We talked with Nick about:
- How to set up your marketing leaders for success
- How to know when to hire an integrated agency and when to hire a CMO
- How to align your marketing efforts to your overall goals
- Niche marketing, integrated operations, and business strategy
About Nick Richtsmeier:
Nick Richtsmeier is the principal at CultureCraft, an innovative firm dedicated to providing tools that unlock critical questions for wealth management professionals and firms. With a career deeply rooted in the wealth management industry, Nick spent nearly a decade as an advisor before transitioning into executive roles. His experience includes serving as CMO and COO for small to mid-sized registered investment advisor (RIA) firms, where he identified recurring issues that kept RIA businesses stuck in unproductive cycles — a key factor fueling the current era of consolidation. Passionate about addressing these challenges, Nick founded CultureCraft to equip wealth managers with the insights and strategies needed to break free from these cycles and achieve sustainable success.
Featured Resources
- Nick Richtsmeier on LinkedIn
- CultureCraft on LinkedIn
- CultureCraft Blog
- Why CMOs Never Last article on Harvard Business Review
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Full Audio Transcript:
Lauren (00:05):
Nick, welcome. We're glad to have you here today.
Nick (00:07):
Oh, thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Lauren (00:09):
Yeah, so I have just enjoyed all of our conversations today. I think one of the things I super appreciate about you is you have not only been in the weeds, you've been on boots on ground, with so many experiences. I know you've worked with TD Ameritrade, you've worked with a variety of financial services businesses, I should say, but that's not like your 100% sweet spot. I know you work with other companies as well, but you've seen the nitty gritty in the weeds of all kinds of production to the very, very high-level strategy of really being able to go in and really unpack some of the really difficult questions and be able to change and shape culture and adjust course. So I'm excited to get into that today. And more specifically, we're going to get really into what is the role of the CMO or how do we unpack that today. So before we do that, do you mind just sharing with folks a little bit about your background, go into that a little bit more, and your experiences?
Nick (01:10):
Yeah. I've been in or near wealth management for the bulk of my career. I was an advisor for almost 10 years, sold my book of business, ended up moving into more enterprise executive roles, and part of that was a CMO/COO role for a small to midsize RIA, and really found I was falling in love with these repeated themes that were keeping RIA businesses sort of locked in a cycle that wasn't working right. And it's part of what fed the consolidation era we're in now. This was in the mid-2010s that there were just questions people were having a really hard time answering. And consolidation increasingly became an answer in the M&A environment. So I created CultureCraft to start to give people tools to unlock these questions. A lot of them apply to wealth managers and wealth management firms. It's really any entity that has to leverage trust to grow the business. Everybody says, well, trust is the engine of growth for every business. It is, but it's different in these long-term high-dollar relationships like investment management and the RIA world than it is if you are a bakery. I mean, the bakery has to be trustworthy. They're not going to poison the cookies, right?
Lauren (02:34):
Right. Yes.
Nick (02:35):
There’s a difference in the kind of trust-based organizations we work with, those in the RIA wealth management space.
Lauren (02:42):
Yes, it's so true. And it's a long sales cycle, right? Trust can be built in so many ways. I mean, we can unpack the marketing component. You can look at it even from operations, right? Operations impacts just are you going to get the same product? Is it going to be at a certain quality? And you could go a variety of angles. And in particular, let's get to the CMO level, right? It's trust within the numbers and being able to talk to the C-suite. It could go a variety of directions. So let's kind of go into the CMO world. You see that, you see the high level. How do you see the role of the CMO today?
Nick (03:21):
Yeah, I mean, I've been either in a full-time or in a fractional capacity, a CMO at a wealth management firm multiple times. And I would say the CMO role is as in trouble as it's ever been. I mean, it is really a tough job. It is. And if you're watching the trades, a high-level CMO cycles out about every 18 to 24 months of the big brand name firms. And there's a reason for that. It's because the role is not well designed for the current environment. It's because the majority of people hiring for it have never seen a great one. So they don't know what they're hiring for. And they also don't know how to do division of labor among the C-suite that validates the CMO’s expertise. I mean, I've talked to multiple large RIA founders who are trying to figure this out. Do we need a CMO? If we do, what do they do? How is that different from these other things other people are doing because they've defaulted to a more heavily tactical director-style role or an outsourced partner. Either one can work but they have big strategy questions no one in the building can answer.
Lauren (04:43):
Yep. It's so true. Harvard Business School put together a great article on this, and it goes through these different roles of the definition of the CMO. To your point earlier about you've got to have strong input to have strong output. Can you talk a little bit more about that, different types of input for what the role of the CMO can look like today, either through title or job description or that sort of thing is a big question to be able to unpack.
Nick (05:10):
For sure. So what you want I think is if we take the title off it and then we'll put the title back on at the end. In a wealth management or kind of trust style business, you want someone who says growing the brand and growing the business is an equal equation to me, and I am going to take ownership of both. Now, on the growing the business side, they have to do collaboration with other business development people who might be head of sales, might be a head of advisory, could have different roles in different firms but you want that CMO who’s very comfortable saying, I'm not here to just give you marketing metrics. I am here to comfortably sit and say, we will grow the firm organically, tactically in collaboration with the advisors and the other business development folks in the building. If you're going to pay top dollar for a head of marketing, 250, 300 plus, that's what you need. That's what you need. And if you don't have that, somebody else has to take that spot. And in many firms, there's a gap there because your business development people came out of usually advisory. They've been advisors but they don't have a concept of the entire toolkit or the entire growth toolkit, all the things they can do. Or you have people who have come out of classic marketing channels and they're just embedded in 2017 marketing.
Lauren (06:52):
Or just hyper-tactical.
Nick (06:53):
Yes, hyper-tactical. What we will call the tactical hamster wheel is we're going to go from SEO to blogs to events.
Lauren (07:01):
Taking it all and trying to just do it, trying to use everybody.
Nick (07:06):
And it's what irritates the hell out of people about marketers because they're like, well, I don't really care how many clicks or views or whatever. What did this actually do for the business? Your CMO needs to be able to easily answer that question. They have to have a business acumen to be able to do that. I would say that's really, really rare in the wealth space, both from a talent perspective because the industry hasn't produced that kind of talent and from an organizational design perspective because executives don't know how to build the org with that in mind, and it creates these gaps. There's a direct correlation between the failure of the CMO role in wealth management and the just absolute halt in organic growth. These two things are correlated and they're caused by similar issues.
Lauren (08:01):
Yep. I hear you. And even if you were to get back to the root of the cause, just the clarification of the role to begin with, just that clarity, like you said, trying to answer those tough questions at the top. And then I also think you kind of alluded to the fact that there's folks who are pushing all the activities but one thing you said earlier that I think is really critical is this idea of collaboration. And I think that's so much a part of the role of the CMO. It's being able to literally go around, have those one-on-ones, and really be able to influence and persuade and also drive the agenda against the bigger picture strategy, which is something that is much easier said than done.
Nick (08:48):
Yeah. I want to just pause there for just a second. I wrote about this morning on LinkedIn thinking about this meeting. The CMO is the most collaborative role in the C-suite. The CMO, when functioning correctly, is hand in glove with org dev. It's hand in glove with advisory business development. It's hand in glove with the CEO owning the brand. So that is part of the challenge from even a leadership capacity standpoint is as a CMO, you have to make the case for your value all day long, every day. And you have to be a grownup about it. And you can't go on LinkedIn whining about how mean people are to marketers. You just have to get to that cycle. But you also have to have the humility to say, I don't really get to take credit for anything by myself because everything I'm doing succeeds in collaboration. That's the ABCs of a marketing leader.
Lauren (09:43):
So true. So well said. And I think that's almost hard to be able to communicate upfront because it is so intertwined with everything. I mean operations, the way things flow, they're communicated from onboarding to offboarding and the tone that's set there, the sales team making sure they're really heard and they have their needs. And it's not about a shotgun. Everybody across all departments wants this but it's about really setting the big picture strategy and then being able to get everybody behind that. It is reducing the shiny object syndrome, which is again, easier said than done.
Nick (10:23):
Absolutely.
Lauren (10:25):
What do you see, because you go into these kinds of conversations and you're unpacking them with teams and leadership, and what is that big picture strategy process like to be able to unpack it? What does the timeline look like and what advice would you give maybe to a CMO, or maybe I should even say to a business leader who's thinking about unpacking that strategy? What would they need to do to be able to go in or be prepared before they go into that actual conversation so they're set up for success so they've got the big picture, they can reduce the shiny object syndrome and everyone's set up for success?
Nick (11:02):
I mean, that's like a masterclass in and of itself, but we'll try and do it in a way. So one of the things I tell leaders is the reason why mirrors exist is because none of us know what our face looks like. And the big challenge for even very smart — and I've just talked to so many of them in the RIA space — very smart, very successful leaders who've grown into that nine-figure revenue size and below, but just really healthy firms, and they can't tell you why their firm works. And that's the first challenge is somebody has to be able to go, this is why this place works, and these are the things that if we invested in them more, it would work better. That level of just clarity.
And it's not anybody's fault, it's just the RIA wave was just that. It was a wave and everybody rode it in fairly similar ways. Even though every firm is unique, there was sort of this continuity to the wave, and now we're on the back end of that wave in a different era, and now it's like, well, I have to figure this out, not for the whole industry anymore, but for me.
There are unique identities. So some people will call that branding, some people call it positioning. All of those things come into play but there is just that sense of this is who we are and this is how we're going to progress into the future. I think that takes some form of third-party analysis, etc. Some firms, we come to have some of that already. They've done that work. Obviously, that accelerates the process. So let's say you've done that work. If you've done that work, now the question is, okay, we know we want to grow in these markets, or we want to do this mix of acquisition and this mix of organic, whatever it might be. Now it's what are the actual strategies? What are we going to do in the next six months, 12 months, etc., to make that happen? And that's when marketing starts to come into the conversation. And almost always, the firm has a level of, maybe not as far as distrust but distaste for marketing. There's been some disappointments. There's been leadership churn. Marketing has been put in a fulfillment role, it makes shiny objects for us. Marketing doesn't like it, the firm doesn't like it. So the next question we work with the business leader on is, are you willing to fix that?
Lauren (13:34):
And by fixing that means a shift in culture, a shift of expectations, all of these things.
Nick (13:40):
Yeah. It is really across what I call the trust dynamics. So it's across cultural, it's across org design, it's across budgeting, it's across all these factors. Sometimes a business leader will hear that and go, oh, you're just telling me I got to spend a bunch of money. No, absolutely not. I have to test for willingness first. Are we open to this going to be a journey? Now, we're going to do lots of great tactical stuff along the way, and I know you and I have tactical stuff we want to talk about today. We're doing tactical stuff along the way but we've got to see that tactical stuff as a journey to a more holistic growth engine, a growth engine that is multifaceted and not dependent on any one magical thing, because all those magical things are incredibly fragile today, which is again, why organic growth is failing. So we try to get you in a place where we're making tactical progress while also strategic shift within eight to 12 weeks.
Lauren (14:39):
Oh, that's relatively short.
Nick (14:43):
Because the big thing that needs to happen is you need to have wins. Everybody's got to have a win. Even if that means working with a great agency to create a great deck or an event tool we can repurpose or something like that. We need your growth mindset to shift. And part of shifting, it's just having different experiences. So what I always tell people is it isn't this: we're going to disappear into a conference room for a year and then come out.
Lauren (15:15):
Write all this fine print, make everything perfect. It's going to sit on the wall, a book that's going to sit on the wall or shelf or whatever.
Nick (15:25):
Yeah. This is going to be sleeves rolled up. Scratched up arms in the garden and put dirt on the fingernails. But we're on our way to a strategic shift.
Lauren (15:36):
So for CMOs who have lost the trust of the C-suite. Is that where you see, you basically need a bolt to be able to come in, somebody has a different voice like yourself or team, or it sounds like it is really a pause, readjust, but readjust has to be a willingness to be able to say, yes, we are willing to shake this up for this to be successful. Longer term.
Nick (16:07):
Sometimes the marketing leader and the CEO will just use those as sort of a stand in for what we're talking about. Sometimes the marketing leader and the CEO just need a third party to translate and to say, this is what he's been trying to say to you. This is what she's been trying to say to you. And all of a sudden, we make a little bit of progress. Now, there has to be, again, everything's willingness. There has to be a leaning in from both parties. If either the CEO or the CMO are like that bridge is burnt, then we just have to move on. And I hate that.
Lauren (16:46):
It just is what it is.
Nick (16:47):
It is when we have to move on. That's not the case in most situations. Everybody's got sunk costs, right? We've invested in each other. We're here, we want this to work. So when there's an existing marketing leader, we want to translate first and help that translation and oftentimes reflect back to the CMO and say, hey, what you're saying makes a ton of sense. I know what you're saying. Your founder doesn't know what you're saying or you are not hearing him or a lot of communication because executive-speak and marketing-speak are just completely different vernaculars.
Lauren (17:30):
Yeah. Yeah. It is different jargon. It's different worlds. And the only sometimes similarities are things that are at the very end of the road. It's ROI but there's a whole path to be able to get there.
Nick (17:46):
Even ROI is such a Rorschach test. Everybody means a different thing by it.
Lauren (17:52):
Yes, it's so true.
Nick (17:53):
Usually we bring up ROI. One of the first things I say is, great, how are you going to measure it? Before you ask me, is this going to produce ROI? How are you going to measure it? Because attribution is the hardest game in growth right now. There's nothing harder right now than attribution. How do you actually say this thing produced this revenue? And so usually we're talking ROI in a very theoretical sense. I was talking to a senior executive or a COO at a larger firm not that long ago, probably five or six months ago, and he's like, well, we're just organizing things more. So what produces ROI and blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, I listed four or five things I knew he was in favor of us doing that had happened in the previous months. I said, what about these four or five things? There's no way to prove ROI of those things.
Lauren (18:44):
But they're still important.
Nick (18:46):
But his immediate response was, well, we intuitively know those are valuable, so we had to get underneath these cohorts.
Lauren (18:54):
Yeah. There's so much power in that definition too, and really being able to unpack that as well. Oh my goodness. You're right. There's so many master classes that could spin out of this, because I do want to ask, before we get into some of the other tactical pieces, you had talked about the situation when you come in, we'd gotten into this idea of there's an existing, we'll just say the title CMO, and maybe they've lost trust with the C-suite or what have you. Are those situations you're seeing a lot? Are you more seeing situations where the CMO, there just needs to be a resetting? What are you seeing with these firms when you're coming in to partner with them?
Nick (19:42):
I would say the thing that's most prevalent is that the firm has — because of just a lack of understanding of what a CMO marketing leader should do — has set these expectations for the role that are impossible and even haven't even necessarily communicated those expectations and have hired a person who has just no career experience to be able to fulfill those.
Lauren (20:16):
They're just already walking in day one and not set up for success.
Nick (20:20):
I mean, there's just a lot, and I don't want to be disparaging anybody who's listening to this. All of you, I believe in you. You're doing great work. There's a lot of CMOs, VPs of marketing, etc. around the business that the title's too big for them.
Lauren (20:36):
Yeah. And it's not okay. It's nice to have a flashy title but with certain expectations it's not going to get you to really accomplish what they want.
Nick (20:49):
And everybody's going to be frustrated. So it feels good initially to have the big title but with the big title comes big expectations, and particularly in marketing, it's expectations no one knows how to verbalize. So you’ve got to know you're ready for the big dance. You have to have thought about strategy. You have to have thought about growing the business. I mean, talk to marketing leaders who are like, I'm ready. I want the big chair. I'm like, great. What should we do in this situation? And then they spin up things like, we should do a cool holiday gift strategy. Like, whoa.
Lauren (21:25):
Or sales is over here and we need these five things and this is going to help us and blah, blah, blah. And they're like, okay, let's execute. And you're like, yeah, it might be a people pleaser component now but longer term, that's a habit and a pattern you're creating in your communicating that's not getting back to actually what does north look like and does that actually map to the business strategy. We worked with a company and one of the awesome things to be able to watch, it wasn't a CMO role, it was a COO role. It was a leader coming in and just hearing everybody and really working closely across departments, working with leadership, getting buy-in, setting really a high-level strategy that really took them beyond three years. You could see all the gaps, and then there was so much more beyond that, but it was just, what it did is it really helped to put energy into the team. And then you can put goals behind that. And I think that model is something that a CMO, again, for lack of better words, can also take that same approach and like you said earlier, pack in or fit with those across departments to make sure there's alignment.
Nick (22:43):
Yeah. I think of one firm we worked with where we just had to spend the first three or four months working with the team to figure out fulfillment. How are you going to get decks out the door? How are you going to get one pagers out the door? And we knew that literally none of that was going to sell anything but the needs and expectations of everybody were so broken down that you just have to start somewhere.
Lauren (23:11):
Yes, totally. Right.
Nick (23:13):
And so that's the magic of a really skilled marketing leader is they can go fast and go slow at the same time.
Lauren (23:20):
So true. Yes. I know. We use that internal go fast go slow analogy as well. A good one. I feel like it's a powerful one. It's the art of strategy, being able to manage that. So you alluded to earlier the wins. So I just want to be mindful of time. I want to get some more of the tactical questions. I think each one of these actually could probably go its own class as well. We'll kind of hit you with a few questions here. So thank you. I know you got some questions from others prior to this. So one of the questions folks ask is, if someone is entertaining outsourcing versus remaining in-house, how do you determine if you need to outsource someone or if you need to actually bring things in?
Nick (24:14):
Yeah. So I'll give you the best-case scenario answer, which 80% of people won't be able to answer. So we'll have to do a few other answers. So the best-case scenario answer is exactly how you want to grow the business, and you know how quickly you want to do it and how long you're going to invest in it. If you know, that probably answers it for you, because if you are like, hey, we don't actually really know how we want to grow the business but we need to support our advisors and we just need fulfillment, and we need to just get the wheels moving and need ideas. Integrated agencies, you guys, is a great place for that. We have a general sense of where we're headed and we need quick wins with people who are good collaborators. That often is about partnering with the right agency.
Lauren (25:11):
Fair.
Nick (25:15):
The case for hiring is really about, we are going to build a long-term growth engine, and we want to empower leadership to do it. So what we tell people who are in that kind of mode is like, okay, if you're going to hire a person, CMO or whatever, just realize there's 10 hires after that or maybe five.
Lauren (25:44):
That’s so true, and that's such a good expectation setting upfront.
Nick (25:48):
Yeah. But don't hire one person to manage a bunch of agencies. That's chaos. Don't hire one person and think they're going to make all your decks, do your social media, give you strategy for how to grow the business, collaborate with all your advisors with all their different ideas; that person will implode or lie to you, or both.
Lauren (26:16):
Yep. Agree. So much good stuff. Okay. I've got another one for you. This one is really big, we could talk for a while. The question is, what's the best way to identify your ideal prospect? What tools do you use and what filters? I feel like this is where I feel like we need to call in Kristen Luke or someone who's really focused on the whole target market deep dive, just high-level thoughts on that.
Nick (26:47):
I'll give you the one thing we give people. We have a whole program for this but I'll give you the one thing that tends to shift the dynamic for people the fastest is building your ideal client profile needs to first and primarily be about psychographics. It should be about how they think, how they feel, how they make decisions, what biases they come to the hiring a financial advisor decision with. It should not be about how much money they have, whether they're dentists, all your niche marketing demographic stuff flows out of your segmentation. And segmentation is a subset of ICP. So ICP is the person you want to walk into every iteration of you, your office, your website, your social media, and go, people like me do stuff like this. And the shortcut is, oh, if it says dentists, do you have a financial advisor? We think we've solved that for people but we've all lived on the internet too long, we all read through that. So what actually works is, do I feel like I belong here? And that's because you've really thought through the psychographic of your ICP.
Lauren (28:10):
Yeah. And that's a deep level of thinking. That's where you go down, I feel like the black holes of the internet and trying to understand what are people actually searching for and really listening in different way and questions, and it might sound silly, but little things, do they like Nespresso or are they more of a, I don't know, a Starbucks drinker? These nuances are little insights into the bigger psychographic of the individual.
Nick (28:39):
I would say the other side, all that's true. The other side of it's just to put teeth on this, so I haven't been specific enough, is usually a place to extract it is who works well, your business. So if you're a firm that does a lot of team-based stuff, then your ideal client likes that. If you're a firm that's very technical and delivers a lot of technical information and gives big investment reports, then your ideal client profile likes that; they're a technical person.
Lauren (29:13):
Yep. That's so fair.
Nick (29:15):
You need to match your ICP. So sometimes the best way to extract an ICP is what we do all the time — let's go find more people who like our favorite clients. Otherwise, you develop that imaginary ICP who you have to rebuild your whole organization around and that's going to fail.
Lauren (29:38):
Yeah. Or something where you're trying to force it and it just doesn't. Yeah. And I think that same kind of framework can apply to hiring as well. Absolutely. And then you can lean into those little, like the Nespresso example, right? It's like there's an energy here that just whatever it is, it matches our firm.
Nick (29:57):
Yeah. I mean, one more quick example on that. We worked with a firm to do this kind of work, and one of the things in what we call the client profile is they want to feel exclusive. The client wants to feel like they went through the metaphoric glass door that tells you what kind of coffee to serve. Once you've decided your ideal client has an exclusivity bias, what they realized is their million-dollar client and their 50-million client both had an exclusivity bias. They wanted to feel like they were special. Then that tells you a lot of things: how to operate the office, what kind of coffee to serve, how to do a client intake. There's so many things that answers for you.
Lauren (30:46):
And then there’s this example where it directly connects back to how marketing and operations and just across departments all work together. You're doing a client intake form that impacts marketing, how it's put together, the experience that's put together, so on and so forth. So just to try to connect the dots there too. Absolutely. Okay. So I got just a few more, we'll wrap it up.
Nick (31:10):
We'll go rapid fire. I'll be fast.
Lauren (31:11):
Okay. Best practices if you're integrating outside agencies. So what should folks be asking themselves? What should they be preparing for? Are there any best practices to make sure the relationship yields results?
Nick (31:27):
I think the first thing you want to know is what's normal for the agency you just hired. Because if you make them play left-handed and they’re right-handed, it's going to be bad. So some of this gets handled in the hiring of the agency. You want their normal engagement to feel good to you. If they normally sit in on internal meetings and you want them in internal meetings, then that's great. If you're like, hey, we need you to sit in our internal media. Maybe they're EOS, right? We want you to sit in our level 10 and they've never sat in a level 10 before.
Lauren (32:00):
It's going to be like, whew.
Nick (32:02):
It's going to be a mess. So some of that is in the hiring process in terms of just your own rule set. You want to make sure they have visibility to all the prerequisites to their success. So that's part of the agency conversation: What do you need to know? What do you need to see? What information do you need to have access to succeed?
Lauren (32:29):
Yep.
Nick (32:30):
Because the bulk of tactical marketing has a ton of prerequisites. So it's really getting agreement on how those prerequisites are going to happen and how they're going to have access to them.
Lauren (32:42):
And being comfortable sharing all that. There's got to be a press from the beginning. If you're going, I don't want to hand over the keys to the castle, then that should also be a red flag, I think.
Nick (32:51):
Yeah. Then you're going to get what you're going to get.
Lauren (32:53):
Information is knowledge and it's going to be able to help everybody win but it requires trust for that to be able to happen. Totally. Okay. Well, I want to wrap things up. Any final thoughts you want to share about just the role of the CMO? Just thoughts and for either folks in leadership, C-suite positions, or even for CMOs themselves?
Nick (33:17):
Yeah, I would say if you're in a CMO/head of marketing role, you have to get really, really skilled in business strategy now, marketing strategy, business strategy.
Lauren (33:29):
100%.
Nick (33:31):
If you aren't on an aggressive growth curve with that, and I had the luxury, I came from an operation leadership role where I was overseeing tech operations, asset management, and marketing and seeing all those together. And I was doing a bunch of training too, so I could see how everything affected everything else. So I got a free education. If you're a CMO, you’ve got to be on an upward slope, find a way, and we have some tools that can help you with that that are free, that if you want, we can help you with that. If you're a business leader, 90% of the time the marketing questions you think you have are not about marketing, they're about growth. And you've got to make the growth decisions first and then make the marketing decisions. Unless you want to spend a bunch of money on tactics.
Lauren (34:22):
Activities that can be like hamsters in the wheel.
Nick (34:28):
As a business leader, you have to be able to differentiate between your growth decisions and your marketing decisions. They are not the same.
Lauren (34:34):
Yep. So well said. And that's also such great input too for folks who are thinking about hiring and what they would want to be able to define as success before they actually even put together a job description. Okay. Well, Nick, thank you so much for your time. I feel like we could talk here for hours, so I'll spare everyone, but this is so fun. So I just want to do a shoutout to you as I know you do tons of writing on LinkedIn. If you also go to additions.culture craft.com and there's a signup for your e-newsletter or what have you, and then you've got a growth checklist as well. Do you want to talk to that briefly?
Nick (35:11):
Yeah, you and I have talked about the Growth Check as well, that it's just this tool we can use. This is a paid service but it's a tool that we use. If you want that eight-week unlock. What Growth Check is for is it takes all the factors that are impacting growth in your organization. It peels them apart. We do some surveying, we do a bunch of other stuff, and then we give you a prioritization that says you can act on these things next and you can walk away from CultureCraft at that point and take your own journey. We can continue to support you but we really wanted to build this tool that allows people a very quick, very actionable, here's how we move forward next. So that's Growth Check; if that's useful to people, we have it available.
Lauren (35:58):
Great. Thank you so much, Nick. We'll make sure to link to all that below and thank you for your time, for sharing your insights, and also just your deep expertise in this space across so many levels of seeing what the CMO role is or isn't, but then also just how it impacts so many other bigger picture questions. So thank you again.
Nick (36:15):
Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thanks, Lauren.
