Exactly. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 07:49
And it’s really betting on yourself as well. So you end up kind of rising through the ranks. You eventually are working for another Other agency. And in 2008 you started your own agency. This is the remote first agency.
What inspired that? Well, you know, you had you know, what made you decide I’m going to run my own business.
Tracy Marlowe: 08:10
I was very ambitious at that time, and I was, you know, rising through the ranks and growing my career. Figured I’d be, you know, working in the agency space for a long, long time. I remember even one day, a friend of mine said, someday you’re going to have your own agency. And I remember thinking, no, that that’s not me. But then I had my daughter and my world turned upside down, and I realized that the priorities that I had, you know, the day before I had my daughter were not the same priorities anymore.
And I was working, you know, more than 40 hours a week at the agency that I was at at the time. And sometimes really late nights, there were nights where sometimes I would be working, you know, and having to tell my husband, please put our daughter down because I can’t, you know, I can’t, I’m not going to be home in time. And I just had a.
John Corcoran: 08:58
Lot of guilt. so it’s so painful and challenging, especially for a first time mom.
Tracy Marlowe: 09:04
Yeah. It was really hard. And so I just recognized that something had to give. And I decided to work for myself and that, you know, and then slowly it just started to grow. And I as I, as the company grew, it was lovely because this agency that really empowered me to be a mom and to have my career work with people I liked to do work that I was proud of, but to still have the flexibility to stop in the middle of the day, go to the daycare and breastfeed her and not have an employer that I had to worry about, you know, frowning down upon me for that.
And then as we grew and I started hiring people, it tended to be women that were attracted to this remote environment. And then I started to be able to empower these women to have that flexibility within their lives. And it was really fantastic. And so to this point, at this point in time, our mission statement as the company is to empower smart, passionate women to enjoy their work in life. That’s really what we focus on.
John Corcoran: 10:16
You mentioned about not having an employer to say that you can’t go off to breastfeed in the middle of the day to the daycare, but there may be some people listening to this thinking, oh, but then you have a bunch of clients that you need to please as well. How did you balance that? How did you especially in the early days when you were starting this brand new business? You know, a lot of times when you’re a new business owner, you do anything to keep your clients and keep them happy, you know? But that can be a tension if you are also setting these boundaries for you.
So how did you navigate all that?
Tracy Marlowe: 10:50
You know, I think I think the fact that we always put it out front that we were remote and that this is who we were the clients knew that. And so I mean I will say our customer service is phenomenal. We will jump through hoops for our clients and we get it done. So I don’t think that at any time any client work was ever sacrificed. If not, I mean, if anything, I feel like the type of people who are attracted to this type of work environment tend to be almost on the edge of being workaholics a little bit.
They, they maybe, you know, breastfeeding their child, but they’re on their phone while they’re doing it and they’re still making sure that they’re, you know, answering calls and, and getting work done. And I’ve, you know, been in the pickup line on a business call, you know, picking my kids up from school. But, you know, I think that’s the thing is we hire people who are just really good at making it all happen and making it all come together. We also do personality testing and whatnot to make sure we’re hiring the right type of people who are going to be successful at home, because not everybody can work in that environment.
John Corcoran: 11:59
A lot of people have stories of someone that doubted them, especially when they’re starting something new or different, which is what you were doing here. Do you recall, did you have anyone who was like, oh, you can’t do that. You can’t put it out there and say, you’re a remote first company. People want a brick and mortar operation that they can walk into, or you can’t just hire women or you can’t say that we balance work life balance like. Did anyone doubt you as you were doing this?
Tracy Marlowe: 12:31
I’m sure there were people that doubted me. It’s funny because I think really a lot of the time it was my. I would really rather hear about it from my employees who would tell me about people that they knew and their families who had come to them and say, how are you working from home? I don’t understand, how do they know you’re actually working? And they’d say, well, because our work is good, my work is getting done, and the clients would complain if I wasn’t doing my work. But we have a lot of, you know, technology and whatnot to manage all of that and keep track now.
John Corcoran: 13:02
But 16 years ago there were less. Yeah, there was.
Tracy Marlowe: 13:05
Less, there was less. But we still have a lot of processes in place that make it pretty clear, you know when somebody’s not.
John Corcoran: 13:11
And we’re talking pre slack, we’re talking pre zoom.
Tracy Marlowe: 13:14
We’ve been talking on Skype for over ten years like we’ve been using Skype chat not the. We don’t really use the video as much. We do calls but I mean we’re on the chat all day long and Skype. We’ve been doing that for I think 14 years. Wow.
John Corcoran: 13:31
Yeah. Wow wow. So, you know, and let’s talk a little bit about the type of work that you decided to do. Did you, did you find that you had to kind of drill down in order to, to maintain these priorities for the business, you had to drill down and focus on a particular type of client or a particular, you know, type of work or anything like that.
Tracy Marlowe: 13:54
No, I will tell you, I worked for a company that specializes in travel and tourism. When nine over 11 hit and I learned it’s sometimes dangerous to specialize. But I also learned, I think, that when you work in different industries, there’s a lot of times you can’t see the forest for the trees if you’re only working in one industry. And so there’s a lot of times where we’ll take things that we learn in one industry and we can, you know, apply and bring learnings from one to another. I will say we do mostly services type marketing.
We don’t do e-commerce or products. We don’t do public affairs, and we’ll do some public relations, but not as that’s more sort of as a peripheral service. It’s really not the foundation of the work we do, but primarily it’s we work with purpose driven companies that are often trying to solve a problem. They have some demographic or market that they’re trying to reach. That might be a little bit of a niche market or a specialized market, and they don’t really know how to connect with them.
And we just help them figure out how to do that in an effective and efficient way.
John Corcoran: 15:09
All right. And I know that you have written about the fact that I believe 85% of global consumer choices are made by women. So talk a little bit about how that’s affected the work that you do.
Tracy Marlowe: 15:22
Yeah, a lot of people just underestimate the influence of women in the buying decision. And so really dialing in and having helping companies figure out, you know, who is you know, who swipes the card is not necessarily the person who’s making the decision to buy and helping them understand that those are two different factors and really understanding, you know, who’s making the decision for purchase and making sure that your marketing is actually speaking to them in an effective way. Because the reality is, a lot of people when they try to market to women. Even if they know that women are part of their target market, they don’t do so in a very authentic and effective way. A lot of times it comes off as stereotypical, not not very aligned with their values.
It is just really doing value centric marketing that feels very authentic and purpose driven. So it really helps.
John Corcoran: 16:26
And I want to ask if you’ve got a client that is actually the city of San Antonio that had an early childhood education initiative that was approved by voters. They came to you because their marketing and the branding of it didn’t really resonate at all with the type of market that they needed to attract. So talk a little bit about that particular case, your use case.
Tracy Marlowe: 16:49
The city of San Antonio had a really cutting edge preschool initiative, basically to evolve the early childhood education within the city of San Antonio public, private. Everywhere. They had their own centers, and they were trying to help educate early childhood educators and improve the quality. Because research has shown economically the biggest place to have an impact. If you want to invest in education, the best place to do it is age four, because you can change the trajectory of that child, make them, you know, really enjoy learning, have a thirst for learning, make them intellectually curious.
They also would empower parents, teach people how to empower parents so that the parents would get involved in the child’s education. And we had to do a grant that was really cutting edge. It’s a completely, you know, very aspirational program. But yet the branding, like the logo, was a little red schoolhouse. It just didn’t reflect.
It was completely disconnected. So we came in and did a complete rebrand and then we started talking a lot more about the aspirational aspects of that program there. Obviously, education decisions are one of the ones that are primarily made by women. So again, we knew that we were talking to the moms, the grandmothers within that community and that we needed to align with them in an emotional way. A lot of the marketing at that point was talking just about, you know, facts.
It was like, oh, well, this is an all day program. We have transportation. We have lunch, breakfast and snacks. We have, you know, and it was just all these logistical things, not really talking about the heart of the program and the why and why this was going to really change the individual child’s future, the family’s future, as well as the community and teaching, you know, people, just the impact that a program like that can have, right? So it was really transformational.
John Corcoran: 18:51
So speaking of impact, I love to ask people about where they were in March of 2020, which of course is when the pandemic unfolded. Now, you have already designed your company as remote first. What was that couple of month period like for you as that started to unfold? And I imagine you had clients that were affected by it?
Tracy Marlowe: 19:13
Yeah, we had clients that were definitely affected by it, and we recommended at that time that all of our clients really turned their marketing off. The ones that we had that were running advertising, it just wasn’t an appropriate time to be advertising products and services that were not somehow going to help make people’s lives better. And so we, you know, put a lot of our advertising efforts on hiatus for our clients. But then obviously, as things started to recover and then really recovered, you know, obviously that was ramping up and then also helping some of our clients kind of have to rethink how they did things.
Like we had a client that did these in-person recruiting events, they were a recruiter, and they would have people fly in from all over the country five times a year, and so they had to move those to all remote and helping them kind of figure that out and how to kind of change their business model a bit.
So there were, you know, several stories like that where we just had to kind of figure out, like, okay, we’ve got to start looking at this through a new lens. And what was.
John Corcoran: 20:15
It’s like for you, you know, having a team of overhead employees to pay stuff like that, you know, were you petrified at one point or did you feel like, well, we’ll be okay?
Tracy Marlowe: 20:27
There were so many unknowns at that point. I felt like we were going to be fine. I mean, I, you know, in business there’s ups and downs. And so I think there were so many unknowns. Everybody kept, remember, don’t you remember?
We all just kept thinking, oh, six weeks and then we’ll all be back to normal. And then it was like another week and then another week and just kind of kept going. But yeah, it was scary. But at the same time, it was interesting. And the fact that we were helping our clients solve problems.
And I felt like the long term was going to pay off. And plus, I also enjoyed at that time a lot of people coming to us and saying, hey, we’re having to work remotely for the first time. We have no idea what we’re doing. Can you give us some tips? Yeah.
And kind of helping them navigate that as well.
John Corcoran: 21:16
Yeah. And having worked previously for an agency that did travel and transportation and that was crushed after nine over 11. It seems like you made the right decision. Like you, you built a business that was a lot more resilient to, you know, that type of, you know, world changing type of incident.
Tracy Marlowe: 21:38
Yeah, that was the good thing is we didn’t have to completely change our business model or anything like that because we were already doing it. So it was really honestly, it was just another day for us, except for the fact that our clients were facing all these, these massive challenges. But
John Corcoran: 21:53
And did you experience the opposite problem, as, your business picked up, and then all of a sudden, you know, a lot of agencies ran into problems with having to hire good people and things like that.
Tracy Marlowe: 22:04
Yeah, we did, we ran into some of those challenges. Yeah. It’s hard finding people during that time. But yeah, business definitely picked up.
John Corcoran: 22:13
Yeah. Just got to go to more restaurants and ask the servers. Right. Exactly. This has been great.
Tracy, I want to ask you my final question, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude to those who have helped us along the way in our journey, especially those who are continuing to be in our lives, peers, contemporaries, that sort of thing. Who would you want to shout out? Who would you want to thank?
Tracy Marlowe: 22:40
The biggest shout out for me would be to the women that I have in my forum. I’m a member of EO as I know are you John? And the women in my forum have really it’s a you know, a bunch of other women entrepreneurs and they have weathered some storms with me that, you know, I picked me up and dusted me off more times than you know I care to think about. But that’s what we do for each other. And I think that’s just been a tremendous help.
And I also really just sort of counseled me through like business issues that, you know, I wouldn’t have had if I didn’t have that forum. And those women and their brains. I don’t know where I would be. They’ve helped me tremendously. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 23:26
Tracy, where can people go to learn more about you and Creative Noggin?
Tracy Marlowe: 23:30
On our website creativeNoggin.com as well as LinkedIn. @Tracy Marlowe, that’s m a r l o w e.
John Corcoran: 23:40
Awesome. Thanks so much, Tracy.
Tracy Marlowe: 23:41
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Outro: 23:45
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.