Gary Lancina: The Marketer Who Fights for the User

Pat McGovern: Foreign. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Over a Pint. I'm your host, Pat McGovern. Today I've got marketer extraordinaire. This guy has worked at Briggs and Stratton, Mercury, Marine, bp, Redbox, SC Johnson, Kohler. There's probably about seven or eight companies that I'm missing. He's also a podcaster. I'm going to call him a friend. My man, Gary Lancina. How are you doing, Gary?

Gary Lancina: I'm good, Patrick, and thank you so much for having me on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Pat McGovern: I'm, um, psyched to be talking to you. Um, you and I got connected through a mutual friend, Jen. Um, big shout out to Jen. She can't talk enough great things about you. The first time we met, you just blew me away. Um, I'm really looking forward to getting into this with you, Gary. Um, let's just start with this. Give us your background. How did you get into marketing? Uh, why don't we start there?

Gary Lancina: Okay. Uh, you're going in the Wayback Machine on that one. Um, so I had no intentions of getting into marketing early in my career. I actually studied government and German literature when I was in undergrad, um, and then went overseas and taught for a while at a school in Germany. Came back to the States, worked, uh, for a small college in their admissions office, uh, and had all the intentions of going to grad school and either being a professor or maybe going in the foreign service, uh, but doing something that seemed a little bit to me at the time, more intellectually stimulating, and, um, you know, life happens. And I ended up getting an mba. And the classes that really floated my boat at the time were all the marketing ones. I loved the connectedness that especially brand marketing, uh, had with all the other functional areas. Right. You do a new product development, you're thinking about the relationship with your customers and end users, you're trying to figure out operations and have to manage costs. And I just loved the complexity of it all. And that's what started my trajectory into this marketing and strategy, product management, innovation space.

Pat McGovern: You've been in the space a while. You've seen a lot of things. Gary, how do you think about marketing today? And by that I mean, has marketing fundamentally changed since you got into the space? I know technology has certainly been brought in, has changed things, but has marketing really changed, in your opinion?

Gary Lancina: Well, this is a topic that, um, I have some passion for, um, because to your point, how we act on our inclinations as marketers, as the nurturers, of value propositions and brands has absolutely evolved. Um, I've got enough gray hairs to remember when the interwebs were new and uh, that changed a lot. And then we got search engines that were actually capable and search engine marketing became a thing. And nowadays AI is disrupting and opening up opportunities that we're still exploring. Fundamentally though, for me marketing is about the establishment and nurturing of high commitment relationships for the exchange of value. Um, I'm purveying something, a widget, a service, uh, an experience and I want some of your hard earned dough. And if we do our jobs right, that happens through an increasingly high commitment to um, relationship or set of interactions that reinforce this is fair, this works for both of us. I'm getting what I need out of this.

Pat McGovern: Mhm.

Gary Lancina: I think along with that though, as it's very, very common in product categories or anything else, how people use the term marketing has sort of inherently kind of been deconstructed into littler and more precise segments. So when I first started in this space, a lot of the brand marketers out there, or even in some organizations, product marketers were essentially general managers of businesses and there are still organizations that run in that way. But I think it was more common back then to have P and L responsibility for a product category and maybe a couple of brands. If we look at it today, a lot of people use the term marketing for what I would think of as marketing communications. Right. And so the, the brand management or product management has been put into. Well, there's a, uh, there's a product team or a category team, there's shopper marketing, there's marketing communications, there's brand development. And that sort of deconstruction of the discrete elements makes a lot of sense through one lens. And at the same time I think it's a bit of a miss if we lose sight of that core unifying thing that all of those facets and more contribute to the perception that the people we serve have of us, of our organizations, of our value propositions. Because end users tend not to care what the org structure is or what the titles are. They're viewing it through a lens of does this entity give me what I want and do I feel fairly treated by it?

Pat McGovern: I want to get your take on um, how you approach when you enter a new company. You've worked at a lot of, a lot of spaces. Yeah. What do you look for, Gary? And what do you, when you, when you step in as your role, what things are you looking for? What things are you. Are you hey, this is my m. I gotta have these things. Like these must things need to get done. And I just, yeah. Curious as how you think about that. And the reason I'm asking that is you just touched on this. Marketing is so diverse nowadays. Like when I was coming up a, uh, cmo, the job was a lot simpler just because for one thing, there weren't so many media channels.

Gary Lancina: Correct.

Pat McGovern: You had a handful. And that was, you know, you could wrap your arms around that. Right. You could understand that. Today it's bananas.

Gary Lancina: Oh yeah.

Pat McGovern: Uh, you know, so anyway, let's leave it at that. Talk to uh, talk. Talk to us about what you look for, what's your must haves. Once you get into a new area that's like this has got to happen.

Gary Lancina: Well, you may, you may find this a little bit surprising, but you know, a couple of the first things that I look at whether I'm joining an organization or I'm helping them out as an advisor or consultant is uh, how do you articulate your objectives and uh, how do you measure your performance? Um, and a lot of that comes back to this idea of if we create the right kind of team capability, composition and behaviors, we're going to achieve good things when we go to market and compete. And I'll give you a little more color on both of those. If I enter an organization and I see that my team's prior objectives were all built around our functional area only, or the goals are, uh, and performance reviews are written around level of effort rather than outcome, those are both indicators of opportunity for me because I have a strong belief that clarity of purpose, like a sense of mission and high trust are the secret ingredients to great performance for a team. Along with that though, is this idea that we win collectively. And so if you go into uh, an organization and you see that teams are being guided, given incentives to act within their silo rather than collectively across the different functions, that can sometimes lead into the insight that sales might be competing with marketing, marketing might be competing with operations, right? And you know, if sales beats marketing, if sales says, well, we missed our objectives, but it's marketing's fault, right? That doesn't actually drive the business forward. That just helps the people in sales feel better about the fact that the organization didn't achieve. And so that's, that's one of the things that I start with is like, hey, how might we, especially at the top of the house, build a sense of accomplishment, achievement, intention and, and sort of the definition of winning that is collective rather than divvied. Up M. And, um, and the reason that I, I look for that and bringing it back to brand and marketing is because if I sell you a product and you have an issue with it, you don't call the brand team to say, I have an issue with it. You call somebody in customer service. If it turns out that the issue had with it was a manufacturing defect, you don't call the brand team. It goes into the factory and on the plant floor. And yet, and this goes back to something I said a little while ago to the end user, it's all from the same source, right? And so, um, understanding that each of those touch points is a moment of truth, right? It either builds or erodes the value of the proposition. That's a good starting point to help bring people together and then start to work through the order of operations, the sequencing of what needs to happen next. In some cases, you've got organizations that have a great value proposition. They've got a great solution, but they've got very little awareness. In others, they may be lacking in innovation, they've got a mature business, but they're kind of getting a little gray around the temples and upstarts are trying to chip away at their market share. Um, but if you can't look across the whole spectrum and say, okay, in the eye of the user, how do we activate our empathy so that we understand from the user perspective what's good, what's valuable? Where there are areas of opportunity, we're going to have issues. And even if you can do those, you know, exercises in manifesting the empathy through insights and voice of customer and walking in the shoes of our users and all of that stuff, if it then comes back in and collectively the organization can't digest it and internalize it and act on it, there's a problem. And so, you know, it's always a question of how to, how to sequence that stuff. But for me, one of those first tells is, am I in a place where I need to redefine what success is, or am I in a place where we collectively understand what success is? But now we got to get to the tasks.

Pat McGovern: You strike me as, uh, a pretty analytical guy. There are so many things you can measure in today's world. I'm wondering, Gary, that when do you have your top five, your top seven metrics, that it's like, these are the things that I obsess over. These are the things I really focus on. No matter where I go, I'm looking at these six things, whatever number it is.

Gary Lancina: Well, I would Say I'm kind of persnickety at times in terms of what success metrics are versus performance indicators.

Pat McGovern: Right.

Gary Lancina: Performance indicators for me are, you know, the things we measure to know whether we're making progress. The success metrics boil down essentially to three things for me, which is sales, profit and market share. You know, sales, are we achieving the scale we want? Profit, are we delivering the value to our shareholders that we need? And whether that's a, in a public company or the shareholders happen to be a private company, a proprietor, a person or some other definition, you know, are we achieving the scale we want? Are we delivering the value we need? And then market share, is that triangulation of are we doing it better than our competition? And in lots of spaces it's really hard to get accurate market share, but you can still measure the momentum there and you can get some qualitative measures. So those are the three that fundamentally I walk in the door every day thinking is what I am doing today going to help us achieve better sales, better profits and beat the snot out of our competition? Which is quite fun for me along. So I'll pause there because you're looking a little, a little thoughtful.

Pat McGovern: Yeah. In that. Here's where I'm thinking things a little bit thoughtful in marketing, the way you're talking about it too, Gary. It's not necessarily I'm going to do action A and I'm going to see the return pretty quickly. A lot of times it's, let's put things in motion. Mhm. Several months later, we'll see what happens.

Gary Lancina: Well, I think you got to balance all of, I think on um, the hypothetical importance difficulty matrix. Let's think about all the things that might be important. And, and you know, you mentioned, uh, Jen, my, my friend and former colleague. Right. We did this at the, at the organization we worked for. We looked at all the different opportunities and, and we force ranked them. No ties allowed. What's, what's most important, what's least important? And then ask the question, how hard is it to achieve? Because when you, when you mix those two things up, what you'll find is there's some stuff that's probably going to have an impact and is relatively easy to do. Take those quick wins, go do it. And there's other stuff that might be incredibly hard but is fundamental or profound in its impact and those are the strategic initiatives where you want to find a way to move at least a couple of them forward so that you're building that Runway to enduring and resilient Competitiveness, right. And there's, you know, it's, it's hard. My favorite color is gray in part because if we get too black and white on this stuff, if we get too near term focused, we might be mortgaging our future. And if we get too long term focused, we might forget to keep the current business healthy and we never get an opportunity to deliver on those big ideas. And so there's a balance there. Sometimes you walk into an organization and it is time to defend Sheriff Shelf at retail. And in the near term, the levers we have are not built around building more brand equity and authority. They're built around hand to hand combat, making sure displays are up, uh, making sure promotions are fine tuned, et cetera. And so that's what you want to do. In other cases, things might seem relatively solid for the moment, but there's a looming competitive threat. You can see a disruption coming. You know, I worked at bp. We spent a lot of time looking at demographics and behaviors around use of, you know, vehicles and electrification and what's going to happen in the future with consumption of our primary product, which was fuel. Um, and there was a ton of debate and healthy debate about how urgent or comfortable our present position was. And so, you know, I think it's those types of reflections that make for a healthy portfolio of activities for a, uh, marketing or brand or product management group.

Pat McGovern: Let's take a pivot, Gary. We've been hanging out at the 3,000 foot level. Let's get a little bit, let's get a little, go down a little bit further. And you brought up bp. I want to talk about two things in your career. I want to talk about BP a little bit and I want to talk about, um, Redbox.

Gary Lancina: Um, I just think very different industries, but yes.

Pat McGovern: Yeah, right. Let's stick with the BP thing. Since you brought that up, here's my first question. Why bp? Why did you go there? Why was that a stop? What was appealing about that? Opening that position, that challenge that's like, yeah, I gotta go there.

Gary Lancina: Well, it's interesting, BP came after the sale of Redbox. And uh, I had spent a bit of time doing consultative work. Um, I was, you know, at that point a bit of a subject matter expert on filmed content delivery from my time at Redbox. Um, and I was in discussions with a handful of different organizations. I was on the advisory board for a startup and the founder actually offered me a big title in that very small organization. Um, I had a consulting firm offer me a pretty healthy gig to come in at A senior level within their consulting practice. And then it turned out that BP expressed some interest in whether I could help them with a couple of things in their US consumer business. And as I was playing it out, my, my thought process was, well, I just did a startup that got to scale and we sold it red box. So I'm less inclined to go take that risk on again. You know, I had kids and was saving for college, et cetera. Um, I wasn't finding that the consulting world had a magnetic pull on me, but BP was an opportunity to kind of go back to the big leagues. You know, I had spent time with SC Johnson, very prominent consumer package goods company, and BP was a big brand. And then it also raised, and this is maybe a theme for me, some specific challenges. Right. The people interviewing me at BP asked me the same thing. Why are you interviewing here? Because I'm a card carrying tree hugger. And um, I said to him, listen, first of all, I think that there are a lot of challenges in this space. It's a very complex undertaking to pull raw materials out of the ground, ship them someplace, process them, ship them someplace else, and then deliver them to the consumer for a fraction of what Coca Cola charges for sugar water. Um, and I think if there were ever to be an issue, a, uh, challenge, I'd rather be on the inside working to make it better than being on the outside just demonstrating and expressing outrage. Now, little did I know that several weeks after I joined bp, we would have the Deepwater Horizon incident, which was a terrible, terrible disaster, both environmentally and also because of the loss of life. Um, and I will say as an aside and credit to BP as an organization, um, there forever after from that moment globally within bp, there's a moment of silence at the, at the time that that disaster occurred. Around the world, everybody is pens down, laptops closed. Moment of remembrance. You know, it is a, uh, it is a big oil company. It operates like a big oil company, but there's a heart in there. And that to me was actually a little bit surprising once I got on the inside, um, and validated my choice to go there.

Pat McGovern: Take us through that incident. Gary, uh, what happened? What was your role then afterwards?

Gary Lancina: Well, there's a ton of documentation on it. I won't give you all of the blow by blows. Um, there's even a movie with Mark Wahlberg. Um, but essentially oil companies are divided roughly into what they call upstream, poke holes in the earth, pull raw materials out and sell it, and downstream, which is the processing and sale on of all the Products that can be made from those raw materials. Our upstream business was in exploration mode in the Gulf of Mexico and had a catastrophic failure with one of the rigs out there, including loss of life and then a very, um, intense environmental disaster afterwards. Yeah, I learned of what was happening while I was sitting in a conference room with customers. Um, and there was this progression of, hey, there's been something reported in the Gulf. I hope everyone's okay. I hope it's not one of ours to, oh, it is one of ours. I hope everybody's okay. Everybody's not okay, right? And then things kicked into action. At that time, my accountabilities within the BP business here in the States, I had fuels product management. I had what we called customer offers, which was all the programs for our distributors and dealers. I had consumer ah, offers, which was your experience at a BP gas station. I had a consumer insights team, M a customer insights team. I had set up, ah, an analytics and decision support team. So I had a pretty broad remit. First thing we did was sit down and acknowledge the emotions everybody was feeling. The second thing we did was kick into action. And some of that meant parts of my team deployed down to the Gulf states to support what was going on in the immediate crisis response. Some of that was building scenarios. How might this get better, how might this get worse? What are we going to do if it goes in those directions? Uh, pre thinking what the actions would be so that we could then identify a specific list of what are we going to track consumer sentiment, customer sentiment? Um, you know, is the, have we stopped the leak of oil, uh, on the ocean floor or not? You know, there were a whole bunch of different factors, but we thought through the scenarios and my role was really to focus on those distributors and dealers and work with them to maintain the relationships and the resilience there. Uh, you know, we had a corporate group that was managing governmental affairs and broad communications, um, so I was in a coordinating role with them. But I worked with our hundreds of distributors and thousands of operators. BP doesn't own but a handful of sites across the US they're mostly operated by independent business people to say, okay, how are we going to get through this? What does it look like on the other side? And touch wood, one, we got the oil leak stopped. Two, uh, we were able to maintain close to 100%, about 98% of those distributor and dealer relationships. And within three years we were back to market share growth.

Pat McGovern: That's an amazing story. I'm struck by it. Gary, listen, even listen to it. Again, is the fact that how are you even prepared for something like that? Not, I mean, just you look, from a marketing standpoint, it's like, you know, a typical marketing person thinking about, like, how do I grow my audience? How do I get better retention? Like, well, all of a sudden now you're, now you're dealt this, this, this hand that it's like, holy cow, what's my playbook for this?

Gary Lancina: Well, I think there are a couple of things here, and it's sort of a good news, bad news situation. Most of us, if we hold positions of accountability at some point, deal with a moment of crisis. Your spokesperson turns out to be not very good human being, but is very tightly associated with your brand. Hello, Hertz and O.J. simpson back in the day. Um, or you have a product failure, or you have, um, a, ah, customer experience that goes viral for being a bad thing, or one of your employees posts something on social media. I don't know if you remember the Domino's incident where there was a Domino's worker that was actually throwing stuff on the floor and then putting it on pizzas. And so Domino's all of a sudden had a reputational issue. Um, so there isn't, there is an element, if you've done this long enough, and it's not the sexy stuff, it's not super bowl advertising, it's not a new product that is, you know, launched to great acclaim, but there is a reality that addressing unexpected problems is part of the gig. And so I had dealt with some of that. Nothing to the scale of Deepwater Horizon, um, but I at least knew that there is a way to deal with the unexpected and that we would get through it. Um, I think the other part is just acknowledging the limits of what you know there. And this is a, uh, truism for me that in those moments of extreme pressure and crisis, a lot of folks default to control, right? They hunker down, they shrink things, they try to, they try to act as if, okay, I'm in control, there's chaos everywhere. And I got this. But that's actually the wrong response. The, you know, for me, it's opening up to the additional input. It's understanding. Avoiding the truth is not helpful. Absorbing the truth is collaborating with people, communicating and leveraging the relationships that you've got so that collectively you can get through it is really helpful. And I would say part of the magic back then with BP was increasing the frequency of contact with those customers, sitting down and planning with them, um, being empathetic to their plight. I mean in some cases we had distributorships that were third or fourth generation owned family businesses that were wholly dedicated to the BP brand. And for them there was this initial existential moment. Can we survive this? Because they looked at what had happened with Exxon years prior with the Valdez incident and it scared them. And understandably. And so, you know, there's um, a, there's, there's no right answer, but there are at least some right philosophical approaches to help with this. And you know, on the tail end when the dust had settled, we at BP worked very closely with uh, the Kellogg School of Management at the time and we put together a uh, coaching course on crisis response to then cycle leaders through and leverage both Kellogg's fantastic academic, ah, and um, I would say, uh, uh, staff of professors and intellectuals on these topics along with the pragmatic lessons learned of having been in the trenches and put together a pretty good program. I used to instruct one of the modules here.

Pat McGovern: That's a fascinating story. Let's, let's shift this a little bit, Gary, and go backwards and talk about your time at Redbox, which is when you start here again, how did you get involved with it? And a little bit about the Redbox model for those who aren't familiar with the product.

Gary Lancina: Well, so, ah, I'll start with what Redbox was. Right. Redbox was a project that spun out of McDonald's of all places. Um, because at the time there was a ventures group within McDonald's that was looking at how do we capture more meal occasions. Right. Um, and at that point I think McDonald's invested in a number of different brands. Chipotle, Bret A Manger, Boston Market, et cetera. And then another part was how do we bring more people to existing McDonald's locations more frequently? And it was under that umbrella, uh, that I believe the Redbox idea first started. Now the initial concept was a convenience store in a box. Um, and the team that had been working on it, uh, as a bit of an experiment because it's hard to maintain the freshness of pre made sandwiches in a kiosk, identified um, a couple of companies that had these DVD vending machines. I think one was Israeli, one was Italian, uh, and they did a little experiment. Um, and lo and behold the cash flow on those was equivalent to the convenience store in a box. And it was a lot easier to manage. So, so there were leadership evolutions within McDonald's and that Redbox initiative got spun out. So now it's an independent company. Um, and the real model at the Time was renting new release movies through kiosks, and the incumbent in the space was Blockbuster. With thousands of retail locations. And for people these days who are relatively young, they probably never experienced on a Friday night walking the new release aisle in a video store. But that used to be a social occasion. Let's hit the Blockbuster, let's pick up a movie or two, etc. So Redbox and Netflix both essentially got traction by attacking different ends of Blockbuster's model. Netflix said, we're going to look at all of the back catalog of movies that are out there, um, because they're cheap to acquire. And, you know, for people who aren't familiar, before Netflix was a streaming behemoth, it was, uh, uh, a provider of DVDs through the mail. You'd build a list of up to 100 movies and they would send you a few and then you wouldn't get a new one until you returned something that you already had. But you could say, you know, I've, I've wanted to watch these 80 films and, you know, two of them would show up in the mail and you could watch and then once you hit, you know, sent them back, the next ones would show up. But it was sort of Netflix's choice what you would get. And that's how they managed their inventory. They didn't have to have so many copies of each of those because they could divvy it up around their network. Redbox took the other end of Blockbuster's model and looked at the freshest films, the new releases. And we had a pricing model that was a dollar a night versus going into Blockbuster and spending four or five dollars for multiple nights to rent a video. And the dollar a night model was really helpful for us because it was an incentive for a lot of people to bring the movie back quickly. And that meant we didn't have to have the same level of inventory. Because even if you rented at Blockbuster and watched it on the first night, if you had paid for four or five nights, the psychology said, I'm going to hold onto it just in case. And in our case, we had people watch the movie, bring it back the next day. And we made that really easy by saying you could rent it at your grocery store and return it at a McDonald's or, you know, rent it at a Walmart and return it at, you know, a 7 11. And it, it became a very fluid thing. Now we had to do a bunch of operational stuff on the back end to rebalance those inventories, but it was worth it. And between the Two of us, Netflix and Redbox, we just kind of ate up blockbusters, revenue streams and profitability from both ends.

Pat McGovern: So how did you get, how did this come about, Gary? How did this, how did this startup basically right, get onto your, onto your radar? And what, what was the attraction there for you to say, yeah, I could do something with this?

Gary Lancina: The honest answer is I had said no a couple of different times to the recruiter who kept calling me up. I was working in a private equity backed turnaround, uh, and having good fun helping stabilize and then grow that business. Um, and this one recruiter had called me a couple of different times. I talked to so and so, they said I should talk to you. I talked to so and so, they said I should talk to you. Um, what ultimately happened was within the turnaround there was a strategic shift and I, I get excited by growing things. And our owners kind of looked at the organization I was with and said, you know what, we, we really like the cash flow this business is spinning off. We don't want to invest for further growth right now. We want to take that cash flow and use it to fund some other activities. All well and good, but I'm much less inclined to maintain than I am to grow. And so third time's the charm. The same recruiter called me up right after the conversation with our board, uh, and I said, you know what, I'll send you a resume. And probably through some luck, I ended up joining Redbox. At the time, the marketing team, we were a very small company. The marketing team was me and three others. Um, and you know, the others were all relatively early in their career. Uh, my office was this sort of weird triangular closet, uh, in the little office facility we had. I had no windows, um, I had a desk at one end and I shoved a little two person table into the, you know, the, the pointy end of the triangle. Um, and we started growing from there. You know, it was, let's look at, let's look at what we're trying to accomplish. Um, let's look at how we're going to build on this. Um, and there were a couple of things that, when I started looking at the numbers that seemed apparent if we could address those, it was going to accelerate our growth. And so that's what I set up to do.

Pat McGovern: Can you share what those, what you were looking at?

Gary Lancina: So at the time that I joined, we had locations in Denver, Houston, Minneapolis, and a, uh, handful in Bethesda, Maryland, Washington, D.C. area. Um, some of the early pilot markets. And we were in test With Walmart and doing some other stuff. The, the thing that I noticed was where we had had our kiosks installed for um, months. It appeared that we were losing momentum. And so we would go into a, um, marketing, um, area and we would install a bunch of these boxes and some people would see them and they would try them. But I was seeing what looked like a decline in same location revenue. And I actually had a little wager with, uh, our head of uh, client relations, essentially sales. And he said, I don't believe that we're going to go negative on same locations year on year, but if we do, I'll support any initiative that um, you recommend. And I think in return I promised to buy him a really nice steak dinner if it turned out that I was wrong. And so within a couple of quarters of being at the organization, we started to see that and that helped. Having his alignment helped us pilot a couple of things that became quite helpful. One was we spooled up free Movie Mondays as a promotion, uh, where we would send out a promotion code at noon on a Monday and it would blow up uh, at midnight. So you had 12 hours to act on it. That was our lowest demand day of the week. And the hypothesis was if we put out a code that's shareable, we're going to get a certain proportion of the people who use it who are going to be new to the Redbox proposition and they'll stick with us because it is a good proposition. And that started to work. Um, and so we knew that if a certain percentage of our new customers or of the customers who redeemed that were new, we knew what their average revenue per year would be. And we were able to build that program. And it became self funding essentially. It was profitable because we drove enough consumption and we got enough new customer acquisition that, that helped accelerate the business. The other thing we did was we tested. I think our first market for testing was Jacksonville, um, what I called the uh, the CNC advertising approach. The insight being people think about whether they want to watch a movie or not on their way home from work. So we set up billboards that were facing outbound commuters and did drive time radio live reads on weather and traffic forecasts because people wouldn't switch away on the radio from those. And so in the middle of a uh, traffic report there'd be a 30 word live read about, hey, make sure to try Redbox. It's a dollar a night, um, you can find them at these locations. And then there'd be a billboard that would Say you know, red box at your local McDonald's here, buck a night. That's right. Right. So we reinforced the proposition and it also started to generate then more awareness and trial and that combination of good trial inducing communication and some good promotion, along with all of the efforts of a tremendous team of field operators and having the right clients or partners for our locations really helped accelerate the business.

Pat McGovern: When did you start there Gary? How big of a company was it and when did you exit?

Gary Lancina: Uh, well, I was only there for a couple of years to be honest. Um, I think I started there in 2006, beginning of 2007 and I think I was out by at the very end of 2009, um, because I started with BP in 2010. So um, yeah, I'm trying to do the math here but um, you know, and I think we went from 40 something million in revenue when I first got there to 700 million in revenue two years later on our way on a trajectory to a billion. Uh, you know it was, it was, it was a, you talk about high growth startups, you know, we were strong triple digit growth during that time period and um, you know that momentum is what, what gave us the valuation when it was actually sold. Um, that uh, was, was you know, quite gratifying and you know, helped put my oldest son through college to be honest.

Pat McGovern: Just, ah, just to close the loop on this then what happened to is, I mean Redbox is, I don't even know if that's still around, is it?

Gary Lancina: Oh, it's been liquidated. You know Redbox I think, I think the sort of lesson from Redbox for me is one of be aware of the limits of what your current value proposition is. Um, you know Redbox had a model that could hunt incredibly well in uh, a disk based media environment. And there were those of us inside who kind of saw that that had a half life and then things like streaming or downloads would become the standard in the future. Um, I wasn't there at the point that further strategic decisions were being made, but just on the surface of seems apparent that Redbox stayed dedicated to its kiosk and hardware based model even as the transition was happening. So again it wasn't an immediate thing. There were a lot of people for whom a uh, $49 DVD or Blu Ray player and a disc and a bucket uh, of chicken from Popeyes or Kentucky Fried is Friday night fun for the family. And that's a very efficient way of doing it. And, and that's one of the reasons why Redbox persisted as long as it did, but it was late to the streaming and download game and by that time, you know, the, the bigger players had already staked out their spaces and they had an advantage. Um, and you know, we could probably go deep on analyzing some of the strategic choices made by different generations of leadership within Redbox and so the rationale behind some of those choices. But I think on the surface of it it's a lesson in similar to buggy whips, don't expect what is good business today is always going to be good business. I'm uh, a believer that brands have longevity, but products and services often need to evolve. And so you know, there's, there's some stuff, some products, you know, Gillette razors, they're still selling razors today and they were selling razors 100 years ago. Uh, but there are also businesses that have maintained their branding but have really had to evolve what their product offers are. And Redbox found itself in a situation where, just like Blockbuster before it, its ability to continue competing was incumbent on changing what its capabilities were. And I just don't think the organization was nimble enough in that regard.

Pat McGovern: Uh, a quick question about that, Gary, and I'm just using those, those two examples as just to understand you a little bit better. Are you a guy who looks at something like I want to take something from 0 to 100 or I want to help revise the giant that once was. Do you get more excited about either one of those?

Gary Lancina: I get excited by putting more growth into something. And my career path, and you touched on this earlier, is not industry specific. Um, I have done work with startups, I've done work with established brands that needed a rejuvenation. I've done work with turnarounds. Um, and what gets me excited is whatever the current state is, achieving a better state and achieving it with a team of people who are committed to the cause. And I'm competitive, so I like to beat up on the competition while doing that. Right? Yeah, uh, it's a moment of joy for me if a, uh, competitor pulls back from the market or if we achieve record market share. Um, and so at SC Johnson there was a brand that I was working with that was 30 years old, profitable, stable, but not growing. And the challenge there was infuse it with an ability to grow. And so we grew both revenue and uh, also added profitability, um, so that it achieved record gross profit and bottom line profitability during, uh, my time there. I worked at Master lock in the mid-90s, way back in the day on their Commercial business, a big B2B business. And the challenge they had was as, uh, somebody who I reported to said to me, if we ignore this business, it grows 2%. If we focus on this business, it grows 2%. We need to unlock more. And within a couple of years, you know, my first year there, we got it from 2 to about 7% growth. And then we added a bunch of new products and accelerated it. And by the time I left there, that business had positive momentum. And a couple years after that, Master Lock acquired their biggest competitor in the space and basically consolidated their market share and their presence to be, uh, a clear leader in that segment. And all of that gets me excited. I mean that was 30 years ago and I'm still excited by how we went about that, the strategy behind it, what the innovation stream was, and executing it in pretty rapid order.

Pat McGovern: Is this too simplistic, Gary, that maybe one of your big unlocks is for any, any of the brands that you have served and have helped, that one of your big unlocks is a deep understanding of customer. Or again, is that just too simplistic? That fits into it. But you know, you got to weigh these other things, Pat.

Gary Lancina: I don't, I don't know if it's too simplistic. One of my favorite quotes, and this is sort of my nerd card as well, because it's from the old Tron mov is fight for the user. Right? I fight for the user. And you know, we, you asked the question earlier, what are some of the stuff that I look for? Another thing along with objectives and how we define success and all of that gobbledygook is, you know, do we actually start with how we might help the user or do we start with what we're capable of doing? Right? And I tend to gravitate towards having a good insight and innovating into the insight versus what are we capable of? Let's throw it in the market. And you, uh, know, I, I want to be in a position where any of the businesses that I'm working with are, are doing right by the people they serve because ultimately it's the people we serve who pay us. They have to reach in their pocket and pull out their cash and say what you're purveying is worth my hard earned dough. And so that is a bias that I have.

Pat McGovern: It strikes me that somewhere on your laptop you basically have a, um, matrix that helps you when you go into whatever situation you're in, just kind of pattern recognize things. Oh, it's the gas business. But here's really the issue. Oh, it's this new startup, but here's really the issue. Oh, it's a lock company that's 100 years old, but this is the issue. Am I right or wrong in that?

Gary Lancina: Oh, probably. I've got a ton of different frameworks that I use.

Pat McGovern: Um,

Gary Lancina: I don't know what I said that was so funny there, but I'll take it. Take it. Thank you for the laughter.

Pat McGovern: All right, let's wrap up with a couple things. How I got to ask you about this, Gary. You're, you're, you're a big picture thinker. How are you thinking about AI just going forward?

Gary Lancina: Ah, this has been, uh, thanks for asking that. This has been a conversation that's been ongoing now for years. Right. Um, we got a couple software engineers in the family, so it's a topic over, you know, family meals. Um, but it's also one professionally that we, we've all got to be grappling with. My starting statement is never underestimate the ability of humans to over and underestimate. There's a ton of hyperbole out there about how AI is going to transform the world into a nirvana. And at the other end, there's a ton of hyperbole out there about how dystopian our future is because of AI. Uh, I tend to believe that we are still in the early days of how these capabilities will be applied. I tend to believe that a lot of the applications are going to be pretty mundane stuff. We're going to find ourselves automating things that are pedestrian. And I'll give you an example. A lot of us used to make lists to go grocery shopping or to dos or whatever. And then we started to do that digitally and then we started talking to our phones. And now AI may start being better at suggesting and monitoring. The idea of what do I need to buy at the grocery store? Is not a new topic, but our behaviors around it, uh, continue to evolve based on what the technology enables. Personally, I think AI is exciting, and I also recognize the limitations of it. Um, I, I would caution people not to invert what it can do well for what we should be doing well. So don't ask AI to think for you so that you can do an expense report, automate your expense report and do some good thinking and, and engage AI to help you calibrate your thinking. Go there. But be mindful that at least as of now, AI, broadly, whether it's agentic or otherwise, is a great aggregator and a great synthesizer. But it is not yet, uh, human in terms of creativity, uh, the innovative insight. Um, and so, again, this, for me, is a theme. I love putting my hypothesis up and having AI punch holes in it and engaging in the debate. And just as I love sitting down with people like you and having a beverage and engaging in the debate. But ultimately, the core thought is mine. And if we try to seed that or we get comfortable thinking that the machine is better at that than us, that, to me, is where we start to, um, tiptoe into some precarious spaces.

Pat McGovern: Last question. Three books you would recommend, Gary?

Gary Lancina: Well, one of the ones that I've just read recently is called Proof, uh, which, uh, seems like a pretty dry topic. It's how people convince others of their arguments. What I loved about it is it went from ancient Greek philosophy to legal means to statistics and the development of calculus. Um, and I found that to be a pretty entertaining read. Um, I think, uh, another book that, um, I find myself sometimes going back to over and over again is, of all things that the Ursula K. Le Guin Earthsea trilogy from years ago. Right. There's just. There's some things about it that I read as a kid. I read it as a young adult. I've read it as I've gotten older. And each time I read it, I get a little bit different perspective on this main character and also how she crafted the books. So I find it good in terms of, uh, a little bit of an escape from reality and sort, uh, of reflection on how we move through the world and deal with different challenges. Uh, that's probably also a nerd card, uh, for me. Um, and then, um, I would say, uh, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which is another oldie but goodie, um, for just challenging the orthodoxy, challenging the perspective of how we view things. Um, and the reason that I bring that up is it is easy to consume mass quantities of information, and it's also easy to allow an editorial bias or even a personal bias to filter what we internalize. I like reading Zinn because he says, let's look at these things that you've learned about from elementary school, sometimes all the way through university, but from a perspective that is not the standard. What did the Civil War look like if you were not a leader? What did the civil, you know, you know, what does. What does, you know, any of these great movements? What did industrialization look like from this perspective? And so I find that to be instructive, not just for the entertainment of reading the narrative, but also Then to reflect on, as I'm consuming information today, how might I think about this from a different perspective?

Pat McGovern: Gary, thanks a lot for coming onto the pod. You are a fascinating guy. We hardly covered. You got to come back for a part two, um, because there's way more to go through. You've got the last word, sir. How do people find out more about you, about anything you want to promote? Take the mic, it's yours.

Gary Lancina: Well, uh, first of all, I would say, Pat, thank you. Um, I appreciate having you as a friend. I appreciate, uh, being able to have the kinds of conversations we do. It's, um, fun and, to be honest, somewhat indulgent to be able to sort of reflect and talk about some of these questions that many of us contemplate but don't actually take the time to debate. Um, so I'm gratified that you would have me back. I look forward to it. Um, I would say if anybody ever wants to get in touch, I'm, um, the only Gary Lancina on the planet. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. Reach out, let me know. Um, you know, and I'm at a stage in my career where I am able to coach, consult, advise. You know, we haven't talked about advising on startups and some of the things that I'm doing in that space with AI and electrification. Um, but, you know, I'm, I'm always game for more and good connections and just like marketing, I want to nurture those high commitment relationships. Uh, so if anything I've said is intriguing or if somebody wants to, uh, challenge any of it, I am game. Thanks very much.

Pat McGovern: Thanks, Gary. Thanks, everybody.