#34 - Managing Through Market Cycles, with Ben West

08/29/18 • 45 min

Building a business is hard, particularly when growing revenue depends on the staff needed to recognize that revenue. When growth is fundamentally tied to scale—as it is in service-based businesses—market cycles and other factors can create serious challenges. For instance, what happens when your enterprise becomes the hot commodity? How do you manage through meteoric growth without compromising quality? And when revenue drops, how do you protect morale and preserve the company’s culture through the hard choices of downscaling? As a three-time company co-founder, Ben West has lived through the booms and downturns of the past decades. Here he shares stories and lessons from his long experience in growing businesses and steering them through the unpredictable economic landscape. Guest - Ben West, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Eventbase Ben West oversees design, product management and technology strategy for the event app platform, Eventbase. Formerly, he was CIO at StockHouse.com, growing the company from 2 to 250 people worldwide and making it, for a time, the highest-trafficked website in Canada. Ben also founded digital agency Intergalactic and co-founded a digital rights protection software company used by leading record labels. Ben is a previous winner of the “Top 40 Under 40” award by Business in Vancouver. In his spare time Ben volunteers with branding, marketing, and knowledge-worker training, and he funds a granting program for small businesses to build digital tools as well as a scholarship program. For this work, he was a finalist for the Prime Minister's Canadian Volunteer Awards in 2016. Host: Alex Langshur

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#33 - Innovation in Action, with Michelle Greenwald

Big or small, regardless of industry or sector, most if not all organizations would say that they’re interested in innovation. But what does that actually mean, and how can individuals and companies innovate in ways that create value? Can we take a vague, overworked buzzword like innovation and make it practical? Enter Michelle Greenwald, CEO of Inventours. She has transformed herself and her career by making innovation more than just something to talk about. Now she shares strategically tactical steps, personal experiences, and driving attitudes for embracing innovation as a priority and a daily practice. Guest - Michelle Greenwald, CEO of Inventours Michelle Greenwald founded DigitalLatest, a summit designed to help executives understand the evolving digital marketing landscape. She runs insight-generating “innovation days” for blue chip clients. And she is steeped in marketing, having been SVP of New Products at Disney, VP & GM at Pepsi-Cola, Business Director at Nestlé and, prior to that, an account exec at JW Thompson. She currently teaches marketing at Columbia, NYU Stern, Cornell Johnson and other graduate schools, and she’s a regular columnist for Forbes. As if all that weren’t enough, Michelle Greenwald wrote the book Catalyzing Innovation, wherein she advocates systemic approaches to fostering new thinking in organizations of all sizes. Host: Alex Langshur

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#35 - Building your market, one landing page at a time, with Oli Gardner

For anyone even thinking about building and testing landing pages, Unbounce is an essential tool and the platform that almost single-handedly created the field. Oli Gardner, the company’s co-founder, travels the world speaking and evangelizing about the importance of the landing page experience in marketing. He’s taken a hard look at more landing pages than anyone on the planet, and he’s obsessed with identifying and reversing bad practices. His rants against marketers who send campaign-specific traffic to their general homepage can peel paint off an unpainted wall! Today’s episode explores how Oli got to where he is today, and how he turned a passion for crusading against marketing mediocrity into such a key online business platform. What are some of the important learnings he’s gleaned along the way? Guest - Oli Gardner, Business Coach Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner is a prolific international speaker who’s on a mission to help businesses use data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike. He became a marketer the day Unbounce was founded. As an early pioneer in the realm of content marketing, his goal was to position Unbounce as the global leader in everything related to landing pages and ways to deliver high-converting and delightful marketing experiences. Host: Alex Langshur