Welcome to Stacking Growth, called to action, a show for the trailblazers, change makers, and paradigm shifters. Each week, a different marketing hero who is called to make a change in their field will join us to walk through each step of their journey. They'll cover the highs, the lows, and what's coming next. Together, we'll help you find the changes needed for your own business to win.
I'm Steph Grignola here with Evan Hughes, and today we're so excited to welcome Garrett Ira, founder of Method. Garrett has lived Refine Labs' dedication to building a talent destination by carving out the space for himself to thrive as a solo printer. Garrett, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about your journey. Yeah, I'm so pumped to talk to you both Refine Labs.
People are my people, so yeah, great to see you. I love that. So if you would, maybe start with your in-house or agency marketing journey. Where did you come from in the marketing world and what was your experience before branching off onto your own?
Yeah, so for me, I kind of had a built-in advantage of my career from the start, and that advantage was that I come from an entrepreneurial family. So my parents were business owners, and by the time I was like probably 14 or 15, they sat my sister and I down and showed us everything about their business on paper. So it was like, here's our P&L, here's our statement of cash flow, our balance sheet, and here's what our important levers are, right? Like here's Cost of goods sold.
That one is really important to us. Here's our people costs, here's a piece of equipment we purchased, and our plans to pay it off. So they taught us about the business periodically from that point forward, and for me, that sort of common business sense, especially financially, really stuck with me more than anything I could be taught in college, right? So by the time I got into the workforce and landed a job at an agency, my first roles were like copywriting, content creation, paid media stuff.
And the things I was bringing up in those roles were a lot more related to running the business than anything else. I had a direct line to the owner of the agency, and I was like, hey, most of the clients we're working with need HubSpot, we're recommending that to them. Why don't we become a reseller that would kind of form our offering a little bit better and help us create a new revenue stream as well? Or, hey, we're implementing more account-based approaches.
What if we house more technical capabilities we could sell into that? Or I think when I first started, there were two of us with the same role, and we were hiring for two more. And I remember going to the agency and I was like, hey, do you know that my body and I were only 70% full and also were not nearly as efficient as we could be because we don't have these certain tools and whatnot? And so that was kind of like common business stuff I was bringing up.
And so I kind of veered into every possible lane on top of my actual role that I'd been given. And so fortunately for me, the owner wasn't like, thanks, dude, but get back in your copywriting corner. He saw that as a big advantage and gave me lots of opportunities because of it. I became a director of strategy, hired a team of paid media folks a year or so later, became VP of client services and helped the company pivot to more of an ABM operating, and then eventually became a partner in that agency and built relationships with our key clients and helped even run operations for a period of time there as well.
So that was the first nine years of my career, nine years at one company, but seeing under the hood for a lot of B2B companies and kind of in having that experience felt like a lot more companies than one during that nine year time. But that was the first nine years. And if that kind of, if that sounds like a rosy, awesome story, like you should know that I pretty much made every mistake along the way. I hired people for the wrong roles.
I took on a client that ended up becoming like a quarter of our revenue, but ended up being a bad fit. And there were major consequences because of that. We moved into a super nice office when we were not nearly ready for it, like to attract the right talent. I mean, just dumb stuff, like just dumb mistakes, like some of the things you hear about, like you can learn from someone else's mistakes and some of them.
You kind of have to make yourself, but those are like a couple that I remember that it's like those things stick with me and I'll never make those mistakes again because, because I felt them them pretty directly. But, okay, we're now in like late 2019, late 2020, and that's when I went into my first in house experience and that also was 2021. I discovered Chris and demand gen live and came across all of the refine lab sort of world and I don't think I've ever been to content. Like I have demand gen live.
I think I probably listened to like 100 episodes in a month, maybe. And it wasn't even just the way, you know, a lot of people talk about, okay, he articulated ways that you things in a way that you could digest it and then apply it. And as much as that was true for like lead gen to demand gen and the attribution, mirage and all that sort of thing. I think the biggest change for me was more that I saw this guy who was an executive level guy who was, he'd answer a question about sea level stuff.
And then the next question he'd answer would be like a question about the Facebook algorithm. How do you run LinkedIn ads and like, what's happening with ads? That sort of thing. And I was like, I kind of had believed from my previous experience that I kind of needed to pick one or the other that I needed to be out of the weeds and I needed to be making strategy decks that had that were 70 slides long and needed to have everything sort of perfectly lined out and be separate from the team.
But I always wanted to be closer to the business and he kind of opened my eyes to that a bit. So in that role, I really applied a lot of the principles and applied them pretty rapidly and saw some good results from it. We definitely went up into the right during the COVID period and obviously we were writing the COVID wave, which had its own benefits, but we did that on much more efficient dollars spent and things of that nature. So, you know, I had a lot of belief in a lot of his philosophies and that's what kind of led me to in 2021, shoot him a cold DM and ended up coming on to on to work with you all at Refine Labs.
So I was also lucky to get to work under Evan and get to partner, partner closely with you and kind of watch up close the things that you did and mimic some of the like your ways of thinking and working to which was awesome. And over two years worked with 15, 20 different companies and got to got to be in that very accelerated learning environment and it was an awesome experience. So talk a lot, but I'll pause there for a second. No, no, no, I think there's so much there to unpack.
There's all in a positive way, though. I think what resonates most with me is just the entry point to the business mindset for you was so much earlier than most of us. And I think that there's an almost an advantage there and a disadvantage, right? Because you start hyperthinking on everything, but the advantages, you're kind of entering some of these conversations with a different frame of mine.
So you are thinking tactically about how to execute media strategies. You're thinking more of like, okay, content writer in that role, but how do I apply this or scale this that's more efficient for the business or how can I do my role times 10 and bring on another individual that can help us accelerate. I think that that piece in itself is such a powerful reminder to everybody that it is about like the different spokes along the wheel that you need to figure out how they all work together in order for you to have the proper business mindset or making financial decisions that impact growth. So I guess my question though is you think about, you know, your journey was very intentional.
It sounds like you kind of saw opportunity to grow up. And you kind of saw opportunity to grow and push yourself forward and absorb new challenges. And then you cut to working with refine labs, seen under the hood of a lot of everybody to be companies. When did you know, like when was the point where you're like, I think I've got this, I want to kind of take this on myself.
I want to kind of go into the solopreneur route. I want to just see what that's like. Talk to listeners a little bit about like what would that jump like? What was some of the risk that you inherently took there and maybe that individuals can kind of empathize a bit with that journey or recognize some of those moments.
Yeah, sure. I think I don't know if I've ever had a moment where I'm like, I got this because I've never felt like I've gotten it in my entire career. But I think that when, right, the timeframe was like the first half of 2023 and second half of 2022 as we know there was like a giant correction in the valuation for a lot of B2B, VC backed, especially SaaS. And during that time, there was like upsides and downsides to that whole scenario.
But like the downside obviously was, I mean, there was a lot of correction in team sizes and things of that nature and cutting and stuff like that. And also the upside to it for me was that I saw that companies were thinking differently about the way that they formed their teams and specifically like being more more open to fractional help. Like the word fractional kind of came up for the first time, like in the mainstream more and like second half of 2022. And that's where I saw more opportunities started to think, okay, like if I'm going to be thinking about career 2.0, so to speak, like what does it look like?
And then also being a solo artist of some sort. But I also think that in the sort of there's kind of a cohort of us that started out on our own in 2023. And there were a lot of different reasons for that. One of them was that it kind of became popularized that like being becoming solo was like a dream life that had way better work life balance, which is not a bill of goods that you should buy into.
I think for some people that can be like if you're burnt out and you want to take a break and just take some like light freelance work, as you figure out what your next role is going to be full time, I think that's great. But for me that was not it. It was figuring out like what the next step is going to be. And I think it was really, really starting a business.
And even if it was just going to be me, I really thought about this as a company and what is the company going to be. I think I heard Megan Bowen say one time that she's always been an entrepreneur with a job. And I think she articulated that well because I always thought about that like myself the same way in any one of my roles. It was like I'm an entrepreneur, but I keep finding great people to work with and to work for.
And that's kind of just how my career ended up coming together. So, you know, from me, I think that there's a couple of stars that align. One was that just from a practical standpoint, I had a couple of companies that did want to work with me on the side and were kind of inquiring. And so I had a little bit of a jumping off point, one of which I was already working with at the time.
And the other one was like, I was pretty confident that I could close them if I did decide to take a leap. And the second one was kind of just like the, like I was talking about the mindset of companies being open to more fractional help. So at the onset, the thing that I did was I set out on paper that I was going to take nine months and I was going to be all in on doing this. Like if I was going to jump, then it was that was kind of my timeframe.
It was important to do that, like mostly be just to set an expectation for yourself, but also for your family, for your spouse. And like with me and my wife, it was like, I did not have half of my salary covered by the time that I like when I made the jump. And so that was something that was very different for us. And so you then go through your personal budget and it's like, you know, what if nothing closes for six months?
You know, what's that going to, what's that going to look like? But so I think that that sort of gave me the confidence to say, this is my plan A. I'm sort of an all in all out type of person where I set to do something. I'm going to see it through it to do what it takes to get results and make the outcome happen.
Because I think that a half measure is a bit tougher, right? Like if you're like, this is something I'm trying out and I think that, you know, I'm going to test the water, see if I like it, that sort of thing. Like clients can sense that. They're not about to give you 10 grand a month if they're like, you might not be so sure about this in a few months down the road.
So there's a practical element to or even like, if you're sort of half in, are you going to join a paid community? That's going to really benefit the business. You're going to buy a piece of software that you really need to provide a new service. You're just not going to invest in the business at the same level.
So I think that there's a bit of a difference there in whether or not you're sort of dipping your tone, trying it out intentionally, which can work. But if you're trying to start a business, like the only way I kind of knew how to do it was to be very committed and all into it. I think that's important though, right? And it's honest, a lot of people will dangle, like I'm starting my own business while I'm working full-time here, which is great.
You can have two different paths. But a lot of those times the gravitational pull is back to comfort, security, stability and your role. And you don't take those in here. So having the ability to recognize that maybe you have the personality type that would step back into or fall back into a comfort zone is like step one, recognizing that and how do I make that challenge.
I do think that my question for you is, was there a bit of an accelerant having been on the agency side of the business? So kind of seeing under the hood of all these B2B companies that give a motion to you that you felt like, okay, I feel more confident in this. And I would have had an in-house role with one niche, ICP, vertical, et cetera. I'm just kind of curious back with that on your journey.
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think that there were kind of two advantages to it. One was that I had seen a couple of different agency models. And I had also made some mistakes in prior roles.
Like when I was in charge of hiring at my first agency, the longer one I was talking about was I hired a little bit too fast and then things got very tight very quickly. And I kind of knew that. If I was going to hire a full-time person, I had a better idea of when the timing and what my revenue level should be and what my comfort level was going to be. Because clients start coming in and you start to get excited about what you could build and who you want to bring along with you.
And then you kind of have to level that out because every time I've had a very big swing of upward momentum, it's been followed by a challenging period, right? Where you kind of even out and come back down to earth to varying degrees. But I think that the big piece and the big benefit to your point of it is that I did have the financial, like I had a very clear threshold that if I was going to hire someone full-time, that my revenue needed to be X. And I was like, because of that, I actually didn't even want to hire anybody and if not hired anybody up to this point partially because of that.
And partially because I found a model that I think works for me to be on my own for the foreseeable future and to buddy up with people in different ways which I can talk more about too. Yeah, I would love to hear a little bit more about that and also just the world of building a business is I assume quite different than when you were a child and your parents pulled in like paper statement. So it's so cool that you've had that experience kind of through different eras of technology. What are some tools that you've used or relied on to help you like organize the scope of an entire business on your own?
Yeah, so for me, I think people like the different people I brought in in the beginning was more the big advantage. There's certainly a lot of tools I brought in and I joined Pavilion and got to know a lot of new people. I brought on some new software tools that made reporting more efficient and I'm not going to make this podcast all about AI and different tools. There's enough of that out there.
But for me, it was more how am I going to frame up the offering and how am I going to bring in people and how am I going to structure it and was more the piece. And so initially, like what I landed on, I tried a couple of different things that didn't work so well. But what I've landed on is basically two offerings where I have an advisory offering and that's kind of what you think it would be. You get me working alongside your existing team in the weeds of your data as your demand gen guide and it's just me and I'm able to work in that capacity along with the team and very much like become an extension of the team.
And the second offering is an agency and that was more my primary offerings, more what my background is and what I'm used to and the capacity I'm used to operating in. But I'm one person, right? So I went back and started buddy up with lots of people and specialists that I've worked with in the past and started to kind of put together handpicked teams that work on a contract basis. And I was a little bit apprehensive and curious, especially in the beginning about how receptive prospects would be given its me full time and then it's a team that is contract based and not housed as full time employees.
And so the solution I landed on is just to be radically transparent about that and kind of just like in SAS or tech enabled service like mapping to their problems and the pain they experience. And they start to see the model actually as an advantage, especially for a client that like a lot of my early clients that are still with me, they had a tough agency experience right before coming to me. And I know that's the case with Refine Labs quite a bit too is like if you had a larger, more traditional demand agency that is not mapping activity to real business outcomes that's kind of back in Legion mode or charges based on ad spend was a big problem I had with the agency I worked with when I was in house. I was able to kind of more like map those pain points and show the advantage of the model.
So it's like, hey, you get to work with me the whole time as your strategist, you're not going to have a revolving door of junior marketers, which is a problem in quite a few agencies. You get to work with hand pick high performers that you would otherwise not be able to recruit in house. And yes, they work on a contract basis, but here are all their LinkedIn profiles, like just being very transparent about what it is and how you execute on things just like built quite a bit of confidence. And then we don't charge based on ad spend and then it's like month a month and quit any time sort of commitment kind of landed on that as the general talk track in terms of how we work and what those advantages are over over a more challenging traditional type of agency experience so teaming up with the right people became ended up becoming an advantage.
That almost becomes the tool, right? And I think that it's okay to write here that there isn't a perfect formula to go out on your own. There isn't the perfect formula to set yourself up for success and know you're going to make it. It's like what pieces of the puzzle am I going to identify based on the needs of the time?
And then that kind of comes together. And I think that that to your point is like, okay, I'm doing more of an advisory. I don't necessarily need those fractional pieces of the puzzle yet, but as I start to get more interest or I find more curiosity coming there and following trends within the marketing space about budgets are a lot tighter. People are more willing to do a fractional support function because they can terminate it a lot quicker, right?
The first to see that more traditionally, but being able to recognize that is such an advantage for an individual who is looking to build on their own because then you aren't stacking the deck to aggressively at the beginning and setting yourself up for failure because to your point, one client churns early on that can have a lasting impact your revenue. So sure the tools like I'm sure we do three episodes around like the tax ability, the taxes here, what tools he is reporting and functionality. And I think that, you know, it's probably a couple other questions related to this, but it's so important to recognize that I can't identify and I know I say this all the time, but there is no like perfect playbook to create your own business or to do marketing effectively what you're doing is marketing yourself. As an individual and your business to a broader audience.
And the way that you do that is unique to yourself and what your specialized in versus what other people are potentially bringing to market. And even just recognizing that the word solo printer is loaded in isolation and I want to dig into just a little bit more about how you found community launching out on your own. Obviously, you've got people that you're connected to that you've relied on for support, but running things on your own. Where do you find that like emotional support?
Yeah, totally. And I think that that's where like being a traditional solo was never necessarily a super attractive option to me because, you know, ultimately I want to work with people I want to work with teams and it takes a team to make an drastic impact. And so, you know, the way that we're structured, I think I have eight people on my roster right now that I'm butting up with. We work like a team.
I mean, it's very much like it was in agency land where we're all in Slack. It's just housed on my side of things. Responses are still rapid. Like we're still doing everything in real time and it still feels very much like an agency experience.
So I think that that's like that's one piece of it. The other one is that there are communities that are out there and have popped up that are a lot more prevalent than they were even I feel like two or three years ago. So one is communities of actual solo producers that I've been part of and had had like a little bit of engagement there. It hasn't been as valuable as some of like the existing refine labs groups and other things that I'm part of necessarily by being part of pavilion has been a definitely a valuable thing to connect with other business owners or bounce questions around connect with new people and all of that sort of thing.
But I think the key is that I mean, like anything like you get out of it what you put in and so any community that you enjoy, like there isn't anything automatic that happens like this isn't your new like W two type of structure like you do have to go out and you have to go get it. You have to create meetings engage with people like even though I haven't done it like a quote unquote outbound motion and like done all of that. I'm definitely really intentionally networked and identified people who are connected closely to others. I'm connected with them things like that to try and try and help them and drum up new business which has been pretty much all I've done in this first two years so far.
So what about? Yep. What do you know? Yeah.
Oh man, this is, it's always interesting right to like talk to individuals about their journey and their path to whether it was marketing specific career and milestone. But a lot of times there's moments where it's kind of this like, Oh shit, or what happened or did I make the right decision and I'd love to know like kind of pivoting a little bit and recognizing like there's been a lot of milestones of success and I know you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation. There were a lot of risks that the business took early on that you saw some failures and or you guys recognize weren't good wins but since you kind of stepped into the solo space if there's anything that you're willing to share kind of along this journey that's been your lowest point would love to hear about that kind of what you learned from it and how you put yourself forward. Yeah, no for sure.
There's been there've been plenty so I think the first one is my sales process. So to speak. I was a little bit spoiled because when I first started I kind of made the announcement there are the first couple of clients came a little bit easy in hindsight. Like they heard I was starting an agency they knew of me they wanted a slot and I was in the number one position before they reached out to me which is where you want to be but there was like very little convincing that I had to do and so in that after those first couple which are still with me today I met with other companies that I wasn't as closely connected with and I kind of treated them like the same as the others and I showed up to the call I'm like here's the offering it was sort of like here's what it is take it or leave it sort of thing and turns out that doesn't really work.
You have to consult you have to advise enough during the sales process so that they can really see your mode of thinking and I was like I'm going to have to do something in order to like show my work a little bit better I'm going to have to show my value a little bit better during the sales process. And this kind of comes down to the question that somewhat divisive I think is do you do free work during the sales process or not. And I think there was like even a post I saw last week on LinkedIn that was very viral had like thousands of interactions on it that was like I'm never doing free work again. And I can understand that because because if you get burned and you spend days doing free work and they intended on closing with you and and they didn't then you can definitely feel burned because of that but I think that if you like if I was if I was a copywriter or designer or I delivered like a specific tactic that that is open to a lot of interpretation or kind of feels that pull of commoditization a little bit more I probably would not do free work because you have a you know you have a portfolio if they're asking for free work I might be a little bit suspicious of that.
But if you're confident and it's kind of like between you and one other vendor that they're trying to decide between they have two good options and you deliver a strategic service I think there's nothing more valuable you can do then then do like even if it's a light audit where you can provide insights. Two clients that I landed it was largely because of the insights that we had in a in a paid media audit right like we found 110 grand of ad spend that was objectively not contributing to the business and that you know that pays for my company's fees and two or three quarters that makes the whole business case a lot easier when you when you see those pieces and they can see you connecting the CRM with what's happening. In the weeds in their paid media like I think that there is there's a lot of value if you know that you're going to get a valuable insight out of the free work that you're that you're doing if you can do it so free work was the other piece I mentioned that the whole radical transparency idea that really improved my sales process as well which is like I believe it or not my website has helped me get clients even though like traffic is not nearly what it is in someone just looking at your LinkedIn profile for example. But during the sales process I've pointed them to the website and it's like all my all my current clients are there all of their LinkedIn profiles are there.
Graphs of the results we've gotten so far there and I invite them to reach out to any one of their choosing there's it's it's rare that a larger agency is willing to do that with that sort of level of transparency and confidence and so. I was able to land a deal because of that as well so those are kind of two of the things that I mean sales process in general that. Had been a bit of a struggle after the first couple clients came easy. Yeah you definitely don't you can't just expect us to continue to roll in right and I think the struggle where people appreciate and kind of attached to was there a scenario that you were burned on any sort of client work I'm actually curious of this because I'm a big advocate of.
Kind of pre work when it's like hey I'm interviewing for a role and here's like our quarterly strategy and plan that I would focus on I'm of the mindset like I think that there should almost be like. 25% of that delivered if it's catching the attention and you want to move forward versus like here's your quarterly plan that I would implement if I stepped into role I don't I'm not a fan of that but I'm here from your perspective did you ever present something and kind of feel like you were burned or what kind of. Or has that not happened and that's why to your point it's just been like a positive advocate for your growth. It hasn't happened up to this point but I do think there's absolutely degrees to it like you're talking about like you can you have to have a bit of a sense to say am I really like on the one yard line with them and they just need to see something and for their confidence to.
To take you across the finish line or like have you not really been on the same page you're totally feeling each other out still and now they're asking you for a comprehensive type of plan I think that those are two totally different scenarios and like when. The other one is you could you could do the deliverable 25% of the way that's kind of one way of thinking about it another is it's like I'm going to give you two pages of recommendations and they're going to be relatively high level and directional and where we're going to go and that way you're not dedicating a ton of your time and you're just dedicating maybe a couple of. A couple of hours or an afternoon to it and doing that also qualifies the client right like if you're if you're delivering something strategic you think it's valuable and then the client looks at it and goes. Yeah I'm not so sure about this and is grilling you about it in some way then you're probably is probably not a good fit you're probably.
Identifying something that is going to end up with you know potentially a painful process as you go along so. I think that there are definitely degrees to it and times that you should and shouldn't do it but I know that for one of my clients that ended up becoming one of my best and strongest partners. It was like the more of a paid media audit three four pages that got us the insights that got us across the finish line. I appreciate that perspective.
Definitely a viral topic I think it always will be and it's just a sensitive subject right now as so many people are looking for jobs open to work opportunities so always just curious to perfect it. Yeah yeah absolutely. So we've come full circle you started your childhood as you know learning entrepreneurship and learning about businesses as you've launched your own what have you learned about yourself let's celebrate you know something I know we just went down the the whole of failures but what are some things that you can appreciate about yourself as a marketer as an entrepreneur based on how you've run this company for the last couple years. Yeah there's definitely things I've learned about myself through the process.
I think so one of those kind of more of a practical piece is that I never saw myself as a salesperson or a business development person. That was kind of a limitation in the back of my mind like I'm a marketers marketer I like to be in the weeds of things like to be in the data and then I like to zoom out and kind of help translate that. My friends who a lot of sales people but I'm not a great business that person is what I've kind of always thought and that hasn't really turned out to be true right like I think in a service business some of the best sales people and business development people are great because they are. They are able to teach their way of thinking they're able to share their learnings and put their expertise on display and to do that between multiple companies that they work with so I think that's been like one of the bigger bigger learnings for me.
The other one I would say to is just a note about stress and how you handle stress. So there's a lot of people that have they have a self awareness that they're like I'm outside of a job like that is when I'm stressed and I like I never want to do this I never want to have my own thing I never want to have you know the need to create a pipeline on the back of my mind and that's like the worst type of stress to them. I found out that that's not the worst type of stress for me it's more it's more for me like knowing lots of people are relying on me for their own like well being that like that's more stressful to me than it is having having my own thing because like I'm very okay living with the consequences of my own decision even if even if something goes wrong right like I think the thing that was most empowering was that I'm much more of a quote unquote dispassionate advisor than I was before and other jobs meaning I'm just going to tell you what I think there's not going to be a lot of fluff around it. If things are going wrong if we're blowing money you're going to hear about it from me first and hear about it very quickly or the business is heading in the wrong direction and focusing on the wrong things.
I'm okay living with the consequences being able to bring that up where you know there's a lot more going on when you when you do work in house or you work for someone else there's. They're just are competing forces and I found that to be actually a lot a lot less stressful to me in that way. Surprises me on the pipeline front that's like where my anxiety probably would start in the initial part but having not been a journey right I can't necessarily say one way or the other. Appreciate you sharing kind of opening up the aperture a bit more to your journey I love to close out with a question as pertains to however you want to apply this right to your role your responsibility or your journey or just marketing at large but what's a shift in marketing that you see coming next and how do you think listeners should prepare for it in terms of building their skills building their knowledge or preparing.
Yeah. On this one it's like how do you just not say AI and give like a can to an answer. I think that the nutshell on that is if you're not an AI practitioner like you need to block the next three business days and be playing with AI tools so and we can probably leave that there. I think directionally though you have a lot of excitement around like what's being called GTM engineering and there's a lot of new exciting technologies and tools out there we're using several of them I definitely see the value in it and it's very exciting because the tools are compelling.
But I think that there's just a there's just a reminder and a grounding that needs to happen that you know when you open up LinkedIn and it's like you can find a signal and you can append this data and then you can use an AI bot to write a custom message that's tailored and scrapes a website to get the exact message and then try and write some email that translates that email into an AI generated video that's pretty good and then another tool delivers it to their DM inbox in LinkedIn and I'm just like good lower like that is amazing and that is like not what we need to be doing this session. Right. Yeah. Like it's just there's levels and there's an order of operations and a priority like a prioritization strategy that needs to happen when like if you if you have a hundred pounds to lose the first thing you do is you don't go and get a food sensitivity test you lower your calories like you lower your caloric intake first like as boring as it is that's the first thing that you absolutely need to do so it's more a reminder to say you have to nail the fundamentals first you have to have a a common sense prioritize bottoms up account prioritization strategy first because I see companies that get obsessed with this type of stuff and they feel like in order to keep up they need to be running a very complex motion when their demos show rate is below 50% or or like the marketing the sales handoff process is broken or somehow in bounds are getting responses two days later and they can't book their own meeting like it's always it's always something fundamental like if you have a new big huge goal it's the fundamentals first or if you have if if growth is stalled and you expected it to be higher than it is it is almost always something fundamental and not that you are not the one nailing you know the shiny object of the day.
I so appreciate that perspective and point of view and I think a lot of companies will try to buy themselves out of their poor forecasting what I think it's average 40% of most ass tools purchased by clients are never touched after the first. So there's a lot of waste of budget in early there and when you get distracted by all of these AI tools shiny object and it just promotes spam and it just didn't do in your message a bit more so love that perspective and it's just a reminder to kind of reset so thanks for sharing. 40% are never touched that is painful that is like that is awful. No it's like 40% are touched and in if you're looking at higher ticket SaaS like more than 50 60% of deals are ending in no decision like you're not losing them to competitors you're losing them to the status quo.
We forget that there are very basic data points that that really matter and where the real opportunities are to go after but it's just it's not a sexy. It's very persuasive when they're used in the right way or approach with the right narrative otherwise it's it's getting ugly out there so yep for sure. Well on that note thank you so much Garrett for coming on and sharing your journey with us we're super grateful for your time and your insights and we hope that everyone listening will fully commit to the space that works best for you and make sure you're nailing your fundamentals. If you want to know more about this journey make sure to subscribe and share this episode out to your network and if you want to nominate a marketing hero to come on and chat with us feel free to get in touch.
Thank you so much for listening we'll see y'all next time. Thanks everyone.