Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence comm and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now, it's Jason, shaft and Jason. You are the founder and CEO of Winston. Francois Winston Francois has found on the web at, it's actually you have a special website.

Speaker 1 00:01:17 It's Wtrf dot team. And for listeners of the podcast, make sure you put a slash pod on there. and then, you know, again, that'll be a great landing page for you to follow along. but it's wonderful to have you, Jason. I'd love to hear kind of what Winston Francois does and and your impact in the world.

Speaker 2 00:01:40 Yeah. Thanks for having me. Josh. So, Winston Francois is a growth consultancy. We help companies figure out how to grow everything from growth strategy and partnering with, you know, founder CEO of the organization to and through helping lead and manage the team of internal and external employees, operators, vendors to put together a, you know, growth in marketing strategy and execute on it. we take a little bit of a different approach to your kind of traditional management consultant or agency in that we we like to get our hands dirty. We work alongside the team. And, you know, by the time we've kind of done the, the job we were hired to do.

Speaker 2 00:02:17 I like to say we followed by the campground rule, we leave it better than we found it. So put you in a position to grow your business and scale it really successfully, even if we're no longer helping.

Speaker 1 00:02:28 Lest someone not realize the the impact you've been able to have in the world, some of your clients include Adobe, Uber, Kajabi, Google. Disney. I think folks have heard of some of those companies. Some of them.

Speaker 2 00:02:43 Yeah, we've been very fortunate to work with some amazing brands. The team has, decades and decades of experience across, you know, all the big tech companies, as well as lots of exciting, high growth startups. So it's it's a lot of fun, to get to help even companies you've never heard of figure out how to grow. And probably my favorite thing about doing this is solving hard problems and unlocking new new growth channels for for businesses and helping them get to that next phase, whether it's raising capital or, you know, just hitting a revenue or a customer milestone that they've been chasing after.

Speaker 1 00:03:20 So growth can come from many different ways. do you mind maybe just giving us a, a quick 101 on what's working well in growth right now? And again, I understand the different clients are going to need different strategies. But are there any best practices that you think are maybe a little bit more universal?

Speaker 2 00:03:40 Yes, there definitely are. I have three questions I like to ask, business owners and entrepreneurs to help them refine their thinking and, and really get to a, a growth in marketing strategy that that takes a first principles approach. So those three questions are, what are we selling? Who is it for? Why should they care? That's the essence of this, you know, being able to communicate effectively about the value that your product or service brings and, why it's why and how it's different. And being really, really specific about who you're who you're targeting, who you're trying to talk to, and understanding your product, you know. Marketing and growth don't work unless you have a great product.

Speaker 2 00:04:25 So you got to start there and then understanding, you know, who you're selling it to and who the customer is, is, is just as important as the product itself. And then, you know, coming up with a an effective message, something that highlights the functional and aspirational reasons to believe in your your product or service, your brand will help drive home the message to that specific customer and get them to say, yes, I want this thing in my life. Another way to think about it, I worked at Google a long time, and our internal kind of marketing, you know, mantra was know the user, know the magic, connect the two. Right? So that's a super simple way to think about. And then tactically speaking, the things that are best practices today really revolve around understanding where people spend all of their time and attention. So anything that you do when you build a product or service, you need to have a great kind of web presence, something that works really well on mobile devices.

Speaker 2 00:05:26 There's a practice called conversion rate optimization. So if you're trying to get people to transact with you online, whether that's to book something at a physical location or buy something e-commerce online, you want to make it really easy and frictionless for somebody to do that. And then when you think about how you get eyeballs and people to show up at your front door, it's a combination of organic traffic, word of mouth referrals, people looking for you because they heard about you, and doing a really good job of paying for advertising in the right places where your audience is likely to show up. So, you know, a lot of the web is covered by Google and meta ads, but maybe your niche People are really active on Reddit, so there's a subreddit that's just for you, so you need to go and explore how you'd advertise there. Those are just kind of quick things. But, you know, think about it holistically and first principles. What am I selling? Who is it for? Why should they care? And then think about how you can show up in a way that's differentiated and in the right place at the right time?

Speaker 1 00:06:18 No, certainly.

Speaker 1 00:06:20 regarding let's and again, I, you know, most of your companies, do you mind maybe sharing just a little bit about the experience? Obviously we mentioned some big brands. Yeah. are you working primarily in kind of a more of a B to C world, or do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about your industry experience?

Speaker 2 00:06:39 Absolutely. So we we work across industries categories and business models with B2B companies and consumer businesses. the fundamentals I just described when it comes to marketing don't really change. The customer changes and how you reach them might change, but the the underlying, you know, selling something to a specific audience, with the right message in the right place at the right time, that that is consistent across business models and industries. So a more direct way to answer the question is, I have a background where I've worked a lot with health and wellness technology companies and startups. So we work with a lot of consumer and B2B health care and wellness tech companies. We've also worked with a lot of kind of B2B, SaaS, you know, software companies that are that are selling software and services around that software.

Speaker 2 00:07:28 But we also have done, you know, tremendous amount of work in and DTC, e-commerce, fintech, you know, property, technology, retail and, and, you know, the team has deep experience that kind of cross categories across business models. So we we like to think about it as a, you know, a Swiss Army knife that you can bring in to solve whatever the problem is when it comes to growth and marketing. And, you know, we're pretty agnostic in terms of industry or business model.

Speaker 1 00:07:54 Yeah. When you begin engagement with clients, do you, see holdovers from previous strategies that that you find yourself saying? Yeah, that's, that's that's not really working really well. And I think you've got the evidence to support support that. Are there any maybe practices that you see marketers doing or maybe, gurus advocating for that kind of makes you cringe or makes you say, yeah, I don't really recommend that anymore.

Speaker 2 00:08:25 I don't love the term growth hacker because I think it implies that, you know, there's just kind of this, like willy nilly, you know, we're just chipping away, hacking at this, trying to figure it out.

Speaker 2 00:08:36 I like the concept of a growth experimentation program. There's a framework called rice. I really like reach, impact, confidence, ease. And the the underlying premise is that you have hypotheses about things you'd like to test that will drive your growth, and you want to stack rank those things based on how much reach they'll have, how much impact they'll have, your confidence that they'll be successful in the ease to do them. That's one area is just let's not hack our growth. Let's come up with a strategy and a bunch of experiments we want to run, and then feed back what we learn into that kind of growth experimentation framework. And similarly, I hear lots of folks talk about, you know, advertising and and brand marketing, PR, comms, getting lots of awareness and exposure, also without the level of criticality or discipline and rigor to measure the results. So there's the spray and pray of I'm just going to do a bunch of stuff and hopefully some of it will work. And the classic, you know, adage, you know, I know that 50% of my marketing works.

Speaker 2 00:09:34 I just don't know which 50%. Yeah. And I think for us, it's all about measurability and understanding for the for the companies spending lots of money across many different ad channels, we often will help them implement multi-touch attribution so you can understand what you know. That was awareness. Those awareness campaigns are doing, as well as the kind of demand capture at the bottom of the funnel and get a more complete picture that tells you like, just because we can see on a last touch basis that this Google ad converted somebody to a customer, that doesn't mean that the billboard that they saw or the TV ad or the the ad on Instagram didn't influence them in that journey to ultimately purchase. And so that's a big part of, you know, really driving home the point of measurement. And for a lot of companies we walk into, they just don't have a good discipline around data analytics, reporting and understanding where they're they're investing.

Speaker 1 00:10:26 Well, and I know PR can sometimes be one of those ones that you have to be quite deliberate.

Speaker 1 00:10:31 If you're looking to look at, you know, return on investment from PR efforts, because sometimes it is it's just it's very general market softening. And any any ideas around, better tracking on again, some efforts like public relations and media visibility or, you know, stuff that, you know, may not be direct response.

Speaker 2 00:10:53 Yeah. There's a there's a ton of platforms out there now that'll help you understand the awareness metrics. So you appeared in these outlets. So you you got this many earned media impressions. Oftentimes you can look at web traffic as a proxy for kind of getting more coverage, because your traffic will spike when, you know, people start hearing about you in the press and they start searching. And so then they come to your website. and then, of course, those those multi-touch models I mentioned, which are more complicated and require a lot of signal to be effective. So if you're a small business, that's not really applicable, but for for small businesses that are doing things with PR, you know, oftentimes you'll pay a PR agency or retainer and, you know, they'll go off and they'll pitch media outlets and you'll get a few hits, and then you don't know what happens after that.

Speaker 2 00:11:37 So I like to work with kind of PR operators, solo practitioners that are just going to really get to know my business and me and tell my story for the founder CEO of that business. and then they're going to come back and say, hey, we got these hits. This is all the outreach we did. Here's the spreadsheet of everything we're doing. Here's the amount of, impressions that those outlets have. We got coverage in gets us. Here's what our strategy should be for going forward. And here are the kind of tentpole moments. You know product launches, features, releases, major investment, you know, rounds of financing. These are things that we can get coverage about. A lot of people, the forget that, you know, people don't want to write about you just because you think your business is special. So you have to have something to say, something newsworthy. And that's the important part with PR. And those newsworthy moments should coincide with a more integrated marketing approach. And not just we're not just going to do a press release and pitch a couple outlets.

Speaker 2 00:12:28 We're also going to run ads and we're going to update our website. We're going to do a promotion. So this is a big campaign that when all of those things are happening in, in, in tandem and in kind of sync together, then you see a lift in the business that you can point to like, hey, this, this stuff is working all together, and we're not going to just do one little kind of tactical thing on the PR channel.

Speaker 1 00:12:49 I want to point out something that I find kind of interesting. Jason, I love your cadence and your vocal tonality. And it's kind of funny because as I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, you were the VP of marketing for headspace. Yep. And I and I don't believe I'm the only one who picks up on the tone of your voice like, yeah, I, I feel I have high trust in the words that you're saying, and I feel calm and reassuring.

Speaker 2 00:13:16 Andy Podium is the OG of, of speaking in a in a beautiful way.

Speaker 2 00:13:20 So I take it as a high, high praise if you got that at all. So thanks.

Speaker 1 00:13:26 Okay. So Winston Francis, is is, again your, your website or wtrf dot team forward slash pod. and so for someone that's listening to us, maybe they, they're doing some research on Winston Francois. So now they're listening to our conversation and they're considering whether or not you would make a great marketing partner for them who would be kind of in that sweet spot where, you know, they're kind of perfect for you there. maybe not too early. Not too often. Left field not to. Farther down the road. But again, if you're working with companies like Disney, I suspect you've worked with some of the biggest. And Google also also a large company. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:14:10 Yeah, I think for anybody who has some really tricky growth problems they're trying to solve and is probably doing, you know, at least seven figures in revenue. our sweet spot tends to be companies that are, that are doing, you know, 5 to 10 or more million in kind of annual revenue, top line.

Speaker 2 00:14:28 the reason for that is we have a team of really experienced operators across every growth and marketing discipline. They've got ten, 15 plus years of experience. We don't, you know, offshore to a $5 an hour person in the Philippines. We are we are working with the the best folks that have come from these great companies that I've worked for prior to starting this business. And so as a result, we're not the cheapest solution. I like to say to people, you can, you can get fast and good and cheap. You pick two, right? Yeah, We are fast and good, but we are not cheap. So I think it's really for somebody who's looking to up their growth game and hire experts that already have solved these same problems before, as opposed to kind of growth hacking or trying to figure it out. the idea is that we would come in and having seen the same problem set before, be able to provide immediate solutions and support for a combination of what we like to call quick wins and then more strategic programs, initiatives that we can put in place.

Speaker 2 00:15:25 So if you're doing, you know, five, 10 million plus in revenue, you've you maybe your marketing leader just left or you don't really have a marketing function and you need somebody to help you stand one up. That's where we come in. And we can provide that strategic level of leadership and support, as well as execution, hands on keyboard resources to do the work, build the process, build the team and the function. And a lot of our clients we've worked with, we actually help them hire, internal resources to replace us. So we'll we'll help them find full time team members that can kind of carry that work forward. Once we've set a great foundation.

Speaker 1 00:15:57 Tell me about, you have a podcast. It's called Frank growth. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 00:16:03 Yeah, absolutely. So Frank growth is came out of a realization that I had, with my wife, actually, that, oftentimes there are silent partners in entrepreneurship that don't really get the spotlight, the attention or the recognition for what they've done to enable the entrepreneur to succeed.

Speaker 2 00:16:20 So we have a podcast called Frank Roth that is all about the intersection of personal and professional growth when it comes to growing a business, growing a family, growing a partnership. We interview couples that want one or both of whom are entrepreneurs and have built a successful business. And we we kind of dive into what what it has taken to get to that success, as well as what has happened behind the scenes in navigating, you know, family and children so that that business can succeed in spite of the fact that it's really, really hard to to grow both a company and, and being a successful relationship partnership and and raise kids.

Speaker 1 00:17:01 I love it your website again WF team. to our friend that's listening. and you've got a great blog here. your good follow on social media, particularly LinkedIn. do you mind maybe just sharing, kind of next steps or resources that that you'd recommend to our friend that's been listening to our conversation?

Speaker 2 00:17:19 Absolutely. So I mentioned a few things. one is, this growth experimentation framework called rice.

Speaker 2 00:17:25 You can look that up. In fact, I think we have a free worksheet on our website. Steamed rice. Rice. And you can download that. And that'll help you, prioritize your growth experiments. If you want to get in touch with me, set, set up a meeting. Learn more about how Winston Francois can help you. you can visit WFTV slash pod pod. And we will be happy to to set up a free discovery consultation. Learn more about your business. See if there's ways that we can be helpful. and you can find me on social media at Jason Crafton or, Winston Francois at WF does growth.

Speaker 1 00:17:59 Haha. All right. Jason Sharpton again founder and CEO of Winston Francois WF team forward slash pod. It's been great. Thank you so much for joining us Jason.

Speaker 2 00:18:09 Thank you.

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