Adam Blake

Adam Blake – Chief Marketing Officer AT Thrivehive. Adam also currently serves as a Professional Advisor at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center where he advises early stage startups on marketing, sales, financing, technology, and general business issues. Prior to joining ThriveHive, Adam founded a consumer electronics business, Pear Cable, which he bootstrapped into a profitable company selling products around the world.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Adam’s success

 Testing scalability using the 10x Method.

Result if you follow the steps in Adam’s session

More capacity in your business and better ROI on your market by always focusing on 10xing your results.

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Usually, the key is it shouldn’t be 10 X the time that or resources that you’re putting in. So there are two only two things you can really put in and marketing, it’s time and money.

And we can balance those, you know, with hiring people who might be putting in time, but we put it in at a lower costs than if we were to do it ourselves. Or it might be, you know, the time of the person on the team, but those are usually the only two real inputs.

And so going back to leverage, we need to be able to get 10 X the result without 10x-ing the inputs. And so it’s usually a comment about the result, whatever KPIs we’re going after. Sometimes it might involve doing 10 times the quantity it might actually involve doing more quantity.

Going back to what I was saying about in order to 10 X something, you might actually have to dial back on something that you want to do. That’s going to mean that each individual component will not be quite as good as it could be.

And I’m not talking about, like, you know, the quality of the writing or something like that. I still believe that needs to be top notch. But, for example, SEO just, you know, harping on the same example, you could be better, but you know, it’s just not scalable to do that.

So you might actually have to write, you know, 10 times, more than 10 times, suppose you might have to write 12 times the number of posts, but if you can find a way that does that, that achieves a lot of leverage so that we’re only doubling the inputs, then that’s a huge win.

All right, okay. And I’ve got a couple of questions I’ve got in mind here to go on from that now. Like, when are we asking ourselves this question? And I’m assuming it’s like, right at the beginning before we’ve even maybe started any work?

Yeah. So I think ideally, that’s the case. I think the best marketers are hard wired, to be thinking about leverage. But I find that it’s frequently not something that people are hard wired to do so, and I do the same thing myself.

I might get excited about, you know, chasing down an individual idea, just to explore it and see what comes out of it without really having that 10x or that leverage in mind when I start, but then you end up chasing something down sometimes that you find after the fact can’t scale and that, you know.

Yeah, there was a learning experience involved in that which has some benefit, but otherwise, it was kind of a waste of time. So I think, ideally, you have it in mind and you’re using that as a filter to figure out what you should prioritize it.

There’s an unlimited number of things in marketing that you could be tackling on a daily basis. I mean, it’s truly unlimited, right? And so, one of the key sorting mechanisms should be scalability and how much leverage you can get.

Okay, so yeah, millions of things or thousands of things we could be doing to make this impact. What are the most common or most often, you know, things that need to be done that ends up resulting in, you know, a 10 x result?

So we could take paid advertising for example. We have ads that we have run for literally years without changing a single thing, which a lot of people will tell you is terrible. You need to be changing the creative, you need to be changing the target audience, you need to be changing, you know, you got to be throughout all these things.

And it’s not that we’re not watching it. We are watching it and not all of them last that long. Not all of them are as evergreen but the way I look at that as again, yeah, I’m sure we could be doing better if we were making smaller tweaks on a regular basis.

But there’s a huge amount of value in having put together this machine, of having figured out this paid ad, both from a creative standpoint, as well as from a channel standpoint, as well as from a targeting standpoint that you could set up and run for years that produces results without any input. It’s hugely valuable because there’s a cost to, you know, your time as a marketer.

And by having set that up, I can now go do something else that’s going to create value alongside to it. Where you tend to run into trouble is when you have to make some significant changes due to some external factors. So if you’re doing this, right, you’re sort of building up a highly leveraged model.

We’re with a relatively small team, you have a lot of activities that are going on. My company went through a rebrand last year and that’s a good example of when you can sort of get yourself into trouble a little bit with these systems, these highly leveraged systems.

That’s a case where almost every single component of what the marketing team was doing had to change. All the creative had to change accounts, had to change IDs, campaigns had to be reset. And when that happens, you can kind of put yourself into a little bit of a world of pain for a, you know, temporary period of time. Because the team is not necessarily the size that it needs to be to change all of what you’re doing, you know, over a very short period of time.

So we got through that fine, but a little more pain than you would have if you weren’t as leveraged as we are.