Four Reflections on Building a Marketing Operation from Four Years at ANCORE
I recently celebrated four years at ANCORE, so I put together four actionable reflections on building our marketing operation from zero to one.
Four years ago, when I joined ANCORE, we were a small, scrappy unit in a garage on the north shore of Boston. Because this was in the midst of COVID, it was tough for all three of us (myself and the two co-founders, Isaac and Nathaniel) to get together regularly. So, I spent most of my time in the early days on Zoom, trying to film content (while practicing social distancing, of course), down at the park by my parent’s house, and trying to learn as much as possible about building a marketing operation from scratch. It was and still is one of the most fun challenges I’ve ever taken on in my life.
As I enter year four, the more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same. We’re still small and scrappy (just not as small as we used to be). We’ve also traded in our garage for a much larger one in our Salem-based HQ. Yes, there are offices now and four dogs roaming the halls, but it still has that garage feel. You can walk right out onto the production floor and watch everything get hand-assembled and fulfilled. Our production crew is the best in the business and are the engine that keeps our operation running. They aren’t just good; they are the best.
I’ve made it a goal this year to write more (better late than never) because I don’t want to forget all the hard-earned lessons I’ve been grateful to receive. There is no playbook for building out a marketing function from scratch, and this is certainly not a playbook. However, I’m a firm believer in the Charlie Munger quote, “The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”
So, in that spirit, here are four actionable reflections from four years building ANCORE’s marketing operation from zero to one.
Read and Listen to the Greats
This is one that I learned in the last year and, honestly, I wish I would’ve learned it earlier. It’s super easy for us to look at what’s working right now and pull your lessons from there. You can open Twitter or YouTube or listen to any of the many marketing podcasts and get a peek at the strategy everyone is using right now. This is not a bad way to go about learning.
However, you don’t want it to become the only way you learn and find new ideas. What you really need is to spend 80-90 percent of your time studying business history and reading biographies of the business greats. Then, you can sprinkle in what’s new.
The reason I’ve found this so helpful for me is because business history plays out over several decades. You can’t fall victim to shiny object syndrome when you are measuring your lessons over a 50+ year time horizon. Shiny objects or fads can’t last that long. This will give you an excellent BS detector when you learn about a trending strategy or the fad du jour.
You’ll be able to separate the signal from the noise because you’re learning the condensed wisdom of decades of experience from people at the highest level of their practice. If you’re looking to get started, I highly recommend picking any of the books from David Senra’s Founders podcast and listening to Acquired (they also recommend different books and include their sources for each episode).
Get Comfortable with the Numbers
Whether you’re building a marketing operation from scratch or running it within a larger organization, you have to get comfortable with the numbers side of the business. This means knowing your ROAS, AOV, gross margin, CAC, revenue, etc and understanding how they affect your business. I know a lot of us got into marketing in the first place to avoid the numbers, but trust me when I say there’s power in understanding your numbers.
I’m not saying you need to become fluent enough to become a CFA or CPA or whatever certifying acronym is out there. You just have to learn to think like a capital allocator and not break out in hives when you look at an income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. There were three things I did to help me overcome my fears here.
The first was reading a lot of Warren Buffett’s writings. The Oracle of Omaha is the best teacher of finance on the planet. He writes in plain terms and sounds like your favorite teacher. If you take a little time each day to read his shareholder letters, you’ll be a capital allocating weapon in no time.
The second was looking at a lot of financial statements. This book was recommended to me by an entrepreneurship professor while I was a graduate student at Babson. It’s the clearest, simplest, and most concise explanation of the key financial statements. Plus, it’s not terribly long so you can demolish it in a weekend and come to the office on Monday with your finance fears conquered.
The last thing was just starting. Create a spreadsheet with your last six months’ worth of key metrics. Input every number and watch the trends. It’s going to feel super foreign and uncomfortable, but if you push through, the rewards will be there. The expectation isn’t that you become investment-banking-analyst-level talented. The goal is to become competent and to build confidence. Keep it simple and think at a single-unit product level. You can do this.
Stay Lean and Mean
One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from steel titan Andrew Carnegie when he summed up some key business advice by saying, “Gentlemen, watch your costs.” The ability to continually reexamine costs in the name of keeping them low is a critical skill to develop.
The best area to develop these skills is by inspecting your fixed costs. This could be anything from your email/SMS provider, tracking software, app plug-ins, or whatever else you need to run your business. The reason we start here is that items like ad spend, affiliate commissions, and even agency payments are (or at least should be) direct drivers of business growth. Cutting costs here can be dangerous to the business and kneecap growth.
Fixed costs, however, can be negotiated, decreased, or cut out completely, with almost zero downside to the business. Plus, the business can lock in those savings for each month from now on. This turns $200/mo savings into $2,400 over the course of a year. Here are a few examples of what’s worked for me.
Every December, I reach out to the software vendors who really help our business grow and see what pricing is available if we lock in for a full year right now. This unlocks at least $2,000 of extra cash every year that we can use elsewhere in the business. Yes, I realize that’s small, but every penny counts.
If I haven’t used something in the last three months, it’s cut immediately. The key here is not to think twice and just cut it. You haven’t used it in the last three months, so the odds of you using it in the next three months are slim to none.
For usage-based softwares (i.e.; Klaviyo), clean your lists. There are probably emails on there that will never convert for you, so by removing them, you can instantly lower your monthly bill. The easiest way to do this is to create a low or no engagement segment and then suppress (or just outright delete) those emails. From there, you should be able to lower your plan and BOOM instant monthly savings.
And what could you do with all those savings? I’d recommend just sitting on them if that’s possible. Keeping your powder dry to go all-in when a big moment (Black Friday, Prime Day, new product launch, etc) arises gives you a massive advantage over competitors. You can go bigger and get bigger returns when it matters most.
Become a Learning Machine
What is the one thing that makes Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger two of the greatest business minds of all-time? It’s not access to the best investing tools in the world. It’s not an ultra fast connection to real-time stock prices. Nor is it predictive-AI modeling or some other piece of hyper-futuristic technology.
It’s their ability to be learning machines. Both were and are voracious readers. The accumulation of knowledge from books and your innate curiosity for a topic are compound interest for your brain. Everything you learn builds upon everything you’ve learned. After a while, you’ll be able to connect topics from different areas of study and find insights others can’t see.
Yes, it will be hard work. You’ll have to sit down and read each night (or morning, depending on your schedule). However, if you can commit to just 20 pages per day, you’ll have read over 30 books over the course of a year. Not bad. And it still leaves time for some streaming, playing the New York Times games, or however else you want to spend your time.
Speaking from experience, the 20 pages per day threshold has worked wonders for me and there were even stretches where I happily exceeded it. As with everything, the most important thing is to just start reading and learning. And if you’re wondering what to read first, here’s an extra pro-tip: The best book to read is the one that is interesting to you right now.
Onward to Year Five
I’m so excited for year five and what it holds. What makes me most excited is that I’ve only done things in four-year increments in my life so far (high school and college). I feel like there’s magic in doing something for five years or more. This is where the effects of compounding really come into play. The time horizon is stretching more and more into the unknown.
When I sit down to write this same piece next year, what will I have learned? I have a few guesses, but that would spoil the surprise of my upcoming writing. What I know, though, is that I will have failed at some things, succeeded at others, and learned a lot along the way. And really, that’s all that matters.