Jeremy Weisz 17:22
Yeah, it’s the same things obviously, employers look for on that end, which is like someone who’s actually done research, someone who’s engaged, someone’s asking questions, that person’s going to stick out more than someone who just kind of says yes and doesn’t really inquire as inquisitive. From a culture standpoint, what are some of the things you do at KSA that help with culture?
Katie Schibler Conn 18:51
Well, we curse a lot, so I like to curse. And so when we’re going through the interviewing process, and if I’m part of the interview, that’s actually something I ask, like, what’s your favorite purse word we have on our job descriptions, the number, like, AI screens, like certain things right now, and you submit an application. So we have, how many times does the job application say shit as like, a baseline of if someone can advance in the career. And I think from that being a question on a screening call, I mean, from an application to a screening call, and being consistent, we’re creating that space where someone’s like, okay, I can open up and be honest. If they are censoring how they talk, then they’re not going to be a good culture for us at all. Around our office, you’ll find lots of random crazy shit and stickers like that say, kick some ass. And oh shit there. And, you know, always see people like, I walk through the Office flipping off everyone in the morning, like, with love.
Jeremy Weisz 20:11
Welcome to the office.
Katie Schibler Conn 20:12
Some people give like a thumbs up, and I just go walking by and say those kinds of things with a big smile and with a hug, and that is what connects everyone. My staff has taken to celebrating people’s birthdays really seriously, and I personally have a very detached relationship with my birthday. But I just let them do that, because it’s important to that. So yesterday, you know, it was one of the guys’ birthdays. One of my key team members made homemade cupcakes for everyone, and just those little things that, like the whole staff always signs a birthday card, shows that we care, and we take that time for our team.
They had an Easter egg hunt, like two weeks ago, through the office and to see adults tackling each other for candy, it just sort of takes that. We always say, work hard, play hard internally. So we take the time to do things together as a team, own our shit and get shit done. So we take those quick, sort of cultural pauses throughout the week, and then just go right back to kick an ass on behalf of our clients.
Jeremy Weisz 21:30
Is everyone in person? Or do you have remote staff as well?
Katie Schibler Conn 21:34
Majority or in person? But we do have remote staff. We have a few key people who we most of the staff probably hasn’t even met in person, but they integrate seamlessly, and we find that, our Slack channel of just bullshitting the remote team members can feel really connected with their emoji language.
Jeremy Weisz 22:01
I mean, you obviously, right off the bat, if someone goes to your website, which we just saw, there’s a swear word in the tagline, yeah. So, either that resonates with someone, a client or a potential team member, or not, I imagine.
Katie Schibler Conn 22:20
Yeah, it’s very polarizing, and I’m okay with that. Like some people will say, maybe you shouldn’t curse. And I say, that’s fine.
Jeremy Weisz 22:28
You’re like, fuck you. No, just kidding.
Katie Schibler Conn 22:30
Like, yeah, no, I’m fucking never gonna change. And I know I’m not gonna change. And when I don’t show up that way, I fail. If I am trying to fit the mold of what others want or clients want, or what is more appropriate from different standards, then I feel like I’m just not being genuine and authentic to myself. So we had an open house probably two weeks ago where we opened our doors in the spring, and we had about 17 people, some who are already in their careers and searching for a new opportunity, many who are college students and trying to figure out what they want to do.
And they come and spend three hours at our office. And it’s always interesting to me to see the change in a group of strangers once they’ve been in our environment, and they come in their suits and they’re dressed to impress. And then they spend some time with the staff and work on a project together and learn more about advertising. And you see, it’s like a volume dial that just keeps on going up by the time the day ends, that they’re like, oh my god, this is so much fun. I love this. And that, to me, is the infectious part about advertising.
Jeremy Weisz 23:50
Katie, what are some of the from a managing this process perspective, there’s a lot of aspects that go into it. Do you have some favorite tools or software things that help you or that you recommend to help teams manage the process.
Katie Schibler Conn 24:10
Of talent acquisition, the biggest mistake I see a lot of people make is that they drive those job postings and they drive applicants to an applicant tracking system, and depending on what you’re recruiting for, that process of filling out a job application can be cumbersome, and the more technical the job you might need high school transcripts and college current scripts and stuff like that. So you can’t even get to the point that you have a conversation with the right people, because the barrier to entry is, I see this job, I have to fill out all this shit and yeah, no, I don’t have time for that, so you have to build a landing page. And you have to build just like we would with any advertising campaign, a quick lead generation concept, whether it’s a book, a 15-minute screening call with a talent acquisition team member, or send us a video, though, treat it like how you create desire for your product or your services that you do.
So we use Unbounce a lot. As far as landing page development goes, some of our clients have different platforms. LinkedIn advertising in particular, is critical when you’re doing workforce development and recruitment campaigns, and then, I would say, surrounding yourself with the right industry peers and groups and associations that you can attach yourself to get some organic traffic to a landing page, that starts actually moving the algorithm faster for us when we see people who’s hitting landing page just on their own, and we can see some demographics and start targeting in on digital platforms.
Jeremy Weisz 26:12
I want to talk about kind of the stages of agency growth and your agency growth, but I want to know back a little bit. Your experience and background is like a Senior Account Manager, Senior Manager. You work at PlayStation with Sony Computer Entertainment, and then you went and became a yak farmer. Okay, so talk about that point in your life where you’re just make a decision to, I think you went to Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Pakistan, wherever. What was that decision to go from I’m a senior manager working on PlayStation, to that.
Katie Schibler Conn 26:57
I think everyone ends up on a career trajectory, and you get caught in, I’m going to do this next, and I get this opportunity, and your career can start to take a life of its own. And I have landed what was in, by all means, my dream job working at PlayStation. I love video games. I’m a huge nerd. I love comic books. I love all that nerd stuff. So that was my dream job. But that dream job came with a lot of personal sacrifice. I was traveling 80% of the time. It was extremely long hours at the time. Was very difficult business to be a female in, and that was wearing me down. And I kept on having a recurring nightmare that I was going to be 60 years old, and wake up with the right side of my bed have being occupied by my Blackberry, my iPhone and my laptop. And I didn’t want that. So when you start interviewing and you get more opportunities, I just kept on saying, this is going to be the same thing, and I needed a break from it all.
So I took that break and booked a one-way ticket to South America, thinking I would be gone for six months when I started travel. And I was in my mid-30s. When I did this, I wasn’t young. Like, when I started traveling, I remember that first night in a hostel in Peru being like, I don’t fucking speak Spanish. I am the oldest person staying at this hostel by more than a decade, and I just quit a job in it was 2010 so, like, we were in a pretty big recession. I had a stable job, and I was like, what the fuck did I just do? And you start doubting yourself. The gift that came out of that travel was I separated myself from my career and the day-to-day. In the beginning months, it was like managing a profit and loss statement, and, oh, I’m going to do a blog and I’m going to post these photos, and I did a really good job of creating work out of nothing. And then finally I just surrendered. And that was where, how, couple, almost a year later, it took me to Mongolia and living on the Yak farms, nowhere near a connected device.
The untold gift of it was that at the time social media was starting to rise, I gave up on having a blog, so I would just upload a bucketload of photos to a social media channel. And then all these old clients started calling me and following me and reaching out because they were sitting in those corporate offices that I had been sitting in, and here I am riding elephants in Lao or, like, climbing mountains literally, and having all these crazy experiences. So that was probably when I first embraced the concept of an oh shit moment, because when you’re traveling like that, nothing ever goes according to plan. And if you’re traveling cheaply, it really doesn’t go according to plan. So every time things wouldn’t work out, I’d be like, well, at least this is a better story, or this is going to be a story I remember, because the stories we tell and the stories we remember are not the ones when everything went perfect as planned. It is when we had those big oh shit moments and things took a left turn.
That’s how I ended up in Mongolia, and that’s how I ended up as a yak farmer. Was never anything I dreamt of, but I embraced those oh shit left turns, and it took me on an even better journey, and that’s no different than what we do in marketing and advertising. So that’s given me that ability to be comfortable with risk, that ability to make bold moves and hope for big wins on the backside of it.
Jeremy Weisz 31:07
You ended up traveling for about a year. What made you decide, okay, it’s time to stop this part of my journey?
Katie Schibler Conn 31:17
I had started, I journaled through the whole trip, I started daydreaming about what I wanted my life to be when I got back, and it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be when I left. I started missing my parents and my brother and wanting to see them in person, and then in my own, oh shit, moments like, I ended up getting sick. So it was probably time to go back to a US health system at that point in time. So I came back to the US, and instead of going back to San Francisco, where I had been living, I ended up getting off a plane in Rhode Island, smelling and looking like something precious, I’m sure, to my parents, with no further of a plan than I’m gonna hang out at my parents house for a couple months and get my feet under me.
Jeremy Weisz 32:17
I was talking to a friend who just was traveling to another country, and they were saying, like, God, everything smells here, and they just realized it was themselves that they were smelling and the smell was following them around, because it was them. What was a crazy story from the journey from that stint that you remember?
Katie Schibler Conn 32:43
Probably one of my craziest stories is I was traveling by myself, and how I ended up on a yak farm in Mongolia is one story. But once I got there, I was there with the reindeer in the northern part of Mongolia, and it’s like on the border of Siberia. So we had this lofty idea, that I had this lofty idea, maybe let’s go see the reindeer, which we didn’t end up going see. But the family that I was staying with had a son who spoke a little bit of English and had a pot, and I had bought a tent off other travelers, because I was not prepared for this that had a leak in it. So I went and bought a shower curtain, because that’s all you I mean, Mongolia at the time was pretty limited in terms of gear that you could get. You could pay $200 for a sleeping bag that you might get at Walmart for 10 bucks.
So it was not proper gear. So I went on a trek with my Mongolian brother and another traveler, and we were gone for probably two and a half weeks, three weeks, never saw another human being other than the two of them living way out wild in the steppe, like having to cook and boil water, and you would hear the animals at night. And one night, it sounds like these wolves are getting, like, closer and closer, and I’m in this leaky tent. It’s cold by myself, if I’m gonna die, at least. This is a good story, and I woke up to wolf Prince right on the perimeter of my tent, like circling, and I have a photo of it, so it was amazing.
Jeremy Weisz 34:41
I don’t know if I could even sleep. If that was the scenario.
Katie Schibler Conn 34:47
I slept in a tent on Saturday night, this past Saturday night, and I was like, oh, well, I don’t think I need to worry about wolves pacing outside.
Jeremy Weisz 35:03
Yeah, I’ve watched, I don’t know if you’ve seen the show Alone. And it seems like, I mean, they are amazingly equipped, physically and mentally to do this, and it seems like a lot of them drop out because of the scare of the animals, like they could be perfectly fine, then a bear’s there and like, I’m out, like, this is scary.
Katie Schibler Conn 35:26
Like the moment when you realize you have, like, no protection against that is shocking and terrifying.
Jeremy Weisz 35:36
I’m sure you have some amazing stories. That’s like, just a bold move even to do that in an environment that you’re familiar with, just going out two weeks camping, let alone you’re in Siberia with not the proper gear and everything like that, is pretty, pretty wild.
Katie Schibler Conn 35:55
So my daughter having danger as a middle name.
Jeremy Weisz 35:59
Yeah. So I will follow on the agency growth trajectory. But is that where it comes from danger? Why?
Katie Schibler Conn 36:09
Danger is my middle name?
Jeremy Weisz 36:12
So she gets danger. What does she think about it?
Katie Schibler Conn 36:16
She loves it. She owns it all day long.
Jeremy Weisz 36:21
That’s great. The next stage, so the first stage of agency growth, you come back and you have a past client contact you.
Katie Schibler Conn 36:32
Yep, I had a past client from PepsiCo call me. I had literally been in the country, I think, three days, and asked me what I was doing, and I said, well, right now I’m really obsessed with indoor plumbing, so I spent a lot of time taking showers and flushing toilets, and that was basically the beginning. She needed help with a short-term project, I was very clear that I didn’t, I wasn’t moving to New York or I didn’t even know if I was staying in the country, but a short-term project was perfect, and that was 14 years ago, So like that, first contract grew over time, and maintained and evolved and shifted and shaped over the years, but really was that first client experience of needing to set up an LLC in like a week to be able to be a subcontractor. So I always say that when I started KSA, I really had no idea it would become what it is today. I was literally staring at indoor plumbing, fascinated, and saying, oh, okay, this is great. I can figure out what I want to be when I grow up now, and this will buy me some time.
Jeremy Weisz 37:58
With Pepsi and with the company, I’m sure the services grew, the services you offer grew, and then the team grew. So with Pepsi, specifically, how did the services evolve over time, with what you did for them?
Katie Schibler Conn 38:17
I was originally called because of my background in entertainment marketing, and in particular, dealing with celebrities and talent and how you leverage them on a global scale, across integrated advertising campaigns, which is actually quite complex because it’s a mix of legal compliance and Global commercialization, and then also the advertising and marketing aspect. So that was where it started, was really my ability to blend seamlessly with teams and agencies that were producing assets and run that interference on soccer players aren’t actors, so you’ve got to manage your expectations when you’re doing scripts, and how are you going to shoot a bunch of scene, simplify the scenes so that what the talent is in is going to fit within the allotted time that we have in the contract and stuff. So that really was the root of it.
A company like PepsiCo songs a lot of talent and does a lot of programs as those programs got more and more complex, the legal approvals and the brand approvals and the commercialization team approvals for something like a celebrity’s image on packaging was a really slow, often loose, undefined process, and then you had this rise of social media. So if I go back to the beginning stages of my career. You know, the likelihood of a market like Thailand, doing something with unapproved artwork from a celebrity and no one seeing it or finding it was, the risk was manageable. Then social media, everyone’s going to see anything, because if it’s cool, they take photos of it, and the talent gets access to it. So we had to tighten down, how do those approvals work on a global scale? So I co-created with a client contact, sort of a way to convene all the teams and organize all those global approvals, because you can’t submit TV commercials the same way you submit packaging files through any automated approval system. There’s just no way.
And that built out a sort of a new way of working, and we have evolved over the times with Pepsi as they’ve changed their marketing departments and teams and how they structure and manage creative and we’re really an extension of their global design teams, managing all those campaigns at scale and helping to facilitate that there is cohesion and governance that’s done quickly on a global scale for 100 plus markets around the world. So it started with one project, helping on talent production for an upcoming shoot to now what we do, which is manage hundreds and hundreds of artwork every month through a governance process.
Jeremy Weisz 41:49
What talent did you need Katie that you had to grow on your team because of this account or other accounts?
Katie Schibler Conn 41:58
I think the systems and the processes. How do you document stuff? How do you make it accessible to everyone? Like shout out for Airtable, as far as a database and system that was a game changer and a universal playing field that we could hack so to say so that people, multiple parties, multiple agencies, could access. And then I had to start hiring people, in the beginning, you would be able to hire, maybe young talent who just wanted the chance to work on a Pepsi as the labor market changed. You got a higher season talent because and you got to pay people well, and so the financials of it are very different than what it was when I first started.
Because the younger generations have different expectations as far as work life balance, and when you’re working on a global campaign and a global team that doesn’t fit into a nine to five work life balance. So how do we adjust our hiring practices, our time off practices, and all those HR pieces, has been a learning curve to make sure that it’s equitable across the agency.
Jeremy Weisz 43:25
Is Airtable, do you use that as a project management tool? Or do you use separate software for project management?
Katie Schibler Conn 43:32
We use ClickUp for project management. Airtable just is been so critical with record keeping for us, and universal in the way that we can embed it into other systems, like a ClickUp so seamlessly gather data, monitor that data, run reports, all of it.
Jeremy Weisz 43:54
So it’s more from like a collaboration perspective between your team and then the client that you’re working with.
Katie Schibler Conn 44:01
And visually it just like we could manage things on Google Sheets, but the visual appeal of how it’s organized in Airtable is second to none,
Jeremy Weisz 44:13
Yeah, it’s interesting, because I can see your company, and this is not the trajectory took going to other big companies and doing there’s a big need, it seems like, for celebrity and Talent Management. And it seems pretty sexy too.
Katie Schibler Conn 44:33
Yeah, it does.
Jeremy Weisz 44:34
So I’m curious why did that not, you go off a good, great. We have Pepsi, we get like Frito I’m making, I don’t know what brands Pepsi doesn’t own, because they own a lot of brands.
Katie Schibler Conn 44:47
Yeah, they own everything. It’s a great point, and we did it for a while. It’s really hard to impart decades of technical legal, I’m a unicorn in terms of my understanding of technical production processes as well as legal implications and contracts and global marketing, and how you transfer that to other talent is challenging. I know a lot of what I know because I grew up through those systems and I did them firsthand. But if you haven’t been on a printing press and seen all that, it’s really hard for all the cogs in the wheel to connect. I also had a family, and I think you reach those shifts in your career where, like, celebrities, require a lot of weekend work and travel and time away from my family. And I didn’t want to do that anymore.
I wanted to put some guardrails around what it was that I could do. So I built up a team to support the PepsiCo business, and then so I could take a step away from the day-to-day on that, and really focus on growing the agency in a different manner that wouldn’t be so dependent on me and my personal expertise. Because, I think especially with Jason Swank. And as you go through any of these programs, that’s how you scale, and that knowledge transfer, making sure it’s not dependent just on me, was a critical turning point for the agency.
Jeremy Weisz 46:33
You looked at kind of types of accounts and types of clients, and what is transferable and that I can manage with the team, and that one aspect is just such a special skill set that you’re like this piece of what we’re doing for them, maybe doesn’t make sense to go out and try and get more and more clients on it,
Katie Schibler Conn 46:52
Right, right. And there’s tons of agencies that are trying to compete in that space too. And I’d rather create my own rules. I just would rather build the unicorn. And have the project management and the sort of attention to detail in the systems and the processes that we have in place because of our PepsiCo business has enabled the agency to be a well-oiled machine on everything else and running integrated advertising campaigns. Now we’ve got it working well where they feed each other, the skills that people learn working on the Pepsi account make them better marketers.
Jeremy Weisz 47:40
Katie, I have one last question before I ask it, I just want to thank you for sharing your lessons, your journey. It’s pretty, pretty wild journey. I want to encourage people to check out teamksa.com to learn more. And it’s just really amazing what you’ve built over the years, and so much to talk about so little time. But last question is just about some of your favorite software tech that you use with the team. I know you talked about ClickUp. You talked about Airtable. What are some of the other things?
Katie Schibler Conn 48:15
Slack’s been a game changer for us, I’m sure, as everyone is. I look at even Google workspace from that, the way that we stage and manage campaigns, that tech stack changes every single week, is what I would say. And I really appreciate Zapier in the sense of how we can connect our different tech tools into single platforms. The platforms like a ClickUp, like a Slack where we can create a whole cohesive, integrated approach with the same tools. Is night and day from what it was even four years ago, that becomes part of our first filters as we’re evaluating whether it’s data sets or research that we can integrate into our campaigns for targeting.
Jeremy Weisz 49:16
Any resources from like a leadership perspective, whether it’s a book or, because I know, like when you set out and you came back from yak farming and everything else, you weren’t like, I’m going to start a company with a lot of people, and so I’m curious of what you and maybe it’s part of probably your background, working with some of these big companies and learning from experience. But are there any resources, whether it’s an audible book or person that you follow?
Katie Schibler Conn 49:47
I love Traction. Traction and the EOS Entrepreneurial Operating System was a game changer for us that is probably a very most referenced ear dog-eared book of all time, and the whole library we give What The Heck Is EOS? to every employee when they start. So everyone should read that entire suite. I did the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program, which was tremendous, especially when I was trying to pivot from the work that we had been doing with Pepsi and similar companies towards what we’re doing now with universities and government entities. So that’s been a critical wealth of professional development. And then lastly, we are WBENC certified, which is a woman business enterprise, and that come there is an entire network of centers and resources and training programs that I get access to through my WBENC certification, which is just tremendous.
Jeremy Weisz 51:00
Yeah, I want to echo that. What’s that?
Katie Schibler Conn 51:03
In terms of learning in constant language.
Jeremy Weisz 51:05
Yeah, I want to echo that, Katie, because Traction from out there. Gino Wickman wrote traction, and he started EOS there. Actually, I did an interview with Gino Wickman, if people want to check it out on Inspired Insider and What The Heck Is EOS? is a book, actual book title by Gino Wickman and Tom Bauer, so people can check that out as well. And I also went through the 10 KSB program. Okay, so I totally agree with you on that it’s like a very cool kind of executive MBA program with Goldman Sachs. And why am I blanking on the university that it’s Babson College, exactly, and you have to apply and everything. But it’s actually subsidized by Goldman Sachs, so it’s free for someone to go through it, which is remarkable. And it’s top-level professors. And I went through it during Covid, when it was virtual. So like, we had people from teachers from Wharton School, business and at Penn teaching some of the courses. And it was pretty remarkable. So thank you, Katie, for sharing that. Everyone check out teamksa.com and we’ll see everyone next time. Katie, thanks so much.
Katie Schibler Conn 52:17
Go forth and kick some ass.
Jeremy Weisz 52:18
That’s right.
