Your Growth Isn’t Broken. Your Marketing Is the Bottleneck with Tim Padgett

Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operational financing people, plus product and leadership to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately.

This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR. Human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Skilling with People Podcast. I'm Gwynver Curry, your host and founder and CEO to Guide to HR.

You know, most companies don't stall because of bad products or weak sales needs. They stall because their marketing never evolved past the founder. And by the time you hit 10 million, that gap starts costing you twice in lots of revenue and the talent you can't attract. On today's episode, we're joined by Tim Pat, a Pepper Group, who spent 30 plus years helping mid-sized companies and private equity firms turn marketing into a true growth engine.

We're breaking down why what got you here won't get you to 10. What got you here won't get you to 100 million and how to build a brand that pulls in both customers and top talent. Well, welcome, Tim, to the Skelly with People Podcast. Happy to have you here.

Before we dive into the topic, do you want to share a little bit more about yourself to the audience? Well, thank you, Gwenavir. I think that uh some of the things that I bring to the table is that I've started quite a few businesses myself. Um, I've also been involved with a lot of startups.

I am part of an angel network, so I invest in companies that are early stage and always looking for a lot of different variables in judging what's a good investment for sure. We also have at Pepper Group, uh, out of our current 42 clients, I think last time I counted, uh, 25 of them are owned by private equity. So um when you talk about demands of growing a business, the private equity guys have little patience and uh they do appreciate though when you get it right. And uh having 25 of them is probably testimony to us getting it halfway right.

I love that. Yeah, PEs that their lack of patience is definitely high up there, right? But I know a lot of VC backed companies where founders feel their investors are pretty much the same, too. So and you you wouldn't expect anything else.

Uh that's their business. And luckily, uh we've hooked up with some really good ones, and they give us a lot of latitude. Uh, I think they respect us for being professionals, and most uh private equity guys didn't major in marketing, so they at least uh uh know that we're doing something that's kind of unique. And um, I I think the other part of that too is to communicate with them the way they like to be communicated with.

So more of a spreadsheet mentality and dashboards than a 12-page report. Yeah. And I've like learned from my past experience that what the difference is between marketing and sales, and please add or correct me, is that marketing is really your long-term game. It's not the short-term game.

Sales is more short-term, marketing is more long-term. Is that is that accurate thought process? And would you like to expand on that a bit? Oh, sure.

Um, I've been a salesperson for most of my career. Uh, I sell for the agency, and uh it's a different pattern of sharing information. Uh, when you're on the marketing side, you're trying to diffuse things that can be very complex and make them very simple to understand and make the value proposition uh undeniable. Uh and you have a variety of ways to do that with a lot of different tactics.

When you're in sales, um, yeah, you're very strategic about what you're going to say, but you never know what kind of banter will happen in in a conversation. So you have to be really prepared. But the key is, I think, in sales is asking more questions than trying to uh pitch more ideas. And marketing helps you prepare for that.

Marketing will also help to warm up the audience before you get there. Um, it's a great way in which to really scale things. You know, we we've been there, we've talked to a lot of business owners that got their business to a certain point, and literally, you know, writing out deals on NAFTA. And now they want to grow exponentially, and to scale that, they need good marketing.

Uh, it's not just a matter of hiring more sales guys. We had a client, uh, the the founder uh said, I don't believe in that marketing stuff. Just hire three sales guys, two of them will fail, and we'll get one good one. I know those founders.

Literally. Yeah. So I kind of going actually right where I wanted to take you was, you know, for those founders that are listening, like, yeah, why don't I just I'm just gonna go get more salespeople and not marketing. One of the things that I had seen a founder learn was he realized too late, marketing is a long uh term game.

And he was already a year or two years behind the eight-ball on where he needed his marketing to be because he thought that let me just get more salespeople in. And so now his sales team is half the size of the org, and his marketing team is like three people, like not even like half a percent of the org. And so I'm curious from your perspective, for the founders that might be thinking that right now, what would you say to them to help them think differently and maybe make a different decision?

So in one to two years, they're not going, oh, I totally missed that train. Well, you know, having an agency, a full service agency, I definitely have some arguments for doing it through an agency versus doing it internally. Um, usually our value proposition is lies in for the cost of two to five people, you get 20 of us, uh, all with expertise in various parts of the marketing spectrum. So you're really not dealing with the overhead, you're not dealing with the hiring, you're not dealing with the training.

All those things come from an agency. So I'm gonna pitch for that first. I think that uh managing salespeople is something you can't outsource. You really have to have them on the inside, and that's what I would focus on.

I think that if you have enough inbound leads that a couple of good salespeople can manage, then you're off to the races, or you can have poor marketing, have 10 salespeople, and you may not have the volume of uh closures that you want. So I I think that yeah, the long game is marketing. That's the way you're gonna scale. And then when you do get the opportunities, you need some some good salespeople to close them and finish it off.

But uh that's the way I would go. Yeah, and I love that concept too, because as a founder starting your business, you might not have the financial resources to bring on two, three, four people who are gonna be your key full-time people in your org. And if you do that, you're also missing out on maybe additional skill sets you might need that you can't afford that six, seven, eight, nine, you know, team members. So having using your funds wisely to get a team of your caliber to come in and help support the business, you're gonna get a little bit more bang for your butt from that perspective until you're bigger and then it might make sense.

And maybe it will never make sense, depends on the business, I guess, also too, right? Yeah, and I think you know, uh, I probably suffered from it at one point, but uh founders have the added benefit of having founder after their name on their business card. Figuratively these days, we don't use business cards as much as we used to, but there's a lot of weight that goes with that, and there's a lot of trust that is uh a client or prospect has because they're dealing with the top guy, and then they get a false sense of security in doing that and think they can hire other people and they'll get the same treatment.

They don't. When you have sales rep next to your name, uh you know, you're you're not considered the same as a founder, that's for sure. Absolutely. I mean, that's really in any org, you're not gonna have the same power if you're a director versus a VP or a chief XYZ officer, right?

Yeah, so that is very true. So let me ask you for a founder that's looking to scale, maybe they're around the 5 million mark right now and they want to get to that 50 million mark. What do you what is some of the most common marketing mistakes you see companies make trying to get past that first 510 and into their double digits? Well, they're usually not used to making the investment level that it takes.

And I think that you really have to look at that and say, I'm I'm going to have the confidence to get out there and spend more to get more, because it is an investment. I always say marketing is an investment. If you didn't have to do it, why would you? You know, the you have a line around the block, you don't need marketing.

But most companies don't have that. So if you're going to invest in marketing, then let's put out some points out there as to what are our goals? How much do we want to increase certain things? What works for your company?

Those are the questions I always ask. How do you get to where you want to go? And I can usually build some sort of system that'll get you there. And if it's reasonable, you know, that there's all kinds of numbers out there.

Uh, manufacturers, you usually think about one to two percent of their top line sales should be going towards market. If you're a service-based business, it can be anywhere from 5% to 15% because you've got higher margins when you have services than you usually do in manufacturing. So you should be spending it and you have a different story to tell. Uh, there's a much bigger uh breach of trust with a service-based business than there is with manufacturing.

You can always order a few parts and check them out and be happy. With professional services, that's a long-term engagement, and you're you have to put a lot more trust into it. So you have to build a better story. Yeah, and I've seen that so many times where a founder plants the seed, maybe waters it once or twice, and then turns around the next day and why isn't this tree producing fruit?

And you're like, it was a seed, like you have to let it grow. So, how can um you help founders with that concept of like it just needs more time, or like understanding like it's worth the risk, it's worth the investment, but you have to like take a breath and let it grow. How do you talk founders off that ledge of like, this isn't working, stop and do something else? And all of a sudden now they're like, they're literally planting seeds all over their garden and then digging it up the next day.

Well, uh boy, I I've heard that story before. Um, I think it's get some early wins. They deserve that, they should see what a difference marketing can make. So um I I want to do that for them.

Uh, the second part of it is let's do some A B testing. Let's not put all of our eggs in one basket. Let's see what starts to tickle people's fancy to engage with you. So I think that there's part of that.

And and again, uh that business owner probably didn't do any of that before. So that's where that new level of investment and trust goes into um making sure that you're doing the right thing with the largest part of your investment. It's okay to try a few things, it's good. You know, you look at tactics.

Um, you can send out postcards or you can develop develop a beautiful video. Which one's gonna help your business more? Um you know, the I think the last thing I saw is 4.5 times more responses to video than any other form of reaching out.

Um, why is that? Because if you do a good video, people are gonna feel it. They're gonna feel it, they're gonna hear it, they're going to see someone's uh the the quality of whatever they do. Um you can showcase that.

You're gonna see their sincerity in what they're trying to do. Um, you may be able to get some of the clients to talk about you and to uh give testimony to what you're doing. And I think that nobody ever publishes a bad testimonial. Sure.

Really, it it's funny. Uh, you know, I've I've asked for a lot of testimonials over the years. And sometimes clients will say, you know, whatever you want to say, just write it out, I'll sign it. And that's that's nice of them.

That that's really uh I guess a testimony to how much they trust us. But at the same time, when I make them do it, because I don't I don't like to do that, uh when I make them do it and they finally get around to it, they'll always mention something I never would have come up with. There is some aspect of what they really enjoyed about the relationship, the process, the outcomes, whatever it is, that maybe I didn't even see. And the key thing is most other prospects will relate to what they're saying.

They're they hit a point that is going to resonate with them. Yeah, I love that. Such a great idea. And I think you know, it also kind of is that maybe first step of like breaking bread with someone, right?

They see you, they hear you, they it's just a bigger, you're not a guy, right? You're not some kind of like tool that's just automatically pushing a message to them through LinkedIn or through their inbox. It's actually a little bit more personal, I think, is why I that's why I think video has actually got a little bit more impact um to it. So you said earlier you're you've been in sales in the past, and I know sales and marketing kind of go very like go hand in hand really well.

Where do you see founder-led sales start to break? And what signals tell you it's time for that to evolve? What have you seen in your past or even current clients? Well, certainly, you know, they run out of bandwidth.

Yeah. If you were selling for a $10 million company, you can't possibly sell the same way for a $50 million company. Unless you're growing up the food chain and you're getting bigger and bigger contracts, and then sometimes the uh founder can manage all that. Um, but that's rare.

Businesses are usually built on scale, uh, quantities, things like that. Um you know, I I think that it's exciting when a founder says, I can mentor some great salespeople, right? There are so many things that you learn along the way in selling, especially, um, that are just gems. And if you can help someone to learn them before they they scrape their knees, making all the mistakes along the way, that's that is such a valuable thing to share.

And honestly, most founders are very good salespeople because they've probably tripped up themselves enough times to know what resonates. And I go back to that resonate all the time. Because if you're selling something that someone doesn't want to buy, it's a waste of both your time and it's probably not going anywhere. Yeah, I think it's really know your audience.

And I always use the example of like, you know, I'm a cat owner, I don't have dogs. So a dog trainer is going to waste their time trying to convert me to a client. I don't have a dog. I don't need dog training.

I have a cat. You can train train my cat enough to wake me up at four in the morning. I'm honored you. Right?

Like find someone that has dogs. And I think that's exactly like what you said there. So let me ask you another question before we move on to talent and how it's connected to um your revenue and your marketing strategies. If a founder wants to get to that 100 million, okay, when they want to get to it or when they're ready, who doesn't want to get to 100 million in revenue?

What has to fundamentally change and how they're thinking about marketing? Well, I think there are a lot of things involved. Um, it and it depends on the business. But let's just use one example.

Um, you can have a wonderful business selling in and around Chicagoland. It's a big metropolis, you've got plenty of opportunity here. This is where I'm coming from. I've lived here all my life.

I live in the in the suburbs, so we've got about nine million people who live in the Chicagoland area. And uh, I don't know what the business count is, but depending on what you're selling, you could do a pretty nice business just in this area. But then you might want to go out and regionally expand, right? And now you have to have maybe boots on the ground, maybe not.

But you also have to understand, even within the United States, how people think and care about things. Uh, in the south, things go a little slower, they want to take their time, they want to get to know you. Uh, in the east coast, boom, you gotta be fast, right? In the west coast, they may be surfing this morning, so you might not get a callback.

I'm I'm making it very simple sounding, but those are things that you have to consider when you're expanding, and you never had to consider them before because you know Chicago, you you lived here, you've got connections all over the place. It's a whole different mindset, and that's why marketing really starts to come in handy because for every audience, you should have a unique message. People will react differently based on a lot of stimulus. So be prepared for it and go out there and do it smart.

So it's knowing your audience, but also meeting them where they're at. Absolutely, you're not gonna force anything on anyone. It's kind of like the buyer. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, no, I I think you were leading right into it. Uh it's kind of like the buyer's journey, right? Like only one to three percent of people are ready to buy, so you gotta figure out where the other 97 to 99 percent are in their journey and join them on the journey. So when they are ready to buy, they buy with you.

Here's another number that I think is pretty fascinating, especially today, and uh this might even be an old number. But at one point we said that 67% of the buyer journey happens before contact with the seller. So you can ask easily, more than ever, you can ask literally hundreds of people what they think about certain vendors or certain product lines or whatever it might be. Uh, you can see reviews like we've never seen before.

Oh, yeah. So you've got all of that research. You obviously have a website, and you can go look at five websites. You can ask your new friend, ChatGPT or Claude, what are the top five of this or that?

What are the features that I should, you know, when I started out, I could walk into a business unannounced, ask if John was in. John would say, Come on in, Tim, teach me about what you guys are doing these days. And an hour later, uh, he would be educated, but you don't get that anymore. No, that's not how it works.

I always say, unfortunately, our attention span nowadays is worse than a goldfish. That's true. Yeah, for sure. And also competing priorities, right?

Everyone's protecting their, I think they everyone, I feel like everyone's protecting their time more, which is great because it means that they're also trying to protect their time to have more time with their family, their loved ones, their friends, their personal life outside of work, but it does make it more challenging. So let's flip a little bit to the topic of revenue and And how they're connected all through marketing. How is a weak brand directly hurting both the pipeline and hiring, even if leaders don't see it that way?

I know it is. I working in HR, I see it all the time. But from your expensive, how do you think it's actually weakening the brand and impacting pipeline and the talent search? Yeah.

Um, well, everyone wants to work with a winner. And so how you communicate who you are and what you stand for is very important. I think that a lot of people, uh it's it's very similar to my last comment. They're shopping, uh, they're looking for great places to work.

And you might have one, but if you're not communicating that on your website, if you're not showing uh great customers who are speaking your praises, and you you start to hesitate because there's always a better company down the road uh that you might try to work for. Um but pride is something that's easily communicated, uh, and you have to be transparent about it. You can't fake it. Uh, we've all been there.

You you go into a restaurant and you have a wonderful server who's really enjoying taking care of you and very proud of what they do, uh, versus the one that you know couldn't work faster and and get your order and smirk and walk away. So it you you want to cultivate a team that is very proud to be there and love what they do, and that's putting the right butts in the right seats and all that kind of stuff. But I think that you you know, we do a lot of work with talent marketing, so we help our clients to define who they are, what their core values are.

Uh, quite honestly, I long story, but I used to hate core values because I thought they were table stakes. The the most simplistic ones, who wouldn't have that as part of what they're doing in their business? Integrity. We're a learning organization, this or that.

And uh in all fairness, there might be 12 good core values anyway. It's how you say them, though, and how you own them that makes a huge difference. At the Pepper Group, we have eight core values. I know, we're overachievers.

At the end of the day, um, each one of them makes people in our company more uh confident, they are more energized, they are seekers of information and education. Uh, they know what's expected of them as individuals, as opposed to putting a brass plaque in the lobby. And quite frankly, there again, we don't have as many lobbies as we used to have, right? Right.

And you know, we're in a creative industry. That takes a lot of guts, I gotta tell you. Um, I think you have to be courageous to be creative. You're sticking your neck out there with your ideas and your designs and what have you.

And if at least those around you are going to support everything you do, you don't mind coming back day after day and sticking your neck out a little bit. And uh I I think that people having the trust that what they do is great, that comes from marketing. You're gonna market either to the recruits, your existing employees, the outside world. It uh it comes in all different shapes and sizes.

Yeah. Um, but I've been blessed with working with some great teams over the years, and each one is uh a little different, but they all share a commonality, and that is we enjoy what we do. And that's huge. Yeah, exactly.

We only have so much time on this planet. Uh might as well do what you love to do um and get paid for it, right? And one of the things I've seen, I've actually known a company whom, when they updated their core values, they actually had um created a background, kind of like our backgrounds, virtual backgrounds, right? And for every employee, they were to choose their favorite virtue, and that was going to be part of the company name and the virtue of their favorite virtue as their background.

And it was actually pushed out first to the sales team, and it actually made an impact to the sales team and the conversations they were having was because people were like, what is that whatever core like thing you have on your background? What does that mean? And that gets them talking about it and just the interaction and engagement internally that the company saw just a huge increase in their retention, in their employee satisfaction survey, and uh just because they did one small tweak to have their core values be part of the day-to-day interaction that their people are having.

Number one, I love when I learn something that is a sneaky cool way. Um not only does it create a little intrigue about what's going on back there, but if you're on a we do a lot of groups on at Pepper Groups, so we want to have you know, a creative person on there, a copywriter, you might have a strategic person on there, whatever. But if each one of us had not only the logo, but a different core value, that would make for a pretty good array across the screen, too. So the next time I'm on a call, I'm gonna see that on the blank side of your wall, right?

I thought it was pretty cool myself. Yeah, for sure. So, um, okay, so we got a couple minutes left. I want to ask a couple questions because being on HR, I always find that founders believe it is HR's responsibility to own the employer brand.

And I always have to educate them. The employer brand comes from marketing, it's part of the company brand. Any faster wisdom tips you would like to share with the audience that might be in that struggle of like, no, this is HR's responsibility versus marketing. I always think, well, marketing needs to go and get more plans, and I can't have them spending time on the people side.

That's the argument I always had a wall with. How much time do we have left? Maybe that's another podcast. Maybe just a quick like a quick thought of like how maybe they should be changing their mindset or looking at the picture differently.

Oh, I definitely have a couple of good thoughts on that. Um so I do a presentation along with another guy on culture in the workplace, and we do it in front of associations, we do it for companies who want to invite their clients in for you know a learning day or something like that, and we'll do our shtick for 40 minutes. But and it's really cool. Uh we use I've seen it, it is really cool.

We use the blue angels to um present the idea of teamwork, and when you talk about how much everything with the blue angels, uh team of 142, there's six guys in the sky, but there's 142 people making it sure that they're safe. And uh it's a great presentation. Anyway, almost all the time someone will come up to me afterwards and say, I know a company who has uh a bad culture, and how long would it take you to create a good culture in that company? And my my reply is where's the bad culture coming from?

And more often than not, it's at the top. So whether HR or the marketing department creates some sort of culture, it's gotta come from the top. You have to have a leader that believes in it, practices it, leads by example, uh, gets people to understand the value and and the momentum that can happen. Uh, and not everyone can do that, but I don't think you can force a culture on an environment that doesn't have great leadership who believes in it.

And uh then you can come to the marketing department and say, here are the things I believe in, here are the things that are important. How do you craft this into a little story that we can tell? How do you create a chart or something that will help me to communicate this? And then the HR department should be able to distribute that information when applicable.

So if there are uh postings or something or a job or the career section of the website, you know, it it's painful for me to go to a career section and just find five jobs listed. Right? Yes, yeah. And it still is a great place to work.

They're just not communicating that they are. Get me engaged. Yeah, give me a chance to love this company. I love that.

Okay, last question. What are what is like one or two things that a founder can do right now, maybe even a quick win, as you said earlier, to help strengthen their brand to immediately improve both the revenue, the pipeline and revenue, but also the recruiting. What can they do to improve their brand? Um hire a good agency?

Uh quite honestly, that's one of the biggest reasons you should use an agency. Because we don't live with the biases, the 40 years of biases that someone inside has to deal with. A lot of good ideas will fall by the wayside because, oh, we tried something like that before. Well, there might have been 15 different elements of that, and only one of them failed.

So I'll come back at it and be able to say, I don't know. I don't know about that. I think it's worth another try, or have you ever thought of? Or I'd like to talk to some people and truly survey them.

It always surprises me too when companies don't invest in a voice of customer survey. We learn so much, they tell us so much when we conduct that for a company. The the clients will say things they've never told our client, and it's a little bit more anonymous, like, right? Well, it is, but they also know we're gonna re tell them what we found out, yeah.

Um, but it at the same time, there's just a level of comfort, and maybe we ask different questions. We are not trying to sell them, we're trying to discover. Makes sense. That makes it a little more comfortable.

So yeah. So going back to your question, what would I tell an owner to do to improve their marketing? Listen to their customer, let their customer lead. Love that.

That is great feedback, and what a great way to end today's podcast. Thanks so much, Tim, for your time and all of your knowledge. Uh, for those that are listening. Oh, absolutely.

And for those that are listening, I hope you got some tidbits like I did out of the conversation. And we look forward to seeing you next time on next week's podcast. Until then, have a wonderful, great day. That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People.

If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, share me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold unfiltered strategies we drop every week.

I'm Gwendor Curry, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high-growth companies feel smart with people for strategies and AI-powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people.

Until next time, have a great one.