IAM071 – Founder & CEO Runs Massachusetts Based Global Marketing & Branding Firm

Paige is the founder & CEO of global marketing and branding firm Mavens & Moguls based in Cambridge, MA. Her clients include Microsoft, Virgin, Colgate, The New York Times Company, venture-backed startups as well as non-profit organizations. She graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Business School. She is a popular speaker and columnist who has written for Entrepreneur and Forbes.

• CEO Hack: Always want your “A” Team and keep your skills top-notch
• CEO Nugget: Stay focused, learning when to say “no”
• CEO Defined: The leader, chief visionary and wearing all the hats. The Chief Everything Officer.

Website: http://www.MavensAndMoguls.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigearnoffenn

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:27

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Paige so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And Paige is the Founder and CEO of the global marketing and branding firm Mavens & Moguls located in based in Cambridge, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her clients include Microsoft, Virgin, Colgate, The New York Times Company, venture-backed startups, as well as nonprofit organizations. She graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Business School. She is a popular speaker and columnist who has written for Entrepreneur and Forbes. Paige, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Paige Arnof-Fenn 1:11

Absolutely

Gresham Harkless 1:12

If you can talk a little bit more about your background and what led you to start your business.

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Paige Arnof-Fenn 1:16

So it's kind of a circuitous path. When I was a student in college and grad school, all I knew is I wanted to go into business and be successful. And I really thought I would join a very established company. I had always had good internships. As a student, I joined a Big Wall Street firm out of college, I realized I didn't want to stay in finance. But then I got another internship, at Procter and Gamble, which is a big marketing company when I was in grad school. And then I went back to P&G after I graduated with my MBA. And I always thought I would work for a big multinational corporation.

And when I thought about my career path, I really saw myself as like Meg Whitman, or Ursula Burns, like a top woman, CEO of a big global company. And if you would talk to any of my friends or classmates, they would have confirmed that was the path I thought I was on. And the internet kind of exploded. It started in really, in my world, it really started in the 90s. And at that point, I had kind of started my career path and these big Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, I worked for the Olympics.

So really big, big brands, well-known companies, and organizations. But when the internet started heating up, I got very distracted and intrigued by what was happening online. And I left my big corporate job at Coca-Cola to go join a startup no one had ever heard of before in Los Angeles, and I think most of my friends and family thought I was crazy or having a midlife crisis. And they all suggested I take a vacation, I was really stressed out. And I said, No, I just think there's something going on on the internet. And I want to be part of it.

So I left my big fancy job with an office and a secretary in the corporate headquarters of Coke in Atlanta. And I joined this internet startup in Los Angeles, a couple of blocks from the beach, and no one had ever heard the name of the company. They were just really starting to grow. I had just bare-bones staff at that point. And I just got hooked. It was so exciting to build a brand from the ground floor and help establish something that no one had ever heard of before.

After working on such well-known big brands. It was just such an awesome challenge to build a small brand into something more famous. And we were pretty successful. We went public a few years later, we were sold to Yahoo. Then my husband got a job in Boston, and we moved back to the East Coast. We had both been students on the East Coast earlier in our lives. And we moved back and I joined another startup as the head of marketing. We got sold to a big private company about a year and a half later, I did another startup as the head of marketing. And we also went public and we're sold to a big public company.

So I really got kind of hooked and addicted after having this first chapter of my life and big corporate jobs. The second chapter was just all internet startups that were very small, and not very well known, and helping them come to life. And that just made me so excited every day I bounced out of bed you really felt like you were creating the next global brand and impacting how people were going to think of this forever.

But when 9/11 hit. It hit it right about the time I got bought out in the third startup that really changed everything. 9/11 probably did more to unsettle marketing than anything else that had in my career because companies really went into panic mode, everyone wanted to conserve their cash because there was so much uncertainty post-9/11.

So companies really kind of started to shut down their marketing efforts. And I had just gotten bought out of the third company. So I didn't have to find a job. But you know, I was young I was in my early 30s, and I really wanted to keep working. And I wanted to do something else exciting because I been I was kind of addicted, I was a little bit of a, you know, and now I'm been on a roll, I got three for three, and basically, post 9/11 because all three of those startups were venture-backed and had a lot of private equity money. And I knew a lot of people on both coasts, both in Los Angeles and Boston, having been the head of marketing.

And people started calling me and emailing, saying, We need help with marketing, even though we're closing our marketing department, we still have projects where you helped me and I kept thinking, why are all these people calling me like, I'm not a consultant, I never worked on the agency side. I'm not very good at PowerPoint. And I think of consultants giving you PowerPoint slides. I'm the client. I'm the one that rolls up my sleeves and does the work. And everybody said, yeah, that's why we're calling you we need help. But we can't hire anybody because we've got a hiring freeze after 9/11 can you just come in and help the way you did with our other investment?

So I started calling all my favorite marketing people from earlier in my career people I've worked with in the corporate side and the startup businesses, everybody had been laid off after 9/11. Because like I said, all the marketing departments were being shut down, all the cash was being conserved. And everybody, all my favorite marketing people was available.

So I had people that wanted to work, and I had projects that needed help. And I just started putting them together. And I call the women the marketing Mavens, and the guys, the marketing Moguls are short, I call them Mavens & Moguls. And it really stuck, you know, I ended up testing the name, and it came back as a winner. We had these first projects that were kind of out there, we did a great job.

And then they came back for more work. But I joke I'm like the accidental entrepreneur, I was not looking to start a company, and I never wrote a business plan. I threw together a website with a buddy of mine from college who wanted to learn how to program and wrote every bit of copy that you found on the site, it stayed for about five years.

So I joke I'm like the cobbler's kid with no shoes. I'm the marketing company, it didn't do a very good job of marketing ourselves. It was a pretty generic website. I think now we're on 3.0. So it's getting better. But it's still a work in progress. But basically, you know, I think I'm as surprised as anybody.

So I started this company. Now it's been almost 17 years. And my longest job before this was three and a half years. So you know, I've now worked for myself, I don't know five times longer than I ever lasted work. And for anyone else. I keep joking. If I got sick of my boss, this time, I'm dead because I don't think I can work for anybody again.

Gresham Harkless 8:05

Right, that makes sense. And it's great to hear that story. Obviously, it's tough to hear about 9/11 and everything, but you never hear about like how it affects other aspects and especially from the marketing standpoint. So what I wanted to do was ask you if you could drill a little bit deeper on Mavens & Moguls and tell us a little bit more about like how you help serve and support the clients that you work with. And then also to like, what you feel kind of makes you a little bit more unique.

Paige Arnof-Fenn 8:26

I always feel like our competitive advantage, or maybe our unique hook is that most of the people in the group, or people like me, they're people that were on my team or people I worked with in previous slides. So our heads and hearts are much more aligned with our clients than in a traditional agency or consulting relationship.

We don't do capabilities presentations on PowerPoint to try and sell our business. I'm not trying to cross-sell or upsell the way an agency typically does. We want to go in and be your thinking partner, roll up our sleeves, help fix the problem, and then move on.

And most of the people in my group are like me that, you know, they love helping, you know, solve problems. They like learning new things, constantly fixing, you know, taking best practices from one industry or category and bringing it into another area where they can solve a problem. You know, they may say, I've got this much of a budget, what can you do to help me and we're not just trying to spend every nickel of the budget, I look at their problems and say, well, here's your biggest problem and it's going to cost this much to fix that.

And then with the money you have left over, I would put it into this other work that you didn't even ask for. But I think that's going to be your next biggest problem. And so they think that we're looking at the problem the way they are as the client, not as a vendor trying to get as much work as we can out of a.

Gresham Harkless 10:03

Yeah, know, it makes sense. It's like you're the make sure that the doctor you're getting, you're getting what you need to be able to be successful, or to make sure that you're a healthy business that healthy and thriving business or organization. So it makes perfect sense. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this CEO hack might be an app or a book, but it's something that you lean on or use that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Paige Arnof-Fenn 10:27

I think that the biggest hack for me is probably on the talent front that you always want you're a team and you've got to keep your skills really top-notch. Sometimes it's easy as a CEO to bring in people that you like, or people that think like you or tell you what you want to hear. But that's not necessarily what's best for your business and for you to grow and expand. So that I think is one hack that is uncomfortable, but I think it's necessary.

Gresham Harkless 11:02

Now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this might just be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or something you would tell your younger business self.

Paige Arnof-Fenn 11:09

I think, really a couple of things, you've got to stay focused, I think it's really easy to get distracted by the shiny objects and all the new things that are being thrown your way, so you've got to stay focused, and play to your personal strengths. The other thing is, I think a lot of success is learning when to say no. And it ties into the focus. I think some of the most successful people know what they're good at.

They know what their strengths are. They know what their mission vision values are. And you stay on strategy. And if things don't kind of sync up with where you are trying to go, let somebody else take care of it, delegate it, let it go say no, and stay focused. You don't have to do everything. But the things you do, do really, really well. That's how you build a great personal brand and a great reputation.

Gresham Harkless 12:00

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And next thing I wanted to ask you, is my favorite question, which is kind of like the definition of being a CEO. And I know we have different CEOs on this podcast, but I want to ask you what does being a CEO means to you.

Paige Arnof-Fenn 12:11

For me, it's about that, you know, you are the leader, you are the chief visionary. You are also the chief cook and bottle washer, you there are no hats that you probably haven't worn on your way to that job. You have to inspire, motivate, stay focused, and keep the trains moving, there are so many roles and responsibilities of being that chief executive, and I think somebody said this on one of your blog postings, it's like the Chief Everything Officer, a lot of things really fall on you, as the leader, you know, the leader is both kind of at the forefront, but also in the back to make sure everybody's moving along the continuum.

So for me, I guess, as CEO, I want to create the right environment, the right ecosystem for everybody to really achieve their personal best to have a situation where we can solve important problems that people are really motivated and excited to come in every day and bring their very best selves with them and their whole selves with that they don't feel like they have to put on an act to be part of the show that they really are being appreciated and recognized for their own personal strengths. And I think that does fall on the CEO. It starts at the top, they set the tone, they set the culture and you know, it's on them to create the right environment for everybody to be successful.

Gresham Harkless 13:48

Very well said no, I appreciate that. Well, Paige, I thank you so much for taking some time out of your schedule. I wanted to ask if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and our listeners know and then how people can get a hold of you.

Paige Arnof-Fenn 13:59

So you know what I would say to anyone that's listening, feel free to go to my website, it's MavensAndMoguls.com. I have a lot of articles on the website. Articles that I've written of them are kind of evergreen topics that I think are relevant to a lot of CEOs and Entrepreneurs and people building their careers, people who are stuck in their careers.

And I talk about kind of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And if you just scan through the article headlines, you should probably be able to stumble upon a few where it might be relevant and help you out of a situation. I don't think any of us live long enough to make all the mistakes ourselves.

So you can learn from any of mine. I'm happy to help because I've got all the whirlwinds to prove it and just you know, I would tell people that find stuff that you really genuinely enjoy doing because if you do you'll probably be really good at it. Don't try and force it into something that's not working for you go find something that you're really genuinely excited about because that's really where you will shine. That's the way it's worked in my experience.

Gresham Harkless 15:14

Very, very true. Paige, I appreciate you so much and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Paige Arnof-Fenn 15:19

Thank you. It's been a lot of fun, Gresh I really appreciate you having me on.

Outro 15:24

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co

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