Joseph Frost: 10:25
Yeah. Glad you asked. So we like to say we’re here for you if you want to go out on your own, but not alone. And what we mean by that is there’s a lot of corporate CMOs that are ready to go try this thing called consulting and or they know they want to be a fractional CMO, but they don’t really know what it is. They just want to go out on their own.
Well, they can go hang a shingle and build their own website and figure it out, or they can join us. And we’ve already got that all figured out. We’re actually a franchise organization, so we have it all documented. We know how to help a CMO go out on their own, but not alone and become a successful fractional CMO. We don’t take away any of their expertise.
We don’t tell them how to market. We don’t tell them which tactic to use and how to price their deals. We just help them get into the business. And then more recently, now we’re helping existing CMOs transition from a practice to a sellable firm. And what that means for us is they got to start thinking like entrepreneurs, not just solo fractional CMOs, and build a real business that could be transferable one day.
And that’s a whole nother set of work that we’re leading at this moment. It’s nothing like that in the fractional space at all. When I got into fractions, the wave just started, and now there’s a lot of fractions out there. Well, the next wave is building actual firms that can be sellable by fractionals, and we’re leading that too.
John Corcoran: 11:47
And when you started the fractional CMO business, did it take a while to figure out that model? Because you’ve got it ironed out now you can reel it off very eloquently, but. But did it take a while to figure out what, you know, in those early days, what this would look like and what would stick?
Joseph Frost: 12:04
It took us about a year to build the client facing model. That and the guts of it have not changed. The fundamentals of marketing the six fundamentals of marketing. Our approach, all of the touch points along the way. That hasn’t changed.
We’ve improved upon it every month, every, you know, every quarter, every year. But it’s taken us longer to figure out how to make other CMOs successful. That’s harder. I mean, helping clients get to a certain level of growth and scale with a spring by bringing the right CMO in kind of happens by itself a little bit. but helping a CMO actually learn how to go out and get business for themselves.
Learn how to build a network. Build the relationships, create a scalable practice model that has taken more time.
John Corcoran: 12:53
I imagine that’s got to be one of the tougher ones, especially if they’ve been in the corporate world for a number of years. They’re not used to going out hunting and finding their own clients, while at the same time servicing their existing clients. Yeah. So I could see how that would be a challenge.
Joseph Frost: 13:07
Yeah, that’s definitely a challenge. It’s the classic seller doer model. It’s really hard. And we’ve addressed it. We’ve built the structure in place.
All of our CMOs get coordinators that support them. You know, we’ve got a lot of infrastructure built in to make it easier, but it’s still hard.
John Corcoran: 13:26
You’ve had a number of different businesses. You have had more than one at a time. How do you manage to have different businesses at the same time? How do you allocate your attention? How do you empower leaders in your company to run it while still, you know, keeping attuned to what’s going on inside that business?
Joseph Frost: 13:46
Yeah, it’s a wonderful question. I’m going to answer it two ways. One is aspirationally. My stated goal is to have seven businesses each EO qualifying that I founded, operating at the same time in seven different countries. So I have this really.
John Corcoran: 14:02
Why is that? Why is that the goal?
Joseph Frost: 14:05
It’s evolved over time. I always thought just from, I don’t know, 20 years ago in the mortgage business, like I’d love to start seven businesses one day that all kind of get to a million, but, but different, like not, not complementary. And then, you know, it took 12 years to do the next one. I’m like, well, maybe that’s 84. That’s what I would have liked, I don’t have that much time left.
So then I try to, you know, take away the separate and, and just keep to the I just have seven that I found that get to a million but operating at the same time is to your point that I haven’t figured out. So right now I have two qualifying businesses at a million each in two different countries. I’m working on a third, but I’ve realized that I’ve. And aspirationally, that sounds good practically. It’s really hard to start and give the energy to one thing that it needs to get to that million dollars in level.
So I’m actually shutting down my Frost Media Group business and really refocusing my energies right now on my core business, which is already qualifying but needs to because we’re taking that next level with AI and with the firms it needs me to and I can’t support another new business right now.
John Corcoran: 15:19
Yeah. I mean, marketing is changing dramatically with the advent of AI. So talk to me a little bit about some of those changes that you’re seeing and how it affects both the way that your fractional CMOs do their work that they do, and also how you as a company continue to operate.
Joseph Frost: 15:37
Yeah, well, AI is changing everything across the board, and marketing seems to take a big hit right away. There’s a lot of easy marketing that can replace AI seemingly around content creation and creative work. As CMOs, that’s not really jeopardizing our value proposition. We come in as the strategic marketing leaders. Now, I have seen some people trying to transplant strategy and marketing plans with AI.
And that’s, you know, if you believe that’s going to work, try to execute on any of those plans because they don’t make any sense. But what we see is that it could be dangerous for us to add AI to our offering as CMOs plus AI, because it’s not a fit like we’re not technologists, so it gets confusing. The CMOs don’t want to become value added resellers of AI agents. That’s not what they’re signing up for. So we took a year to build AI as a capability and now figuring out how to leverage it as our, you know, leverage our core competencies with it.
Which means we are going to market not as an AI capable CMO company, but we’re going to double down on the value we bring is strategic marketing leadership. And as a strategic marketing leader, we know when we know what you should be doing tactically first, then we understand where AI could actually make it more revenue producing or more profitable than without it. And that’s what you need when you’re a business owner trying to figure out AI these days, you need someone who knows what they’re doing that’s strategic first, then brings it in where it makes sense and just doesn’t buy a bunch of tools and chase a bunch of, you know, these, these, these promises that don’t exist and can be adaptable because it’s changing so fast. It’s like what we built six months ago has already been, you know, replaced by a single line of code.
John Corcoran: 17:36
Which is a hot, hot thing that’s going on. I don’t know if like six months from now, if we’ll still know it, either it’ll be massive or it will be like, what was mobot? Who knows? But then you expanded this into fractional proz.com, which was providing other fractional leaders and other categories. Seems like kind of a natural evolution, but it also seems like it could be fraught with its own challenges, you know, trying to go and find, you know, fractional CMO, CFOs who’ve worked in the corporate world and attract them and then get them placed.
So tell me a little bit about that transition.
Joseph Frost: 18:11
Yeah, we started originally it was the Fractional Professionals Association, one of our CMOs and me about six years ago with just an idea. We wanted to create a community where fractions could go and network because there wasn’t one. And, you know, that was a kind of a soft launch and it never really took off. We ended up shutting it down when the. The Fractionals United Communities started to get built because it served the same purpose.
But we kept thinking about this fractional pros concept. This is how my mind thinks, and just tinkering with it and trying things. And it’s still not much of anything, to be honest in the US. But what we found is that there was a big opportunity in Canada. So we have fractional pros, Canada, which has 1300 members now and a really strong community, and it’s led by one of our Canadian CMOs up there, Robert.
And it is doing what we wanted it to do here in the US, but it just never took off. Maybe too much, you know, competition. But in Canada we’re able we’re meet monthly with Fractionals. We’re doing training, we’re building partnerships. And it’s really taken on a life of its own.
And I think that could be, you know, one day, the next million dollars add on to.
John Corcoran: 19:27
And you got Canada.
Joseph Frost: 19:28
And it’s another country.
John Corcoran: 19:29
It’s another country. Yeah. Yeah, but.
Joseph Frost: 19:31
We’re far away from monetizing it right now. We’re just pouring value into the community because every fraction we can add to that community. And even in the US, our local CMOs have an opportunity to build a relationship. And that’s how business is driven in the fractional space. Word of mouth relationships.
That’s, that’s where it comes from.
John Corcoran: 19:50
So the kind of the model is support it, fund it while you build up the community and eventually you figure out where the value is, you figure out how you can monetize it.
Joseph Frost: 19:59
Yeah, yeah, we think we can. We actually think we have some good value to offer what we’ve done in the US with your yorCMO, we’ve built the model for scaling CMO work and delivering fractional work. Well, a lot of that can be transferred to any fractional. And we can introduce that through training. Potentially licensing, but probably more on the training side in Canada.
And we’re packaging some of those offerings to take them there.
John Corcoran: 20:25
I have a friend who does fractional CFO work. And, I’ve interviewed people that do that before. And some of them decide, okay, it’s going to be one day a week at this client and we’re going to go on site or virtual for that client. And it’s just kind of a simple solution. Do you advise a certain way of doing it, or do each of the fractions that work for you do it the way that they want it to?
And you can say, well, you know, you can do it that way if you want. How does that work?
Joseph Frost: 20:51
There are a lot of different models out there. We, the one we advise on is the one that we use. And it’s creating a value based pricing flat monthly rate with a clearly defined scope of work and not making it hourly. Don’t make it daily, just make it value based. And so how we do that and we, it’s very similar to a lot of planning tools out there.
We have quarterly sprints with clear priorities for the quarter with milestones that we hit as the leadership team. But then we also run their departments. So we have team members internally that are meeting their goals. And we have external vendors that we work with, and we show up just like an employee with a monthly salary to execute on these items. And when you have a salaried employee, you’re not checking in on every single hour they spend or didn’t spend.
You’re not, you’re just are they doing their job or they’re not doing their job? And that’s our approach. When you start with the other models, they work. They’re different, but they work. But you’re capped at five days a week or four.
You’re capped at a certain amount of hours or not. And I always think of hourly billing, I know you have some attorney background in you. I always think somebody loses one of those people. Oh yeah. But in a flat monthly scope, it’s pretty, pretty well understood.
Both teams are winning.
John Corcoran: 22:09
Yeah. As long as you scope it the right way, then it definitely can be a win all around. And I know that you have been excited about AI doing a lot of work in AI, looking at releasing an AI product. Tell me a little bit about that.
Joseph Frost: 22:27
At the beginning of last year, we decided that we needed to really embrace AI as a company and CMOs included. So we started figuring out what that meant, and it quickly realized that a lot of the vendors, at least at that time, were also trying to figure it out. So there wasn’t a proven go to place for AI to support marketing. So we brought it in-house. We brought the capabilities in-house.
We brought two full time software engineers. We hired a fractional CTO to help make sure we run it properly. And we started building our own agents to make ourselves more efficient, to update our deliverables to our clients to, to support our internal operations, to make sure we felt confident in the team. And then, we started seeing what clients wanted. And sure enough, somebody wanted a list building agent to solve it.
You know, they were spending six hours a week building lists and they just automated that with AI. So what else took that same list? Building agent to a roofing company that was trying to figure out how to identify flat 200 zero square foot or greater roofs that are white. Well, that’s really hard to do. You can’t buy that list.
But with AI and with satellite views and with a little bit of work, we were able to build that list. So we took that one tool and created another kind of modification of it. And then we started building some content tools. But everything is so bespoke. We can’t really productize anything and take it to the market.
And we don’t want to be a SaaS product tool company. We are fractional CMOs, we want to solve problems and bring AI when it makes sense. So what we’ve realized is that AI has got to exist in our world to support our CMOs in their core competencies. But what we do think we can bring to market now is what we’re calling the marketing brain. So the marketing brain is client data that yorCMO infrastructure and IP and the CMOs judgment.
And we build it once for every client and then it’s ongoingly updated with weekly check-ins, quarterly planning and real time marketing data tactics that we’re measuring, and the brain gets smarter and smarter and smarter. It’s not running the marketing. It’s a resource for the CMO. So then the CMO can go in and say, how’s this doing? What have we done?
And they can interact with it. The client can as well on their end. And then we build a Romi database return on marketing investment so that we can see real time metrics that we’ve never been able to show before. And clients finally get a lens into his marketing working. That’s been the Achilles heels of marketing forever is how do you know what’s the ROI on my marketing spend?
And you can sometimes get it granularly with certain tactics, but globally it’s very hard. So that’s the product we’re building. We hope to launch that in the next 3 to 6 months. But it’s gonna be launched internally. We’re already using pieces of it to be a little bit smarter with how we’re serving our clients.
John Corcoran: 25:17
Yeah. These things are changing so rapidly. It’s amazing to see the different tools that you can spend all day trying different tools. Yeah. For sure.
Yeah. Well, Joe, this has been great. Where can people go to reach out, connect with you? Are you a LinkedIn guy? Email.
Where should people reach out?
Joseph Frost: 25:34
Yeah, I think LinkedIn is always the easiest for me. Joseph Frost on LinkedIn. Joseph. Not Joe. And if you call me Joe, when you message me, I’ll know you actually know I’m Joe versus the spammers that still call me Joseph.
John Corcoran: 25:45
Yeah, yeah. I actually have in my LinkedIn, I have a little microphone at the beginning of my name. So if I get an email that says, hey, microphone John, then I know that they just scraped it and just sent an email. Definitely wasn’t personalized.
Joseph Frost: 25:58
I love that. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 25:59
Yeah, yeah. All right. Joe, thank you so much.
Joseph Frost: 26:02
Thank you John. It’s been great.
Outro: 26:06
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.