had so many brands, a lot of the apparel space, but so many brands that were digitally native. They started their business just with a website. Then, ultimately, in a desire to grow, they opened up stores. In a desire to drive traffic into stores and to the website, they started using direct mail. Now there's this almost a cottage industry of a couple of agencies that are helping brands with catalog. It's a different concept often times in catalog today than it was. It used to be 80 pages, 100 pages the old days of Spiegel books, 300 pages. Today they're more targeted, probably fewer pages, so less cost in the mail, but clearly ways to drive traffic to stores and to online.

Speaker 1:

Is there a number of conversion? For every household that a catalog has sent, x dollars of revenue comes in or is lost. Or is it just to show viability in the company still?

Speaker 2:

No, no, every business is a little bit different. Frankly, nowadays it's much more difficult to determine. The terminology is attribution how you're marketing dollars or attributing to the sales that you got, so that you can make decisions on whether a dollar spent here is as good as a dollar spent there Across the back. With this Correct, when I was getting started, you mailed the catalog. Only one of a few things happened. You got no orders, or you got a phone order, or you got a mail order. That was it. You didn't have to worry about whether a customer was starting their transaction on a digital, on a mobile device, or they were starting on desktop, or you didn't have to deal with that. The only other situation when you mailed the catalog is the customer could go in the store and make a purchase because they saw something in the catalog and they wanted to touch it or see it in person rather than just buy it.

Speaker 1:

Correct, they had to get a phone and I feel like that's the main reason why retail stores although a lot of the times they're empty, that's why they still exist Is so the client can touch or feel the product, see it with their own eyes, before they make the purchase.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's still a real need for retail. It's an experience number one. Walk around the Short Hills Mall on a rainy Saturday, over the summer or anytime, and the mall is very, very crowded. Alright, maybe there's not as many people that are actually carrying bags, but they're there for the experience, to walk around to see what's new to people watch. I think there'll always be that need.

Speaker 1:

Got it. So I will say there are times where I get a catalog, for instance, something I'm really into. I'm into jeeps, I love my Jeep. I think any Jeeper will understand the passion for driving a Jeep and when I do get one of those Jeep catalogs, I do look through it.

Speaker 2:

Does it stimulate you to go online to buy something it used to, but now that I've bought everything before I hit crazy excess obsession.

Speaker 1:

I put it down, but it does get me to look, which puts that company in the front of my mind. But other magazines I do throw out. And I happen to have a client that does direct to mail and the conversations I have with him is regardless of if that piece of mail gets thrown in the garbage, your client, right, the homeowner had to put their eyeballs on it, Even if it's for a split second. They had to make a decision is this junk? Let's go the other way. This is too muddy. We will certainly be sinking in that over there, but that's why his business is very relevant, because you had to make that decision before you threw it in the trash. And that's what some of this marketing is about. It's a reminder.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, it's the three. Second rule Can you get in front of the customer for three seconds and look? Marketing is? You've probably heard it's a 360, trying to get a 360 view of the customer. But it's also trying to touch the customer in as many ways as possible. So maybe, as they pick up their mail and they're standing over the garbage pail, maybe it's around digital advertising that they see while they're playing wordle. I mean, there's just so many different touch points and you try to hit on them as best you can.

Speaker 1:

Hey listener, thanks for hiking along with us. Discover more episodes at iTookahikecom, or to recommend an adventurous guest, apply to be a sponsor or to simply drop us a line. All right, so back to digital marketing. You pivoted into the digital space. Is there a learning curve for you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know yes and no. So much of what you do in digital is kind of similar to what you did in catalog. You spend dollars, you get sales, so there's KPIs around that which are very similar. You get impressions on a digital website, which is very similar to the fact that you have mailed out a bunch of catalogs. You get orders, which gives you a conversion rate. You get dollars, which gives you a dollar per impression or a dollar per spend. So the key metrics in digital versus catalog were very, very similar. Okay, sure, there's a learning curve in the tactics that you use. You mean, you have to learn. When I got started, google wasn't a thing, it was all Yahoo search, so you needed to understand that Digital marketing was not prevalent then, certainly, sms messaging. So, yeah, there was a learning curve about the tactics, for sure.

Speaker 1:

So what was one of the biggest learning lessons that you were able to glean from digital marketing that really accelerated or propelled your understanding?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think when you go back again to catalog, you kind of had two buckets. You had your customers, your house file and then you had prospects. And here in digital it's not all dissimilar. You have a funnel, you have top of funnel, which is kind of your prospects. Maybe you would consider it more brand awareness. And then as you move down the funnel, it's more about speaking to your customers and looking for more performance. I guess performance results from the dollars that you're spending as you move down the funnel. It's more of what we call performance marketing. So think of a retargeting ad that you might see on. You go visit a website, xyz site and then you go back to, let's say, wordle, like I said, and you see an ad because you were on XYZ website. If you click on that ad and you get a sale, that's bottom of funnel, that's retargeting. That's a customer who had been on your site maybe was playing around, didn't check out, and now you're coming back to retarget them on another site and if they buy, it's an effective campaign, all right.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about that for a second, because that is the greatest mystery in everyone's mind. How does that work out? How come I go and add a paintbrush in my Home Depot cart right, and then I go, switch over to anything else and all of a sudden an ad popped up. How does that work?

Speaker 2:

I probably won't even bother to explain the technical side of it, but it's. Is this a nerd alert moment? Yeah, look, it's all about the tech. The tech has been built to be able to track either a cookie on your device, on your desktop, or other kinds of personally identifiable information that's available out there, to know that not necessarily that it's Mark Friedman, but to know that this customer has exhibited this behavior. It was that device, correct, it was a device. And one of the things that again didn't exist so much in the catalog space is about what's called identity resolution. The name of the game is to be able to stitch together Mark Friedman's doings in the digital world so that I can really view him as a whole. Now, I talked about 360 before. What is Mark Friedman doing out in digital? And I could be on my iPad, I could be on my mobile, I could be on my desktop, I could click on Instagram. All that stuff gets pulled together, and there are companies out there who their single claim to fame is the technology behind identity resolution. Wow, so.

Speaker 1:

How dangerous is identity resolution, right? So is this a big brother moment where the machine knows more about me than me?

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, there's no question that there's a big brother-ish. My wife and I laugh, or she laughs that Facebook and Instagram and not serious. But Siri, all these things are listening to us. So she kind of will have a conversation and the next thing you get an ad on your Facebook feed from that kind of thing. So one day she wanted to see if it worked and she likes Twizzlers, so she's yelling out Twizzlers, twizzlers. I'm like what are you doing? She says I want to see if I get an ad from Facebook for Twizzlers now. And no, we didn't get one.

Speaker 1:

Ah okay, so that's a very anticlimactic finish. That's kind of the way it works. But so I do remember this happening. We had Alexa in our home and since then I've stopped having Alexa Make your own decisions. But we were approaching the end of our car lease and I wanted to look at a specific car. My wife wasn't really into that car anyway, but I mentioned the car in our living room where there happens to be an Alexa device. Everything was peppered on our phones with that car company, the exact car. So that's not coincidence.

Speaker 2:

Maybe I'm noticing it more or not, but that had to be obviously because of no, it's getting more prevalent, though in and I'll probably get this wrong At least two years ago, there were a lot of changes in iOS and the level of tracking capability that was available. Apple made changes and some of the other large companies made changes, and, in theory, with the intention of making it more difficult to track, which made it more complicated for marketers.

Speaker 1:

So then Apple is trying to protect its consumers. I would think it would be the opposite, because Apple can't. They profit off of this.

Speaker 2:

For sure, and it depends upon how skeptical you are or not. So that's a different topic.

Speaker 1:

Fair enough, All right. So let's go pivot towards the small business and maybe some lessons that we can offer to them. If you were advising the marketing efforts of a small business, what is the first thing that they should really look at?

Speaker 2:

It's really understanding what your business can afford to spend to market and it's incredible how many businesses that I see and usually I'm working with companies that want me to help them with their digital business. So, and if they have retail stores or they have other channels, you'd be surprised how many businesses don't have a P&L specifically for their Ecom channel. I'm not surprised.

Speaker 1:

I am not.

Speaker 2:

Even if you realize that there's some things you can't break out. But at least go through the effort of establishing the P&L, establishing what you think your break even is, and based upon that you will know what you can afford to spend to acquire new customers, the cost of acquisition, all of those things are super important.

Speaker 1:

So I hear this all too often from CEOs, from business owners, where they don't understand that spending money or spending budget or creating a budget on marketing should be a percentage of revenue Correct and it will have a return. Because I think and please keep me honest here, but from my experience business owners see marketing as a risk and a waste of money. Right, and I think that's because they don't understand the powers of marketing or even how to market.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think the answer is yeah. There are probably some, lots of folks out there like that. Now, it also depends upon what kind of marketing we're talking about. If we're talking about brand awareness marketing, so, I've got. Someone let the dogs out. Yeah, let's hope they stay behind that fence. Yeah well, who can outrun who? You probably can outrun me.

Speaker 1:

so I don't know. So let's turn in on this path and we'll pick that one up again.

Speaker 2:

So what were we saying? Are we talking about marketing and spending.

Speaker 1:

Marketing for small businesses isn't spent.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So if my experience again is these smaller businesses, if you can show them that a dollar spent on Google, for example, will drive $3 of revenue so what's called that a $3 row as a return on ad spend they may understand that I put a dollar out, I got $3 back. If you tell them to do top of funnel which I was talking about before, which is just brand awareness, I just want to have a whole lot of people see my website, even though it may not be as targeted as I like and I might not get any direct sales that I can track. That's really hard for a smaller business to understand.

Speaker 1:

Yeah well, small businesses want to see faster returns. Right, that dollar is deeply personal to the business owner, so sometimes they don't have the ability to have a duration of time.

Speaker 2:

Correct. That's correct. And oftentimes if you're in it for the long haul and you're well-capitalized, you could be investment spending. And investment spending is meaning that you know that the dollar I spent today does not generate a sale that is profitable to me today, but you're interested in acquiring that customer because maybe you know that your rebuy rate the number of people that you acquire today that will buy again from you in the future. Maybe that next purchase is where you gain the profit.

Speaker 1:

That's right, so return on investment. So this is unfortunately. If we're gearing the conversation to small business owners, they're afraid of taking additional risk with their investment, that's correct. What I advise business owners is you should not be taking a hefty salary. Take whatever you absolutely need to get by, preferably nothing, because every dollar you reinvest back in the business can be worth tenfold in the future. Same thing with marketing For every dollar you invest in a good marketing strategy it can be worth infinite times more. But you do need the duration of time you need to water that seat. So, with a small business in mind, if there was a very, let's say, strategic investment, how long do you think a business owner should wait or be patient for a marketing strategy? And I know this is kind of a very big topic, hypothetical but how long would you say the average marketing strategy in a small business would take to return an investment?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it really. It's not only what I might think, it's the appetite, the risk averse or not that the small business owner is. When we were operating some of these businesses, we were willing to lose money on the first purchase because we had a good understanding that, based upon the products that we sold, there was going to be a repeat purchase 30% of the time, let's say, within 12 months. That's right. And when I factored in, let's say, the loss on the first purchase and 30% of those people buying again, on average, whatever they were going to spend, if I could make money on the sum of those two, then we were willing to do that.

Speaker 1:

But that's for a much bigger company.

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah, I mean again, it's not so much size of company, it's how well capitalized you are and the culture of the business and a lot of what you sell. If you're a car dealer and the average customer turning that car over five years, six years, seven years, you've got to be able to make enough profit on that one sale. That's going to hold you for a while because you're likely not going to see that customer Again anytime soon.

Speaker 1:

Well pertaining to car dealers. From my understanding and if anyone has better knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong it's all about service. Yeah, it's about the service.

Speaker 2:

They make virtually nothing, very low margin on the sale or lease of that car, but they fact yeah, but to your point they factor in, you know, the, let's say, the cost of acquiring the purchase or the lease and then what they can generate on average over the three-year term of the lease. But you're right, all those components are part of it.

Speaker 1:

All right, so back to marketing efforts. What happened to your career after digital? Did you stay in digital? Did you pivot?

Speaker 2:

No, I've stayed in digital. You know, I think the pivot for me was still digital, but going from a scenario of being on the brand side where I was an employee of a company, you know and this is a good you know, perhaps a lesson for you know, for some folks that are listening In 2010, I guess and you know, I first started working in 1983, so you know quite a lot of years was the first time I woke up without a job. My position had been eliminated and now needed to think about what was I going to do next. I really hadn't had to look for a job for a very long time. All the jobs that I had gotten, up until this one I had been recruited for, or I knew somebody, or what have you. But now come, basically, february 1st 2010. On January 31st, my boss says jeez, we're eliminating the role. Thank you very much, see ya. And look at that. Wow, just like that. Yeah, now I'm being overly dramatic because I was very lucky. I had a good severance package, so I wasn't stressed, so there was no jelly of the month, club Nope.

Speaker 1:

Please, listeners, get that reference or Google it. It's hilarious.

Speaker 2:

But I did have two kids that were getting ready to go to college in 2012. Pressures on, so now I had to decide what I was going to do. Next morning I woke up, called a buddy of mine who has an office still does in downtown Westfield and told him I needed an office. He said come over. He stuck me in an office and that's where my LLC Details Interactive was formed and the idea behind that and, as I say this a few times, the word interactive back then made sense. Today it's a little dated, but I was now going to go from an employee of a company to a standalone. Put my shingle out try to be a digital commerce consultant.

Speaker 1:

So the baker for the bakery, who makes great muffins and cupcakes, is now a bakery owner. That is a pivot. You go into the world of entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2:

Yep. So what is that like? Well, it was interesting because I'd always wanted to have a business, but I never had an idea enough of what that business could be. So I wound up just being an operator of other people's ideas and being the strategist and the executor of those businesses. Now I had to find out whether somebody would actually pay me, be on a salary for what I thought I knew. And I have always been a good networker and we can talk about that. At least I think I am a good networker. I can't understate what's the right word Understate, understate, over estimation. Yeah, I can't understate how important networking is maintaining relationships, reaching out to people periodically without being a pain in the behind, and keeping those relationships going.

Speaker 1:

Networking is a huge skill that takes a lot of practice and a lot of getting over the fear of vulnerability and embarrassment, but it is the most critical aspect of any successful sales mentality.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely and frankly it got easier, at least for people like me. I'm not the kind of a guy people laugh at me when I say I'm shy, but I'm not the kind of guy who walks into a room of people that I don't know. I don't stick out my hand and say hi, I'm Mark Friedman, not my comfort zone. But when you're doing it on LinkedIn or you're doing it through email or a text, it takes that fear factor away. Well, you have anonymity.

Speaker 1:

You do have a screen so you can be who you want to portray in a way that's correct.

Speaker 2:

You need to be persistent, but you need to be respectful of people's time, and it's really served me well. And so I got. I started that February 1st 2010,. And within 60 days I got my first gig. And I got the gig because of a relationship with a recruiter who didn't have a job for me but who had a friend who had a company and he had said to her hey, if you come across anybody that could help me on a consulting basis, let me know. Well, sure enough, I got my first gig and for that full year I had quite a lot of projects, you know, one begat another, and I was kind of at the cusp of deciding do I stick with this? Do I hire somebody to help me or do I continue to pursue a full-time gig? And just as about the time I was getting serious about doing this permanently, I was recruited to head up the commerce business at Steve Madden Well-known brand, yeah and wound up doing that. For seven years and fast forward to today, I've had a number of different full-time gigs. For various reasons they no longer existed. But I'm consulting again and I like being busy and the consultant thing is just a different kind of busy than having one job, but it's worked out very well for me.

Speaker 1:

So that's an interesting pivot that you took. You were seeing all of this success especially early on in your entrepreneurial career, which is rare, by the way. Right 60 days having your first big client, and a big client at that, and you took the route to go back to working in corporate America. Yeah, and is it solely because the big name, brand and the title or the ego, which is okay, or is it the fear of when my next meal will be, or you just didn't like being an entrepreneur?

Speaker 2:

No, I liked being an entrepreneur. It had nothing to do with when my next meal was going to be. I think some of it had to do with when you're a consultant. You're not an operator, right, which means that you can make suggestions. Ultimately, the brand itself has to implement. And I still, even to this day although, as my career moves towards the ninth inning, I still really like waking up in the morning and seeing how the business performed, that I'm involved with. The prior day.

Speaker 1:

So you like being in charge and I agree with you. As a consultant, I can coach, I can consult, provide business therapy for my clients all day long. If they don't want to do it, they won't do it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you just have to realize that. But so to your question about why did I move back away from the consulting, that's, the opportunities presented themselves to be involved with one brand as an operator, and I like that Dream job, were they my dream job.

Speaker 1:

Yeah well, with Steve Madden when they came knocking at your door. Was that considered your dream job at that time?

Speaker 2:

No, as a matter of fact, when I went there the first day I live in New Jersey their office was in Long Island City. That's a hike. So that was a schlep number one and candidly and this is gonna sound like I was a primadonna, but I walked into that office and it was an absolute dump.

Speaker 1:

That doesn't make you sound like a primadonna. That's unfortunately, in this case, the shoemaker's kids. It was just, I had no shoes.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it was. Just look. It was an extraordinarily successful company. It still is. I'm still friends with people that I made relationships with there. But when you're looking to take a job you look at the totality of the experience and first impressions are big. You walk into an office. It was in a residential area in Long Island City. The building was kind of old and run down, then steps to walk up to the main level were about two feet wide. They had duct tape over the risers Awesome, it wasn't what I expected from a brand like that. I went in there and they kept me waiting 45 minutes for the first interview. I was like am I really going to? Is this going to be a culture that I was going to like? But anyway, I got past those things they made. Steve was very gracious, made me a very nice offer and wound up working with them for seven years.

Speaker 1:

So that's actually really important and this for anybody that owns a business that first impression for a new hire, even when you're interviewing them. You could have walked out, they could have lost the opportunity to have hired you.

Speaker 2:

I think companies look at I'm generalizing companies look at it that it's more important, that the hire is more important for the employee, the potential employee, the candidate, than it is for the company, and that is quite the opposite.

Speaker 1:

Today, especially with the shortage, in quality people.

Speaker 2:

But you'll be surprised, Darren. I still see situations where, because it's so much easier to apply, very easy to click the apply button on LinkedIn, which is a mistake. We'll get to that in a second. How many companies really will have interviews with people and then ghost them? It's still an issue.

Speaker 1:

It's asinine, but the reason why I say the easy apply button is a mistake is because everybody easy applies and then you're just gonna fall into a pile. If you really want that job, it's a dream job find out who the listing HR person is, or whoever's listing the position, and send your CV directly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or find other people that are connected to others in that organization and see if you can get your way in. And this goes back to what we were talking about before about networking.

Speaker 1:

I've advised people back yes, back to networking. A great opportunity is connect with others around that listing person, build a quick relationship with them, connect with them on LinkedIn and ask if they can be willing to introduce you personally to that person. It does work. It's worth the effort. Hey listener, thanks for hiking along with us, discover more episodes at iTokaHikecom, or to recommend an adventurous guest, apply to be a sponsor, or to simply drop us a line. We'll keep marching forward. So let's go back to entrepreneurship. Do you miss it?

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm actually in it at the moment. I had spent a bunch of time over the last couple of years with Eddie Bauer in a combination of full-time employee roles and contractor role and, beginning in the middle of the summer, that changed, so I'm consulting again. I've been very lucky to have picked up a number of clients, which is great. I feel like I'm adding value to the respective teams. I think they feel like that as well, and in many cases they're fairly small businesses and they're dealing with much of the things we've talked about today.

Speaker 1:

So would you say that back again, networking very important. That's how you got your clients, because you seem to have a stroke of luck. You start a business, you find clients. So are these individuals that you've known in the past?

Speaker 2:

Well, let's see. I'll cycle through for you the more recent ones. So the first one that presented, right after early in the summer, a friend of mine that I knew from the industry. She had interviewed with these folks for a job. The job wasn't really big enough for her so she went off and did something else, but she recommended me, so that was a referral. The second one was somebody that I knew from a prior job that we worked together. I had done a project for them three or four years ago. They called me back and said a lot of the work you did for us was right on, spot on. We need to evolve, so are you available? The third one was a guy that I've never met face to face. We cultivated a relationship on LinkedIn and he called and said hey, I've got a project. I don't have the bandwidth to do it, I think you'd be great at it. He had heard my podcast and we did that. The fourth one is somebody that has a store in Westfield. My wife's a shopper there. I reached out to them and just again, back to the networking. Then the last one was also somebody that lives locally, lives close by. We had some mutual friends. So I persisted and learned, I found out what she was doing and I reached out and reached out until she responded. And now I'm doing a project for them.

Speaker 1:

So I think that's the most important takeaway from this. Obviously, the marketing conversation is phenomenal, but networking is everything You're putting yourself out there. So let's look back. And then I want to talk about your podcast, because you do have a podcast and you have some very amazing guests on there, thanks. So, before we go there, over your entire career, if you could think back what was the biggest mistake that you made and what was the learning lesson from that mistake? No, this is not a job interview.

Speaker 2:

I think that the mistakes perhaps that I've made when you lose a job and I think I can explain at least rationalize why I have lost some of the jobs in digital commerce there's lots of reorganization and whatever.

Speaker 1:

Not uncommon for marketing people to be replaced.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and look, I can go back over my career and say were there things I could have done differently? I think probably the one consistent thing is when businesses were struggling, maybe I wasn't as quick to react to the downturn as perhaps I should have been. I don't think you feel it necessarily in the moment, but if you've had time to go back and think about it, that's perhaps the learning.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's a hindsight reflection.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, look, I have no regrets for. Maybe there's one job I took that I have regrets for, but I don't really have regrets. It's kind of a wasted emotion, I think to be regretful. I just try to learn from each experience. When, like I said, my career is already close to the ninth inning though I'm not a retiring kind of guy. I need to be busy I will feel like I've had a nice career. For me, the most important part, when I leave a job and when people reach out and tell me that jeez, I feel like I've learned something from you. That's the most satisfaction I get. That's the thing that really makes it worthwhile.

Speaker 1:

Now let's talk about your podcast. You do have a podcast and you have quite a few episodes. How many exactly?

Speaker 2:

Just recorded number 84 today. So I've been at this since right before COVID. Wow, it started as really it still is a hobby. I had worked with a really nice guy still friends with him at Steve Madden. He was my IT e-commerce business partner and we had done a bunch of conferences together Other of us are funny, haha, but we're kind of clever and we really got along well and the audiences, I think, responded to us. I had said to him hey, we should do a podcast together. He agreed but we never did it. Then I left Madden and whatever Right before COVID started. So the end of 19,. I kind of put the concept together with a friend who's my editor. It's been fun. It's called the Marketing Playbook Podcast. You can find it wherever you get your podcast on Apple or Spotify. There's a YouTube channel. The idea is to take a guest, have it be very conversational, talk about their first story, kind of whether or not there was something in there growing up that suggested that they would be or follow the path that they have in their career, and we kind of wrap up the show with three key takeaways that listeners can bring back to their personal or to their business lives. We've had the CEO of Levi's, a fellow named Chip Berg, who went to the same college that I did and happened to be in the same fraternity and kind of a bookend. You know that we're recording here in. I guess it's October already, october of 2023.

Speaker 1:

This is October what Second?

Speaker 2:

But last week I interviewed and put out a show with Gary Vaynerchuk Gary's kind of the self-professed king of social media. That was a great opportunity to spend a half hour with him.

Speaker 1:

We've had a lot of fantastic guests. Can I surmise that networking has played a role in you getting these guests to appear on your podcast?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, every single one. I would say that I haven't gone back to count, but I would say that roughly half the people that have been guests I did not know previously had no prior connection with but somebody either introduced me or I reached out to them on LinkedIn, told them what I was doing and it'd be a surprise. More often than not, people were willing to do it.

Speaker 1:

Well, because who doesn't love talking?

Speaker 2:

about themselves, talking about themselves.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely that, and podcasts are a very awesome opportunity to really market either yourself or your brand, put out a life legacy, and when you do have a listener, the listeners tend to stay engaged.

Speaker 2:

It's been a lot. When I first started, my wife said to me, after I told her I was going to do this, her comment was are you going to make any money? Doing this no.

Speaker 1:

I was like it is incredibly difficult to make money by doing a podcast, because a podcast is a marketing tool.

Speaker 2:

I said to her no, I'm not going to make any money and, as a matter of fact, it's going to cost me money for every show that I do because I have an editor. It's not a significant expense. Well, it's fun. It is fun and I've met a lot of really nice people. The other part of it you talk about branding, and one of the other things that I do in my career is try to make relationships, referrals. If I have some partnerships with companies that offer a certain service, I can talk to somebody on the podcast. Now. I have a personal relationship with them and, as they feel like they have a need, I can perhaps talk to them about their need. Now they feel comfortable with me because they were on the podcast.

Speaker 1:

Networking yet again. So what are some of the greatest learning lessons of having your own podcast? I think I've learned a few of them.

Speaker 2:

Well, you probably have Turn the mic on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, hit record, especially on new gear, that's important.

Speaker 2:

It's funny that you say that, because when I get ready to do the show, I always tell the guest I'm going to hit record, because I don't want you to be the recipient of the first one that I forget to record.

Speaker 1:

So are you the first one? For me, no, actually you're the second one. You're the first time where the cable was unplugged, but the first time I got my handy dandy new recorder forgot to turn it on. No, I turned it on, I leveled it, but I forgot to press the record button. Luckily the practice when I preach redundancy diversity I have backups so we were able to make it work.

Speaker 2:

But not every show is going to be good and I don't beat myself up over it. That's probably another good takeaway for folks Make a mistake, you don't do something well, there's really not a lot of value in beating yourself up over it. Take away your learnings. Make sure you don't do it again. Make sure you try to improve upon what it was that you didn't like. I think in my early shows there was a lot of stammering. I wasn't as natural as I wanted to be, even though I felt like I knew the content. When I was done with the Gary show, my wife always says to me after the show how to go. I was like I nailed that one. It was good. In my show, much like you're doing here, I tried to ask a question and then get out of the way and let the guest just talk. It was great.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, that was a great episode. Thank you. A lot of good lessons from that. We are now at a river crossing of just some rocks. They're an easier path. Yes, right here, maybe Much like life, there is always an easier path if you open your eyes and take time to think and stretch.

Speaker 2:

Yes, you go first. Look at this. All right, great, I think I know where I'm going.

Speaker 1:

All right.

Speaker 2:

This is like the horse crossing.

Speaker 1:

This is except. I'm the horse and there's a loose rock All right.

Speaker 2:

I'm not sure where the next foot goes, so maybe that's not the best path. I think you should get a straw and suck all the water out of here until it's dry, and then I will go. You think I've got yeah, All right.

Speaker 1:

are we finding another path?

Speaker 2:

I'm not sure the one that you're walking on is optimal.

Speaker 1:

This is. I took a hike and a bath. It's the beauty of nature Trails get flooded. So, to tie up the whole episode, what should we really be focusing on when it comes to marketing efforts? What is the most important value that we should take away from this?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think it's we didn't really talk about this but know who your customer is right, because you can spend a whole lot of dollars talking to people that are not potentially. You know your customers, so that's important Understanding, perhaps, who your competitors are, so that you would evaluate your own business based upon you know the kinds of things that your competitors are doing. And then you know marketing dollars and how you measure the marketing efficiency of the dollars you put into play. I think those are kind of three important things I would agree, and what are the pitfalls that you should avoid?

Speaker 1:

At what point do you know that your marketing effort, whether it's with a vendor or your team, is just not working and you need to pivot? Where are those warning signs?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it's about metrics. You know, if you know you can spend a whole lot of money, but you know, if you don't have something that you're really confident in, that you understand. You know we talked about it before return on ad spend. You know you need to know your economics, you need to know what you can afford to spend and what your comfort level is. And you know I see so many businesses they look at the metrics and the spend doesn't meet their requirements and yet they continue to spend and that's just dumb.

Speaker 1:

Well, that sometimes, you know, is relatable in all aspects of business throwing good money after bad. Yep, and unfortunately the reason for that is because you haven't set up KPIs metrics in the traction world rocks or milestones objectives. You just started spending where you got fooled into spending right and unfortunately we, rather than admit failure, cut our losses. We like to throw more money at a problem and you see that with marketing all the time. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So burning marketing question why are most people not all, but most people in marketing bad at marketing themselves? You?

Speaker 2:

know, it's funny.

Speaker 1:

Do you want to see the graves? There's a grave site up here.

Speaker 2:

Is that where they put people like me that can't make the backup on the?

Speaker 1:

You made it, so you should recognize where you are.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, we can see whatever you want. Yeah, I don't know, it's interesting. But you know what? If you said to me Mark, sit down and write your resume, that's hard. Yeah, it's very hard.

Speaker 1:

Outward looking self-reflection is extremely hard.

Speaker 2:

Even a LinkedIn page. I created a LinkedIn page forever ago. I probably haven't updated the about section forever. Yeah, you should probably do that and I probably should do that the Gen Zers.

Speaker 1:

I'm learning this with my marketing efforts. The Gen Zers don't like to spell so, for instance, when you're dropping an episode, instead of writing the word episode, they like epi. That's just lazy. Well, aren't we more efficient now? Isn't that the nature?

Speaker 2:

of evolution. Look you look at brands that had multiple oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 1:

We have a grave site here in a trail, some old graves.

Speaker 2:

Crazy right? 1785,. Wow yeah. Well, Jersey is an old state 1776, november 22nd 1776. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Jersey is an extremely old state and this is where Washington fought in these hills, defeated the British. I don't know if anyone here was in that, but I imagine I've lived here 30 years, never been here. You never know. So that's why I like coming here, especially with residents. They just don't know about this.

Speaker 2:

Well, look, union County's big and there's places in Westfield that have never been True, but it's funny you were talking about shortening things, epi. Look at brands that were well-known brands and over time they fall back to using the letters of their brand and the marketing space is littered with companies that have done that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, it looks better on social media. On a short form platform, but I'm learning that myself, as a 43-year-old dad who didn't have social media until about three months ago. With the birth of this podcast, I am learning how not cool I can be.

Speaker 2:

Well, and I'm enjoying that you need a 12-year-old to run your social for you.

Speaker 1:

Well, I don't know if they're really truly employable. My kids are nine and five. Nine, nine, five, so I guess I have to reach out to somebody who knows a little more than me, which is another extremely important lesson Find smarter people than you, baby. If you're a business owner and a CEO, hire people that are better at their job than you are.

Speaker 2:

And it's not just about a business owner or whatever. When I've looked for staff in my organization, the comfort level is finding people like you. Because you feel like you can talk their language, you'll feel like you'll like them better. On the contrary, you find people that are complementary to your skills. If you're the numbers geek, find somebody that maybe has a little bit of a creative head, and vice versa.

Speaker 1:

That's right. Write people, write seat. And what I've also noticed in hiring staff and advising when you hire people it actually makes you better. You want to perform for others and they want to perform for you. So you can have a much better net result if you surround yourself with good, qualified people and make up a nice, well-rounded staff. We are almost back. So, mark Friedman, you consider yourself successful.

Speaker 2:

You know, I said to you earlier in the show, everybody's measurement of success is different. I'll say I'm successful in the sense that I'm happy I've been able to provide for my family emotionally and with the other things that they've needed over their life. I've been able to do that with my parents as well. So yeah, I think from that perspective I would say I've been successful.

Speaker 1:

Well, I would say you're certainly successful in everything that you've put together, both in your business and personal world, right your entrepreneurial world. You've been able to make it and succeed. You've inspired me, for sure so much so that this episode's far better than the last one. So I will say thank you for bearing with me and coming out again and really not making fun of me, which would have been comical as well. And this time we did hit record and we're on the back nine, so to say.

Speaker 2:

Look at that, turning the coming off full tilt on golf.

Speaker 1:

You know it's a practice thing. After a while you just get this intuition. So, mark Friedman, thanks for hiking with me for the second time. I really enjoyed this. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me Next time when I took a hike. We venture into the remarkable life of Andrew Ruditzer, a trailblazer who co-founded MaxBurst and continues to inspire as a visionary entrepreneur.

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Darren Mass

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