Dive into a riveting journey with Grant McKinstrie, from learning SEO on the fly to becoming CEO, and discover the team-building magic behind the digital position. Fuelled by video games, trust, and meticulous processes, this episode unpacks the strategies that transform ordinary groups into extraordinary marketing teams.
Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.
- Trust as a team-building foundation.
- Video games’ role in company culture.
- The art of mastering time management.
- The growing impact of AI on marketing.
- The synergy of PPC and SEO for success.
Resources:
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Quotables:
- 4:56 – I mean, playing like Call of Duty and like League of Legends all these years. And also just like kind of reaching that final boss aspect of you just, you build yourself up throughout this entire time. You’ve learned so many different things. Oh, dark Souls is another one to get into it where it’s like you just keep getting beaten down all the time. You die hundreds of times until you really like, understand all of your mistakes all the time. You make a bunch of mistakes throughout the entire period of time. And you just build up to this final outcome of like, we finally conquered the mountain, the demon, whatever it might be. And yeah, it’s just like, it’s the satisfaction of really like reaching an end result after just like busting your ass and like really working hard through it. ‘Cause yeah, it’s really easy to say that like video games are a fun thing, but there’s like so many positive fundamental like building blocks that you can take out of it that you can just apply anywhere else too.
- 11:20 – I was like, holy crap. Like this is just working out all in my favor and how could this possibly go wrong? And they liked me in the interview they’re like, do you know anything about SEO? I was like, I know nothing about SEO, I have no idea what this is. And they’re just like, come back next week, tell us what you learned. Go and read up as much about SEOs you possibly can and tell us what you learned coming back a week later. It’s like, okay. And so I take an unbelievable amount of notes, I bring my notebook into the interview and they just said, we’re really impressed that you even brought in all of your notes here.
- 15:04 -15:04 – It was month to month to month to month constantly rinsing and repeating just how to do SEO in different forms. And I was like, I feel like I could be applying so much more knowledge and so much more value here. And that was when I approached the co-owners at the time and I was like, “Hey, I’m getting a little burnt out of SEO, I’d like to try something else”. And they’re like, “Hey, this is perfect timing.” We are just looking to do like a pivot to like digital position 2.0. And they were like, “Hey, would you have any interest in trying PPC?” and I was like, “Absolutely!”.
- 21:24 – I think is always the biggest part of trying to establish a process is who is responsible for everything at every step of the way too so that nobody is ever confused or nothing gets left undone because somebody assumes that somebody else is going to take care of it. So it was, as I was working through that, I started to knock out a bunch of other process client offboarding, employee onboarding, employee offboarding, employee training, pretty much everything that just sets a foundation of like where the business is going to be able to succeed from.
- 35:51 – I think the, yeah, the trust element is so big and I don’t know, I think it’s, I think a lot of it does come from who is making the hiring decision to, like, the hiring is the biggest part of it is one, initially understanding and defining like who is that right fit to bring into the company, which we’ve certainly had some misses in the past and ultimately like we’ve, we’ve lost a few people because of that, but no one’s gonna be perfect at hiring to begin with.