Mojo Media Labs Retains Clients with Team Culture

Michael Rose is the CEO of Mojo Media Labs and the author of ROE Powers ROI, a book about what he calls return on energy. Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode of Inbound Agency Journey, with Andrew Dymski introducing it and joining for the recap. Michael went from biochemistry and pharmaceutical R&D to a print and promotional products company he started in 1997, and then to the agency he spun out of it. The conversation is about how he structures a team: hiring for fit, nine defined roles, selling strategy by results, and the decision to open the books.

Four years of project work, then all retainers

Michael started Marketing Candy in 1997 while finishing his first year of law school. By 2007 he was bored, which he took as a warning sign, and the soul-searching that followed produced both the return on energy idea and Mojo Media Labs. From 2007 to 2011 Mojo struggled with project work the way most agencies do. The change came with HubSpot in 2012, and Mojo hit gold partner status in about 18 months.

Today, we don’t do project work. All of our clients on retainer, we have clients going into year two and year three. Client satisfaction’s at an all-time high, I would say, as is employee satisfaction.

(Listen at 04:53)

Fit first: hire, promote, and remove on core values

Gray asked how the book shapes the way Mojo serves clients. Michael started with the team instead.

At Mojo, we look for fit first, period. We feel like we can train for everything else, the marketing side, but we have to have the right people, and those people have to share our core values as a company. We have six core values that we make all decisions on at Mojo… We promote, recruit, retain, sometimes remove based on core values.

(Listen at 10:40)

The core values are posted on Mojo’s website. Michael’s three personal standards are on the chalkboard wall of his office: customer and employee satisfaction, improvement, and profitability. He doesn’t believe in work-life balance anymore, only work-life integration: let people handle an urgent personal matter during the day, because they won’t plan or collaborate well otherwise.

Fourteen people, nine roles, zero churn

Mojo had four roles in 2014. At the start of 2015 it split the work into nine.

We tweaked our model pretty drastically in starting 2015, where we’ve identified nine roles within the company to deliver inbound marketing. With that, we have 14 people sitting in nine roles that have clearly defined, or at least we’re trying to more clearly define the responsibilities of each role. We talk about roles and responsibilities like it’s one thing, and it’s really not.

(Listen at 13:33)

The roles: digital marketing manager, account manager, content manager, email specialist, social media specialist, SEO specialist, inbound designer, programmer, and a production manager who owns project management and training. Gray asked for a client success story, and Michael gave a retention number instead.

We had zero customer churn in Q1. And that’s significant because sales is not our problem… I really attribute that to the new roles and responsibilities. People have their swim lanes.

(Listen at 15:58)

Q1 grew over Q4 in every area, including lower fixed expenses. Michael’s view is that unicorns don’t exist in inbound marketing anymore (that was 2011 thinking), so each role is something a specialist can step into and add value on day one.

Sell strategy by the campaigns, not the weight of the document

An account manager had told Michael that campaigns are the tactical implementation of strategy, and he’d adopted the line with clients.

When we use that terminology with clients, it kind of calms them down, particularly in the onboarding process, because it takes time to create strategy, but we don’t believe in selling strategy based on the weight of the document. We believe in selling strategy based on the effectiveness of the campaigns or the tactics that are in that strategy.

(Listen at 11:52)

Onboarding time is what Mojo struggles with most. Clients often understand inbound but lack the infrastructure for it, and the gap before campaigns go live is where expectations slip. Michael borrows Paul Roetzer’s drivers-and-builders idea to stack campaigns that produce visits and conversions while the foundation gets built, and he warns clients about what Mojo calls RAM.

Strategy in search of tactics is a waste of time and tactics in search of strategy is a waste of money. That’s where random acts of marketing come into play.

(Listen at 23:34)

Opening the books in Q2

Michael sits on the board of Small Giants and credits Jack Stack’s Great Game of Business for the next step.

We’re going to kick off open book management in Q2 of this year, where we share the financials with everybody in the company, becoming very, very transparent. And I hope that will impact people not just at work, but I hope that impacts and makes them financially literate on the personal side as well.

(Listen at 31:50)

Gray asked what drove the decision beyond financial literacy. Michael’s answer was that people make better daily decisions when they can see the numbers.

When somebody knows that fixed expenses are up a percent and a half, they know, based on their responsibilities within their role, how they can impact fixed expenses. And when they start making these smaller decisions every single day, it really starts to add up to where you can set a goal in the company to reduce fixed expenses by X percent.

(Listen at 33:05)

One of Mojo’s core values comes with a question: how did I add value today? For Michael the answer is always to increase revenue or decrease expenses, and a team that understands a million dollars in revenue isn’t a million dollars in the owner’s pocket makes those calls better.