Meet Allison Tivnon, Middle of Six pursuit strategist and the author of Marketing at Low Tide: How to Recession-Proof Your Marketing Team. In this two-part discussion, we focus on the elements and structure that make for a successful marketing team. Whether you are a ‘department of one’ or one of many, we'll look at the skills necessary to support your firm and keep your sanity!
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.25 | Domain: 6
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we're chatting with Allison Tivnon.
Hey, Allison.
Good morning, Wendy.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
This is very exciting to be talking to you on this podcast.
I know, isn't it fun?
I'm so glad you're here.
I have no doubt we're gonna have a really great conversation.
I was thinking about how typically our meetings together usually go over time because we get so deep into the topic and there's just like one more thing, one more thing.
So I have a feeling Kyle's got some editing in front of him to make this a reasonable length podcast.
Yep.
Oh, I can't wait to dive into this subject matter too.
Yeah, it'll be really good.
And before we get into it, I feel like it'd be nice for you to share a little bit of your background with our listeners, you're a really special member of our team because before joining Middle of Six, you published a book and that's unique to our group.
And I'd love for you to share a bit about your story, how that came about and what the book is all about.
Oh, well, it actually started in 2018 when I created a presentation deck called Marketing at Low Tide, How to Recession Prove Your Marketing Department.
That was derived from the fact that I worked in an economics firm and was asked frequently, when is the next recession going to hit?
Because I had access to folks that knew information like that.
And it got me thinking about the fact that at the beginning of my career, which happened to start right as the Great Recession was taking hold, I saw a lot of really short sighted decisions being made at AEC firms that were letting staff go in marketing or downsizing their departments, or just really tying their hands behind their back and not giving them the tools that they needed to to pivot into recession-oriented marketing.
So I created a deck that was centered around that.
And then in 2020, I took a sabbatical and spent the next six months converting it into book format, same title, about the same structures of presentation, and ended up with a product that when I launched it in October of 2020, it started selling immediately.
It was hitting a nerve with folks all across the industry and all across the country that were all grappling with the same type of issues.
How do you prove your worth during recession to your firm leadership and protect your internal resources to make sure that you are making the moves internally and externally to position yourself for when the economy does come back?
Awesome.
Thank you for that overview.
And it sparked like 10 questions and comments I wanted to share.
But we're going to actually save a lot of that conversation for a dedicated podcast.
I personally have purchased this book for our clients and share tips from it.
And you've done a great job outlining the things that a marketing team or other leadership team should be thinking about preparing their marketing staff for this kind of downturn or just whatever the tumultuous times that we are in, whatever you want to call that.
So we'll take a very close look at your book at some point.
It'll be really exciting to go into that some more.
But the topics that you've selected for us to discuss today are very related to your expertise that you gained from doing interviews related to the book.
Oh, I cannot wait to dig into it.
Yeah, well, it's a really phenomenal resource, and I think it has been successful and resonated well with marketing teams and marketing leaders who went through the 2008 recession or who are just aware of kind of what could be ahead of us and wanting to plan and prepare and use some of those lessons learned to make great decisions going forward.
So we're totally going to dig into the book on another episode.
There's so much to cover in that.
But what's great about today's conversation is it's actually a little sneak peek tidbit pulled from content and your research that you did on the book, because we're going to talk about recipes for a successful team.
I'm thinking that this is really influenced, Allison, by your conversations that you had in preparing for the book.
You had reached out to people across your network from marketing coordinators, directors, firm leadership to get their input and information.
And I think a lot of that's going to show up here in this conversation today.
So it should be really great.
So Allison, can you share a bit about the different people that you interviewed and talked to to prepare your content for the book?
So in the course of writing the book, I realized that it couldn't just be me prattling on page after page.
I was going to have to inject it with some true experiences from other people in the industry.
And so I reached out to 20 different marketing professionals that I had relationships with, everything from marketing coordinators all the way up to marketing directors, and some folks that had spun off on their own to create their own consulting firms, just to get their insights of what their experiences have been, working in this industry in marketing as part of big teams, marketing departments have won.
And the insights that I gleaned from those interviews has informed the way that I look at how you structure marketing departments in ways that are going to be agile and able to pivot regardless of what's happening in the economy.
Well, excellent.
So that gets us to our first question here, which is related to the pressures on a marketing department.
So if you're a marketer, I'm sure you've felt that.
It can be very intense at times.
And it has an enormous impact on the overall success of the firm and definitely on the health and mental well-being of your marketing staff.
So considering all of those factors, Allison, what would you say is the recipe for a successful team?
Oh my gosh.
Wendy, you and I could talk about this all day long because you've been in this industry a long time as well.
You've worked at multiple firms as I have before we landed here.
So we've seen a lot of different mixes.
And I think that a recipe for a really strong marketing team has to have structure.
I worked at a firm that had no structure at all.
They called themselves a flat structure and that extended into the marketing department.
So everyone was on an equal plane.
Everyone had the same title.
There was no leader.
There was no one who would go into the boardroom and advocate on behalf of the team.
But also sometimes you need to have someone who's pointing in a direction and saying, this is where we're going to go and creating team unity around that.
And if everyone is looking at each other on an equal plane, even if some have more experience than others, you get into tribalism, you get into ego, you get into people who are protecting their turf or their way of doing things.
You end up with templates scrolled away on people's desktops and just mismanagement of internal assets.
And it leaves so much space open that needs to be filled with connection and discussing professional development and creating a place to go.
So that I think is the absolute number one thing, is it cannot be a flat structure.
It has to be a ladder.
You have to have a place to climb.
Right.
I like that idea that structure is helpful because you have someone in that leadership role, which is actually ready and willing to have challenging discussions, bring new ideas to the leadership team.
And, you know, it doesn't have to be adversarial, but just advocating for the marketing team as far as resources and focusing on strategy.
I have been in, have witnessed scenarios where the marketing team does not have a strong structure.
And what you see right away is that RFP, RFQ requests just flood into the department.
And there isn't someone to quarterback and say, hey, have we, what's the strategy here?
What's the go-no-go decision?
Is this the right use of our resources?
What are we sacrificing to go and do this?
You know, those opportunity costs.
And a structure is a really simple piece of that puzzle that helps your team from just being overwhelmed with the requests from an entire company.
And also, if you can aggregate out each individual's issues, what is making them stumble through their day?
What is making it impossible for them to get through their checklist?
You can look at all of that in concert together and start to identify weaknesses within your department, either in terms of missing a skill set, having too much of one type of skill set, or not having the right tools, resources, or firm support to do your jobs well.
And if you don't have the ability to have one person who's collecting all of that feedback and information, there's no one who's going to be able to then transmit it to the decision makers in your firm.
When I say a leader too, I don't mean someone who's gonna come in and just set all the rules and direct and tell people what to do and be removed from the day to day.
Yeah, that's a really good point, that the leader is providing a clear vision and it's their responsibility to see what the team needs as far as resources, tools, training, and then moving things, blockers out of the way so that they can be more successful.
I definitely agree with that role.
And even within a very small team, there are ways to divide up responsibilities so that someone is paying attention to what's the educational opportunity for the team, how can we be more inspired, what are the roadblocks that are getting in our way so they can be more successful even in a very small group.
And you're absolutely right.
Even in a department of one, you have to have the data.
You have to be able to pull together a list that is gleaned from metrics to show to your leadership when you need to make decisions or even at a point when you have to hire again.
It's a very hard argument to make in any scenario, but you have to have the data to back it up.
Wendy, I'm curious.
You spent many years working as internal staff at firms throughout this industry in the Puget Sound region.
You then went off and started your own company and had a blank canvas to start with.
What were some of the things that you learned throughout your career that informed how you decided you wanted to build out your own team?
Yeah.
Well, my experience comes from the general contractor side of things.
And my first role was as a design manager in a marketing team of about five or six.
It fluctuated a little bit.
And in that scenario, we were really well rounded.
We had business development, marketing leadership, technical writing coordinator and QC person.
Someone focused on social media.
And I had sat in the seat of design manager.
And that felt really good.
It was also my first introduction to AEC marketing.
So in a lot of ways, I am sure that I have modeled Middle of Six's staff to be in that way where we have subject matter experts that can lead the team and provide guidance to the team.
In that first organization, everyone brought their expertise and we were all better for that.
And you also could rely that they were studying the best practices and aware of what their roles were.
So I felt like that was a very healthy and strong way to organize a department.
I think also one thing I've noticed about my colleagues here at Middle of Six is that we've all gotten past the rigidness of this is the way you have to do something into a place of extreme flexibility to lean on each other's expertise, know that we don't each individually have all the answers, and not feel like that's a slight to ourselves to ask the question.
I think that is a roadblock for a lot of department staff is that they think they have to know all the answers.
We talk a lot in our industry about imposter syndrome.
I don't think anyone gets through their career without feeling that.
I'm not going to say on a daily basis, but it's pretty-
At some point.
Yeah, it's often, and it's not a bad thing, because it's a signal inside of you that you're stretching and you're growing in new directions.
You're taking a chance.
And if you have a team around you that is supporting you in that and understands that there's always going to be new ropes, new obstacle course, there's always going to be something that you're going to stumble your way through on the first pass.
If you have support to do it again and again and get it right, all of you come out of it just better and more bonded together.
For the marketers that are the loan marketer in their firm, you have S&PS.
You have a network of people that you can lean on.
If you don't have the answer, someone else out there does.
Yeah, a sign of a healthy, strong team has some of the flexibility that you just mentioned there, Allison.
We are really fortunate at Middle of Six because we are five years old and we've hand selected every person.
They really, really want to be there.
We're not carrying a lot of baggage at this point.
In some situations, you may have the team built in a different way or roles are unclear.
That can be challenging.
But I think starting off at a platform of trust and respect of your team, when we make a hiring decision, the entire team is involved in vetting and having those conversations.
So before the new team member logs into their email for the first time, we have a really good sense of what it's going to be like to work with them.
We're building a relationship to start, and then the work comes.
I feel like that balance and that focus has worked really well for us, and I would definitely recommend a slow, methodical, thoughtful approach to hiring so that you can bring those teams on and start off with a lot of mutual respect, and trust that they're going to do what they've been hired to do.
And there's also the fact that we have a very unique business model and that the staffers that we need to do our work really well need to come in with some rubber on the road.
They need some experience working in-house.
They need to have a pretty good defined skill set toolbox to come in with them.
And a lot of departments, you want to create that continuum.
So you have entry level all the way to ideally a marketing manager, a marketing director in the firm, and you've got folks that are on the journey at totally different levels of understanding and experience and just time.
So there's this mentorship that has to get baked into that.
And you have to have a lot of room for the folks at the starting point to just wrap their heads around the role itself and how it's going to affect your ego, your drive, your personal life, and make room for that because this is such a demanding job.
It demands a lot of your heart, not just your head.
And I know you get what I'm talking about with that.
You end up really living this kind of a role, and that can be a very jarring experience for someone that's new to the industry.
I don't think anyone gets out of their first year in this industry without at least one really good cry.
Oh, my goodness.
I know.
I actually have a rule now.
I don't cry about work, but I had to put that in place because I used to cry when I would lose a proposal or something like that.
And even though I care just as much as I used to, I don't really let it get to my heart quite the same way.
Yeah, and that also, I mean, as a leader, you got to be the strong one, but you also have to make room for grace, make room for people that are still building up that thick skin.
And I think that's another part of this is that we can't ever think that we're going to be somewhere forever.
There is so much leapfrogging in our industry.
Departments are typically small, and if you want to advance, sometimes the only way to do that is to leapfrog out and into another firm.
You're never done, and you're never in a position where you can ever stop thinking about the fact that you are training your successor.
And if you keep yourself in that mindset of there always being an element of education and everything that you do, pulling people up and allowing them to hear your story and your experiences, sharing that with them, and making room for them to grow, you are doing right by your firm.
You're making a pathway.
So at some point when you exit, someone else is going to be able to come in equipped to continue on the work at that firm.
Okay, you said so many things that I want to comment on, and I don't want to get confusing here.
So I'm going to start with one piece, which this is, I don't know, I'm not a sports person, our producer Kyle will have to chime in and correct me if I get this wrong.
But you did talk about your in-house team has a structure that is different than our team as a consultant.
And I think that is important to just pause one more second on you're so right, that coach who I think is best if they are a player coach, right?
They know how to do the work, they do it, they're in the trenches with you.
I feel like that just creates camaraderie, and I don't know, just that to me is a winning combination.
So you need that coach.
And then you have, you have your all-star team that could do this in their sleep, for sure.
You want to have some of those players as part of your group, but you also need to have the younger team coming in, the younger players who maybe are gonna bring a different perspective based on their experience or past experience, maybe in a different industry, or just because maybe they're in a different generation, so they're opening our eyes to new things, new ways of communicating, whatever that could be.
And then getting to your point that you made of people are going to move around.
It's actually very, very healthy.
I would not recommend that you should, as an owner of a firm, you would expect, I'm gonna have a marketing director here for 20 years.
That may happen, and fabulous.
Great.
There's a lot of good reasons for that.
But you can have so much positive energy that comes from people coming in and out of your team, and looking for new people and realizing this is an opportunity to restructure or add a new skill set.
So I like that team analogy.
It makes sense, and it doesn't need to be very fixed to be really successful.
One of the other things about this job that I think, I don't want to get into demographics too much, but we definitely see a lot of women in this industry.
And I think part of the reason why is because there is a really high, almost a nurturing and maternal aspect to the work that we do.
There is that in coaching as well, where you have to bring people along with you.
We do this all the time with our technical staff.
We have to explain to them why they have to get us materials on time.
We have to kind of coach them through how to write their resumes, which can be a vulnerable thing to do.
People don't like talking about themselves, but we also have to be able to really be flexible in the fact that things are not always going to go right, and we have to figure out problem-solving and solutions and pivoting constantly, and that creates a lot of internal strain on the team.
And to have someone that's in a leadership position, to be able to protect the team and stand up and speak out for them, but to also do those check-ins that are so important, mental health check-ins with each person, say, how are you doing?
Do you have what you need to do your job well, is so vitally important to our industry.
We're going to stop here and break this conversation into two parts.
Remember at the beginning when I predicted Allison and I would go along?
Well, there you have it.
We have a goal of keeping each episode under 30 minutes, so that they can be easily listened to during your lunch break, or on a walk, or a midday trip to the coffee shop.
Join us for episode 3, where we'll dig even deeper into the recipe for a successful team with Allison Tivnon.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
Cattle Davis is our producer with Graphic Design and Digital Marketing by Allison Rose.
If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, send an email or voice memo to theshortlistatmiddleofsix.com.
If you missed anything or want more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.
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Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
Bye everybody.
The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.