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Courtney McAara: Hello, I'm Courtney Makara, and this is the Society of Marketing Technology Consulting Podcast. SMTC has joined forces with the marketingops. com community, but our mission is still the same, to educate and support anyone involved in the MarTech world as a consultant.

Mike RIzzo: Hey, this is Mike from MarketingOps. com. If you're thinking about going into consulting or you're already a successful consultant, join us online by becoming a member. As a pro member, you can join the SMTC and other private networks at MarketingOps. com. 

Courtney McAara: In this podcast series, Grant Gregorian and I interviewed guests on their journeys as consultants.

Courtney McAara: We discussed all that it means to be a great MarTech consultant from setting up their business or joining an agency, And how to find new clients and keep their existing clients happy. I hope you enjoy the interview.

And grant and I are joined today by nate hall who is in seattle, washington and is currently a independent Freelance mops consultant.

Hi nate. Hey, how's it going? [00:01:00] Absolutely, and hi grant you're also joining us today, of course. Hello. Hello looking forward to it Yeah, so grant and nate actually have a little bit of a background relationship. Um, and you guys want to Talk about how you met and then maybe transition into how Nate got to his independent spot now.

Yeah. Like, uh, I met Nate, uh, when I was at Engagio and, um, Nate was at SIFT, I think. And so we, we were not, we did not have a consulting relationship. I was a vendor and he was a customer of the Engagio and, um, but then since then I learned that, you know, He went off on his own. So that's why I wanted to uh, we wanted to talk to him because Nate has the the trifecta experience.

He's got the agency experience back in the day. So I asked him about that. He's got the full time um ops, uh it on a team and on an internal team and he's now uh independent, um, so Nate, can you tell us just a little bit about [00:02:00] that background and how did you? Navigate All three of the different things and, uh, and then, and then tell us what made you decide to go off on your own?

Uh, yeah. So, um, full background is kind of out of college. Um, I kind of dropped into marketing ops by meeting someone at a Marquette Roadshow, actually. Um, I knew from high school and I was looking for a job and she, uh, said, okay, well, we have this contracting job at this company called Gigamon. He'll come in and do some Salesforce cleanup, Marketo cleanup, learn about marketing attribution.

And when I got there, worked for a few months, there was a company that they were working with called DigitalPi, which was a consulting agency, um, who I got to know. And they basically took a chance on me to be kind of their first, um, Junior hire, um, to teach all things Marketo, um, and become a marketing ops consultant.

So I did that for two years at [00:03:00] DigitalPi, um, and then moved on to a company called SIFT for three years. Uh, B2B SaaS company in San Francisco, uh, worked as a marketing operations manager, has about 75 people when I joined, uh, and then did that for three years as they grew and just in March, uh, moved out to be a freelance consultant.

Um, Yeah, I could talk a little bit about kind of why I made each move. I think that gives good context. Yeah, I'd love to hear the decision of, you know, you're at the agency, you have that relationship, um, you know, some people think that that's like the pinnacle, that's the best it could be, you know, you've got that work life balance.

A lot of consultants in the agency can work from home. What made you see the SIFT opportunity and think, Oh, I actually want to go in house again. And I want to be an employee. Yeah. So at that time I was, let's see, I was 24. Um, and I had been living in mountain view, um, which is more kind of suburb, [00:04:00] a lot of SAS companies, families, and had just moved to, uh, San Francisco with my now wife and all my friends are working at, uh, kind of B2B SAS companies and other areas where there was awesome culture.

Um, happy hours all the time. You get to meet a ton of people, not only in marketing, but all these different, um, areas where, uh, people are kind of excited to get into the office and meet each other and really become friends. So, um, I was, I was, uh, working from home as, as everyone was at the company, about 25 people.

Um, and in my tiny San Francisco apartment, in my living room with my desk, And I was like, okay, like it would be cool to actually not work from home. Um, even though everyone else at the company was 30, um, or older, had families, love the flexibility of being able to pick up their kids from work, um, or do, or go to the grocery store at the day.

I didn't have any of those responsibilities at that time. So, um, I just wanted to go out and kind of meet people. I lived in, in San [00:05:00] Francisco. Uh, so that was the main. So yeah, it was really more just like a personality kind of time of life decision. Um, great way to network and meet people is to actually have an office to go to.

Yeah, exactly. And I didn't really know, um, any different than the agency life because it was pretty much my career since college at that point. Um, so that was the only thing I was really thinking about at that time. Yeah. And then once you got into that role, was it like a culture shock? Were you like, Oh wait, you know, the grass is always greener.

I made this shift and now I'm in house and, um, I, I missed that flexibility of the agency, but you, you were there for three years. So obviously it wasn't an immediate, uh, you know, negative feeling, but it sounds like it was a positive experience. Yeah, I mean, it probably was a culture shock, but I don't remember it being having regrets when I, when I got there.

Yeah, it was, we were using a different system. So we were using HubSpot when I was a [00:06:00] Marketo person. So that was, that was interesting to get used to, but I've been so well prepped Buy digital pie, um, on the business side and with my skill set that that was pretty easy to get into. And I think I was so starved for like meeting co workers and being, being with people in real life that I, I kind of thrived when I got there on that side.

Yeah. Well, would you say you learned the agency? that was helpful in your full time role? Um, I think the idea of having a client and a customer and figuring out how to have that relationship and, um, you're in a customer service role basically and that is very clear. When you aren't consulting, but when you go internal with marketing ops, especially you're still in that role.

It doesn't, it doesn't really seem [00:07:00] like that because you're in house, but your customers are your sales team, the other people in marketing and they're making requests all the time and you have to kind of approach it the exact same way. Um, I think people really appreciated that mindset, even internally, um, where you're very communicative.

Right. You have to do that consulting. You have to, you can't just wait a day, um, to give someone an update on a project. Um, and that was, and I took that to, uh, to SIFT. And I think really people really appreciated it. Wow. I never, I guess it's, it's very true. You're like in, in, in house Agency. I mean, I know bigger companies are even like technically set up that way.

They have little service centers and mops. It could be one of them. And you know, everybody else in the company is kind of like their stakeholder customers. Did you, what about like, um, project? Like I know that if you take that to the [00:08:00] extreme, you could even. Talk about like your billable hours of at work, like scoping projects and saying like, Oh, I'm overbooked or like, Oh, what's the priority on that?

Um, you know, what's more important, this project or this project. Did you run into any, any of that? It was interesting. I think we were small enough of a company, um, that I just didn't have a ton of people that knew marketing ops and the projects and, and had an idea of what should be prioritized, where I did get that autonomy.

Um, But I didn't have a ton of like people throwing projects at me So I did so I didn't have to manage my time quite like that and the way I was consulting But I did have an idea of what was important to figure out. Um And a lot of that was reporting. Um so that you can then understand what else is broken So I was able to go and kind of focus on building the infrastructure Because I had I had that time because we [00:09:00] weren't running a ton of campaigns at that size of a company and to manage our own team.

Mm hmm. Did you feel like it was, you could go deeper? Like, I know that that's one thing I, whenever I've done consulting versus being in house, one of the things that always appealed to me about working on the same team. You know day over day Is that you can just go way deeper and get into much more detail About the projects and you're kind of ultimately responsible for them as well whereas when you're a Consultant, I mean, I guess depends on what kind of consulting you do, but it's a much more surface level treatment Uh, you know, you can kind of like say oh it's kind of like That's this sort of this is how we do it and you um, you don't have an opportunity to have a year over year kind of like Experience of seeing that project end to end.

Yeah, I I'd agree with that. Um Yeah in [00:10:00] consulting It's kind of you're kind of in some way told what the initiatives are and maybe give an idea of what projects are Specially working on and so If you want to go deeper, um, or something that you may think is equally as important or more important, but it's not exactly that project, um, you feel like you can't really do that because you're keeping, you're billing by the hour and you want that hour to be spent on something that they want you to spend it on.

Whereas maybe if you're in house, I, Kind of go on a tangent for a day or two days and that could actually turn into something um That was a bigger project that was more meaningful Uh because I had that freedom of creativity and ability to go deeper throughout my day and week Yeah, like I uh, I think that's a really that's that's an interesting really interesting point I think it also speaks to what kind of a consultant you Could be or should be like and how you develop the relationship with the client because you're absolutely right when you're in house [00:11:00] You probably by default do have somewhat more creativity because you just have more time I guess on this one specific account um to think of think of other creative ideas to solve problems or Suggest initiatives bring new projects to the table Right as opposed to just being assigned projects, which is what most people think of us Using consultants for it's like hey, we've got all this work who's going to do it Let's hire someone to do it.

But on the other hand the best consultants i've met are uh, they do this these judo moves Where they're brought in They're brought in for a very specific like, ah, we have all this work Um, can you do it and you're like, yeah, I can do it But actually and this is where the judo move comes in the consultant says But why are we doing this in the first place or did you guys?

Think about doing it this other way entirely which would mean that you don't have to do this work at all and in fact the project should be this other thing [00:12:00] entirely and I can help you with this other project and kind of redirect the focus and the priority of the client in a way that the client says wow, you're you're absolutely right, uh, we We shouldn't be doing this, you know what I mean?

It's a, it's a whole new project now. Does that make sense? Courtney, have you, have you pulled the judo move? I'm, I'm learning. I'm a baby judo. I'm learning the judo moves. I mean, it is interesting when it just kind of comes up organically and someone brings you in for, oh, you know, we have this project. And once you kind of dig in, you're like, you know, a week or two there, it's like, you know, this could be more efficient.

And it is interesting. Um, the relationship with clients. Some of them are like, No, just plug and play. Like, we just want it to be done. We know what your hours are. We have an hourly rate or budget. Um, but then there have been some clients for sure. I think it's like a, a mutual judo move together where they're like, Oh, well, what do you think?

You know, now that you've been in our instance for a week or two, do you, do you see anything? And I love, you know, being [00:13:00] given that opportunity to give suggestions. Yeah, I'd say that's something I'm trying to develop too. I don't have quite that at this point. Yeah, I have a question actually for when you were in house at SIFT.

Um, did you have the opportunity to grow that team? Meaning did you bring in any outside consultants or agencies or did you hire full time employees to work with you in MOPS? And how did you decide if it's a hire or an agency? Um, we were not big on agencies on the MOPS side. I actually don't think we had an agency for the three years I was there.

Wow. Okay. And so it was basically on me, uh, for the first year and a half, I was doing kind of most of the execution work in Marketo, managing the instance, managing the, the sync with Salesforce and, uh, most of the surrounding technology marketing. But, um, about halfway through, [00:14:00] we had a big change at the company and with marketing in particular where marketing operations, uh, which was me.

And at that point we'd hired a senior marketing ops manager. That was Mike Grant, if you remember him too. Um, And we split off into a centralized revenue ops team. So we were under demand Chen before then. Um, and so for the second half of my tenure at SIFT, we were revenue ops and, um, I told my manager, I want to be more focused on, uh, just administration, analytics, uh, more on reporting technology and, uh, So we hired a, uh, a MOPS specialist, essentially, who came in and could take over a lot of that, that execution work.

Um, so we ended up going full time with that, and, uh, the person we hired was really, really great, learned super fast, um, and got it from the start, from the recording. whole infrastructure side. So that, that works out really well. [00:15:00] And that's something I advocate for now is just hiring a junior person who is really good at spreadsheets or, or data, um, to come and start to learn the system so you can be freed up for other things.

Kind of like a digital pie did with you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I, uh, so then talk us through the going solo because your timing was terrible going solo. Terrible, terrible. Yeah. Terrible. Tell us about that. So the reason that I did it, um, so I, I talked about how I kind of love the culture of being in house and in the office.

And, um, two years into being at SIFT I moved from San Francisco to Seattle and started working out of a small engineering office and the rest of sales and marketing was in SF. So, I kind of started to lose that part of being in house that I loved and over that next year and still [00:16:00] liked where my role was going in my team, um, but it kind of worn me a little bit there and I was burning out.

And then, um, I also had started thinking about other things that I wanted to do, um, for my career. And just also side passions too and one of them was I'm really passionate about food and I was wondering like how Is this something that I want to turn into a career or is this a side passion of mine? But I didn't have any time to to spend thinking about that or working on that um as well as a couple other things that I wanted to try and and I had the experience of being a consultant And I knew that if I did it as a freelancer, I could actually control my hours in a way that I couldn't at an agency.

So I could do 20 hours or 30 hours a week while trying out other things. And so that in combination with kind of the, uh, the culture of working with my team and being in the office that I had lost from moving to Seattle. led me [00:17:00] to think that the timing was right to try it out. That's so great. It's actually very, very similar to my story.

I was working in a San Francisco or San Mateo based company and I moved to Portland and there was a Portland office. So I would go into the city there, but the majority of the team was still down in the Bay and kept that relationship for, gosh, almost two years of, you know, working remote. Um, and just, it just kind of naturally kind of ran its course.

I think there's a lot of changes in the California office. And again, my personal changes. And I also have like a side passion that I want to dedicate, you know, some hours and stuff too. So we definitely have similar stories there. That's awesome. So, uh, um, how did you, how's it going? I mean, the reason I said that your timing was terrible was because of COVID.

I mean, like you said, Hey, everybody, I'm now a new Salesforce consultant solo. And that's just when COVID [00:18:00] is hitting. How have you been impacted and, um, how, uh, what's your experience so far? Yeah. So, um, it was terrible timing. Like you said, I kind of quit back at the end of December, gave a two and a half month transition.

Um, and was planning to do some consulting for SIFT, which I was leaving to kind of be my source of income while I figured out the rest of my business. Um, and that was dropped pretty much immediately because of COVID. Marketing budgets got slashed. Um, and so, I spent the next kind of 10 to 12 weeks, um, networking.

I was on LinkedIn a lot. I tried basically all the things that like STRs and inside sales was doing at SIFT. I was like, okay, I'm going to try this out. Cold emails, cold LinkedIn messages, um, getting my pitch down to what can be written and your connection requests. Um, and [00:19:00] then talking to, um, people that I'd worked with at SIFT who had left and gone to other companies or, um, somehow knew from just being in the marketer world or the marketing operations world.

So what worked, one of those LinkedIn messages worked out of like the hundred. So I don't know if I recommend it. Definitely that SDR life though. That's, you just got to plug away, right? That's true. That's true. Oh, I have a whole new respect for this experience. Um, it is an emotional rollercoaster for sure.

Um, but yeah, things, things looked really good at the very beginning. I had one, one potential client saying that no shortage of work at least 30 hours a week and then just went dark. So those were, um, those were fun challenges. Um, But eventually using my network and this Mops Pros, I'll give a shout out to that Slack community, um, there were enough opportunities where I could get kind of [00:20:00] full time in, in 12 weeks.

But yeah, that's, so that was kind of the, on the business side, um, for getting clients. And the other part that's been a challenge has just been starting my business, figuring out how to get insurance, How to record hours and send invoices. So that is something that is not natural to me at all as far as that type of organization and, um, finances.

So that has been a challenge and I'm still figuring that out. Yeah. I am also still figuring that out. Um, you know, I did have, I did do my taxes for 2019 and I had some support and some help, so we can have another episode where we go into the nitty gritty of, of all those gotchas and potholes to avoid. I love that.

Sure. Cool. Well, Nate, uh, best of luck to you. Thanks for taking the time, uh, to chat with us and to share your story Yeah, thank you guys for having me really enjoyed it. Thank you. Bye. Bye Thanks, and thank you for listening to this episode of [00:21:00] smtc podcast If you like this episode, please rate us on whatever platform you're listening us on the ratings make this podcast better Because we will listen to your feedback And it makes it easier for other people to discover it as well.

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