Leading In The Time Of Virus
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 228: Mae Karwowski
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business.
In today’s world, leadership means meeting the challenges of two viruses - COVID-19 and racism. In this environment, unlocking creative thinking and innovation has never been more critical.
This week’s guest is Mae Karwowski, the founder and CEO of Obviously. They describe themselves as a team of best in class marketers and technologists who are obsessed with pushing the cutting edge of influencer marketing.
When your company’s success depends on creating and maintaining virtual connections, how do you keep your own company physically connected when the world is pushing us apart?
Effectively solving that problem has been behind the success of almost every business that has increased its value and reputation in 2020.
Here’s Mae Karwowski.
Charles: (01:02)
Mae, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Mae Karwowski: (01:05)
Thanks so much for having me on.
Charles: (01:07)
Obviously this is a big change for your team, how big is your team?
Mae Karwowski: (01:10)
We're 30 people.
Charles: (01:12)
How are you connecting now? Were you all located in one space before the pandemic?
Mae Karwowski: (01:17)
No, we have a few people who've always been remote. Our headquarters is in New York. We have a team of five, in Paris. We have a team of four in San Francisco and also our warehouse and fulfillment center in the Bay Area. Then a team of, currently one in Los Angeles. So we've always been working across multiple time zones, and we're really good at communicating because our clients are global. But I think now we've actually really transformed the company to work remotely. We've wiped all of our calendars, all of our standing meetings completely clean, and we now have a totally new way of working with super short daily stand-ups for different teams, and very dedicated task force for different larger projects we're really trying to accomplish right now.
Everyone is very online, digital savvy in general, so they know how to get into Zoom, which for some large corporations is not always the case. But yeah, everyone's been really good about making sure and checking in, and really make sure we're communicating and connecting in the right way.
Charles: (02:27)
Given that you had multiple locations and were working with clients around the world, how much of a shift has this been for you? What's changed?
Mae Karwowski: (02:35)
I mean, so much has changed. I think, it's a little bit less about the geographic spread and it's more about what are client's needs currently. What are my team's needs currently? There's just been so much uncertainty in people's personal lives. I have a number of more junior members of the team who are back at their parents' place, they're on a Zoom call and it's clearly in their childhood bedroom. It's like, "Okay, what's going on with you? How is that going?" So making sure that everyone is just super clear and focused on what we can control.
That's a big part of my leadership of the team now is like, “Okay, there's a lot of variables that are up in the air that are not up to us, but what are the things that we can make sure that we're crystal clear on?” We've really spent a lot of time with my senior team, just clearly writing down everyone's goals, objectives, both short-term and long-term, talking through those consistently, constantly almost, with their teams to make sure that everyone's staying focused. Then just jumping on the phone and having a sidebar conversation when you're just needing to check in a little bit on a deeper level. So yeah, we're just reinventing everything.
Charles: (03:53)
How much of that is different? How much of that would you have done in February, say?
Mae Karwowski: (03:59)
We've always been a really agile company. One thing that I've said since starting the company seven years ago is like, “Ee're online, we're in social media, literally change is going to be the only constant for us.” So you have to be someone who is comfortable with that to really work at our company. Because we could be recommending TikTok yesterday, and then today saying, “Let's pause on it,” and then tomorrow going full steam ahead with TikTok. There are so many things that are changing so quickly in our space, and that provides a lot of opportunity, but if you're a type of person who really thrives on something super consistent, it does pose a challenge for some people.
So when we hire, we really make sure that we're having people who are really excited and energized by the idea that we could have a really innovative concept on a new social media platform, and we're going to test it out, and it works really well, and we have a totally new revenue stream, and then we change the plan. Or the team almost jokes about how agile our org structure is, but we've really switched around who is owning what parts of the client relationship, from sales to client success. We're continually refining that in a way that, I think someone who's like, "Hey, I just want to be an account manager at an agency, and I want to do that for five years. Then I want to get promoted to account director." That type of person has some trouble at a company like Obviously.
Charles: (5:30)
I'm conscious that agility is one of those attributes that companies have really needed over the last six or seven months. The companies who were more agile have had a, if not an easier time, at least be more successful in terms of their ability to adapt. But I'm also conscious that agility can come at the cost of certainty or consistency sometimes. So how do you manage those two? Because people, obviously, as you said, the people that would be drawn to working at a company like yours would want to be fast moving, fast paced, open to new possibilities, but when you're living in your childhood bedroom, right? Your parents, you also would like some degree of certainty. I imagine that there's some constancy and some things you can rely on. How do you balance those two?
Mae Karwowski: (06:12)
We always talk about it in terms of, what's the foundation? What's the foundation that we're working from? So actually probably in May, so a few months in now, we went back and refined our mission, our vision, and our values, and re-went through that with the entire team. Then every Monday meeting, I go over one value and one or two examples of something that happened the week before, where people really exemplified that value. I think that that really grounds people. If we're saying like, “Hey, the client's needs are number one,” we need to find out what our clients need right now from influencer marketing. Then we can say, “Okay, well, hey, in April everyone's product....” All of our brands are these giant multi-billion dollar brands, their production studios were closed. They had no social media content, they had a huge need. So we were able to say like, "Hey, this is our value. We're going to find a way to help them.” We then had influencers doing live streams, doing Instagram takeovers, creating all the content and filling out the content calendars of some very, very large brands, and doing it from their home office as a way to hit that foundational need, but in a very, very agile, new way of thinking and problem solving. I think if we just have to really, over-communicate what we stand for, where we're aiming and knowing that there could be some variability within that, then I think that usually works really well.
I think it has to be communicated constantly, which is actually new and different and something that was hard for me at the beginning of all this, I think. Just like learning how to communicate the same key things repeatedly, knowing when people need to hear that reinforced over and over again, has become something that I think I've really had to learn how to do in the past few months. Usually I have an idea, I'm like, "Cool, everyone's got it," and then I move on to the next thing. That approach doesn't work as well right now.
Charles: (08:18)
Where did you get the realization that you needed to, in some cases over communicate from?
Mae Karwowski: (08:23)
From my senior team. I think I'm always looking for feedback and always looking for, "Hey, how could I have communicated that better? Should I be the one communicating it, or should someone else in the team be communicating this message?" I think I've really grown a lot in that. A good example of this is just, we've really embraced a more transparent look at the financials and how we run the company, to really give people an understanding of, "Hey, here's our definition of stability as a company in this super turbulent time, here are our goals." Then really reporting on numbers that I was never reporting on previously to a 30 person company.
I think that a lot of people who have much larger companies would be pretty shocked at my monthly business reviews with the entire team. But to be able to break that down with them, and to be able to show them month over month charts and what our goals were in terms of margin and top line revenue every month, has really provided a level of transparency that I wasn't comfortable with at the beginning of this. But I think now is just seeing how much that's meant to the team and how much it has really provided that level of stability, has been just so impactful for me, and I think something I'll take with me for the rest of my career.
Charles: (09:48)
Yeah. I think it's a really important reference, actually. I know that when we were running one of our earlier businesses, we were very invested in exposing as much of the business as we possibly could to our key employees. Not only did I find it engendered trust from them in what we were trying to do, but it allowed them to help us solve the problem in a different way. As they were suddenly coming to us and saying, "Hey, that thing about this part of the financial question or paradigm that you presented to us a couple of months ago, I've been thinking about that, and one way we could address that, or one way we could go after that is this," and they'd come up with ideas that I would never have thought about because they were much more on the front line in many cases. Are you seeing the same kind of response?
Mae Karwowski: (10:31)
Oh, definitely. Yep. Influencer marketing in general as an industry is growing so quickly. My company has grown between 40% and 80% year over year for the past five years. We've just been on this trajectory and we've been growing as the industry has been growing so quickly. My team was just used to me putting an aggressive top line number out there, and then I was plotting away and either hitting it or coming in above it, or coming in below it and understanding why. I think with the pandemic and just with the economic situation, now it's a conversation more around, "Hey, it's not just about that top line number, it's making sure that we're selling to the right clients. It's making sure that we're selling with the right campaign minimums. It's that our margins are in line with where they need to be."
Then now we even have more junior people on the team who were like, "Hey, we sold this campaign. I think the margin is going to really take a hit if we do X, Y, and Z which is what the client wants. Can we have another conversation about it?" To have employees that are that empowered is, I don't know, I think it's really awesome. I also think that a big thing for me is I want my employees to be able to think that they can start their own company, and that they feel like they've gotten some of those tools working at Obviously, and that I'll help and support them when that time comes. So to have people who are now really clearly understanding like, "Oh, here's a balance sheet," is awesome to me.
Charles: (12:08)
So this entire philosophy that you've just espoused, really requires a lot of trust in people. Where does that come from for you? Are you naturally a trusting person?
Mae Karwowski: (12:19)
That's a good question. I don't know, I would say no, I'm not. I would say also that we are consistently challenging our team with goals and trying to get people to see like, "Okay, who's going to overreach? Who's going to over-deliver?" This is…the company that I built, it's all about like, "Hey, you can advance really, really quickly here. You don't need to be an account manager for five years. You don't need to be one for three years." I have an amazing employee who is now at the exec level, who came in at a senior director level in the matter of less than two years. I don't think we need to put specific timelines on people, but we need to give them goals and see, who's going to take the ball and run with it and see if there's a real opportunity working here. Because our company's growing really quickly and space is growing really quickly.
So I think it's just continually having those conversations, and yeah, sometimes people leave the company, and that's okay too. I mean, I'd almost rather really know it and build an exit plan for someone, and be able to have those transparent conversations. So yeah, I like to have a team that I can really trust. I think that it's built over time though.
Charles: (13:37)
Have you hired people in the last six months?
Mae Karwowski: (13:40)
Yes, we have. We laid off a number of people at the beginning of COVID just because our pipeline went from being very, very full to very small in the matter of 14 days. Which I think hopefully I won't ever experience again, but I'm glad to have some of those difficult times as well. We've actually hired back a number of the people that we laid off. Now we're looking at a few new roles that we have open, I'm really thankful to be able to say that as well.
Charles: (14:18)
How are you going about making sure that they're the right fit? Because as you said earlier, it takes a certain kind of person to come in and be successful at a company like yours, for lots of different reasons. How are you now, because you don't have the chance to meet in person, you don't have the chance to see people three-dimensionally, right? You're limited to the screen. How are you making sure that from a chemistry standpoint and culturally you think that these people are going to fare?
Mae Karwowski: (14:43)
Yeah. I'm a little bit less worried that it's happening over Zoom. I think it's more about the preparation. Are we asking the right questions and really having a process? So making sure that we interview, we have between four and seven, sometimes eight interviews for someone to come into the company. Each person that's interviewing that person is asking some of the same questions and some very different questions. We're really coming together, forming a consensus and everyone's buying in, that like, "Okay, I really think this was the right person for the role.” If you're on the technical side, because we have a fantastic tech and product team, that's really driving and at the heart of this agile methodology that we use across the company.
They have really technical tests, so we're just making sure that we're asking all of the right questions. A lot of that is about, "Hey, how do you think strategically? And how do you work with clients? How do you solve problems?" And that for us is huge. Specifically, because the way that our company is set up, my CTO and co-founder has built just this amazing technical foundation that we work off of. It is really eliminated 90% of the very menial tasks that most people do at an agency. Which means that we have essentially just taken off a lot of work from people who are going to be experts, and who are specifically focused at, “You are going to grow this client relationship,” or, “You are going to set up the perfect strategy for this client when they work with influencers.”
Or, “You are going to build a product that we're going to sell in the next three to six months, because this is where social media is going.” That ability to really not have people spending all their time doing data entry into a Google Doc, because that's what the client wanted. It's like, "Oh no, we already downloaded that, it's already here. It's already in one place." It means that we can really focus on getting the best people who we can pay to just do one thing and do it really well.
Charles: (16:55)
How far out are you planning your business? I mean, it feels to me like you're very conscious in terms of the way that you think about building it and structuring it, and I think to some extent codifying it, right? You're trying to make it more robust than simply how you see the world or how you would do something. You've really… sounds that you've created a team, and a structure, and a set of practices behind that. How far out do you plan?
Mae Karwowski: (17:21)
We have a plan, and we have a plan for this year, and we have a plan for say, halfway through 2021, which at the end of next month, it will be all the way through 2021. So we have, “Hey, here's the core foundation of the business. Here is what we know we do really well. Here's what we know clients will buy. We know our current clients want more of. How do we grow the core business?” Then since there's so many things happening in influencer marketing, there are new platforms, there are new trends, there are new tools we can use. What are the additional bets that we should be placing? I have two parallel tracks mapped out. One is the core business, the second is like, okay, additional revenue streams that we need to see, which is going to work and become part of the core, and which we need to drop by the wayside pretty quickly.
That additional revenue stream conversation is always evolving, always changing really quickly. But then the core business, we know where we're going, we know what we're working on in terms of the product and the tech roadmap. Then we're seeing what works and what doesn't, and we're pretty quick to act in terms of like, "Hey, here's the structure of this client team. Why don't we actually have these people report to a different person." We're pretty quick to change things around, but the general gist was, “Here's how much money we should be making. Here's what our margin should be. Here's how much we should be growing. Here's what our campaign minimum should be.” All of that is set.
Then given something like COVID that you're like, "Okay, cool. Here's where we're going to be. Here's the new plan, temporary plan. Here's where we're going again." We're back on track now, which is fantastic. I mean, I think that was a big question mark for me. In June was like, “hat's going to happen Q4 this year?” I don't know, but it's great to see that we are back on track.
Charles: (19:19)
How far out do you dream? For want of a better word. I mean, do you have thoughts about where you'd like to be in five years for instance? I mean, do you think on that scale as well in any part of your planning process, or even just in your blue sky process?
Mae Karwowski: (19:35)
Yep. I think in terms of the bigness of an idea, I would say, then in terms of five or 10 years, and I think earlier on in my career, Instagram wasn't around when I first started and started the company. So you're like, "Okay, so you know that a lot can change in five years, but I think we'll take a major concept that we think could be a really significant revenue stream that's very scalable, and how do we get there? And what are some of the milestones we need to get through to validate it? I think more in terms of milestones than I do a length of time, because just so much changes in the social space very, very quickly.
Because there's not only all the platforms that all of these influencers are on, but there's also a whole economy based on how much influencers are paid to do different things, and that's shifting at all times too, which is part of the larger economy. So given that there are so many factors, it really has to be, “Okay, what are the milestones that are going to validate, or reject this thesis that I have?” And then we go from there. We have a few really, really big ideas right now, which I'm very excited about.
Charles: (20:49)
As the world changes so quickly, how do you make sure that you're paying attention to the right kinds of influences in society? I mean, obviously the pandemic in March changed our world. George Floyd's murder changed our world again. How are you making sure that you're both as a team conscious of the areas that you should be thinking about, and how are you making sure that you're conscious of where you should be taking clients?
Mae Karwowski: (21:16)
Yeah, I think that's a great question. We are constantly surveying influencers, and then we're constantly looking over the results of all the campaigns we're running. Any given time, we're running 75 to 150 campaigns for a set number of clients. So like, hey, what's working? What's not working? And then what are influencers telling us? What are trends they're seeing? What are the things that they want and need that maybe changed from a few months ago? I think a big thing with the start of COVID was January, February of this year, influencers were making so much money on branded content deals, that so many of these influencers were not diversifying their own revenue streams. Then in March, a lot of brands like, “Hey, we’re on pause, we're not doing this, or we'll get back to you.”
I think influencers then started thinking more entrepreneurially as well. Like, "Oh, this is a revenue stream that could go away for me. It is also my livelihood." We started having conversations with influencers about, “Hey, what else could I be doing other than branded content deals? Do I have a passion project that I want to turn into a business? Do I want to do more affiliate work? Do I want to host a webinar series?” Just really help them think through what it means to become an influencer when you're not in boom times? So I think, that’s just been a wealth knowledge.
Then from a leadership perspective, I think my strength is being forward looking and seeing, “Okay, what are the things that influencers want? What are the things that brands want? How do we monetize on that? How do we make brands happy in doing this?” Then management for me is something that is a little bit harder, and that I really lean on my senior team to really help and make sure that we're… here's the idea. Is execution matching? Is the reality matching the idea? That's really how we've been getting through all this.
Charles: (23:21)
Last two questions for you. What have you learned about yourself in the last seven months?
Mae Karwowski: (23:27)
I've learned, I think just how resilient I am as a leader. We were doing so many Zoom calls, I realized that when there is a great deal of uncertainty, people really look to the person who's leading the company. You really have to be on your game, and you really have to be there for your team. They're depending on you, and it is a make or break moment when it comes to being a leader, and for a company too, a lot of companies have failed in over this time period. To really be able to step up in that way, and figure out, okay, what do we need to do every single day? And how do we get back to this trajectory we were on, has been, I mean, I think I'm still processing a lot of it, but it's just really showing me like, okay, cool. I can do this. If I can handle this, what else has the world in store for us? Because we can handle it. We can do it.
Charles: (24:25)
Last question, what are you afraid of?
Mae Karwowski: (24:29)
Afraid of…. I think there are just so many variables outside of my control, of our control in general. I think that's still a fear, we could do an amazing job, we could do everything right, and something else could happen. So I think it just comes back to facing that everyday and saying like, "Okay, yeah, a lot of other things could happen, but if we are preparing for the worst and also shooting for the best, we're in the best position possible."
Charles: (25:05)
Well, I want to thank you for joining me. I want to say that rarely do I see or meet somebody who I think has got such a good balance between the strategic needs of a business, the practical operational needs of a business, and the human needs of a business. But I think it's very impressive, the way that you are taking this company forward, and I wish you enormous success and nothing but the best.
Mae Karwowski: (25:25)
Oh, thanks so much. That means so much to me.
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