Advertising agency to private equity: Building a brand on the same team

[00:00:00] Lindsay Rogers: Hello and welcome to the Brand Hunch Podcast where we explore ideas and hunches around how marketers are growing great brands. It's our look under the hood at how much is marketing science and how much is built on a hunch. In today's episode, I'm joined by Brian Wakabayashi. Brian's the head of brand at CoLab, a San Francisco based creative studio for startups.

[00:00:25] Lindsay Rogers: What I found most interesting about CoLab and its positioning is that it's majority owned by Westcap, an operating equity investor focused on technology startups. So therefore CoLab predominantly works on the businesses they invest into. Brian recently posted on LinkedIn, and I'll read you a shortened version of the excerpt.

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[00:00:41] Lindsay Rogers: Building a great brand can feel at odds with the startup hacker ethos of moving fast and breaking things. You can't quantify cool or funny or poignant on a spreadsheet, but everyone knows it when they see it. I love this sentiment and I reached out to Brian after reading it as it talks directly to the importance of having a brand vision and backing yourself as a business leader.

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[00:01:00] Lindsay Rogers: Brian, welcome to the show. Tell me, where did this post come from? [00:01:03] Brian Wakabayashi: Hey, Lindsay. Thank you. Um, I'm trying to remember why I wrote that. I think, you know, in many ways. It's the last five to 10 years, we've seen this rise of this idea that data can solve all of our problems. And I think that's wrong. I think data can inform humans that can solve problems.

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[00:01:20] Brian Wakabayashi: And I think the distinction being like, a lot of times we'll try to fi nd our ways. into, you know, judging a piece of creative by how it performs. And without really thinking about the overall impact of a, of a piece of creative or, or how it positions the brand or some of the things we've forgotten over the last 50 years, I think with, with startups, as you start to move into tech startups, you see this like disruptor mindset of like, we're going to do things differently than anything else.

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[00:01:45] Brian Wakabayashi: And we're going to throw out the baby with the bath water. And sometimes you end up with a very. Sort of shortsighted sort of, uh, or myopic sort of view on marketing. And I think for a lot of, uh, our portfolio companies, they're all along the journey at different points. We see some that are much more data focused and some that are started to understand that like data tells part of the story, but the stories.

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[00:02:06] Brian Wakabayashi: Still the story, you still have to have one, just, you know, looking at things through the lens of one metric is a short sighted way of, of building a brand.

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[00:02:14] Lindsay Rogers: And what do you think about the idea that founders are the magic of the brand? Do you find that to be true? A lot of the time, is that sometimes true?

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[00:02:22] Brian Wakabayashi: You know, I mean, yeah, there is a lot of truth in that, in that if you think about founders in the ecosystem they're, they're sort of born in, they have to be a bit magic in order to attract the financing necessary to be founders in the first place. So you have to, you know, sometimes in your twenties, convince a lot of people to give you hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to start a company in the first place.

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[00:02:44] Brian Wakabayashi: And then a lot of people to join you who are much more experienced than you, and ultimately a lot of clients to come on board if you're B2B or customers to buy into your, your B2C. I think this is a, a certain amount of, there's a certain amount of delusional, uh, energy necessary to be a founder, I think similarly, to be a creative or to be.

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[00:03:01] Brian Wakabayashi: A strategist in advertising, you have to sort of assume that, you know, and that you can sort of out think your way into knowing better than everyone else that came before you. And I think that energy is necessary. Well, that said, what I, what I've noticed is like, yeah, I mean, it can be the founder. It can also be another person in, in the startup.

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[00:03:18] Brian Wakabayashi: It doesn't always have to be the founder that has that ability to tell stories. You know, at some point you need to be able to translate your business proposition, your products and your vision into something that people actually want. And we see too much of this where it's a lot of describing what we do or what you are or what you want versus really understanding what the customer or the consumer ultimately wants.

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[00:03:39] Brian Wakabayashi: And that's where we usually meet our portfolio companies, like in that jump from talking to investors, talking about the products and then ultimately speaking to customers. And I think it's in that gap there that we try to help out.

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[00:03:53] Lindsay Rogers: This is a really hard question to answer. So good luck. How would you describe the magic that you might see in a brand when you see it?

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[00:04:02] Brian Wakabayashi: You know, I mean, the short answer is you just sort of understand it and know it intuitively because that's, if it needed explanation, it wouldn't be magic. The longer answer is when you've done this for a long time, you start recognising little signs and those signs are essentially all details. So when you look at the brand identity is the first thing that hits you.

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[00:04:20] Brian Wakabayashi: Can you look at the details of that identity? Was it executed well? Did they actually think about the brand experience in every corner of the digital experience of the social experience? So they actually pull through. An idea in design, one of our brand redesigns featured taking an H and turning it into a doorway and a bridge.

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[00:04:39] Brian Wakabayashi: And so that central idea, which related back to the business proposition was, we tried to pull that through with the art direction, the font selection, the colors and the typography and all that sort of thing. I think looking at details as a way to tell, I mean, I think it's true of. You go to a restaurant and, and the details of a dish are usually what make it great and also what make it expensive.

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[00:05:00] Brian Wakabayashi: And, uh, I think the details of, uh, of, you know, a house, a car, anything you'd rather try to do.

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[00:05:07] Lindsay Rogers: I think of this idea around considered, you know, when you go to a restaurant or you go, you have an experience that's excellent. It feels considered. It feels like someone has. Stop to think about this. And it's intentional, not just a sloppy it'll do, or, you know, and I think that's what separates good and a fi ne experience from an exceptional one.

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[00:05:25] Brian Wakabayashi: I agree. Yeah. I mean, it's really, it's human beings thinking about every bit of that. Hey, what if someone comes in and does this, or what if it's not this target? It's another person. How would they see this? We often see it in our product design work. We don't, we don't start with creative or design. We start with like research side of it, the user interviews, and we try to build a consumer journey.

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[00:05:45] Brian Wakabayashi: And inside that journey, at each moment, we try to figure out, like, what is that person thinking, feeling? What are the hundred things that they might need, want, be distracted by? When you do that, I think you're able to start to really understand that, like, these are the things we have to design for. And that's where you get that feeling of things being considered.

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[00:06:03] Brian Wakabayashi: Like, maybe you came in for one thing, and then you changed your mind. And then you're like, oh, wow, they've thought about what happens if I change my mind. And I think that's where you can see a great product design. Versus a pretty good one or a fine one.

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[00:06:15] Lindsay Rogers: Have you ever undertaken research and had a bit of a hunch that either it's not applicable or it isn't going to suit the end customer?

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[00:06:21] Lindsay Rogers: Or maybe found out later on launch that the customers not responded in the way that you thought they would? Or have you always found research to step through to be the correct path forward?

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[00:06:31] Brian Wakabayashi: I mean, yeah, every time you start research, you find something you didn't expect to find, right? And if you find nothing that you didn't already know, you probably weren't ambitious enough in the research design.

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[00:06:40] Brian Wakabayashi: All that said, I think. It's not uncommon to come in with some sort of preconceived notion about your consumers. Like, so one of our, our portfolio companies, B2B, their main target is financial advisors. So we sort of talked to a good number of financial advisors to figure out what they were thinking and how they felt about a product and outside our portfolio.

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[00:07:00] Brian Wakabayashi: The most interesting thing about those interviews was that like advisors knew what they were supposed to say to the answers to our questions. They're supposed to say, Hey, I care about X, Y, and Z, and I care about being a fiduciary or being responsible with my clients money. But when you start to break down.

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[00:07:17] Brian Wakabayashi: And you gain trust. You start to like, be able to sort of push on that a little bit. You start to see some of the insecurities. And even though financial advisors are supposed to always project a certain amount of certainty and confidence, the reality is they don't know what's going to happen in the future.

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[00:07:32] Brian Wakabayashi: And then you start to see, oh, they I'm not sure if I'm giving the best advice or I'm not sure if these products are going to be right for my clients. I'm also not sure if I don't evolve fast enough with this newest, the new alternatives and all that sort of thing. If my clients will see me as an expert.

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[00:07:47] Brian Wakabayashi: So we started underlying that or understanding that it wasn't so much, we weren't solving for what we thought we were solving for. It wasn't just about getting the latest bells and whistles in their platform, but it was about. Helping them feel more confi dent. And ultimately like they were leading their clients rather than the client sort of leading them.

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[00:08:03] Brian Wakabayashi: And it didn't feel that different from being in an agency or, or any sort of consultative practice. So I think that was a, that's an example recently where we did go, okay, this isn't about pushing as many features as possible, but it's about really about understanding that. These financial advisors hide behind a professional mask, but at the end of the day, they, they're just as sort of worried and confused as everyone else.

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[00:08:25] Lindsay Rogers: I always come back to that Henry Ford quote, you know, the sort of, if you ask people what they want, they'd say a faster horse and actually the role of research to unpack what problem we're solving. Um, and perhaps unmet needs to develop something completely new. Um, and it sounds like the role of research throughout your projects is doing just that.

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[00:08:43] Lindsay Rogers: I've actually, in my career, come to really respect and appreciate great quality researchers and the power of research. I think I came into my early career as a creative, uh, you know, in a creative agency space, sort of thinking, Oh, that's a lot of time and frankly, budget used to kind of not even create much stuff.

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[00:09:01] Lindsay Rogers: And actually now the whole idea that if you sort of. Uh, you know, you start a few degrees off, you might end in a very different place. Have you found the same with research?

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[00:09:11] Brian Wakabayashi: Yeah. I mean, great research is, is fun. I mean, I started my career, I worked in the mailroom and I was the, uh, executive assistant too, which meant I reported to the EA, which reported to the head EA.

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[00:09:22] Brian Wakabayashi: Which I was the lowest person on the total pool above interns. And, uh, one of the fi rst things I got roped into doing was research. So I would transcribe focus group audio and do man on the street interviews and get people to fill out surveys for coupons. And this was over 20 years ago. So when we, we still did surveys with clipboards, I think the research part of it is one, the two things I've learned about research is one.

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[00:09:43] Brian Wakabayashi: It's about what you ignore. When you do a day of focus groups, a lot of service, you start to see a lot of data you ignore because it's not important or B it's, it's an expected answer. People know how to answer a question. Sometimes they answer it with their heart's intent and sometimes answer it because that's what they think the expectation is to, um, you can't just give research to people and expect them to know what to do with it.

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[00:10:06] Brian Wakabayashi: You really need to transform it into something useful. People overuse the word insight, but you have to at least add a layer of analysis and recommendation to it. And that's when it becomes powerful. Early on, I had this creative team. I was like a year or two into my career and they were, you know, 20 year veterans at that point.

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[00:10:23] Brian Wakabayashi: I think I'm older than them now, which is sad, but, um, they were sort of cranky sort of classic creative director style where you would present research to them and they would basically nod and be like, okay, we're going to go to lunch. Halfway through the meeting. And so this happened and I was so pissed off about it.

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[00:10:39] Brian Wakabayashi: I was like, I have all these great insights, but they won't listen. I've talked to all these people and they won't really hear what I'm saying. Cause they were already decided what the creative direction was going to be. I had notes, but they didn't really respect my notes. So what I did was I took all the best quotes from the research and I like.

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[00:10:55] Brian Wakabayashi: Printed it up and if you remember like back in the day, they used to have marker comps all over the wall, you know, and a good sort of creative team would have an off ce space. You'd just see piles of like half assed, you know, like headlines and, and drawings. So I went in there while they were at lunch and I like pinned a bunch of quotes.

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[00:11:12] Brian Wakabayashi: Amongst the marker comps and I mean, I think, uh, they found it kind of, uh, annoying and arrogant. They didn't say anything bad about it, but at least years later, I think, uh, not years, but it was like, uh, weeks later, like the campaign was finished. They had actually changed the campaign and it was, it was a while for them to admit that like some of the things we were doing had made an impact, but I think it's that it's like, you can't just go like, well, here's the chart.

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[00:11:38] Brian Wakabayashi: Here's a deck full of quotes and expect someone who hasn't been thinking about it for the last three weeks to go. Oh, that's brilliant Now you really got to sell it in or if you can't sell it in you have to like sort of inject it into the creative conversation in a way that might be obnoxious but You have to sort of get it in there somewhere, and then you'll see it in the work.

[00:12:00] Brian Wakabayashi: Sometimes it's easy. You just tell them like, hey, this is what it is. I also don't like it when people just take my word for it a bit. It's like, it means that they're not thinking hard enough. Like, if they just leave the strategist, it's kind of like, well, no, push back a little bit. Like, let's, let's have a conversation because there is a give and take.

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[00:12:15] Brian Wakabayashi: Like, I might be wrong too. So, I mean, I think it's something in there. I think it's what you do with the research rather than the research itself.

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[00:12:21] Lindsay Rogers: It's an interesting juxtaposition between sort of backing your ideas and feeling confident in the, you know, the, the root of the thought, but also potentially the humility of recognising with research that you don't know everything.

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[00:12:35] Lindsay Rogers: And actually the power is probably in, in not knowing and being okay with sitting with new ideas that perhaps challenge old conventions. That's an interesting juxtaposition.

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[00:12:44] Brian Wakabayashi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's like different kinds of research. There's research that uncovers something big that you haven't thought of, uh, which is rare.

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[00:12:52] Brian Wakabayashi: But most research is about finding little things or finding an angle you haven't thought of. I think it's more, oh, if you just look at it this way, it's slightly different. Or, or maybe these two data points actually add up to something.

[00:13:04] Lindsay Rogers: How do you define a great insight?

[00:13:06] Brian Wakabayashi: Uh, this is a, it's like, I see this conversation a lot.

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[00:13:10] Brian Wakabayashi: I'm on a strategy LinkedIn. It used to be strategy, Twitter, and now it's gone. A lot of us have abandoned Mr. Musk's is a weird, chaotic platform these days. But a former boss used to say that an insight is at once obvious and completely unsaid prior to that moment. So there is a quality about it where when you articulate it, people go, Oh yeah, it's true.

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[00:13:35] Brian Wakabayashi: There's like a sort of intuitive truthiness to it. But at the same time, it hasn't been articulated in quite that way. Um, that's usually the, the stereotypical sort of like brand strategy or, or communications insight where you can say something like technology meant to bring us closer is actually driving us further apart.

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[00:13:53] Brian Wakabayashi: And you go, Oh, wait a minute. That's, there's something there. I think a lot of times for me though, I have a broader defi nition. In that, you know, I, I feel like we're, sometimes we're too precious about insights. Like every, not every insight has to be a built in tagline and campaign. I think there are insights that are, Hey, we didn't notice this, but this is an interesting thing.

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[00:14:13] Brian Wakabayashi: Um, one of our portfolio companies is a search firm, they're called Hunt Club. They're a tech enabled search platform, talent platform for mostly tech startups, and they work with bigger clients and smaller clients as well, but a lot of tech startups use them. We did some brand design work for them, so brand identity design, and in the early conversations with them, we discovered something, which is, um, unlike a lot of talent search fi rms, 70, I think 70, 70 plus percent of their jobs were new jobs.

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[00:14:43] Brian Wakabayashi: So they were recruiting for roles that didn't exist in the company prior to the search, which was an interesting thought for us. We're like, why is that? So, and they're like, of course, well, we work with a lot of startups and so they're growing and I go, that's, that's interesting, but it's also. A problematic thing when you're like, every job is a new job that didn't exist before.

[00:15:02] Brian Wakabayashi: And that throws some candidates, but the kind of candidates they wanted were the ones that were excited by that. I get to define this role. I'm the first performance lead or I'm going to establish the practice and make it my own.

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[00:15:13] Lindsay Rogers: Yeah.

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[00:15:13] Brian Wakabayashi: So that's where we, we landed the strategy. It was all around this idea of find your future.

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[00:15:19] Brian Wakabayashi: And the full sentence was find your future CMO or find your future, whatever. But the idea there was like, It was a message to companies about finding the future of that function or finding the next level. But it was also a message to candidates, you know, this is where you're going to establish your first role as a VP of marketing or, or head of sales or head of analytics.

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[00:15:38] Brian Wakabayashi: So I think that was sort of the thought. And I think that's the kind of thing that's not, it's not a huge aha to go, Oh, most of your jobs have never been done before, but in that, in that company. But it was just enough of a pivot to go, okay, this is where we need to, to really land this idea. So I think that could be an insight too, even though that's just a stab ultimately.

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[00:15:57] Lindsay Rogers: Yeah. So I find it really interesting that a PE firm would invest in essentially a whole marketing, um, almost like a whole marketing function within, um, within the business, helping to support and ideally sort of rocket. Power the businesses you invest in. How did it come about and how does your role fit in?

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[00:16:15] Brian Wakabayashi: I mean, I definitely didn't, uh, help it come about. I think I would say that a lot of the credit belongs to our founder, Wescap LT or Lawrence Tosi. Everyone calls him LT. I think LT is one of those rare CFOs who sees the financial value and creativity and can translate it to other sort of financial people.

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[00:16:37] Brian Wakabayashi: And, well, he himself has a long history in Merrill Lynch. Always in sort of financial roles. I think he's in now Westcap. He's always been able to sort of understand the value of an intuitively. And I think that's, that's something you just don't get a lot of investors. So that ethos runs through the organisation. And I think, and it's not just creative, uh, it's, it's just thinking about the value of product, marketing, sales, engineering, and just sort of like operators in general.

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[00:17:08] Brian Wakabayashi: So. L. T. has a vision for WestCap that was, it was grounded in the idea that we're going to invest more than capital. We'll do a better job of due diligence, finding the right founders and startups, and then we'll actually, we'll invest money, but we'll also invest expertise. And a lot of PE firms sort of say that, and they just advise.

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[00:17:30] Brian Wakabayashi: And so typically like most operators, it's what they call It's a non financed people in PE land or VC world. Most operators will just like jump on a call once a week or every couple of weeks and say, Hey, you should do this. Or I've seen this before. You should call this agency. And it's valuable, but it's not that valuable, right?

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[00:17:51] Brian Wakabayashi: Like there's a certain, there's a certain amount of like advice is, is, is good. And sometimes it's, it's extremely. Um, timely, but you know, there's, you still have to do everything yourself as a start. Um, with Westgap, we started building out an agency that actually would execute. So we will say, Hey, you should redesign your brand identity.

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[00:18:12] Brian Wakabayashi: Here's an eight week path to doing that. We're going to do strategy fi rst. And then our designers are going to come in and show you directions. And then you're going to pick one and then we're going to give you a brand guideline, then you're going to implement it. And you know, that, that work can be hundreds of thousands of dollars of fees avoided.

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[00:18:26] Brian Wakabayashi: So there's that part of it. And then the other part of it is we've invested in you. So we have money inside of this company. If we give you a better brand identity, if we create marketing materials that are more powerful, your company is going to be worth more. And thus our equity is going to be worth more.

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[00:18:43] Brian Wakabayashi: So it's this sort of virtual circle of if we do our jobs really well, we're raising the valuations of these portfolio companies.

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[00:18:51] Lindsay Rogers: So you mentioned before that because of the nature of Westcap owning CoLab, you're not necessarily pitching yourself. You're sort of there almost like my words, not yours, but sort of quietly confident, you know, you have the skill sets and you can help these businesses.

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[00:19:03] Lindsay Rogers: But I guess I would guess only if they are open and receptive of it. Yeah. How does that change the process then if it's much more of a peer approach than an agency client pitching scenario?

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[00:19:14] Brian Wakabayashi: You know, earlier you asked about like founder magic. I mean, there is, there is certain profiles of founders that are just like, Hey, I don't want outsiders in my business.

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[00:19:22] Brian Wakabayashi: And that happens. You know, there's sometimes they're like, Hey, we got this. We don't need to, and they're doing well. And we're like, okay, cool. You know, it's not about us pushing an agenda on them. It's about being there to help when, when they need us. So we do look for, you know, like, is there going to be an impact we can make?

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[00:19:38] Brian Wakabayashi: You know, sometimes we have had projects where the impact wasn't there. It just didn't work because they weren't really ready to receive the work we were able to do. So over the last three years, we've really learned how to sniff out like what makes a good fi t or not. Um, so when we meet the portfolio companies, you know, for the first time, which is usually early on, right after investment, first hundred days, a lot of times it's just about figuring out what they want versus what they need.

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[00:20:03] Brian Wakabayashi: And they will sometimes come in and ask you for things and you're like, that's not what you need. It's great to be able to tell somebody, I mean, like, look, I've spent 20 years in the agency world, so you never say no to things. People go, Hey, can you do this? You're like, yeah, sure. And then you go home and you figure out who to, which freelancers to hire to be able to do it.

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[00:20:20] Brian Wakabayashi: But I think there's a, there's a power in being able to say, like, that's not what you need. There was a moment where one of our portfolio companies came in and asked us to do a marketing campaign for them. And they had this deck, they actually presented to us to help them do it. And we looked at it and we're like, we're not the right agency was the first words out of our mouth.

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[00:20:37] Brian Wakabayashi: And I'm like, you're just looking for a performance agency. There are better performance agencies and you have two on retainer. Why are you really asking us to come in and do this? And the CMO at the time was sort of fl abbergasted. It was like, why would you not want to do this? And I'm like, well, it's not that I don't want to do it.

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[00:20:53] Brian Wakabayashi: I just think there are agencies that are better experts and perform marketing. And I don't think you want to hire us to do this. And that if this is, these are your goals. And through a series of conversations, we realised like what he really wanted was to do brand work, but he was hamstrung by sort of metrics and goals.

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[00:21:11] Brian Wakabayashi: Sort of structure that said anything you did in marketing had to be boiled down to customer acquisition cost. And if you do that, the only thing you can do is performance advertising. And so you're like, well, no, we're not going to work on this. We're going to work on your measurement framework. And so instead of creative, we started with marketing strategy, our product and insight lead, our marketing strategy lead, and myself, we all just worked on, like, let's get a goals, measurement, strategies, tactics framework together and help you sell it into the board.

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[00:21:43] Brian Wakabayashi: And so we did that for a couple months first. And then he came back and was like, all right, now let's get a marketing campaign.

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[00:21:49] Lindsay Rogers: Sounds like much more of a hand on heart approach. You're approaching it based on the need and the requirement built on your experience without having to sell a quota of something to make numbers for a quarter.

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[00:22:00] Brian Wakabayashi: Yeah. We're just as happy to say no to things and be like, Hey, listen, I know somebody who knows how to do this. It's not that we're trying to avoid work. It's just, we want, like, we want to do what everyone's uniquely sort of great at here. So. One of our founders is Jason Mamaril, J Mama, as we call him, um, as he calls himself too.

[00:22:18] Brian Wakabayashi: Um, but J Mama is a product design genius. He's a lot of what you think of as the Airbnb product experience was designed by him at some point. And. When we think about that, we're, we're, we're always trying to do is find out, is there a moment where Jay Mama and his team, he has a lead product designer, why you, and for that team to be applied to something, we want to make sure that there's a huge impact that they can deliver.

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[00:22:42] Brian Wakabayashi: It's not just like, Hey, we just need a new website.

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[00:22:44] Brian Wakabayashi: We're trying to find those moments where like those talents actually make a difference rather than just keeping them busy. Um, I think it's, it's easy. There's a lot of portfolio companies right now. That we can work on. And so I think we always have to be picky about where we spend our time.

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[00:23:01] Brian Wakabayashi: And we're always trying to look for like, where are we actually going to have material impact?

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[00:23:04] Lindsay Rogers: Yeah.

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[00:23:04] Brian Wakabayashi: Where can we actually drive sales?

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[00:23:06] Lindsay Rogers: Yeah. You've obviously come from a strategy, a senior strategy agency focus. So let's sort of, um, put you in the basket with sort of generally creatives. And now you've moved over to much more of a marketing consultant role.

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[00:23:20] Lindsay Rogers: How is that transition from sort of creative? To being a marketer changed. And how do you intersect with the sort of traditional four P's of marketing?

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[00:23:28] Brian Wakabayashi: Yeah, that's a, that's a tough question. I mean, I think it's, it's first off, like you learn more. I've learned a lot more in this role. An analogy I might use is that let's say you were sort of like a specific type of neurosurgeon and you worked on a very narrow sliver of work and you were very dedicated to it.

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[00:23:46] Brian Wakabayashi: And then suddenly you found yourself in like the army as a fi eld medic and you just, okay, well, you gotta. This guy's got a broken leg. This person has a blue one. And like, you're just trying to, you know, you're much more simple, basic, straightforward. Practice of your craft. So strategy is largely, I would say it's not that it's unnecessary.

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[00:24:08] Brian Wakabayashi: It's just not really consumable by startups. So if you give them like a big strategy presentation, they're not going to be able to apply that to a team of marketers and agencies waiting for that strategy to go execute it because that team doesn't exist. And so really it's, I've had to simplify, I've had to, uh, be much more about like, what's going to make the biggest impact.

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[00:24:29] Brian Wakabayashi: And it's about getting to the same end point, which is still a clear, concise and compelling story to tell, but do in a way that's actually useful. So I think that's been the big shift. And you also asked about the four Ps, right? We don't get too involved with pricing. I know some of our operator friends on, uh, at West Cap do will advise on pricing.

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[00:24:49] Brian Wakabayashi: I mean, promotion, obviously we're, we're still very much involved with. Marketing, and I would agree, I would argue that like product and place are kind of interchangeable in a, in a tech startup world. A lot of times the product is a digital experience, the place that it happens as a digital experience, and we are getting involved with that, but it's not, it's, I wouldn't say we're using that framework to think about it.

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[00:25:09] Brian Wakabayashi: I think it's more or less like, I think the more interesting thing is we've tried to create a collection of disciplines. Uniquely important at growth stage. So beyond seed at startup, you're at, or have achieved product market fi t, but you haven't scaled and become a scale up yet.

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[00:25:28] Brian Wakabayashi: You know, that's design.

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[00:25:29] Brian Wakabayashi: That's marketing creation. That's brand strategy, but that's also PR. We also have a product and insight team. Our marketing strategy team comes primarily from a performance background, even though they also do a little bit of brand media. So it's the things that like nine times out of 10, a growth stage startup needs right then and often can't afford the best talent.

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[00:25:48] Brian Wakabayashi: So they're operating usually with 10 less years of experience than we are because that's where the salary scale is at.

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[00:25:55] Lindsay Rogers: You mentioned at the start that, uh, you know, it's sort of hard to predict human behavior via data points as there are so many variables, but I guess you also operate in a private equity environment where spreadsheets and, you know, data points are not just tradition, but they're also more readily understood by financial inputs.

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[00:26:15] Lindsay Rogers: How do you sort of tell that story? You know, the marketing story, whether it's investment or the decisions or the advice that you're providing, how do you share that story? If it's not through data points?

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[00:26:24] Brian Wakabayashi: I it's, it's not that we don't use data points that I love data points. I just don't think they're the beginning.

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[00:26:30] Brian Wakabayashi: I think they're more of the end. And what I mean by that is, you know, first off, I think people overestimate how much investors are data driven, like they are data focused, but I would say they're still looking for the story. So yeah, I mean, they're human beings. They need to figure out like we're story creation machines.

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[00:26:46] Brian Wakabayashi: We need to figure it out even when it's not really there. What's the causal relationship between this happening, this person and this event and data is a, you know, a tool to prove or disprove that I still think that like things like ARR, IRR, customer acquisition costs and LTV, those acronyms, soups will sort of become the snapshot, right?

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[00:27:05] Brian Wakabayashi: Investors will. Secretly confiding me that they look to the, the end of the investor deck first, if those numbers math out and then be like, okay, now I can read the rest of it because all right, this, this business is, is on solid footing. But beyond that, it's like, you can hide a lot in those numbers. You could have high growth rates, but maybe you're buying all your growth from Google meta.

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[00:27:25] Brian Wakabayashi: And not in a sustainable way, you know, we see this a lot with like overly performance dependent brands where, you know, they don't realise it, but they become so dependent on these platforms because they don't have a diverse marketing mix that I'm like, you know, Facebook increased their per impression cost 11 percent last year or something like that.

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[00:27:42] Brian Wakabayashi: That means your business became 11 percent less profitable. So it's, it's a little bit like they know how to juice the numbers at that early stage, because they're basically when you're in the beginning, you're really marketing towards investors. And then it's ultimately consumers, but how do you make that shift?

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[00:27:57] Brian Wakabayashi: And, you know, you can't be so dependent on just making these numbers work.

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[00:28:01] Lindsay Rogers: So we're thinking about sort of the scale up market and startups that don't have huge budgets like multinationals do. When a, an organisation you invest in comes onto your radar, what kind of assessment, whether it's journey or how do you assess the quality of the brand and the job to be done?

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[00:28:19] Brian Wakabayashi: We have a lot of tools, but we don't have one path. So the great thing is we get to talk to the deal team or the investment team. And so they will go deep into their, into their data and fi nd problems that we would never be able to do as an agency. And so we'll already have either access through the deal team or even West capital oftentimes sit on the board of these companies and you'll start to go, okay, here's the real problem.

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[00:28:42] Brian Wakabayashi: It's that they need to pivot out of this market into this market, or, you know, it's a supply problem. It's a demand generation problem. It's all like, we'll sort of have a big foundational understanding.

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[00:28:52] Lindsay Rogers: And will they often provide you with also the opportunities for the business based on the investment?

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[00:28:57] Lindsay Rogers: So we, you know, we think this is an underrated component and this is where we would like to focus efforts.

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[00:29:02] Brian Wakabayashi: Yeah. I mean, you'll get the perspective from the deal team and the investment team. As, and that's collaboratively turned into a document we call the smart scaling plan. So both the fi nancial side, the investor side, the operation side, and CoLab will all sort of contribute to a document that said, these, this is the diagnosis.

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[00:29:18] Brian Wakabayashi: Like these are the things where we feel like putting some resources, you'll have a great return on investment. And sometimes those are spot on. And sometimes you get into it and then you realise actually there's this other issue here and you find those and you, and you just sort of have to adjust and move on.

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[00:29:34] Brian Wakabayashi: One of our best tools for that. Like when we start on a piece of business, we'll start with something called a brand toolkit. And that is, when we started off, I called it the brand blueprint because it was a strategy exercise. And then we started realising that strategy exercises were not useful to startups.

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[00:29:49] Brian Wakabayashi: Change the name to a brand toolkit. And now it's sort of strategy plus creative. And what it outputs is your typical brand pyramid strategy. On a page, but it also outputs copy. So it'll be, here's your about us page, your elevator pitch one line, and it's all meant to be external. So you can instantly sort of use it to impact sales decks, press websites, and they see the value right away.

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[00:30:13] Brian Wakabayashi: So I'm not going like, here's a strategy. And then three weeks later, here's some creative off the strategy. Three weeks is a lifetime for a startup. They need to see it all at once. So we take our time and do the rigor. We'll go through the stakeholder interviews, the workshops, consumer research. Um, but we also say we're going to deliver the strategy and the creative within the same time period so that you don't see one is disconnected to the other.

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[00:30:34] Lindsay Rogers: Yeah. Awesome. I think that's such a superpower that the. Private equity itself is in, you know, the same business as the data points for growth, uh, in the same conversation as where you jump in to help out, there's no disconnect there between, Oh, let me go and brief someone on this component.

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[00:30:50] Lindsay Rogers: You're sort of in the same conversations, which I can imagine adds a lot of value. And also. A lot more speed to market when you think about CoLab's customers of tomorrow. So say companies you may be working with in a few years. So working backwards, probably by nature, they have less funding, maybe a smaller team, maybe zero marketing budget.

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[00:31:09] Lindsay Rogers: What are things that you think they should be focused on? One or two things that they could get right early on that would really help you a few years later.

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[00:31:17] Brian Wakabayashi: It's, it's interesting. Uh, we just work with a two person startup that, um, is coming out of Y Combinator, it's sort of a friend of the family in that, uh, one of the founders used to be a Westcap employee and went off and did this, so we worked on it.

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[00:31:31] Brian Wakabayashi: It was mostly just to help them out. We didn't really charge them too much. We do have external clients that we, um, we service. We don't have that many. We try to be picky and work with people that. We're doing something really innovative or that we like a lot, but it was interesting work. So working with a two person, barely out of white combinator sort of startup, you start to realise that the thing that is most important is narrative.

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[00:31:51] Brian Wakabayashi: Your story is your pitch deck. You're the way you gain the next round. Your story is how you gain clients. Your story is how anyone remembers you because mostly you don't have media. You're just basically PR and meetings and you're not going to get much else out there. You know, if there's content, it's, it's all mostly found or written at that point.

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[00:32:14] Brian Wakabayashi: It's very limited. And I think the mistake that people make early on is that they sort of go from story to story to story and they go with whatever they find interesting in that moment or their clients are reacting too well in that moment. And I think that's a good way to drive a sales strategy, but it's a bad way to drive a brand strategy because a lot of times it'll change so rapidly.

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[00:32:37] Brian Wakabayashi: Sort of end up with this inconsistency. So the fi rst thing that costs no money to really figure out is to be good at sort of fi guring out like, what are the core tenants of your story that are going to last the next 12 months, not lock yourself into something too specific to where, you know, you've, you can't pivot, but find some things that, you know, how are you different?

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[00:32:55] Brian Wakabayashi: What is the simple way of describing your product? What is a concise way of, of talking about why you're better, like getting those bits, right. And then you can, I think, go on to things like brand design. You know, visual design is, is oftentimes misunderstood as like, this is sort of a nice to have, like, we'll make this, we'll make brands slightly prettier.

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[00:33:15] Brian Wakabayashi: It's not, it's a, it's actual investment and an investment pays off a lot faster than a lot of people think we had, you know, there's a recent example of, of Tropicana changing their. They're back in the U S again to like an 18 percent sales drop. I think similarly, even a very narrow B2B FinTech brand, your visual identity and your website within a few seconds, people are like, Oh, this is a tiny company and I'm not sure they're big enough for us.

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[00:33:43] Brian Wakabayashi: And that impression is never communicated in the meeting. But it's the same people who might invest in a nice offi ce or a better wardrobe for a sales meeting are like, ah, we don't need to pay for a design logo is fi ne. And I'm like, well, the logo makes you look pretty bad and you might be losing these sales because no one is going to say they didn't buy something because they thought the logo suck.

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[00:34:04] Brian Wakabayashi: But it's like, it's part of an overall impression back to what we were talking about earlier about details. But the details are off on something. You're like, this hasn't been considered. This company doesn't go that distance. It's not really ready for my business because maybe I think I want the best.

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[00:34:18] Lindsay Rogers: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I interviewed on a prior episode, a guy called Joel Connelly, who's a Blackbird of EC here in Australia. He talks about differentiating money from money and how a lot of, you know, fi nancial institutions, they provide money, but money is money. wherever you go. They've obviously gone down the route of creating a huge festival and foundation and a whole lot of other advisory elements that bring brand to life for their customers.

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[00:34:43] Lindsay Rogers: And talking to you a bit of my hunch is I think more PE firms will acquire or build creative teams in house. Exactly what you're talking about, the long term benefi t of brand and the impact on commercial outcomes, especially when you talk about product and, you know, most. The funding, especially in Australia, I'm sure it's similar in the US is going to tech led, you know, a lot of SAS businesses and product changes or tweaks that have huge commercial, hopefully gains, but implications make a massive difference at a commercial level. So I think they'll continue to be more emphasis put on the customer journey and the products we're building for a customer, not just from the business's perspective as along with branding, what are your thoughts?

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[00:35:22] Lindsay Rogers: And what do you think about the sort of. Agency or lack thereof marketing model in the future.

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[00:35:28] Brian Wakabayashi: I will say number one, I think PE fi rms are different than VC fi rms in one key respect in that while we're growth stage, so we're, we're not buyout, buyout is when, you know, a PE fi rm comes in and buys the majority of the stake in a, in a company we're, we're between VC and buyout.

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[00:35:45] Brian Wakabayashi: So we're in that middle where a company has been funded, maybe a series, a seed stage angel, and then we'll come in and help them scale to the point where they can either go public or become, you know, a big, big enough company to, to merge or be acquired in that space. It is more competitive, meaning the best companies attract a ton of suitors.

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[00:36:07] Brian Wakabayashi: So there's money there's, they, they don't need money. What they need is the best money. Inside of that sort of round where they're like, okay, let's see whose money are we going to take? And I think that's where Building a point of difference to say like if if you do take funding from west cap You're not just taking funding from west cap.

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[00:36:25] Brian Wakabayashi: You're also getting CoLab you're also getting a number of other services that you will not only save money on but can be are specifi cally sort of created for uh growth stage startups, we sort of our our internal tagline for CoLab is We're a creative studio re imagined for startups. And so, like I said, half of our folks aren't from the industry world.

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[00:36:45] Brian Wakabayashi: They're from marketing, uh, from startup marketing land. So there's a very specifi c product we're building and a point of differentiation we're building in P. I think you'll see more funds do that. One of my colleagues attended sort of a conference where they're like, they're talking to other operating platform folks across P and VC.

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[00:37:03] Brian Wakabayashi: And a lot of this is like, how do we differentiate ourselves in a sea of. of people with, with money and become sort of like a uniquely differentiated or distinctive sort of operator in that space. As far as how agencies fit into all this, I mean, I think, look, it's a strange time in the agency world. I think, um, you know, depending on the market you're in, we're seeing.

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[00:37:23] Brian Wakabayashi: Kind of declines in billable hours across the board. The world that like existed before was that you wanted to get, you know, an anchor AOR client that was a lot of money and a lot of work, but it was, it kept the lights on. Then you started to build in medium and small size clients around it. There just aren't that many RFPs.

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[00:37:42] Brian Wakabayashi: When I was at McCann, I did a study about the last five years of RFPs. And I showed every year the quantity and the quality of each of RFPs were declining for the West coast. Uh, over a five year period, like devastating. I think that's in housing. I think that's consultancies like, you know, Deloitte's of the world, sort of coming in and offering these courses.

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[00:38:04] Brian Wakabayashi: Um, and you know, and now it's AI. Now it's even PE firms. What agencies do, I think is important, but I think it's like where we do it and how we monetise it. Is changing because CoLab isn't, you know, built on bill of hours. It's built on how much can we accelerate the patient growth? Yeah, I like to see that it might work.

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[00:38:25] Brian Wakabayashi: It might not. I'm not, we have looked and we haven't seen anyone doing exactly what we do, but if it does work, I'm sure we'll become a very common model. If it doesn't work, then we'll try something else. But I think the power of creativity, the power of strategic thinking, and all those things I think will still be valued, but how it gets compensated, whether it's in house or through a giant consultancy or PE firm, I think we should be trying these things because I, I think, um, You know, the, the life of an agency person is interesting and that's what's kept me in in all these years.

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[00:38:55] Brian Wakabayashi: It's been more fun than having a real job.

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[00:38:57] Lindsay Rogers: Your first point, I think it's really interesting around like, where is the most valuable money, you know, outside of the dollar value of the money, how a startup can choose to align itself with the most valuable money from a consultancy or opportunity perspective.

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[00:39:12] Lindsay Rogers: And to your second point, I completely agree. I think competitors to agencies are not the landscape they used to be as in direct. Other agencies as competitors, and I think for us as an agency person engaging and employing interesting people that followed the problem and look at the solution through different lenses for us anyway, is a more interesting problem to solve over time than just it having to be, you know, through a certain medium or on a certain channel or in a traditional way.

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[00:39:40] Lindsay Rogers: And that's a bit easier said from a smaller agency than a large one. But to my fi nal question, I'm really interested on your. Perspective here, prior to your career at CoLab, how much of your career would you say was growing brands via gut instinct versus marketing science? And has that changed in your current role?

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[00:39:58] Brian Wakabayashi: I mean, I, you know, the first, the easy answer is it's mostly instinct, you know, I mean, I think the value of experience and skill in agency world is not so much whether you've read the latest report or. You know, up on the latest thing you go from marketing science, you know, it's, it's more about your taste being able to tell if something is good versus not as good or great versus good is the most important thing in what we do.

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[00:40:25] Brian Wakabayashi: Like, a lot of times we'll, we'll start to get distracted by things and move into a world where we're like, well, have you read this or this, this metric is, you know, years ago is access your voice. And now it's something else. I think that, like, understanding those frameworks and marketing science is important.

[00:40:41] Brian Wakabayashi: I've worked on. You know, giant corporations that had a billion dollar ad spends across the world. And we, you know, I work closely with, uh, their sort of effectiveness team and, you know, help design their, their, their copy testing all the way to their brand tracking to go like, let's, this is how we're going to judge effectiveness.

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[00:41:01] Brian Wakabayashi: And that's, and that's a great fi eld in and of itself, but it's ultimately not. What you're paying a creative agency to do, you know, and I think it's something that we got to be careful of is the bigger the client, the more you're going to have a team of people that, that measure effectiveness and report back on ROI and, you know, you're going to be able to influence it just a bit.

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[00:41:21] Brian Wakabayashi: To me, it's like, it's not about staying in your lane, but it's about do the thing that you're best suited to do, which is use the research, use the data to inform, you know, sort of great ideas that can, that can actually change someone's hearts, minds, behavior, etc. And I think that's so long winded way of saying, I think you have to trust your gut.

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[00:41:41] Brian Wakabayashi: There is a little bit of, yeah, early on, you use the data to, to gut check yourself. Come up with a story, come up with an idea, look for evidence to support it and vice versa, like all the research tools we have nowadays, it's, it's amazing. I used to sit there and tabulate, um, you know, uh, surveys that I, that I wrote down on scraps of paper into Excel and then it would make charts and then it was like a whole process now you can get research respondents in a minute.

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[00:42:10] Brian Wakabayashi: You can get surveys back within an hour, you can get AI analysis, you can get synthetic audiences. There's so much that's just at our fi ngertips. What I think though, when you make everything that ubiquitous and easy, is that you still need to come up with something. It's not just about being able to support your bad idea.

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[00:42:28] Brian Wakabayashi: But it's about, you know, making those, making that data, push your ideas further.

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[00:42:33] Lindsay Rogers: .., Tris, Chello's co founder often talks about, you need to learn the rules to break them. And, uh, you know, I think learning the rules and the importance of marketing science sets a great foundation for. framework of thinking or sort of which levers we're pulling, but I think having learned them, then using hunch and sort of fine tuning your own hunch based on your own experience and layering it over the top is where the power lies.

[00:42:57] Brian Wakabayashi: Yeah. And I'll just add, I mean, look, I'm a big nerd when it comes to how brands grow and understanding like, you know, distinctiveness versus differentiation. You know, um, understanding, it's not bad. It's just like a very intellectualised argument, but when it comes down to it, the one thing that they all agree on is sort of like the quality of the creative is one of the most important levers.

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[00:43:21] Brian Wakabayashi: And, you know, that's where I live. And so I try to focus a little bit more on my output rather than on the intellectual justification for my existence.

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[00:43:30] Lindsay Rogers: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time.

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[00:43:32] Brian Wakabayashi: Thank you. This has been awesome. It's been pretty fun.

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[00:43:38] Lindsay Rogers: What I found most interesting about my chat with Brian today was not just his approach to how considered every touch point of a brand should be, but also the role that private equity plays in brand building over the long-term. I think it's a trend we're going to continue to see, and I really love the sort of hand on heart peer approach to brand building rather than the constant pitching or in housing.

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