IAM965- Digital Marketing Executive Builds and Manages Teams

Mike is an Evidence-based, Data-Driven, Lean principles-guided Digital Marketing, Product Management, and Business Intelligence executive with over 15 years of focused experience in building and scaling multi-sided marketplaces and heading digital marketing for enterprise-level e-commerce and retail brands.

Mike has extensive “big company”​ experience complemented by a startup career training with and mentoring for companies like Google, Facebook, and 500 startups. Mike has been involved in building and managing teams within companies that range in size from startups with a small, cross-functional team to NASDAQ-listed, Internet Retailer top 100 retailers—all in a top-level decision-making capacity while managing multi-million dollar budgets.

• CEO Hack: Book- The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership
• CEO Nugget: Focus on your customer's pain
• CEO Defined: Being the rising tide that lifts all the goals

Website: https://growth-rocket.com/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikevillar

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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[00:00:24.60] – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO podcast.

[00:00:52.20] – Gresham Harkless

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 Mike Villar of Growth Rocket. Mike, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:01:00.50] – Mike Villar

It's great to be here, and I thank you for having me here. I've been a longtime fan of your show, and I'm thrilled

[00:01:07.59] – Gresham Harkless

Appreciate it. I'm thrilled to have you on as well, and always great to have fans who are doing phenomenal things on the show. And, what I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Mike so you can hear about some of those phenomenal things that he's doing. Mike is an evidence-based, data-driven, lean principle-guided digital marketing, product meant project product management, and business intelligence executive with over fifteen years of focus experience on building and scaling multi-sided marketplaces and heading digital marketing for enterprise-level e-commerce and retail brands.

Mike has extensive experience extensive big company experience complemented by a start-up career training with and mentoring for companies like Google, Facebook, and five hundred start-ups. Mike has been involved in building and managing teams within companies that range in size from start-ups with a small cross-functional team to Nasdaq-listed Internet retailer's top one hundred retails, all in top-level decision-making capacity while managing multi-million dollar budgets. Mike, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:02:06.50] – Mike Villar

Yeah. Let's do it. Absolutely.

[00:02:08.90] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's do it then. So to kick everything off. I wanted to start, I guess in the beginning, hearing a little bit more about your CEO story. We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.

[00:02:18.19] – Mike Villar

Sure. Sounds good. So, I learned digital marketing pretty early. I started building websites back in the day, in the GOC these days. I'm pretty OG. So, back in, like, nineteen ninety-nine, I believe, when I did that. So, after I started, you know, honing my skills in building websites, I learned that I could earn some money on the side by monetizing my sites through affiliate links. So, back in the day, the thing was, okay. I'm gonna for no doubt or whatever down I'm into, during that time, right?

So, I monetized my sites, and use exist. I'm I'm I'm sure a lot of people still, remember them. But from there, it was an easy transition to a full-time career in digital marketing. So the majority of my career was spent, with a company called carparts.com. They are a pure-play e-commerce retailer of aftermarket automotive parts and accessories. Then like many others, I got entranced by the siren call of startups. I worked for two consumer electronic startups and a real estate startup before starting Growth Rocket with my partner.

And, we just started Growth Rocket back in twenty fifteen. During that time, if you are a small to medium enterprise, there's a pretty big void that exists between the capabilities of a specialized freelancer and the bigger advertising agencies. Now, that that something that we knew we could feel, really well given our experience and our skill sets at that time. And we started with a few referrals from our contacts at our previous jobs. More referrals followed after that, and Growth Rocket pretty much just snowballed into

[00:03:42.30] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I appreciate that. Always great to have an OG on, especially having so much experience here. And you're organic, it sounds like, growth into what it is that you're doing now. I guess pun intended, from you being able to build those websites, do the affiliate links and start to see the value, and then start to snowball into the digital marketing support that you provided and now the digital marketing agency and the company you have now?

[00:04:03.80] – Mike Villar

Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:04:05.40] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. So I know you touched on it a little bit, could you take us through what you're doing with Growth Rocket and how you support your clients?

[00:04:12.09] – Mike Villar

Yeah. Sure. So, Growth Rocket is a full-stack, boutique performance marketing agency. There's, like, a huge emphasis on the performance part. We are focused on lead generation and customer acquisition. So for instance, if you come to us and ask us, hey. Can you create a viral video for us that would go, and, gonna be shared by millions of people? That's probably not something that we can do well. You know what I mean? But if you come to us and ask us, oh, I need, to acquire leads or, customers, with a budget that does not exceed x thousands of dollars or a cost per acquisition that does not exceed dollars. That's exactly what we do. Right?

So we are a Google-certified partner, a Facebook Blueprint-certified agency. The team is currently, around thirty-five people, which are split, pretty evenly across our three I would care if I would call them our our pillar departments. So search engine optimization, involves the content team, the technical SEO people as well as our link builders. We have our engineering team, which is certified, for the Magento, stack, and our paid acquisition team. So these are the people who are the media buyers, the Facebook marketers, as well as the Google advertising people. Right?

So, up until the mid to twenty, last year, we were primarily catering to enterprise clients in the United States, until we saw an opportunity to do, what I would call, e-commerce enablement, for small businesses and start-ups. So, when the pandemic hit, you know, we thought, okay. There's a lot of, businesses that were affected by this, and they're scrambling to go online. So there was a virtual, gold rush toward e-commerce, and, we decided, decided to sell the shovels to those people. Right? So recently, we expanded into catering to small businesses and start-ups and expanding regionally, into the Southeast Asia region as well. So, yeah, that's a brief background of, what we do at Growth Rocket.

[00:05:54.69] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes so much sense, and I appreciate that. I love that phrase, ecommerce enablement, I think you said. Just because I think so many times, well, I just love the underlying connotation of that word enablement because I think so many times when, the disruption that we all experience, we sometimes feel like we're disabled, but having that ability to be able to leverage that, to be able to build and continue to service your customers is huge.

[00:06:20.10] – Mike Villar

Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:06:21.39] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And you have those three pillars. I feel like they all go in tandem as far as, like, helping people to get their, information out there, but on a deeper level, as you said, is really to get that growth, to get that performance that companies are ultimately nine out of ten's looking for.

[00:06:36.39] – Mike Villar

Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:06:37.19] – Gresham Harkless

That's correct. Perfect. And do you find, like, they all are in tandem? They work along the same lines and overlap, or Or you feel like they all stay in their lines?

[00:06:46.69] – Mike Villar

They overlap. I mean, when I talk about, like, SEO and how it, I would say, like, fit into the entire marketing mix, It has a longer, I would say, like, how do you say this? Like, the the window at which you would realize those benefits. Right? Because you need to build, in that organic traffic up, and it's not an exact science. A lot of it is reading what the Google algorithms would do next and, basically playing along those guidelines. But at the same time, it varies from client to client. I mean, some clients would not necessarily want SEO in the beginning, and I understand and respect that.

They want immediate traffic, they want immediate results, and, we push the paid advertising services to those people. But we caution them not to ignore SEO as well because it's better to start SEO now and build your SEO muscle right now as opposed to the future. In the end, what would happen is that if your SEO traffic, or your organic traffic, really takes off even while you're doing well in paid advertising, the effect of that is your cost per acquisition just becomes good. You know what I mean? It eventually goes into this downward trajectory where, okay. Wow. I'm also getting free customers from organic traffic while I'm crushing it on the paid advertising side.

So that's how I present that.  But, yeah, definitely those, those, those three pillars are gonna overlap at one point if we are doing, like, a full-scale full-funnel engagement with any client.

[00:08:06.30] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes so much sense. I appreciate you for bringing up that point because I think so many times and correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like if you're a first mover and you're doing advertising on a platform whenever it first comes out, you can get it for pennies on a dollar, so to speak, but that price usually increases. But something like SEO is a lot more long-term, and it could potentially bring in those long-term clients if you take care of both of those things in tandem, but understanding the long-term effect that SEO can have.

[00:08:31.10] – Mike Villar

Agreed. And, an example that I always use is Pinterest. It's a good example of not putting all your eggs in one basket. In the early days, their success was based on the fact that they were able to tap into the Facebook API, utilize the shares and the likes of people, and they drive that, to their properties. Right? At some point, Facebook pulled that plug, and they were only able to recover because of SEO. I mean but imagine if they didn't have that sort of, like, pivot or backup, they would have been dead in the water a long time ago. Right? So that's the example that I always use when I speak to clients.

[00:09:02.89] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate you for sharing that because I think so many times we forget, that sometimes we don't own those platforms even though sometimes you connect with an API, you build something that connects with the API, doesn't necessarily mean you own that information. And understanding that the disc versus the pros and cons in each is huge.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So what would you consider to be what I call your secret sauce? It could be for yourself or your business or a combination of both. Is it that ability to see the forest for the trees, understand the pros and cons of each, and be able to present that to clients, or do you feel like there's something else that makes up your secret sauce?

[00:09:34.00] – Mike Villar

That's part of it, and I think, you bring up a good point there. For me, it would be our ability to see the forest for the trees, number one, because of our experience. We have enterprise-level capabilities because of my partner's experience and myself and some of the team members who I pulled from you made different jobs, and, you know, they're currently working at Roof Rocket. But at the same time, all of those are tempered by our start-up DNA. As I said, my experience brought me to a couple of start-ups as well.

And because of that, the confluence of enterprise-level capability, and our startup DNA, we have been able to scale campaigns for our clients with, multimillion-dollar budgets. But at the same time, the teams with the company have remained entrepreneurial enough to deliver that tenfold growth potential to clients of all sizes. Right? So the discipline, that we gleaned from, managing large-scale campaigns allowed us to double down on what's working, but at the same time, the frameworks that we learned through our journey with start-up still allow us to have that grit and, growth hacker mentality if we could still call it that and be able to approach customer acquisition at angles that, I would say bigger, enterprises would not even look at. You know what I mean?

The other, differentiator that I always present to our clients is that we are a CMO as a service. Right? And they mean that in a way where we are small enough that I'm still very involved, with all of our clients. And, the way I work is that I pretty much stand in for a CMO if they don't already have one. I'm very involved in the profit and loss of the company. And we are not limited to the three areas that I mentioned earlier. I give guidance and consulting as well for any sort of business intelligence or business strategy, related issues, or problems that the client typically would have. Right? So, yeah, I would say that those are our unique selling propositions.

[00:11:14.39] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And, I wanted to, switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:26.00] – Mike Villar

I don't have a favorite book per se, but I would say, the book that I referenced a lot, would be, this book called The Score Takes Tear of Itself,, by Bill Walsh. So Bill Walsh is an NFL coach, a six-time division champion. And the gist of the book is focusing less or less on the victory and success and instead obsessing about, the quality of execution and the clarity of thought and making sure that the team has the right attitude. So, I feel like that's something that I set as a guideline for the team. For us, we have cobbled together, like, intricate processes for each department. Right?

And making sure that we exercise discipline and abide by those frameworks, and never waiver from the processes that we set, will do the trick. If we keep on doing that, the winning takes care of itself. The success would come, you know what I mean, and fall into place by itself. So as opposed to focusing on the victory and, the score, we focus on making sure that we have sound processes and making sure that everyone abides by them. Right? So that's, that's that's a guideline that I always talk about internally.

[00:12:26.29] – Gresham Harkless

And so I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around marketing, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

[00:12:36.70] – Mike Villar

Sure. Let me, I guess, like, approach this from, you know, two contexts. Right? So, the first would be because I come from a marketing and product management background. I think I would be speaking from those lenses or using those lenses. So, for marketing, I would say focus on your customer's pain at first and more than anything else. So tell them how you can help them and ease the pain that they're feeling before telling them about your brand story.

[00:13:00.39] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, and we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Mike, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:10.29] – Mike Villar

Okay. So, there is a saying, that says the rising tide lifts all boats. Right? My definition of being a CEO is being that rising tide that elevates not only your company but also your team and your industry. So basically just like elevating everything. We internally use a performance management system popularized by Google called, the OKRs. Right? And, one of the objectives, that we have, literally printed, on every wall in our office, is to be the gold standard for outsourced, digital marketing services in the region. Right? So not only, am I saying that, okay, we need to be successful as a company, but we need to elevate the standards of the industry as a whole with everything that we do. Right?

And transitioning to the boat the other boat about, like, the team. One of the curses, and the blessings of being a small company such as ourselves is that you can't afford to hire top-notch people right off the bat. Right? So for the longest time, for instance, I've been looking to hire, like, a chief operating officer. But the reality is that the budget could be used elsewhere. You know what I mean? So we've gotten into a practice where we look at potential instead, and we've been very successful at spotting people who have the potential and what it takes to succeed internally and externally as well.

And, we invest in, training them. We invest in making sure that they grow professionally and personally. And that's what I mean by rising the tide and being the rising tide that lifts all the boats. For me as a CEO, there's nothing more fulfilling. You know, business success is a given. That's something that you should be focused on. As I said earlier, making sure that the industry elevates itself with your contribution is another thing. But seeing someone who I have managed and trained or have worked for my company, Growth Rocket, succeed, internally or somewhere else is very fulfilling to me.  When I see what if hires that they made a couple of years ago make it to the director or vice president level than another company? I'm very happy for them. And that's something that I feel very fulfilled about. So to me, that's what it means to be a CEO.

[00:15:12.70] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that analogy and that visual as well too. I think so many times we don't realize the decisions that we make impact our clients and also the people on our team. And if we understand and approach, those decisions and the things that we do as if we are rising that tide, then it starts to have a tremendous impact on things that we see, and sometimes we see years and years down the line as well too.

[00:15:35.60] – Mike Villar

Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:15:37.10] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Mike, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

[00:15:51.00] – Mike Villar

No. I mean, I think, I would direct the people who listen to your podcast, to our website. We have a blog that, we, consistently update, with content related to digital marketing, SEO, and, all the subcomponents that I talked about earlier. It's a growthrocket.com. You can contact me directly via email at mike@growthrocket.com. That's it.

[00:16:13.39] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Mike. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can follow up with you. But I appreciate all the knowledge, all the awesome work that you're doing, the reminder to be the tide and to lift that tide for so many people and in this world. So I appreciate that again, my friend, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

[00:16:30.10] – Outro

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 I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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