Building Winning Teams & Authentic Marketing Leadership with Justin Steinman, CMO of Ensora Health

Speaker A: I trained under a lot of really good marketers, particularly during my time at Novell, uh, and then again at ge. I learned a lot and I've put together a model and it's a playbook, and I ran it at multiple places and I ran at Definitive, and when I was coming here, uh, and I was recruited in here and I met with the board, I walked them through the model before I met a single person in the marketing organization. And I wish I could tell you this model is innovative and fancy and differentiated. It is, in the words of BD and the Beast, a tale as old as time.

Speaker B: You're listening to the Revenue Driven cmo, um, uh, the podcast where we break down the most effective growth strategies from top marketing leaders. Join us every week as we dive into their stories, challenges and insights that drive revenue. This show is brought to you by Level Agency, where AI, uh, enabled performance marketing expertise blends the art and science of marketing to deliver measurable results.

Speaker A: Hello everybody.

Speaker B: Welcome to another exciting episode of Revenue Driven cmo. I'm your host, Chris Mechanic, here with an incredibly exciting guest today. Today's guest is, um, really like a general manager, right? So he, uh, is a very well rounded business, um, person, uh, in general, like talk about finance, talk about sales, talk about operations, um, but of course, with a deep, deep specialty in, uh, in marketing and product development. He's a passionate builder of teams, a passionate builder of companies. And he's got a track record, um, and a resume, honestly, like none other. Just to give you a sense, um, this is a guy, uh, with an MBA from mit, started, uh, out his career in consulting, like at, um, one of the big five. Well, Accenture. I'm not sure if they're big, if there were, or if they're considered a big five, but probably, you know, big five consulting firm background. Uh, then he went to Novell, uh, where he held various marketing leadership positions, then over to GE Healthcare. So he was just like, boom, boom, just like Fortune 500. After Fortune 500, uh, did a stint as a senior marketing leader at Aetna, big healthcare company, followed by Definitive Health. And now he is chief marketing Officer at Therapy Brands, which I can't wait to learn more about. I can't wait to pick his brain in general. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show, Mr. Justin Steinman. How are you, Justin?

Speaker A: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Absolutely, man. I'm honored to have you. Um, you, you know, you seem like you should almost be on a CEO podcast, but, um, so props to you, man. You've got an amazing career. Uh, I am curious. Uh, that's amazing. Yeah. So I'm curious, and I'm sure all the listeners are curious, too. Like, what would you say is one of your biggest secrets to success in the marketing realm?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. I'll give you two. Right? Uh, first off, it's never about you. It's about the team and the talent. And I consider myself fortunate to have worked with some amazing marketers. I would tell you, uh, with no small, humble brag here, that 5 of the people that I've hired have since gone on to be CMOs in their own right. And so that, to me, is like, wow. I've worked with some of the best, and they've been wildly successful. And I've always viewed my job as really for three things, right? You get the right team in place, you set the destination, and then you give them resources and get rid of obstacles, right? You got to hire the right team, and you got to empower them and trust them to get the job done. Uh, a wise manager I once had said, you know, it's better to get 80% of the way to your destination with 100% of the people on board than 100% of the way there all by yourself. And so I've been really, really fortunate to hire and build great teams, and I love and stay in touch with almost everybody I've worked with. This. The second part of that kind of goes hand in glove, if I could put it in two words. It's be authentic, right? And it's be authentic to your team, and it's be authentic to your customer, slash, prospect, right? People can spot a phony a mile away. Everybody. Kenny, uh, and all of our listeners here today, you know it in your gut when someone's being phony. And there's really, in my opinion, viewer, fewer, bigger turnoffs than someone who is just trying to be something that they aren't. If you don't know the answer, I don't know. Help me figure it out. Don't be afraid to help. If you have a belief, share your belief. Explain why you're at. And when you're having tough conversations with your team, have them come from the heart, not from the mind. Say what you feel and say with caring compassion, and your team will go to the last, last, furthest mile for you. And then on the flip side of that, be authentic with your customers. There's some weird thing that happens to people. They sit down in front of their computer and they suddenly forget that they are a human. And I Am not a professional marketer. And I must use big, complicated sentences with multisyllabic words, multiple phrases, and try to show you how smart I am so that you buy my product. And people buy from people. Right. And so be human, be accessible. Say what you mean. I often tell my team, if you can't explain what you're selling to your spouse or partner across the dinner table, uh, then you're probably marketing it. Wrong. Keep it simple. Right? Put it in terms that everybody can understand, why it matters. Don't try to impress me. If you're selling something. We sell software for therapists here at, uh, therapy rounds. I don't talk about. We have a SaaS solution to help you manage your complicated schedules. No. We let you take notes and set your meetings and bill insurance companies. And it works just like Gmail. You log on, you can use it on your phone, you can use it on your laptop, you can use it on your desktop. It doesn't matter. It just works. I'm talking to a therapist. That language resonates because I'm talking to them as a person.

Speaker B: 100%. Yeah. And, um, well, what strikes me, I'm wondering when you learn this or, you know, how you learn this. Because if I look at your background, my. What I would have, would have assumed was that like, like you were from consulting, you're from big, you know, big healthcare companies who are traditionally quite buttoned up and multi syllabic. Right. As you put it. So, like, how did you develop this, uh, from that background?

Speaker A: So, ironically, I actually would tell you that all of this I learned all the way back in college when I was the editor in chief of the Daily Dartmouth, the daily campus newspaper at Dartmouth College. And being the editor of the Daily Dartmouth is a unique experience because it's a five day a week newspaper and we pay everybody who works there exactly zero dollars. So everybody who's working there is working there because they want to be there. So as the editor in chief, how do you manage and motivate a team of people who are purely there to volunteer? And by the way, if you don't publish a newspaper the next morning, everybody on campus knows you failed because it's supposed to be there. It's every night you're producing something, and either it's in their mailbox in the morning or it's not. And that was really where I formed my, you know, it was the management crucible that I came out of. I learned how to write really well on deadline. I learned how to not have an ego because I was surrounded by a lot of good writers. Any one of them could outright me. And we edited each other constantly. So it was always about in service of the best story for the reader, not about how many words Justin got in tomorrow's newspaper. And it was about motivating a team by being transparent, being honest. And when you said, when you think you said thank you enough, you want to say it five more times.

Speaker B: That's a good, that's a good tip right there. And actually, um, as a leader myself, I could, I could really stand, uh, to benefit from that one. Like, hey, when you think you've said thank you enough, say it five more times. Because, uh, and I think there's, there's a brand of leaders that are like this. But you know, like you, you have high expectations of the people that are working around you. And you, you know, you sort of uh, uh, are, are looking for a certain level of performance. And so like, if they are just doing the things, sometimes it's like, okay, it's hard to stop and think to say thank you, like if they are achieving extraordinarily and, and exceeding your expectations. And it's like, okay, wow. Like that's, you know, it's really easy to think to say thank you. Um, but I think that in and of itself is really good advice for a lot of leaders, is like, hey, stop and say thank you. We've all worked for those leaders. That's like, you know, a little bit of praise is really, uh, really hard to come by and means a lot of. But guess what, it's free, it's cheap to give out, right? So I don't think, I think that, um, I think that that's a great tip. But hey, let me ask you this. So coming from that background, right, and you, I get it that you weren't always the boss, um, coming. Coming up through the ranks. But coming, um, you know, at an Accenture, at a GE Healthcare, is there, is there ever a temptation or like a cultural sort of, uh, tied that is like almost discouraging of that authenticity and that sim, that really simple way of communicating.

Speaker A: Uh, well. So when I was at Accenture, I was doing ironically, SAP implementations that had nothing to do with marketing. I graduated from college with a degree in English and line up writing SAP data conversion programs as my first job. I uh, did that for four years before I realized that was not me. So, uh, well, that was a fantastic career experience. And I'd tell anybody, you know, to go do a job like that after college because I graduated college with Exactly. Zero business knowledge. And Accenture taught me a ton about it. Uh, I had zero marketing responsibility there at all. You know, GE when I was there, was still at its height of who it was, and it was always a great place to work. Ah. And GE almost is the opposite way. Radical transparency, radical honesty. Uh, if you hide bad news, it will be found out and there'll be consequences for hiding it. Uh, and so it was almost more like, know your numbers. Use your numbers to predict what happened, and you better be on top of your business in any way, shape or form. And if things aren't going well, you need to raise the red flag and ask for help immediately. Uh, the people who asked for help at GE did very well. The people who tried to be solo heroes or nothing to see here type of managers and leaders, those people washed out. And again, GE could spot a fake a mile away. Uh, those are some of the smartest, hardest working people that I've ever met. But there was a standard of rigor and excellence there, and it was just not accepted to be anything other than brutally honest sometimes. That was tough, by the way, because if you weren't doing your job, and that happened to me a couple times, my boss was like, hey, Justin, like, good job, nice try. He was like, justin, that was bad. You gotta fix it. And if you don't have thick skin, that's a hard message to hear.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that you are kind of accidentally dropping a lot of value bombs here. Not accidentally. I mean, I'm sure it was very purposeful. Um, and, and it took time to learn. But the same way that it's like, hey, there's a certain brand of leaders that's just really hard charging and needs to say thank you more often. There's also a brand of leaders that's just like, too nice.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And like, should be a little bit more kind of like, hey, this is not good, like, you need to fix it. Um, type. Uh, so, yeah, that's, uh, where, where, where are you? Like, what style of leader are you? It sounds like you're more on thank you side, but then how do you approach it? Like, when, you know, when something's not right, do you have a framework for, like, delivering feedback in such a way that it, um, you know, gets the job done effectively without crushing people?

Speaker A: Yes. I don't think I've crushed any people. I'm sure I have accidentally along the way. Nobody's working. Uh, it all comes back to, we're talking about at the beginning, right? Be authentic. Uh, Uh, I have high standards of everybody and none higher than myself. And when I'm hiring and building my team like here at Therapy Brands, I've actually hired almost over 70% of the staff I hired in the course of a year. So I interview every single person. I don't care if you're an entry level marketer or a VP like before you set foot here, I meet with you. And I've always done that when I'm in marketing organizations. You can always find 30 minutes your data to employee. Anybody's going to join your organization. I don't care what the role is. And so I hire based on attitude and aptitude. And aptitude is, do you have the skills to do it? Can you do the technical skills? If you're doing demand gen, can you do it? Can you write a clear positioning statement if you're in product marketing, et cetera, Aptitude is much more harder to hire for, but it's very good. And it's more important in my opinion than aptitude actually. Are you the kind of person who wants to succeed? Are you in. Are you innerly driven to go beyond what is asked and what is expected of you? Uh, and you're the born that way or you're not, and if you're not, that's totally fine and good for you. You and I are probably not going to work real well together. And that's okay, right? Not every company or every manager is for every person. But I, I look for the kind of person who if I say, hey, here's a triangle, I want you to color it in red by Friday, they come to me back on Wednesday and go, actually Justin, what you were really looking for was a green circle. And here's why. And it's done. What else have you got for me? Right? You can't train that. You're either born with that attitude or you're not. And a lot of people, uh, on course of world are like that. And so what you do is you thank those people, you show appreciation to them, but in the event that they don't meet their job or they're struggling, you gotta be like, hey, this is not working. Here are my expectations of you and here's where you're falling down and let's figure out how you're going to get there together. What help do I need to give you? Do I need to be more involved? Do you need me to get rid of a roadblock? Have I been giving you unclear instruction? Have I not been accessible to you? Right, uh, let's find the problem together. I will always address underperformance head on. But as I said earlier, I will always address it from the heart with a caring about the individual look. My job is as a manager, is to make you into the best version of you and help you become the best version of you. I can't do that by being a jerk. It will not work. I can give you tough feedback provided I put my arm around you virtually and appropriately. And we're on the same team here. What are we going to do together and how can we win as a team? As long as you put the team above the individual, good things happen.

Speaker B: Love that. Love that. Cool, man. Well, um, that was sort of a, I guess, you know, a series of secrets that you just laid out. I want to go back to the first one real quick. I loved your very simple view of the world where it's like, hey, your job is basically hire the right people, set the vision, remove obstacles. Um, let's talk a little bit about each of those steps. I'm curious, like, when you enter a new organization, how do you even determine who, like, what roles to hire for? Right? Like, like, so, okay, you're day one in therapy brands. You guys sell software, um, in, in, you know, the healthcare space. Like, how do you, even before you get to the, to the fiber of the person, to that, like, attitude of, um, over. Over delivery and overachievement. Like, how do you even decide what seats to hire for versus, like, what to. Answers?

Speaker A: Yeah, so, uh, I trained under a lot of really good marketers, particularly during my time at Novell, uh, and then again at ge. I learned a lot. And I've put together a model and it's a playbook. And I ran it at multiple places and I ran at Definitive, and when I was coming here, uh, and I was recruited in here, and I met with the board, I walked them through the model before I met a single person in the marketing organization. And I wish I could tell you this model is innovative and fancy and differentiated. It is, in the words of BD and the Beast, the tale as old as time. Uh, it is product marketing one team marketing operations and demand gen, your second team, and corporate marketing, your third team. And then I have got a clear set of roles, responsibilities under each of those teams. And this model works in SaaS, software businesses. It's been deployed, it's been tested, it's been true. Uh, everybody in the organization has a way to plug into that. And so I come into an organization with that model, and it can be adapted the Specific roles underneath that need to be shaped by what the products are, what the market is, what the skill set of the people are. But I firmly believe that you need a VP over each of those three things and then they build out their teams to meet the needs of the business.

Speaker B: That's brilliant. Dude, you are just dropping bombs over here. I love it. That's like, that's big secret number four right there. Um, so corporate marketing is what like brand basically like think about field marketing, trade shows, like, like offline media.

Speaker A: What's corporate marketing? So corporate marketing first and foremost is brand. It's brand, it's social media, it is graphic design, it is communications, it is content writing, it is the website. Uh, it is all of that kind of the company. Right. PR ar you have it these days, all of that demand gen. I have events sitting under demand gen because a good event generate demand for you. It should not be a pat you on the back and make you feel that events are expensive. You need an roi. I need marketing qualified leads coming out of an event. Within my marketing operations team you always have demand generation managers who should have a one to one alignment with the sales team. So you immediately talk to your CRO or your chief sales officer and say how's your sales team lined up? And I actually embed a demand generation manager in each of the individual sales teams so that the head of those teams knows if I need something in marketing I call person X. Never a question in their mind. And the demand gen managers, I actually put their bonuses tied to the bookings target of their respective sales segment. So if their sales segment has a good year, they feel it in their bonus. If their sales segment has a bad year, they feel it in their bonus. Right, but you don't ever question what their alignment is on there. And then I also have events on that team as I said and then marketing operations because without good marketing patience and data. Demand gen, the demand. I look at my demand gen funnel at least twice a day. It's a real time updated funnel. I could tell you right now for all of our segments how many MQLs per working day we've generated this month. What our MQL conversion rate is. SQL to win rate is how many SQLs we have ACV days and cycle. I live and die by those numbers. Uh, and, and ed there.

Speaker B: Um, so the demand gen uh, managers. So in moments where sales people are not asking them for something, are they in charge of what all the different channels. Like they're in charge of paid social, paid search or like what are they doing in, in absence of.

Speaker A: They're executing event to uh, drive demand. Right. So they have an NQL target on their head and an MQL and SQL conversion rate on their head. So they built. They are the single biggest spenders in the marketing organization. So they are doing webinars, they are pushing nurture sequences, they are buying lead lists. It's not a self support role, it is a lead generation role for sales. So the worst thing you could have would be a sales leader saying I want to go after the physical therapy adult market and a demand generation manager generated a bunch of leads for children's PTs. Right. Complete and total mismatch. Right. I want them talking about, okay, I want to go after the adult physical therapy and a demand generation manager. Is in there. Who is the office manager? Is it that chief physical therapist? Is it the billing person? Who are the different people in there? Okay, we need to have an email search email sequence to both nurture and generate demand. Let's have a webinar, say up, there's a conference, you know, American Physical therapy conference. Let's go to there. All right. How many leads are we going to do? And so these demand gen people are super busy. Uh, it's a great job for someone who wants to get uh, a lot of stuff done and is a box checker. I hit my number. It's the only area of marketing where you can quantifiably say I hit my number this month or not. Right.

Speaker B: That's cool. So then, um, so you don't have like a centralized, like, like paid search or SEO SEM team or like a paid social team. It's more so demand gen managers like sort of running their own campaigns.

Speaker A: I have a centralized expert in SEO and paid search who works with agencies and she's the pivot point because I do believe it. She sits on the demand gen team, right. And she works with the demand generation managers to optimize it. So this woman, her name is Kaylin Kaelin, is an expert in how to play the Google game, for example, right. And SEO optimization and paid search. And turn this lever, twist that dial. And she has a, uh, SEO, an organic search agency that supports her and a paid search agency that supports her. I believe in outsourcing agencies for that type of work because the market is changing so fast. I can't build that, can't build that skill in house in my team. And then Ellen, um, plugs in with each of the demand generation managers to provide her paid search Google expertise and leverage those agencies. So she kind of sees the bigger picture across all of it. Because if I didn't have her, I could have my demand engine managers bidding against each other for the same keywords. Right. So she's kind of the stopgap checkpoint. But she doesn't have to tie in directly to all of the different product teams because if you have paid, search, distributed out all that way, you get chaos.

Speaker B: Right, right. Yeah, I gotcha. That's really cool. Well, I think um, I think that it's smart like, like you know, if I'm interviewing you say, and you lay that whole thing out, I'm like, hey, this guy's brilliant. Because you know, it might not be like a, ah, like a totally new and novel model, but it's like at least he's got a plan.

Speaker A: He's got a plan.

Speaker B: He's done this before. It seems logical enough. Right. I think it's actually smart, um, the way that you've got demand gen because it sounds like they're almost doing kind of like a BDR ish role, like in terms of like procuring lists and doing like, know, email outreach type campaigns. Um, but it's much more than that which um, I think is really cool. Do you have also BDRs, like folks that are like going like doing onetoone sort of outreach? Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah, we do have BDRs here. The BDR sit with the sales organization. I had it both ways. Sits with sales, sits with market. I don't really care. I talk to our head of sales 10 times a day. He and I are 100% of the same page. He calls my people like all his people don't really matter. Uh, uh, and so the BDR though is doing one to one outreach. I always think of sales as one to one and marketing as one to many. Right. We're running broad campaigns to get touch to touch a lot of people. The BDR is dialing people specifically and trying to get them. So BDRs are much better in higher transaction volume products, dollar transaction products, whereas marketing is really much more in volume products, lower acv, but you got to get a lot more units through. That's what we want marketing to be doing.

Speaker B: So you guys are, you guys are pretty legit. I'm looking at the site now. This is a good segue to talk therapy, uh, brands. But um, for folks that aren't so familiar, like tell uh, us a little bit about it and, and I'm curious, like why is it called brands? Is it like you've got. I was just like you don't really see that name or that sort of naming convent convention often. So, um, I'm curious about that and just like, like what kind of volume are you guys doing in terms of leads and deals and such?

Speaker A: So, uh, we are roughly, uh, we are a six figure over $450 million in revenue ballpark right now. Uh, so a pretty healthy sized company. Uh, and the reason it was called Therapy Brands and by the time this uh, podcast goes up, it won't be called Therapy Brands anymore. Uh, we could talk about that. So Therapy Brands was actually created through a roll up of companies. Uh, a private equity firm rolled up a bunch of smaller companies and put them into one bigger company. And our goal is to grow it and get it big and get it out there. Right. And so Therapy Brands was because the PE company wrote up a bunch of therapy companies that, hey, we're going to call our brands Therapy Brands as a company doesn't really stand for a lot to a therapist or someone in the marketplace. Which is why I have embarked upon with the team and uh, the board and everybody else, a full and total rebrand. And since this company will be launching, since this podcast, excuse me, will be going out after April 7th, I can share that we'll have renamed the company at that point to be Ensora Health. And so Therapy Brands, the website you're looking at now as we record this web podcast in mid March will be no more. And so instead it will be in Sora Health. And yes, E N S O R A. Uh, and so we have been working on that night and day to get ready for the launch coming up in early April.

Speaker B: Awesome. That's super cool. Okay, and then so the um, on the old site, uh, you, you look at the, it looks like you've got different products like theranest, Share Node, Echo Vantage, um, are those names going away as well?

Speaker A: Yes. So that reflects actually legacy of acquisition and one of the driving reasons for our rebrand. Right, so those were all the companies that the private equity group had rolled up. Correct. And so there's no relationship between theranest and Echo Vantage and Fusion and Catalyst other than the fact they were once standalone companies. And so, um, that's really a house of brand strategy. Right. And the most famous house of brand strategy in the marketplace is of course Procter and Gamble. Right. You go to the grocery store, everybody buys a product from Procter and Gamble. Nobody actually knows that they're buying a product. Procter and Gamble, that's like Crest, Charmin, Tide, Cascade. Right. Dawn I mean, these are how great. These are household names. That's a really expensive marketing strategy to pursue. One that we can't afford.

Speaker B: In their case, they almost can't afford to not do it.

Speaker A: Correct. And, but they've done that over time. And is it consumer versus business to business. And so we have moved more towards a branded house strategy where you have a single brand, in this case Ensora, and then you have descriptive names for all of the products as to what they do. The most famous branded house is FedEx, FedEx Home, FedEx Ground, FedEx Air, FedEx Office. Right. One key brand and a bunch of, you know, other descriptive names after it. So we're going to be naming our products to be in soar. Mental Health Insurer Data Collection in soar. Applied Behavior Analysis, uh, and soar. Substance Use Recovery. So you'll know exactly what they all are. You won't have to know that, for example, Echo Vantage is a substance use recovery product. Because again, if you're buying and we're driving an inbound marketing strategy, you are not as a buyer going and typing, what is Echo Vantage? You might be going in and typing. I need a substance use recovery software platform because I run a substance use recovery center. So why not name your product what the people who are buying it actually want? Again, not rocket science, but kind of Blythe.

Speaker B: Well, I'm an SEO by heart or by, uh, by training. So you're making me really happy with that. I'm like, I hate like, you know, when folks coin their own terminology and lingo. Um, but yes, I'm intimately familiar with what you're talking about. I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but my agency was just acquired, um, and we, you know, spoke with, with many groups. Um, and you know, the general plan, uh, for agencies is that exact same roll up, right? It's like piece of a bunch of them together, roll it all in and sell it at a higher multiple. Um, but one of the main reasons that we went with level. Who's the group that we went with was because it was not a house of brands strategy. Like it was intentionally built to be, um, an integrated machine. And um, and it just so happens, at least in the agency space, that your valuations are considerably higher, uh, that way than it would be as a house of brands.

Speaker A: Uh, there's reason why both strategies exist, right? And you got to look at what your industry is and what you're not. In our case, we need to build thought leadership. And as you rightly called out like 10 minutes ago. Like therapy. Brands doesn't mean a lot. And you'd never seen a software company called Brands before. Well, neither had I. Right. And so if I'm going to build thought leadership, I'm going to build it not at the equivantage name level or the fusion level. I'm going to build it at the ansora level and then have all the descriptive names take value from that one master brand. And I can try to imbue that master brand with a lot of value and what it means and we can define it and then even start seeing thought leadership come out eventually. It works for me. If you go and soar. Hell, oh, yeah. They're the leaders in mental health software. I bet they have something for me. That's how I'm going to drive the overall marketing strategy.

Speaker B: I hear you. So, um, was there a catalyst for you guys to go from sort of the house of brands to the more integrated approach, or was that always just like, part of the plan?

Speaker A: Uh, it's always been really part of the plan and we always kind of talked about it because it's not only a marketing thing, it's a technology thing as well. Right. Uh, we don't need to have seven scheduling modules or 10 scheduling modules. We can have one scheduling module and then deploy it across all the different sizes or practices. Right. Because there are some things that are common and, uh, other things that are different as you get to the practice. Right. Note taking, for example, is actually different.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If you're a solo practitioner versus working at a large clinic, the notes, forms are different, the information you're capturing is different. So that's gotta be customized by the product line. But scheduler man, right. There's only one way. You need to submit bills to an insurance company. So the idea is we can standardize our technology platform, reuse certain modules where they make sense, and then custom build other modules where they don't make sense to build this entire platform. In many regards, you can think of it as if we're trying to follow the automotive industry, right? Where Honda has one set of platforms for the car, they build Hondas and they build Acuras. Right. And all the Honda and Acura trucks all have kind of the same underlying chassis, but then they're customized and built up 25% the same, 75% different. We're trying to do the exact same thing here on a technology side in software. Right. And so the idea is that we move from these multiple products, multiple companies, into one central company, leverage the technology get the best of. Right. You know, of these 10 companies that we were looking, maybe one of them had the best scheduling module. We'll put in all the other ones. Right. Oh, these guys over here, they had the best billing module. Put that in everybody. And ultimately we have the technology and we have the platform and we become one integrated large company that can then scale and grow.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's brilliant. Okay, so it's not just like a front end brand merger. It's also in terms of the product itself is.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Um, so that's, that's like an undertaking, I would say probably five times the size of just like the, like. If you're just basically merging websites together, you know, that's, that's a big endeavor in and of itself. But when, when you're talking about merging all of the, the back end tech together, like pro the products themselves, I mean, that's a huge endeavor.

Speaker A: Yeah. To be honest, their endeavor is harder than ours. I mean, I got to connect websites and you know, as I joke with our head of product all the time, hey man, I can just write words on a piece of paper and the functionality exists here. I got to go build it, man.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's like I could just write a prompt for that. Like you gotta write 400 lines of code.

Speaker A: Right. We've got a brand new AI module for note taking, you know, that took two seconds to put on the website. You have like a dozen engineers work on that for a year to actually make it a reality.

Speaker B: Oh my goodness. That's wild. Yeah. And I mean considering, you know, they, the, the products themselves. So how many different, um, companies was it? Was it like five companies, six companies?

Speaker A: It was somewhere, depending on how you slice it, between 10 and 12 companies. I would tell you that we are merging 17 websites into one on April 7th.

Speaker B: Man, I wish we had more time. I want to hear all about it. Um, why don't you give us like the skinny. So, uh, with that, like, what were, um, what were you most worried about going into it? What kind of things are you learning now that you're in the midst of it? And then like, what are you really going to be watching like a hawk as it goes live? Yeah.

Speaker A: So the thing that I've learned the most and has been the hardest thing to do in all of this is there's really nothing more subjective than brand. Great. You and I can look at, uh, a, uh, math equation. There's a right answer and there's a wrong answer. Right. What's a good brand and a bad brand? We kind of all know bad when we see it. We kind of all know good when we see it. But you can't quite quantify it. Right? And brand speaks to everybody at a personal level. And what you gotta remember is, is like when you're marketing, you have the privilege of speaking for the entire company and you have to be able to bring everybody on this journey. And so, yeah, like the engineering department gets to weigh in with an opinion on brand. I don't get to weigh in on whether we use Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services. I have zero qualifications to make that assessment. Right. Uh, we just covered the extent of everything I know about them. But this brand, you know, the engineers at a party on Saturday night and he's got to be like, I work at a Sora Health and I'm really proud to work here. And you know, we are bringing harmony to therapists and I, I, I'm proud. Let me tell you more about it because for all you know, the person who's talking to you at that party on Saturday night is the world's best engineer who we want to come work at our company. You just don't know. Right. And so you've got to be humble enough when you're doing this brand to listen to everybody. But at the same point, you don't have to implement everything they say because if you do that and you just become a yes, sir, yes ma' am type person, your brand becomes a mishmash. And you're just trying. You don't stand for anything. You stand for making everybody happy. So the trick and the magic in all of this is how do you involve everybody? Give everybody a seat at the table, hear them out. Selectively figure out which input you're going to take. Selectively figure out which employment you're not going to take. But make sure that everybody sees their, sees their input in the brand. And then when the inevitable freakout happens from everybody, from the board on down, you know, miss your demand gen number for doing the brand thing. Can't use that as an excuse. What do you mean? We're going to have to change all of our websites in our clubs. We can never. You got to change your email. Oh my God, company is going to go down. You're going to break the company. Justin, that shade of yellow is hideous. I don't like it. It says like, x random board member. I appreciate you. Thank you. But like, trust me to do my job right. Like, and so bringing everybody on this journey is tough and it's emotional and you've got to be able to take it all in, have really thick skin. Remember, it's never about you. But by the way, if this thing fails completely, it's entirely about you. Uh, if it succeeds, it's about everybody. And yeah, we're all happy if it sucks. Justin's an idiot. He screwed up our brand. The reason how that works. Right. And so you got to keep all that in mind as you go through the process. And above all, you can't be the guy who freaks out. Whatever happens, you cannot be the guy who freaks out.

Speaker B: I see. So it sounds like arriving at the brand identity, you might call it the name, the logo, the color palette, the tone of voice, these things was the most challenging part, or is the most challenging part.

Speaker A: Yeah. Is getting everybody on board.

Speaker B: So how do you deal with that? Um, so you gave some advice. You were like, hey, you know, let people know that they had been heard selectively. You're deciding what to listen to or what not to listen to. So, like, how do you handle that, you know, random board member who hates the yellow. But, like, you, you've placed that yellow there strategically and, you know, you believe in that yellow. Like, what, what do you do with that? Uh, or how do you, how do you.

Speaker A: You patiently explain why it's the right move. And I thank you for the input. I hear you. You've got to pick your battles. I can give them the yellow. Uh, right. If I'm going to hold on, if they're picking on five things, I'm going to figure what really matters to me and what I'm willing to give on. Sometimes it comes about, uh, we were talking way back, you know, 100% of the way to your destination by yourself or 80% with everybody. There's, you got to figure out what the right 80% that actually matters is and give on the stuff that doesn't. And so that's what you have to do, is really listen to that and figure out what's the true north. And, uh, be transparent with people. Like, I shared the company name with everybody all the way back on February 14th. Right. And I got approval, final approval from the board to go ahead and make the switch on our, uh, February 12th board meeting. Got home that night late, woke up Thursday morning, scheduled a meeting for Friday morning, and I kicked off the presentation with, let's see if 600 people can keep a secret for 60 days. Right. And, ah, I'm bringing all of you in. I'm going to tell you the brand name. You all have to swear to me Right. And, you know, I gave him the brand name, I gave them the new tagline, I showed him m a mock up what the website's gonna look. And I charged everybody up. And then they've had 60 days to be excited about it. And they're on the inside, right? Versus they wake up on April 7th and there's a whole new company name and they have a new email address in their box. And no matter how good it is, they're upset.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah, that's true. Um, how did you come up with the name? Or how did you. What is the name? Uh, where did it come from?

Speaker A: Yeah, so the, uh, name came from a ton of research. Uh, when we kicked off this project, we did a lot, a lot of research. We interviewed customers, we interviewed prospects, we interviewed lost deals, we interviewed physicians and therapists with absolutely no relationship to us at all. We use one of those third party expert research surveys that go off and survey a thousand people with a quantitative survey. We did focus groups with, you know, 10 focus groups of 10 employees each. Every single ELT member was interviewed, Every single board member was interviewed. We took all this data, we synthesized it, uh, with our agency and what's called a ics, an integrative collaborative session to figure out what our core positioning is and what the problem that we are going to ultimately solve and differentiate ourselves on. And the problem that we landed on was unrelenting. Administrative complexity has taken the joy of practicing therapy away from the therapists, and it's not letting them be the best therapist that they can be. Right. There's so much noise and so much complexity. Like, nobody got into therapy because they enjoyed billing insurance companies, right. Or taking detailed, documented notes. They got into therapy because they want to help people. Right? And so we said, well, what can we do as a software company if the hero of our story is the therapist who is helping people at the most critical point in their lives? Right. Might only be six months, might be two months, but they're helping people at the most critical point in their lives. What can we do? We can remove the administrative complexity. We can create harmony between the therapist, the clients, and the healthcare community. And so we put this blueprint together around practicing in harmony, and that was going to be who and what we are. And then we went in search of a name that kind of could tie into that core theme. And, uh, we did a bunch of name brainstorming. We had a bunch of different stuff. But full disclosure, I sat down one night with a glass of Scotch and ChatGPT and spent about three and a half hours I looked at well over 1500 names combining and prompting and re prompting and this and that and the other and ultimately stumbled onto and sora and two or three other ideas. And sora really stands for en for ensemble. And sora is the Japanese word for both sky and healing. And so we help you heal together under one sky. It was really critically important to me that we had health as the second word in her name because I want to symbolize that we are a healthcare company in the segment we play in. So hence we became Ensora. Health. Healing together under one sky.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: I love that.

Speaker B: Yeah, my first, uh, well, the thing that jumped out at me was soar and like that sort of, you know, paints a picture of success and I'm flying. Um, but that's, that's really cool. That's an awesome story. I love that. Um, in general, this was an awesome episode. Like, I'm leaving. Genuinely inspired. Genuinely, um, impressed with what you guys are doing. Excited to see the new brand and to see how you guys executed. I'm sure you'll kill it. Um, but thank you for your time here today. Mar.

Speaker A: Hey, I had a lot of fun. I love talking about this stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah, dude, I really learned a lot. Um, for folks listening, if you learned anything, if you were inspired at all, if you enjoyed, uh, this, drop us a, a, uh, review or a five star, um, rating wherever you get your pod. We appreciate that. Forward this along to a friend who would enjoy it. Uh, pay it forward that way. Um, Justin, for folks that want to learn more about you want to learn more about Ansora. Um, as you guys launch, where, where would you direct them?

Speaker A: I would direct them to Ansora Health.com a brand new website.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Love it. Yeah. And we'll include that in the show notes as well for sure. Um, Justin, stay on the line just one second. We'll wrap up. But, uh, for everybody else, that was another awesome episode of Revenue Driven cmo and we will see you next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Revenue Driven CMO M. Um, we really appreciate you being here. For more details, show notes, past episodes, head over to revenue drivencmo.com this show is brought to you by Level Agency Combined combining AI enabled performance marketing expertise with the right mix of data and creativity to fuel growth. Catch you next week.