Selling Belief with Mat Zucker from Prophet

Speaker A: Foreign m.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Malicki and Jeff McKay.

Speaker C: Jeff, I believe you've brought us another wonderful guest today, so I wanted to thank you for that. I feel like you do a really good job of finding us really interesting people to talk to, and today's guest is going to be amazing. So Matt Zucker is with us today. Matt has served as the creative leader for some of the world's leading agencies, including Ogilvy One, Razorfish and Omnicom. Currently, he is the CMO of the global strategy and creative firm Profit, where he leads a team focused on building the firm's positioning as the uncommon growth company. And, Matt, you actually came to us kind of through the podcast. I think you listened to one of our episodes and reached out and said, hey, I really like that. And then we kind of connected that way. So maybe you or Jeff could. Well, first off, Matt, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Uh, thanks so much. Thanks so much. Yeah, no, I think when you like something you hear, you should probably tell the people that did it. I just find it's polite. It's also a good networking strategy. I tell people this all the time for their careers. I'm like, who talks about what you're interested in? Tell them. We don't always know when we're on a show, like what. What people think. We're craving feedback, and I'm an egomaniac, so I crave it more than anyone, so I try to give it as well.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, we appreciate that. Uh, but anyway, it prompted a conversation between the three of us around belief. You had written a piece around belief and this idea that professional services firms are now selling belief. They're not selling a product or a service. They're selling beliefs. So talk to us about that. What do you mean by that? That's why I kind of said, you know what? We're open with belief here. So what does that mean?

Speaker A: Yeah, so from my context, I led the marketing and strategy practice at Profit for years, so I was helping clients. And now I'm our, you know, I'm our cmo. So I'm m doing our head of marketing. So I'm kind of thinking about how to market the firm. And for me, I wouldn't say we're not marketing product at all, because a lot of consulting firms and professional services firms need to commoditize what they like. It's. It's. It's a thing that's going on. What I'm Saying is that it's far not enough and neither is expertise. If anything, my villain in all this is trust. So for me, if you want to define belief, belief is sort of in this context, it's the client's conviction that your firm could deliver an outcome that there's not necessarily evidence for. It's actually kind of religious. I don't know if you're religious or not, but there's this. It's because there's this leap and think of these three different, like, pieces. There is the direction. I believe this firm understands where we need to go. Right? So this is like super intellectual. It comes out of your thought leadership, your insight. You get my industry, my industry. What's that going to happen? Right? There's direction, there is capability, which is at the foundation of a lot of stuff. So I'm sure we're going to talk more about capability. Like, these people are competent and they can get us there. This historically has come from case studies, relevant case studies, and those aren't completely untrue. But there's room for a new proof, a new proof that has to exist that you can get us somewhere because it's experiential. I think it's also like how you show up in the room, the people. I think it's also what you're like. I think people like to work with certain people. It could be the way you work too, which we can talk about too, because I think that's been a real. That's been a differentiator for us. Not just the what, but the how is a great weapon. Not for everybody, but for us, it's been very, very powerful too. And then there's this, like, very super personal, like, instinctive, intuitive thing is like, I'm going to stake my rep. Like, I'm going to put my reputation on the line for this. Right. I'm not going to get fired for this. I'm going to get promoted for this. And this is like super emotional, but it's also like super political inside an organization because you've got all these other buyers and stuff. And. And so you've got to. So for me, belief is. Is. I know, is where it's going to go. Conviction. You can do this conviction and personal stake thing. It's more of a gut. A gut instinct, if that makes sense.

Speaker C: I want to jump back for a second. I'm sorry, Jeff, because you said something that actually struck me as really almost profound. Was that, um.

Speaker A: Only almost?

Speaker C: Yeah. I'm looking for the right words, but you basically said at that opening of that sequence, you basically said, as a buyer, I'm making a leap of faith that you can solve this problem. But you sort of implied that it had not been solved before. That, you know, there are certain problems that professional services firms and consulting firms solve all the time. Right. You know, we've done this sale. We've done a gazillion Salesforce implementations. Here's 50 case studies on our. On our Salesforce implementations. Remember? Certain problems that have never really been solved.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's both. There's both.

Speaker C: That's kind of what you were implying. I want you to dive into that juxtaposition of the two.

Speaker A: Well, first of all, you're hired for problems that have been solved before. But what's new? What's new is the way you got there last time is not going to get you there this time. So there requires a belief to solve even yesterday's problem in a new way. But there's plenty of problems also that are just new and interesting and new white space. We went through this during the digital transformation, right? Like twice. So this is not. We've been here before where there's a whole set of opportunities that didn't exist before, as well as ways of doing it. But I would argue belief is needed for almost any kind of assignment that comes in the door in 2026. And ahead.

Speaker D: Jason, it's interesting that you jumped on that. The thing that jumped out at me, Matt, and I think I heard you correctly when you said this, is that trust is the villain. What do you mean by that?

Speaker A: So I guess everyone just uses trust. And I think I built so many brand strategies with the word trust in them. And, um, you know, I work insurance a lot, and it's. So it's true, like, trust is important. It's just that trust is yesterday. Trust is coming out of. I've done this before and there's stuff. And it's fine. It's just. It's not. Trust might get you in the room and get you on the short list, but it's not going to win you forward the future, is it? And belief is a layer on top of, or an additional thing in addition to trust. They're not necessarily the same thing. Belief is like a more active step forward. I just think it's. I mean, I like having a villain. So for me, trust is it. It's just. It's the past.

Speaker C: What I like about what you said, you laid out a couple things. One is expertise isn't enough. You're not selling expertise because everybody that's in the room has expertise or they wouldn't be there in the first place. Trust is the next layer. Where again, the same thing holds that if I'm letting you in the door, I'm a senior decision maker at a large corporation. If I let you in the door, I trust you on some level, most likely. So now to your point, the point of separation is now I got to believe. I have to believe that you can take me where I want to go.

Speaker A: Yeah, you can deal with whatever happens in month two, because things change. Right? So wisdom, we talk about wisdom sometimes as this ingredient that AI may not have yet. Um, it might have a little bit of expertise and it'll acquire experience. But wisdom is very human. Wisdom is kind of a magic sauce. Obviously, that helps you pivot or know where I'm going, or I kind of trust you to make some decisions, or I take you into the boardroom with me. I don't just take you in a boardroom because you're an expert, because you could be like a shmagegy, look terrible and embarrass me. I'll take you into the boardroom because I trust you. But also I believe that no matter what comes up and things will. The unexpected. Yeah, you're going to help me handle it. So to me, that's belief.

Speaker C: The other thing that struck me, Matt, as you were talking, Jeff, I was alluding back to our conversation with Matt Dixon and what we talked about in one of those discussions when we had him on, was the recognition that loyalty is in decline. My point being that increasingly. Back to your comments about trust, Matt, that, yeah, the trust is there, but I'm less likely to buy again. In fact, there's evidence that executive decision makers actually feel an obligation to look for new providers, for new partners, new firms out of their mandate to the broader organization that I can't just keep buying from the same firms I've always bought from.

Speaker A: It's a really good point because a lot of our winning strategy, in some ways we win a lot, especially in new areas where we haven't been as deep, you know, like, as, you know, we're super deep in brand. Right. But when we go into growth strategy and business strategy, sometimes we win not because we're the most trusted, because they already have some friend, but they kind of hate working with them or they hate the way they work, or they hate. Or there's somebody asked them what else is out there? What else is out there. And so you're a challenger. So if you're the incumbent You've trusted. If you're the challenger, you need some trust just to get on the list. But you're not going to win on trust. You definitely have to win on some kind of belief about how you work or what you show up with or your idea or something like that.

Speaker C: I like it. Okay, now I got a little lost in the thread there and I want you to, I uh, may be asking you to repeat yourself and if I am, I apologize. How do we actually build belief? Like what do we do? I mean, I know you threw out a few things, but I kind of want you to kind of walk us through your thought process on how do I get a client to believe that I can take them where they want to go.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I made a list because that's what I do.

Speaker C: Oh great. Exactly what I want. Okay, that's what I need.

Speaker A: So like most professional services firm, we publish a lot of IP and so you're putting out ip, you still want it to be fact based and research based. But I think it has to be forward looking. Even the business leaders uncommon growth, uh, Playbook, uh, which we just published two weeks ago has got a whole thing on future back and future back innovation that we believe going forward is really important. Your IP has to be forward looking. It still needs to be rooted in some kind of data. Um, otherwise it's just kind of a prediction, it's kind of lightweight. You can't really take, take that into the boardroom. So even our forward looking research, we ground it in some, in some proprietary data we have done in the past, but we make the leap. You know, it's almost like using, you know, benchmarks, like benchmarks are fine, but benchmarks are only half the story. You have to do predictive modeling and scenario planning. Although if you only do benchmarks you only get optimization. Like it doesn't work. Like benchmarks are, are not that helpful or semi helpful. So forward looking. The second thing is I think how you show up, we've been talking a lot about this is when we go to meetings instead of just the case studies which you might want to do or there might be in a submission to get you the credential in the room, but in the room and maybe I know this from advertising, you show up with an idea, right. Or you show up with client zero is a big topic right now where you've got to use your own sauce. So if you're going to talk about AI, you need to show them what you did for yourself. So we're like the AI optimization I'm doing for profit. We'll use as a case study to show other clients because we do that if you're, we show clients all the time. Our, our proprietary uh, platform are called Maya. Our AI form that they're, we show them both that they're going to get access to it, that they're going to use it. And then some of them want to build, we help them build their own, you know, like figure out their own. So it's, it's kind of like a little bit more of a demo. You're showing up to demo ideas. I don't think we'll get to the like ad agencies do that torturous pitch type process where they bring ideas forward and business thinks, I kind of hope we don't go there because that's a little ridiculous. And that's been really painful for that, that, that part of the industry, I come from that. And they're trying to shake that, the free, the free work thing. But I do think how you show up is different. With the proof of, proof of concept that builds belief, not just trust. And then, you know, I don't know, grab some other data, do a scan. I think you do something with their stuff to show that you get them and those create a lot of belief generating activities. When you play around and you can be really humble, like, look, we grab this, I'm not even sure how accurate it is, but if it's true, if it's true, this is what we think it'll tell us. And we see three different directions you could go and these could be interesting choices for you. What do you think? Have you already done that? And so I think there's a very humble way to use client data or something like it to be able to play with in the room. But it's the live demo feel and I think that builds belief, not just trust.

Speaker C: So really, uh, I'm going to cluster into three things. There's still ip, there's still thought leadership and you might tuck case studies in underneath that because if they're publicly available anyway because they're both demonstrating an ability to solve the types of problem the clients might face and they're demonstrating a forward looking approach to things. The second thing is it's how you show up in the room. And then the third thing, I guess along the lines of that is also bringing fresh ideas. Jeff, you always talk about this idea that new is new to me. If you show up with something new to me that's valuable. I think the bar has been raised a little bit Particularly for experts in the sense of like. Because you can come up to speed pretty quickly on just about any industry, any company, any situation, any business problem that when you come in the door and you show up, you better show up with more than I can get off. At ChatGPT, if you're an expert on something and if you can't, then my belief probably declines as a buyer right now, if I had to guess, I don't know, would you agree or you think I'm wrong?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, uh, I think that that's right on. And now you're making me think of a fourth thing which is sort of the language we use, which has always been sort of true. Like you gotta. But now with this new world you're also, you know, we learned a lot in search that people search for keywords and the long tail phrases which have become the queries. Yeah, speaking the language of the client and the customer has always been important. But I think it's really going to be more important because if half your discovery is through the LLMs, um, then you need to speak what the robots are looking for too. Not just. And there's a whole structural thing you have to do in the back end to connect the dots. The way even we build our sites is different. But I'm not sure that's a belief issue as much of an access visibility issue. Maybe that's not as important to this.

Speaker C: Well, I think it's both actually. I was going to say where I thought you were going to go and you didn't go was, um, I always talk about there's certain firms that they look like an outsider in the room when they're trying to talk to a client of a certain type. And you see this. I'll pick on the accounting firms for a second. You see this in accounting firms a lot where if you go to their websites, let's say, and you go to their industry pages, because they all have industry pages, they sound like an outsider offering opinion about what's going on in the sector. They don't sound like someone inside the sector that really gets it. And uh, as a buyer, if I were in one of those sectors, if I went to that page, I would be turned off because I'd be like, well, you don't really know what's going on. You just act like you're trying to demonstrate you do, but you don't really. Buyers can see through that. I feel like that bar has been raised where it's kind of like if that's the best you've got. All you can do is kind of opine what's happening around the sector, then you kind of get pushed out the door pretty quick, and there'd be no belief there. Um, I have no belief that you can get me where I want to go, because there's just no evidence that you can really understand what I face as a decision maker. Do you agree with that or no?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, I think that's. That's right on, too. It's also making me think about the individuals, you know, and that they've been in your shoes or they've been through this before, and here's how they. How well do you have to get to know them? You did that episode on personal branding, and, you know, I think that's still pretty. Pretty relevant. I think the challenge now is personal branding has to be cohesive because of the new environment we're operating in. So you have to have both. You need the cohesive brand so the robots know who's part of what and people still being themselves, so they're credible. But it's all got to add up. So it's kind of a complicated puzzle.

Speaker C: It is, yeah. Ah.

Speaker D: Welcome to professional services.

Speaker C: Welcome to professional services.

Speaker D: It takes, um, such sophisticated sales, marketing, and delivery.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Malicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Petal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on itunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Speaker D: I want to revisit the how you show up. One of the things that I talk to my clients about is showing up as your best self. This. We are who we are, and we need to find clients and environments that allow us to show up, uh, so that we are best selves in delivering work. What. What advice would you give to firms who are trying to think through this incredible element of belief about how you show up in the room? Um, is this something that I really control, or is it something that I just am?

Speaker A: I mean, you have to be yourself, obviously. So if you're a stuffed shirt, then you're a stuffed shirt. Maybe you should bring someone interesting. I think there's just things to amplify. Whatever you just, you know. So we don't just talk about differentiation, we talk about relevance. Like, how are we relevant to your need? Not just. Not just are we interesting. Like, we're the uncommon growth company. So We're a challenger. We're going to look for other ways to do things. We're going to look for alternative routes. We're going to, you know, we're going to say the old playbook doesn't work enough. But that's not enough to have you believe. I think you've got to like that. And if you're not really like that, it's a little tricky because it's like, well, is the need there? Do you need a more conservative approach? Well, we can be that too, but maybe it's different people that are in the room. So I think casting is important. I think you got to bring in the people that are going to work on the project. I think no one wants the bait and switch, even if you can't promise everyone. I think love and passion goes a long way. Like if you research someone's problem and think of different ideas, that helps. I think showing up in the room with demos Instead of just 40 page decks shows a humility and a collaboration. One thing that really struck me coming over from advertising to consulting was I used to take the brief, go away and come back with an answer or two, and I was right or wrong. And here it's a very collaborative. Like, we're going to do this together, you know, I know some firms have their way of doing things, but we're like, I don't know, wearing this with you. We've got some methodologies and we're going to not. We're going to use something different if it doesn't work for you. Uh, it's about doing it with you, not at you. And I think that goes a long way regardless of who you are. But you still have to be yourself. I mean, if I put on two suit, like a tie, like I don't look like myself, but if I could wear a jacket.

Speaker C: Yeah. Uh, I'm only thinking about what you just said, and it's totally true. Ad agencies try to keep. Purposely keep the client at arm's length, right? Try to keep them out of the sauce, because if they get in the sauce, they're going to muck it up. We got too many cooks in the sauce, right? As they say. Um, and consulting firms are kind of the opposite. It's like, well, we actually want them to be as involved as we can. We want to collaborate. We want to, um, frequently, big firms that were embedded, we're working on site. So it's very much part of the culture. Get to a minimum viable product or whatever. It's interesting. Um, I want you to Talk about something else. There's a couple of things you wrote about that. There was an article, we've alluded to this a couple times and we'll include it in the show notes. There was an article you wrote that fostered a lot of this conversation for us. And I want to talk about something you said in there that I thought was really interesting because. Well, there's two other, uh, pieces of that. One is about the need to build belief earlier in the buying cycle. The idea that you have to earn that belief much sooner than maybe you needed to in the past. Talk to us a little bit about that. What are the indicators that that's true to you and what are the implications of it?

Speaker A: Well, you've probably seen the research from, I think it was like LinkedIn and some of the consulting firms. It was KPMG a lot around, um, shadow buyers and the buying circles. There's a lot out there, Gartner does it too. And that there's more buyers than just the one, you know. So you've got a job to do with some other people that you're going to eventually hopefully meet. And if they don't know you, you're not going to win. So there's something earlier to do and that's less around belief, that's just around trust. Right. Just baseline, like brand recognition. Oh, I've heard of them before. You probably need to push it further. So you need an advocate in the room and probably more than one that believes you. And then you need a whole bunch of other people that trust you. You're not going to get everyone to believe you. But as we all know, the decision process is happening earlier and people are getting filtered out much earlier, especially if they're using the LLMs. But even in traditional search, which is getting the AI overviews, you're still getting even word of math. Like how people hear about you, they're only hearing about another. So you've got a lot of work to do a lot earlier with building not just credibility, but that kind of differentiation. So the uncommon growth company for us was a way of saying, hey, you want like it's not just competing to do slightly better version than who you have. It's do you want a different way of looking at it? Do you want a different way like, which is, we think is very appealing, at least in many cases, maybe not in every. But you can't do everything. So that's. So I think you need it earlier to stick out. And what we're learning about how everything works, the ecosystem works Is that all these other pieces, uh, are connecting much earlier in the process and you can just lose and win earlier. This happened when search started too. I think it's just an extension of that too. The tricky thing with belief earlier is that belief is a relationship. So you may not trust that I know the future in the first meeting. So I got to start working at it much earlier and show you different ways I've done it and which ways I'm predicting. And that's where like LinkedIn conversations or publish columns and op eds and things like that, or speeches, you know, make things interesting. It's like, oh, I want that, I want that. I'm interested. I want to hear more about that. So as much as the speeding the purchase process can speed up because people make decisions faster, you also have to do a lot more earlier. I think if you want to build a layer of emotion, trust or those capability directions I mentioned earlier. Um, and not just the forester ranking that you're on the landscape.

Speaker D: Matt, you used words like belief, love, passion. This sounds like almost spiritual and very much emotional, which is so foreign to professional services, but real. But I mean really because, uh, rational people talking about rational stories and now you're proposing something that is quite irrational, if you will. Emotional, visceral is probably the better word because belief takes faith. That doesn't it?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean it takes faith that uh, you're going to get me where I'm going, that you can solve the problem, that you'll make me look good. There's ego in it that if things change or you'll help me fix it. Because there's unknowns. I think everyone admits, even with known product, even things you've done 10 times. Right. Like if you've done, if you've gone to. If you've been to three companies and done three brand transformations and then you have one tomorrow, it's a different world, right. So it's going to be, it's going to look different the way you do it. So even though it should be a playbook, there's a new playbook. Um, so I think it is a motive. I think there are some rational elements within it that you've done this before. You know what it would do. You can show up in the room, you can put on a sport coat. So I think there are rational pieces. I don't think it's completely emotional, but it definitely has that spiritual leap of faith to do what hasn't been done before or to do what's been done before in a new way.

Speaker D: So, uh, if I'm a consultant and I'm listening to this conversation, or I'm a managing partner, uh, because I think there's an individual response and then there's a collective firm response that a managing partner might drive. If I'm an individual consultant listening to Matt Zucker talk about belief and that I'm selling belief, what do I have to do differently than what I'm doing today?

Speaker A: So I would look at your style, like what you're bringing in the room and how you talk. And it's probably mostly right, like you're probably proving the trust and expertise argument. I think you ask yourself is, what can I do? What are the unknowns? The way the market's going to go, the way the culture's going, the way the business is going, the way technology is changing, what can I do to show if things change in three months I'm ready. Or how can I talk about how we've been doing it differently rather than the same? Be a little more transparent probably too, and be a little more humble. I think it's more transparent. Just like you're elevating more younger people that are more savvy about technology, you should also. You can be more transparent about how you do something. Um, so, yeah, I think there's subtle changes to how you show up and what you share. I think adding in some content that's predictive is probably a smart move. I think we're onto something with future back, not just backward looking. I think a lot of the consultancies and firms I don't know about, the accounting firms also show up with a lot of history. And I think history is probably 50% of the answer. What's the other 50%? Bring it.

Speaker C: Well, to your point, the vast majority of consulting spend is about realizing a desired future state. I want a different reality than the one that I have right now. In almost every situation, it's why you're making the buy. Yet firms show up talking about everything that they've done in the last 10 years. So they spent a whole bunch of energy looking backwards.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I would add one more thing actually is also the execution. I think we spend so much time on the strategy and the insight, which is great, and that's what you get probably paid for the premium. But I think a lot of consulting firms and other kinds of professional services firms need to also show up with more of the execution. Whether you're going to do it or not, actually demonstrate the knowledge and the way you're going to do this is xyz. Like basically, here's the roadmap and here's the reality because I think we've got a lot of PowerPoint thrown at them and I think the action, the actionability and we call it speed to impact Rush. The urgency is very paramount. I mean look, we acquired a firm and we do full end to end now, including media. So when we talk about creative transformation or brand trend, we can actually tell you how much you should spend, where you should spend it, what you should do, whether you use us or not to execute it. But I think execution is. It's funny, when I came from agencies, everyone up here was thinking like, there's strategy and execution and I'm like, how naive are you? There's strategy in execution first of all. And also strategy is like the smallest part of it. You execution is the biggest part of it. It's the biggest pain point. It's the organization, it's much more money. So I think having some savvy around how, how you're going to do this should take up more than a slide in the deck.

Speaker D: Yeah. And I think ah, that's so true today with AI because there are so many unknowns, there are so many possibilities as well. So I think that's a great point.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that's where partners help.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: You can say, look, there's different people you can use to help you execute us or other people. And here's how to do it, here's the ecosystem required to get it and it is urgent. You got to get some betas out fast. We can't really. Time is not on everyone's side. So quality matters still of course. But speed's kind of paramount.

Speaker D: So if that's the case, uh, what would you tell our listeners today if you could do just one thing to get the ball rolling on selling belief, what would you have them do?

Speaker A: I would do so Chansu, our chief Digital officer who's also got my. I followed him for momicom here. Um, he encouraged me to come into consulting. He's been advocating for partners to show up at meetings and I don't know if he's like, don't bring a deck. But like he's like bring a demo. Show them, show them our platform, show them a model. And it's pretty like, you know, we'll see how many people do it. But I think it's really exciting and I've seen him do it and it makes a big difference with the clients. They want to see stuff, they want to see behind the curtain. And you can use your own stuff as client zero as the example. So I'm sure you can. You know, you can't really. Sometimes you can't show other clients stuff. But, um, that's the one thing I would do is show up differently. Show them something and don't lecture at people, but do it with them and see what happens. You might get a more provocative conversation and a faster sale.

Speaker D: Yeah, M. That'll perk up people's ears.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Matt Zucker promises faster sales.

Speaker C: All right, well then let's. A couple quick things I wanted to ask you. One is what do you want to tell us about the uncommon growth company? You know, just in general, like what do you want to tell us about profit? What do you want to tell us about that phrase? What would you like us to know about profit as it relates to your. To the way you're positioning it?

Speaker A: We've talked about uncommon growth and the promise to help clients unlock that for a long time. Only in the last two years did we declare ourselves the uncommon growth company or the down. And it was a kind of a way to align everything we're doing. And of course, like you said, we have to define what we mean by that. And it's not just exponential growth. And I don't know if you can promise exponential growth, but you can say it is high impact growth that is sustainable, meaning year after year. So it's not just a quick burst and it's not optimization that's the enemy. So it's growth that is sustainable that is, um, a little more human. However you want to take that, it's a little more interesting, it's less robotic. Doesn't mean robots won't help you do it. It's actionable, meaning speed to impact. You can get in market and you'll sense it. We developed this definition and it was a way to guide people to look for alternative routes to things. An interesting creative problem solving that's still pragmatic and insight driven. And then we researched a couple hundred companies and looked at who had exponential growth patterns over a couple years. This was our research about a year and a half ago called Uncommon Growth and Uncommon Times. And we did a whole campaign in the Wall Street Journal about it. And what we found was what the levers were that you would want to pull behind those companies. Uh, that the definition worked and that what were the elements that they would do, which is like customer centricity, pervasive innovation. And you know, there was a couple elements that work. We had some good Examples. So that was great, because then we could say, okay, how do you. Now, that's why we released the new playbook, the Business Leaders Uncommon Growth playbook. So how do you do that? So we've identified the five shifts you got to make, and then here's how, you know, here's the things you might go do. So make it super practical. That emphasis on kind of execution. Like I mentioned, the how so Uncommon growth has a. Has a broad definition, but it's rooted in being able to maintain it. Kind of. It is kind of exponential, but you don't want to promise exponential.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's also, like, highly actionable rather than theoretical.

Speaker C: I like it. All right, um, and then two last things. One is tell us about your podcast. So you host your own podcast. So let's take a moment to plug the podcast.

Speaker A: This is the most important thing you'll hear this show. So I got into podcasting because I did radio commercials because no one wanted to give me tv. So I got into radio. Early on, I got into the first wave of podcasting. So I've been a podcast addict during all its waves. It's finally here. Yeah, I have two podcasts. One is City. It about moving from the city to the Hudson Valley to the country. So city boy moves to the country, and it's more of a travel, like encouraging people to go more rural, um, to give up on your craven urban lives and come see cows and sheep and goats. Um, and then the second one is more relevant by this audience. It's called Rising. It's about marketing careers and media and innovation careers. Profit co sponsors it with our agency that's a friend of ours called Direct Agents, my buddy Josh Boaz. Direct Agents is a great acquisition agency and media agency, and we basically interview people about their career trajectories. We've done some CMOs and some senior folks, but we're kind of most interested in the next level down, those that are still rising like the number twos. So if listeners have. And we can go outside market, if you've got any suggestions on some amazing people who are number two rather than number one, I think we'd be very interested because we think of them as our future clients. We're also really interested in what they're going through, but we'll take a CMO or a CFO if we get one. But I think there's a lot of podcasts out there for that. This is a little bit better of a niche.

Speaker C: And, uh, if someone wants to find you, how can they find you?

Speaker A: I guess LinkedIn, like everyone, although I'm really into substack right now and I'm surprised this didn't come up on your personal branding. Thing is, a lot of people are developing substacks for their personal branding and there's interesting. Some people are Even pulling off LinkedIn or using them both indifferently. So I have a substack newsletter called Sugar and Spice, which I cover a mix of marketing, moving to the memoir, moving to the Hudson valley and memoir. Three M's. So it's about a third, a third marketing oriented. So substack or LinkedIn I would use. I'm not really on Twitter anymore. I'm trying to use Blue Sky. Are you? I'm trying to use it.

Speaker C: No.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know. That's why I'm alone.

Speaker D: Uh, Sugar and Spice and everything. Nice.

Speaker C: Well, I really enjoyed this. It was very thought provoking. Um, I really like the way you're sort of challenging some. I'll just say challenging some cultural norms of professional services that have existed for a long time and asking people to think a little more deeply about what it is they're actually selling and how they're going to market. I think it's really timely and interesting and, um, I enjoyed it very much. So, uh, Matt, thanks for joining us and also thanks for listening. I appreciate it.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. I'll keep listening.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Um, find content related to this episode@rattleandpedal.com Rattle and Pedal is also available on itunes and Stitcher.