Diagnosing What’s Actually Broken with Kathy Guillory

Full Transcript

Lightly edited for filler words, false starts, and crosstalk. Speaker language and phrasing preserved.

Intro + The Adventures of Belle Bear Marketing

Dmitry: Welcome to What’s Your Process? Today we’re joined by Kathy Guillory. She is the founder of Belle Bear Marketing and the author of The Adventures of Belle Bear Marketing, which my kids absolutely adore. Kathy, it’s great to see you. How are you?

Kathy: I am doing great. So I love that you said The Adventures of Belle Bear Marketing, because my kids call it that too. Anytime you say Belle Bear, they’re like, “Are you giving them the Belle Bear Marketing book?” I’m like, “No, honey, I didn’t write a Belle Bear Marketing book. I wrote a book about a polar bear.” But I love that you said that because my kids do that all the time.

Dmitry: That’s hilarious. That was completely unintentional, obviously. I do know the title of the book, and I have it written correctly in my notes too, which is the best part.

Kathy: It’s the power of brand. Belle Bear Marketing is now becoming so big that people talk about the books and just naturally finish it with “Marketing.” I love it.

Dmitry: Well, maybe the follow-up for Belle Bear is to write a marketing book.

Kathy: A polar bear cub is going to start talking about lifetime value and customer acquisition costs. That might lose some nine-year-olds, maybe.

Dmitry: Listen, it’s never too early to start talking about ABM.

Kathy: Spoken like a B2B marketer right there.

Dmitry: Lots of random ABM conversation outside of podcast life these days. But Kathy, what do people need to know about you?

Kathy: Aside from the giant six-foot polar bear that is behind me, I’m Kathy Guillory, founder of Belle Bear Marketing and Belle Bear Media, which writes books and hopefully will do other things down the road. Big plans for that. I call it Big Bear Empire Energy just for fun, because alliterations are great. But we’re going to talk about marketing, and on the marketing side, what people need to know about me is I am a fixer.

When you think about CMOs or marketing consultants or other marketing strategists, they kind of fall into different categories. I am totally that fixer. Kind of half Dr. House, half Sherlock Holmes, but without the pipe or drug addiction. Without the fun parts, right? A lot of people are really turned off by chaos. I love chaos. I really thrive in that. I can really walk into a mess and just start to make sense of it. I actually live for it. It’s really exciting and exhilarating for me.

So I think the best thing people can do when they hire me is hand over the keys. Give me access to things really quick, really early: the right people, the right systems, the right software, the right reports. Let me get in and then get the hell out of my way, and let me just do my thing. I’ll check in with questions, but let me rummage around. It’s when people try to manage the information flow that comes to me that I get really frustrated, because I’m like, “But I don’t want to look at this, I want to look at this over here, because this stone is interesting and it doesn’t make any sense. Let me make sense of that.” So that Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House, diagnostician, fixer is my sweet spot.

Dmitry: I love that. The comparison is great in and of itself, but the notion of “let me in and get out of my way” is fantastic. Especially in this space, there’s too much either handholding and babysitting, or “I know how to do this, but I don’t have the time, so I’m just going to micromanage you.” The reality is when you bring in an expert, you’re usually doing it because you don’t know how or you’re unsure. So just let that person lead you, let that person teach you, let them figure it out for you, and then claim your reward.

Kathy: Absolutely. And by no means is my diagnosis final. There’s absolutely room for input and feedback and room to challenge and push my recommendations. But that comes a little bit later. When someone starts with the mindset of “I want her help, but I’m going to guide her on how to do it,” that’s when you get into a little bit of friction. I totally want input, because my perspective is different and I may not have all the historical context. As much as I learn quickly, I don’t know everything. I haven’t been there five years. So that information is really, really helpful, but I find it most helpful once I’m done, for feedback. And then we work a plan together. But it frustrates people, because they’re like, “What do you mean? You don’t need access to that stone.” And I’m like, “I promise I do. It’ll make sense in two weeks.”

What is one thing you’re world class at?

Dmitry: All right, so let’s not make the viewers and listeners wait two weeks, because we’re almost speaking in riddles here. Let’s let them in on what you do. Kathy, what is one thing you’re world class at?

Kathy: I am world class at a marketing audit. I have a marketing audit that is specific to B2C multi-location companies, and that is just something I do really, really well. Multi-location is different. A lot of people ask, “Is that franchise? Is it corporate-owned?” It’s any mix of those.

It stems from my background. My last corporate job was at a PE firm, and we were growing across the country, purchasing vet clinics and pet care centers. Not 150 locations, 150 brands. So 150 websites in different markets, with different names and slightly different product offerings and prices. 150 email lists, in some cases with overlap across markets, so think about that from a segmentation standpoint. Probably 450 social media platform logins, because we had at least three social media accounts per brand. It was marketing on steroids. Whenever I tell marketers this, they’re like, “Did you sleep?” No. We also had 100% turnover on the marketing team, because it was all very chaotic, but it was an awesome opportunity to really learn. I led performance marketing, so all the websites, paid social, organic social, and an $80,000 ad budget.

So you’re trying to promote a vet clinic in rural Texas where people are driving to see their vet, and in the same breath, talking to your media agency to promote a vet clinic in Manhattan, where you’re literally looking at blocks and not miles, because if you do miles, you’re on Long Island. Whereas in Texas, it’s a 90-minute drive to go see your vet.

That experience drove me to focus on this space. When you have three or five or six locations, you’re doing okay. By the time you get up to 10 or 12, it gets really, really hard to scale, and a lot of these problems start creeping in. So my sweet spot is that audit, outside perspective that I’ve built up over the years. And it’s really thorough. When I say audit, people are like, “You’re going to look at my website.” No, I mean we really, really get under the hood. It has five core parts.

It’s also very time-intensive. On discovery calls, one of my questions for CEOs is, “Do you have time to devote to this?” Because it’s not just me coming in. A lot of it is me digging and talking to the right people, but it’s usually a two- to three-month engagement, the leadership team is very involved, and about two-thirds of it is client-facing, with 90-minute discovery calls where we go through everything.

Under the landscape bucket, we look at your environment, your competition, we do a SWOT, we look at your customers. Do you have ICPs? Are they updated? Are they accurate? How are you doing on customer acquisition? How’s your retention? What’s your marketing strategy? What’s your budget? I look at channel performance going back 18 months, which is a lot in and of itself.

I break brand into two different parts. We look at your internal brand: what does your internal team think of your brand? Do they know where to find stuff? Do they know how to talk about the company and the product themselves? And then I do a pretty comprehensive reputation audit. For a lot of these multi-location businesses, it gets really hard to manage your reviews and your location info. When you have one Google Business listing for a consumer brand, it’s easy, you just go to Google and update it. When you have 10 locations, you need to look at Google, you need to look at MapQuest. There are dozens of places that still have residual contact info. There are tools out there, Yext is one I’ve used over the years, BirdEye is another, that aggregate all that together, to make sure your address is correct, your phone number is correct, your hours are correct. Even something as simple as holiday hours: who’s updating them? Are they updated? Often they’re not, or they’re wrong. It also gives you an opportunity to standardize how you’re replying to reviews. That’s something that’s missed. By the time you get into two or three locations, you may do it very well at one but not consistently at all the others.

And the last piece I look at is your marketing infrastructure. For organizations that have marketing teams, do you have the right roles? That’s a big part of growth too. The team you have at three or four locations is not necessarily going to support marketing at the same level when you have 12 or 15, with the same tools. So are you building for scale, or are you just cruising along? Part of the challenge is getting them to set up their systems and processes now so it doesn’t hurt them down the road.

One of the big things that comes up when I talk to teams is, “We’re getting hammered with requests from the field. They’re emailing us, ‘I’m doing an event, I’m doing this, I’m doing that.’” And your whole day is just responding to requests, which is not a good use of time. So one of the recommendations would be: let’s look at requests over the last two years, categorize them into three or four buckets, set up a web form that gets routed to the same people, create easy-to-edit templates, and spend some time building out self-serve tools so you don’t have to start from scratch every single time. Then you spend 10 hours building it and two hours a week managing it, not 40.

Dmitry: Speaking my language here.

Kathy: I know we’ve talked about this before. And in this infrastructure bucket, it’s also their tools and technology. A lot of these businesses at this growth stage are very dependent on agencies or vendors. Nothing against agencies or outside vendors, but if you don’t have someone looking at your vendor contracts holistically, there can be a lot of overlap. For one audit I did about a year and a half ago, there was a paid media agency and an SEO agency, and there was $15,000 a month in overlap. One was charging you $15,000 for SEO, and the other had SEO as part of their $30,000-a-month package. Who’s actually responsible for SEO, and why are you double paying for it? Because nobody was looking at it, and nobody was doing it, which is an even worse takeaway. You’re double paying for it, but nobody was doing it.

Dmitry: What you’re describing in a lot of ways is stakeholder sprawl. Big companies have big teams, with multiple people doing the same thing, possibly in the same region, probably in different regions, and no one’s talking. So you have those silos. That’s where most cash gets burned, that’s where most time gets burned, because then all of a sudden you have conflicting information.

Share the process with the stakeholders

Dmitry: I’m going to pause you right there for a sec, because in the last couple of minutes you’ve covered many, many things, and I want to slow down and dive into the different parts of this. Everything you said makes sense, but I think there’s more to each one of these steps. So I’ve hired you to run a marketing audit. What is the very first thing you are doing?

Kathy: I do a kickoff call with all the stakeholders, and I share the process on that call. All of these different areas I just talked about have a series of discovery questions. The first thing we do on that kickoff call is assign a stakeholder to each category. If we’re doing the environmental audit, more than likely I’ll be talking to the CEO and the head of product. If I’m looking at ICP validation, I want to meet with the marketing team and the sales team. So we assign an internal owner to each of these. There’s homework they need to do before each one, and there’s a separate Google Form questionnaire for each area.

Some of them we do in a different format. For instance, for the competitor analysis, I want the client to do a competitor analysis, and then I do one as an outsider, as a consumer. On the call, we talk about the difference, what I’m seeing versus what they’re seeing. There are parts where we go through the questionnaires on the call together, and it’s more collaborative. There are parts that they do, and parts that I do alone.

So the kickoff call is where we have that initial conversation and put together the groundwork of who the internal owner is. We also commit to our dates and timelines. Typically an audit lasts two to three months. It can go as fast or as slow as they want. I’ve done one in six weeks. It is really crazy to do it in that time, because the first step is gathering all this information, and then I need a week, week and a half to synthesize it all and put it together. So two to three months is really the target. I wouldn’t do it any longer, because then you lose momentum. You start to forget the things you covered early on, and people get pulled in different directions. Two to three months is the right amount of time from the initial kickoff to final recommendations agreed upon.

Dmitry: How did you come up with that two-to-three-month number?

Kathy: Just trial and error. Like I said, I did one in six weeks, which was nuts, and I would like to not do that again. It was too rushed, and in hindsight we probably missed a couple of things because we were rushing to meet a specific deadline. And realistically, sometimes the schedules dictate it as well, because the calls for each section are 60- to 90-minute calls, usually with multiple stakeholders.

Dmitry: Scheduling.

Kathy: That’s one of the reasons I share the process before the agreement, because I want the team to be committed. These businesses are also seasonal. If you’re a lawn care company and your busy season is June to September in New England, we’re not going to do your audit during that time, because you are not going to have the time to talk to me. Let’s wait until September, once things slow down a little, and then we’ll carve out the time. So I want to make sure I have not just buy-in but the time commitment from them upfront. And yes, I do ask CEOs if they have the time to work with me. I’m pretty honest about that.

Dmitry: It’s important. Setting that expectation upfront is critical, because a lot of people don’t do that. And this ties back to what you were saying earlier about “come in and get out of my way.” Obviously there’s support that you need, especially on the front end, because you don’t know what they do yet. That means there’s a requirement for them to be involved, to care, to share things, to involve you in things. And you want to set that right off the bat, before anything is agreed upon or signed: “This is generally how I run it. It’s going to take two to three months. These are the requirements of you as an individual and leader. You’ve got to be cool with that.” That way there are no surprises. To put a bow on this point, there are too many surprises in this game, and more often than not they come after the contract is signed. No one is happy about surprises post-contract.

Kathy: Yes, exactly. There are no surprises about the expectation of level of effort involved on their side. And then there are no surprises about the deliverables either. Everybody knows: this is what I’m getting, and this is the process.

Dive deep into discovery

Dmitry: Amazing. So you’ve kicked everyone off. They’re informed, they’re excited, you have access to all of their calendars. What happens next?

Kathy: Then we dive really, really deep. We have these discovery meetings where I’m collecting all the information and the work they do ahead of time, and we go through all of it. This discovery stage takes about six weeks on average. It depends on the size, and it also depends on how much marketing you’ve done. Do you have a marketing strategy? If they say no, that’s a little bit easier. Do you have a marketing plan? No.

I do a really deep dive into the budget. I like to look at three years of marketing spend, which seems excessive, but what are the trends? A lot of times your budget will tell me more about what you prioritize than any plan you have on paper, because that’s what you’re actually paying for. So if you say, “We’re really leaning heavily into organic,” but 80% of your leads come in through paid, no, you’re not. You may want to say you are, and you may want to say that to make yourself feel better, but in reality you’re not. Do you not know that, or are you fooling yourself? Sometimes leadership genuinely thinks they’re leaning heavily into organic, but 80% of leads come in through paid. That actually happens.

Dmitry: Which side of that coin do you find to be true? People believing it, or people just telling that story?

Kathy: In some cases people genuinely believe it, almost so much that they’ve convinced themselves. You almost need someone to come in from the outside and hit you over the head with the numbers: “Hey, that’s actually not true.” Maybe they haven’t pulled those numbers, or if they pulled them, they haven’t looked at them through that lens.

Dmitry: And in a siloed organization, you may not have that visibility. Performance has their budget over there and they’re doing their thing, meanwhile “we’re getting a ton of website traffic and everyone loves us,” or “we’re getting a lot of engagement on social, so people clearly love us.” And you don’t actually see how those two things align.

Kathy: What I sometimes see, like with a client this summer, is that they are just too analytical. They have too much reporting, too much data, and their weekly dashboards have 27 things on them. That’s awesome from one perspective, that you can track these 27 things, but there is no universe where those 27 numbers are all equal. So what are the two or three things you really need to be looking at for each timeframe? Maybe there are two or three things I want to look at daily just to make sure things are going well. There are two or three things the marketing leaders need to look at weekly to make sure trends are going in the right direction. And your leadership outside of marketing probably needs to look at monthly reports unless something is wrong. So part of it is right-sizing the KPIs for the audience. Your leadership team dashboard does not need 27 things on it, because if it has 27 things on it, 20 of those are not getting looked at on a weekly basis. Our brains are not designed to equally care about that many things at the same time. That’s just not how prioritization works.

Dmitry: And that comes back to leadership. If leadership is telling you that you have to care about 27 things, that means leadership doesn’t know what’s important. That’s why what you’re doing is really critical: of these 27 things, these three or four are the ones that actually matter.

Kathy: Because those are going to be your leading indicators. If you watch this number really closely, you’ll be able to predict with some level of certainty how the next five numbers are going to behave six weeks from now. They’ll set up reporting and they’re like, “This is great, we have this daily. Now what the hell do we do with it?” That’s where some of that clarity comes in.

And I’ll back up a step. If they don’t have a solid marketing strategy that’s repeatable and working, well, there’s obviously a reason I’m here. There are typically a couple of “why now” moments. Usually it’s a leadership change, there’s been a change in marketing, or a new CEO is coming in and wants to know what’s under the hood. Or there are external market forces: we’re going into a new market, we’re looking at branch or store expansion, we’re growing through M&A and purchasing locations in a different state. It could be there’s a new competitor in town and they’re eating our lunch. It could also just be that what worked last year isn’t working this year, we don’t know what the hell is going on, help us. But there’s usually a reason. One of the questions I ask during my initial discovery calls is, “Why now? What’s prompting this conversation right now?” Because if they say nothing, that’s a red flag. If there’s nothing prompting you to look right now, how much are you going to invest in this, and how serious are you going to be about making the recommended changes? Because everybody loves an audit until I come back and start telling them what they need to change.

Dmitry: That’s like your LinkedIn headline.

Kathy: True story. It should be, seriously. The metaphor is, everybody loves to learn until you give them a test.

Dmitry: For sure. But it’s also, “Tell me how great I am.” And that’s not the job. I’m sure there are plenty of things this hypothetical company is doing well, but they didn’t bring you in because of those things. They brought you in because hopefully they have the awareness that they’re not doing this other set of things well, and they’re wondering: should they be doing them? Should they be investing more in others?

Kathy: Exactly. And they may not know exactly what they’re not doing well. That’s where the Dr. House, Sherlock Holmes part comes in. Nine times out of 10, they’re seeing the symptoms. There’s a hole. The funnel is leaky, and they don’t know why. They don’t know what’s causing it. So the step to fix it could actually be three or four steps before. Lead volume is down, well, it could be that all of your Google listings have the wrong hours and the wrong phone number. You wouldn’t necessarily know. There was a branch that moved locations, and there was still an old address. I was like, “This is ridiculous. It’s been six months, update it.” They did, they put in the new phone number, and guess what? The phone started ringing. Sometimes it’s really big things. Other times it’s a really small detail that just needs to be pointed out.

Dmitry: I know you just shared one, but what’s the silliest little detail you can share without breaching confidentiality? I’d be really curious about some of those little findings.

Kathy: It’s really, really little things. This was back in my corporate days, at one of the vet clinics at the PE firm. With the Google Ads, they would turn calls off at a certain hour, because there was nobody available to answer. So if you saw a Google ad for your vet clinic during business hours, you had the option to call or book online, and if you called, a person would answer. After hours, you only had the option to book online, because logically, we don’t want you calling and going to voicemail. It’s a crappy experience, and we’re likely going to lose you. And the time zone was wrong. It was a clinic in Arizona using New York hours. The ad agency running this at scale for 150 brands, not necessarily their fault,

Dmitry: 100% their fault, are you kidding me?

Kathy: Still their fault, but an honest mistake in the sense that they should have been looking at it. Their team should have been QC-ing it. The national marketing team should have been QC-ing it as well, for a level of oversight. And then for the one, two, three weeks this was wrong, the local vet clinic team should have been asking, “Why are we not getting calls after noon? Why is 12 or 1 o’clock when all of our calls stop? Is something wrong?” Three levels of failure. A bunch of things were updated in one big swoop, and this vet clinic in Arizona was no longer taking phone calls after 1 o’clock because it was using East Coast hours.

Things like that are more likely to happen when you’re looking at such a big, geographically dispersed portfolio. That’s not going to happen if you have three stores in New England within a block. Time zones are not an issue you’re thinking about when you’re small and geographically constrained. But as you grow and expand, who owns the QC on that? Totally the agency, but also the marketing team. And at a certain point, the local team also needs to be flagging it: “What the hell? Why am I not getting phone calls?”

Dmitry: See something, say something. The MTA got it right on that one. All right, back to discovery. You’re looking at the marketing plan, you’re looking at budgets, you’re asking “why now,” you’re addressing potential symptoms. What else is important to your specific audit, to make sure you do discovery well?

Kathy: The team. If there is a team in place, I spend a lot of time with the team. Normally when I’m coming in, they’re worried. There’s a consultant coming in, they’re evaluating us, is she the big bad wolf who’s going to come in and say get rid of us? I tell them upfront, my job is not to come in here and cast blame. My job is to figure out what is not working and what could be improved. My report is not going to say, “Hey, Tim over there in that performance marketing role is the reason your ads are all messed up.” It’s going to say, “Your ads are messed up, here’s the plan to fix it, and maybe we need to reevaluate who’s in that seat.” But I’m not going to call names.

Dmitry: Sorry, Tim.

Kathy: Sorry, Tim. But sometimes there is some restructuring that needs to happen, and it’s hard, because all restructuring decisions feel really personal. But it usually has very little to do with the person themselves.

I’ll tell you about one. I went in to do an audit, and there was a person on the team who was hired six months earlier, and 100% of this person’s job was organic social. That was the beginning and the end of their role and responsibilities. To me, in 2025, on a small five-person marketing team, that is not a full-time, soup-to-nuts position. It just doesn’t make any sense. This person was also doing organic social in a silo with no input from others, so the messaging didn’t match, the positioning was off. She was making her own visual assets, using some brand guidelines, but there was a lot of disconnect.

So part of my recommendation was to rework the org structure. There was also an open slot on the team. The open slot became a content specialist role, which did not exist. Someone owns content across all the channels, email, social, websites, blogs, everything, so all of your content is consistent. Then they feed content to the digital marketing specialist, who schedules it on social. There’s an in-house creative director who partners with designers and contractors to make sure things follow the brand guidelines, creating assets for email, website, and organic social. Now organic social is a fourth of somebody’s job. That person is still responsible for that channel: sharing best practices, here’s what we should be doing, here’s the content we should be sharing, here are trends I’m seeing. Content writes the content, graphics people do the graphics, it all comes together, she shares it, and then she brings back reporting. Now everything looks and feels the same regardless of where you go, the team is working together a lot more closely, and we’re not just wasting headcount.

Was that decision personal? At the end of the day, there was a person who was out of a job. But that person was actually offered one of the two positions and ultimately didn’t think it was the best fit, because her experience was solely organic social. For that organization at that moment in time, that role did not make sense. On a larger 30-person marketing team, maybe that is a role. But here it just wasn’t efficient.

That’s what I mean by looking at the team. I actually have a pretty cool, in-depth skills matrix that I go through with them. It’s not “tell me your strengths and weaknesses,” it’s more “what do you like to do? What energizes you? What part of the marketing work do you want to learn and grow into?” It helps me understand where they are, so we’re doing a little bit of career mapping as well. Because some people are like, “I’ve done this by default because the last six people who did it keep leaving and I’m getting stuck with it.” That’s not a good professional experience either. How long until you leave? So a lot of it is right-sizing the role for the org and making sure you have the right people in all the seats.

Dmitry: Something we talk about a lot with our clients is what we call the golden triangle: people, process, and tools. When you’re looking at budgets and marketing plans, a lot of that comes from process. But you could have the world’s greatest process, and if the people aren’t right, it’s not going to work. Simultaneously, you could have the most talented people on the planet, and if the processes around them are bad, those talented people cannot be successful. That’s really critical.

When you brought up the example of organic social in 2025, I got a little nervous, because I was like, Kathy’s putting a target on her back, social is critical for marketing teams these days. But depending on the size of the org and the people involved, maybe there’s just not enough there. So again, that caveat of discovery: knowing the size of the organization, the kind of business and industry they’re in, and the channels that are important for their business. All of that becomes so important, because you want to not just right-size the team but create opportunities for growth in the future. The person doing social didn’t want the content role. They wanted to stick to social; that was their bread and butter. Cool. They probably need to be in a different organization where the system is built for exactly that.

Kathy: Where it’s set up to do that.

Dmitry: And I think taking that empathetic approach, as opposed to, I always think of George Clooney in Up in the Air: “Thank you for your time and goodbye.” It happens, and it sucks when it happens, but it’s not meant to be that.

Kathy: It sucks, and it’s not the person’s fault either. The person saw a job posting for a strictly organic social role. My recommendation in my summary was that the several people who had been leading marketing did not really think through all the moving pieces you needed to execute the marketing plan at this level with these resources. It was a five-person marketing team, so really lean for the size of the org and the goals it was trying to accomplish. You’re going to have a lot of overlap just by the nature of it. On smaller teams you really need people who are willing to roll up their sleeves. The conversation was even, “Okay, maybe you don’t want to do content. Do you want to do paid social? Can we expand your scope to include websites and blogs?” And it was, “No, I only want to do this.” And it was, “Well, we just can’t afford to have a dedicated person doing just this, because that means six other really important things are also not getting done.”

So thank you for calling it out. I am fine with the target on my back. I have opinions. But my opinions take into account the scope, the budget, and the overall structure of the team.

Dmitry: 100%. And I called it out because I knew there was more to it. This goes back to your point that your budget dictates what you actually care about. If 80% of your budget is going to paid, then maybe you can’t actually justify the bandwidth for organic. If organic were that important to you, you’d have more budget set aside, more headcount, better content. It’s the difference between talking about something and actually believing in it. Social is a very touchy subject these days. We’re starting to see more social professionals going into head of marketing, VP of marketing, and CMO roles, which I absolutely love, because they’re the ones building community and talking to customers on a daily basis. But there are also thresholds of roles and responsibilities within a company and a team, and it’s got to make sense. If the math doesn’t math, too bad.

Kathy: That’s it. And even if we had a team with an extra five people on it, we would have that person in charge of social and community, but they would be fed content by content people, which I think is critical. Because if all of a sudden you’re on the website and it’s Giving Tuesday, and you’re on social and we’re celebrating something else, your left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. It’s the worst.

Synthesize and score the data

Dmitry: All right, let’s get back to it, because I like our tangents today. After evaluating the team, if we’re talking eight to 12 weeks and a six-week discovery process, that’s the majority of it, is there anything else you look at before moving into actually evaluating and analyzing?

Kathy: For marketing performance, I look at all the reports, and then I talk to all the stakeholders. Part of that is: how well do the stakeholders understand all the reports? And it’s not just the dashboard with 27 KPIs on it. How often are people looking at this, and are they even looking at it? Most of the teams I work with have fewer than 10 marketing people. The businesses are multi-location, but they’re in this sweet spot of growth, three to 12 locations, where they’re expanding but haven’t grown to the point of several-dozen-person teams. So one of the questions is, are you actually pausing to look at the KPIs? You’d be surprised, nine times out of 10, they’re not. They may pull monthly KPIs by channel on the fifth of the month for the previous month, and nobody’s looking at them. But guess what? By the fifth, your new ads are already up. So what are you actually doing with this information?

Or they’re like, “We’re going to do this email campaign and run an A/B test and see the results.” Cool. But either you don’t build in enough time to collect a large enough sample size for statistically valid results, or you set it up and never go back. And even if you do, are you actually incorporating those learnings next month, or is next month’s email going out before the test is done? That happens a lot, everywhere. I think we’ve all been guilty of it: “We’re going to test this.” Cool, but what the hell are we going to do with the data?

Dmitry: It’s always my favorite. Test everything, for no reason.

Kathy: And I’m all about testing. Testing is incredibly important. But if you’re really going to test: A, let’s not test everything all at once, because then you don’t know what’s working. B, let’s make sure we give it enough time, because the last thing I want to do is make huge business decisions based on a sample size of 50 people. And C, let’s make sure we have a plan for what we actually want to do with the results.

So I collect all this info, all these inputs, and then honestly, I sit with it for a couple of days. I review the notes. I record all of my calls in Fathom, and I’m also one of those old-school people who takes handwritten notes. I very rarely look at them, but the physical act of writing is what commits something to my memory. It makes it stick. I’ve always been like that, even in college. I never read my notes, but taking them helped me remember.

So I synthesize all this information, and every one of these areas gets a score from one to 100. I actually have little circle marks with scores. Then I write up the reasoning behind the score. Some of the scores are more subjective, and some are more prescriptive. For instance, if I’m evaluating your website and your domain authority is five,

Dmitry: That’s a real number, yeah.

Kathy: I’m not going to give your website a high score. The reason I do scores is I’m sort of forcing a quantitative measurement for qualitative data. On an audit I just finished recently, they said, “We didn’t even look at your scores, we just read all your comments.” And I was like, “Great, but let’s also go back and look at the scores, because the scores are what’s going to help us prioritize what we work on next.”

The next step after sharing the audit recommendations is that they digest it for a couple of days, and then we come together, usually me, the leadership team, and the stakeholders who were involved, and we prioritize the things we want to fix, in what order, based on impact to the organization. For example, your ICPs may need to be updated, your customer segmentation is wrong, and your funnel is leaky. At the same time, your brand guidelines are dispersed across four different places and nobody knows where to find them. Both are important and both may have a low score, but one is going to have a much faster, more visible, tangible impact on your bottom line than the other. So we’ll put a plan together to fix both, but the leaky funnel comes first. Or a website audit where the site had 65 accessibility issues. That’s a problem that could potentially get you sued.

Dmitry: Been there.

Kathy: A, it’s a bad user experience. As marketers and business leaders, we should want as many people as possible to be able to access our products and services. B, it can also get you sued. So let’s fix all of those before we do the nice-to-haves.

We categorize them, typically into buckets: the things we want to work on right away, in the next 30 to 45 days, then near-term, then longer-term goals. That’s the part where I really want their outside feedback. I’ve collected feedback all along on the individual pieces, but this is where I want their point of view: these two things are broken, but they’re not equal, and one has a bigger impact on the bottom line. I can usually make an educated guess, but they know their business better. That first meeting is typically about two hours. It can get very long and overwhelming, so I’ve actually split it into a couple of sessions depending on the size of the stakeholder group. It’s a lot to digest.

Then, based on their feedback, I put together the actual plan to fix these things. That includes budget recommendations, a 12-month plan broken into short, medium, and long term, and the resources needed to execute that plan successfully, whether it’s a new org structure, new vendors, firing this agency and hiring that one. Vendor consolidation is big for a lot of these multi-location businesses, especially if you’re growing through M&A. You bought a clinic here, you bought a practice there, and they all come with their own hodgepodge of vendors. So on what timeline do you integrate them into your existing structure?

Then I hand it off to them, packaged. So far, every time I’ve done this, it’s led to a retainer for me or someone on my team to actually go in and fix it. From a business perspective, it’s a really smart way to do business development, because by that point you’ve spent three or four months with their team, you know their business, and they’ve just onboarded you. But that is 100% not the expectation. I’m not going into this thinking I’m going to do an audit and sell you a retainer. In some cases it’s not going to make sense for my team to do the work. You may have the internal team, with a little restructuring, to go do this. It is 100% a standalone plan that you can take to anybody, or even take the pieces, like, “We have a paid media problem, we’re going to fix things on our website.” It’s descriptive and specific enough that a different vendor will know how to fix it.

What’s next?

Dmitry: Fantastic. So I’ve got to ask: where can we see you in action? What’s next? Where’s your process living? What do people need to know?

Kathy: You can find me, Kathy Guillory, on LinkedIn, and on my website, bellebearmarketing.com. What’s next is a really good question. I love doing these audits. I think they’re a lot of fun, and over the last few years I’ve perfected how I do them. One of the challenges, a good problem to have, is that they often lead to more work, and I can’t always support that work. I only have so many hours in a day, I have retainer clients already, and I’m not going to live and sleep marketing. It’s not my whole life, I’m sorry.

So what I’ve been doing over the last few months is I brought another person onto my team, someone I used to work with at the firm. She has a very similar background supporting multi-location businesses, with both local and corporate marketing needs. I’m essentially grooming her to be the next fractional CMO. The first couple of audits we did together, and she has just taken on her first retainer client from that work. So I think that’s the model: we expand to have other people who can help with the audit. I’ll still be involved, because it’s my process. I helped build it, so that oversight for consistency and quality control is still really important. But ideally, two to three years from now, I have three or four other fractional CMOs who are equally trained to do this really deep dive and are also able to support the ongoing work. We’re not always going to bat a thousand, that’s unrealistic. But logically it makes sense: you spend time onboarding somebody and working with them, and if there’s opportunity for more work, you’re probably going to keep working with them. I don’t want to lose that level of continuity just because our capacity taps out.

Dmitry: Makes perfect sense, and it retains control. You brought up QC a few times, so I get it.

Kathy: It’s important.

Dmitry: Kathy, thank you so much for this. This was a lot of fun and really interesting, the depth of how you’re evaluating things. It’s not just metrics, it’s not just the surface. Hopefully there are a lot of takeaways for people. Have a great rest of your day. I’ll talk to you soon.

Kathy: Thank you.