Tom Bruce - Founder & CEO of Conversion Path: Finding Your Niche, Marketing Attribution, Narrowing Your Focus, and Letting Go of Control

Tom Bruce  00:00

When I went to college, my first semester, I got a 0.5 grade point average. I mean, that's not what my parents were looking for, you know, and it's not what I was looking for. And I never did it again. I got my head on straight right after that, but I had to feel that pain of completely failing, just screwing up bad to decide for myself, I was never going to do that again.

Callan Harrington  00:23

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back to another episode of That Worked. We have a great episode this week. I'm joined by Tom Bruce. Tom is the founder and CEO of Conversion Path. Conversion Path provides e-commerce brands with competitive advantages in remarketing, Google Shopping, and paid search engine optimization. Tom started his career as a CPA and CFO for early stage ventures. As a former CFO turned marketer, he saw an opportunity to use his financial background to optimize digital marketing efforts. And I gotta say, this is a great episode for anyone that is starting or growing a business, we talked about finding your niche, the importance of focus, and how to let go of control in order for your business to grow. And if you've started a business, you probably have heard this before, it's a really common problem that almost all founders will have to face at some point. So they can get out of the way, and have the business grow beyond just them. The piece that I enjoy talking about the most is going through those ups and downs that come with growing a business, and how to really get comfortable on that roller coaster that is entrepreneurship, because I don't know if there's a better word to describe it than that. It's a roller coaster. And I loved hearing how Tom managed those ups and downs as his business grew. So with that, I'm not going to take up any more of your time. Let's get to the show. Tom, welcome to the show.

Tom Bruce  02:23

Thank you.

Callan Harrington  02:23

Hey, give us a little bit what is Conversion Path? And who are some of the customers that you serve there?

Tom Bruce  02:30

Yeah, so I would say some of our main customers that we deal with are FTD Flowers and Samsonite. Those would be some of the ones that the audience might be familiar with. But we also deal with a lot of small and midsize e-commerce companies as well.

Callan Harrington  02:44

Gotcha. And how long have you been doing that for?

Tom Bruce  02:47

Since 2011.

Callan Harrington  02:48

2011, so, you've been in this for a while. What made you get into that?

Tom Bruce  02:51

So, I worked at a startup before as a software startup called Znode that was here in town. It was a very cool experience that had a nice exit associated with it at the end. And when I worked there, I started as their CFO, with a finance background as a CPA. And so I helped them out with some fundraising and organizing the accounting and things like that. And then I quickly started to get a lot of questions about digital marketing. And the guys that hired me knew that I had messed around with ads in the past, basically, just kind of on my own, did some work with Google ads, and found it super interesting, I guess, because of my left brain angle. And I found Google ads is very analytical. It's more of a spreadsheet exercise than a creative in a lot of ways. And so, they started asking me a bunch of questions about their ads and how they were running them. And fast forward, six months later, I was their CMO, and I was managing an agency that ran the ads. And I had kind of come up with a strategy that was different than the one that they had been running. And I was ready to execute that. So, I presented that plan to them. And they gave me the green light. And we did some maneuvers to get a lot more sales out of the adspend that they had. And so that was a great experience. When they exited the company. Shortly thereafter, they gave me a nice bonus for helping them achieve their goals. And that set me up really well because I had two wins from that relatively short career experience. The first being the capital I needed to start the business I wanted to start, and the second being knowing what business I wanted to start.

Callan Harrington  04:29

I'd love to dive in on one of those pieces in particular. We'll definitely come back to the other, but you mentioned this bonus structure. So this bonus, essentially when the company exited, you got this bonus?

Tom Bruce  04:40

Yes, yeah. They had me and the gentleman in charge of sales, a guy named Dan Clifford, that I worked closely with. We both had bonus structures to help them achieve their objectives of getting you know, to a certain level of sales, which supported them getting to an exit

Callan Harrington  04:55

Was this like phantom equity?

Tom Bruce  04:57

It was.

Callan Harrington  04:57

For our listeners that may be unfamiliar with this, phantom equity, and I'd be curious that this is how it worked in your case, so, phantom equity is an agreement that you have set up with a company where you're not necessarily on their cap table where you have ownership shares in the business. But it's usually tied to either a number or a certain percent of what that sells for. And if the company successfully exits, that triggers, and you get paid that amount. Is that how it worked with you?

Tom Bruce  05:26

Yeah, yeah. Phantom equity is great for the company, because they have full control, and they're not legally obligated to nearly as much as if they actually set up an official stock option plan, which is kind of irreversible. So yeah, that's a more common thing to find in a lot of companies until they reach a certain size.

Callan Harrington  05:43

I have known a decent amount of people that have had phantom equity situations, and done really well off them. Of course, the obvious downside is that phantom equity most likely doesn't stay with you if you leave the company. So, you do need to trust who you're with. And you know, you need to approach that, in my opinion, same level that you would, if you're looking to get equity in the company. But that's a really cool story. And I think that's something that I think a lot of our listeners can get a lot of value from. So, were you working at the company? And then this happened? Or did you negotiate this prior to coming?

Tom Bruce  06:16

No, I was working at the company, and that happened. And, you know, when I first started working there, I really had no equity based incentives at all. And I didn't think that that was going to change. But as we got closer and closer, in conversations with acquiring potential acquirers, I think that the managers realized that it was important that they, you know, have strong incentives to retain managerial staff.

Callan Harrington  06:40

I think that's excellent. Once you had that in place, did you approach your work differently?

Tom Bruce  06:46

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was a lot more bought in after that occurred. I mean, it's sort of a statement to people of how important they are to you. And so, you do feel like you're a little bit more of a partner, so to speak, a little bit more bought into the organization. Even though it is phantom equity, they can fire you, and you lose the all of it. And also, with phantom equity, I mean, you pay ordinary income tax rates. And so if it's a sizable bonus, you might be giving up 40% of it, you know, whereas if it's a real stock option, you might only have to pay 20% in tax. So, there's definitely some benefits there to doing it as a stock option plan. But that's a lot for a company to administer.

Callan Harrington  07:27

It is. And I think a lot of people, what they don't realize too, is oftentimes with options, you're buying that.

Tom Bruce  07:32

Oh, yeah, good point.

Callan Harrington  07:33

If let's just say you get $100,000 worth of stock options, and you decide to exercise those, you got to pony up $100,000. Now, could that be worth it? Of course. It could be life changing. But you still got that decision that you need to make. And it's funny, if you read- I don't know if you saw this, but if you read on equity, every single person has 500 different million opinions on what you do, when you do it, how you do it.

Tom Bruce  07:57

It's risky. I mean, as a business owner, when you start getting down the path of equity share, I mean, there's a lot of risk with that. And it can go wrong in a lot of ways. So, it's definitely got to be well thought out. And you have to know- I think equity works well when you know exactly where you're going as a business. And so, if you're in a really volatile industry, where you have to reinvent periodically, equity is harder to do. And I feel like the industry we're in now is somewhat that way, it changes drastically, every couple of years. We're going through massive change right now. And it's impacting everybody in the vertical. So that's a harder environment in which to use equity successfully and equitably, really.

Callan Harrington  08:36

When you talk about those changes that are going on, how do you navigate those changes?

Tom Bruce  08:42

I work a lot. I mean, you know, I remember one time, when I was younger, I took the StrengthsFinder test. Have you taken that?

Callan Harrington  08:51

Yeah, absolutely.

Tom Bruce  08:52

What were a couple of yours? Do you remember?

Callan Harrington  08:53

I can't remember. Like, it was early in my sales career, because strengths finders were huge in the in the sales space. I don't specifically remember those. I remember my Myers Briggs, which actually changed. It changed over time, funny enough. But I'm curious, what did you find from those?

Tom Bruce  09:08

Well so, I mean, my top two were futurist and strategist. I remember after taking that I was like, yeah, well, that explains a lot of the career choices that I have made. Like early in my career, you don't get jobs where you can do futurist and strategy work. They're just not on the table. And so I jumped around and tried to do different things and tried to do some of my own things because of that, because I wanted to do that kind of work. And I think that's ultimately what kind of led me to become an entrepreneur is that that's the kind of work that I wanted to do. Yeah, so futurist stuff, I mean, thinking ahead, where's this industry going? It's something that I do a lot of. I spend a pretty large amount of my time trying to figure some of that out, and then make sure that our products and services are aligned to that. I mean, I would say I spend a ridiculous amount of time figuring out how to differentiate our messaging against who else was in the industry, but then also aligning what we actually do with that messaging. Because if we're going to say we do things differently, we need to then do things differently. And it needs to matter. And so to make all of that work is just always a lot of work.

Callan Harrington  10:14

When you kind of talk about those, that you're pairing kind of the messaging to what you're doing. If I'm hearing you correctly, it's, we could go out and say something that's going to draw buzz, people are gonna get excited about it, but if we can't back that up, then we're going to ruin our reputation very quickly. Is that correct? Am I on the right page there?

Tom Bruce  10:33

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think the thing that's common in our space is, there's a lot of companies that can- like, say, a retargeting company, they can do one thing really well, which is get an ad in front of somebody who is at the end of their buying cycle. And the challenge with that is a lot of those people were going to buy, regardless of whether or not you put that particular ad in front of them at the very end of their buying journey. And so a retargeting company is going to count the times that someone clicked that ad and made a purchase. The difficulty with that is, how incremental are those sales? I mean, a lot of those sales were going to happen anyway. So, they have a high bar to prove whether or not they're driving like, real, additional sales. But they usually don't do that. That's usually not in the scope of their work.

Callan Harrington  11:23

What's the different way in which to do that?

Tom Bruce  11:25

Yeah, I mean, the different way to do that is to do actual testing of the impact on total sales to the company, as opposed to them just reporting sales for which there was one of their ad clicks. So, it's just you know, they're reporting on kind of a directional indicator. And saying, it seems like our retargeting ads are doing really well look how many times somebody clicked it before they bought your products, and then they don't take responsibility to prove whether or not those are sales that would not have otherwise happened.

Callan Harrington  11:55

So, you're looking at the full path, as opposed to essentially, okay, here's the last one, like, here's what our ad did. But what does the whole picture look like? Is that correct?

Tom Bruce  12:02

Yeah, you got it. So, to give you a little more color around that. What we're doing that is extremely unique, like it's shockingly unique, in my opinion, is we're going to ecommerce companies and saying, We optimize your results around your total sales and profit of your entire brand, not just channels that you hired us to manage. And so that is something that people don't really like to do, right, the level of accountability is very high there. And that also means that if other parts of their business aren't doing well, well, we have to look into that and figure out what's going on. And normally, people say, "eh, nah, I just stay in my lane, I manage Google ads, and I'll tell you how those appear to be performing. But there's a lot of problems with that, because you can start ramping up a Google Ads account. And according to the Google ads platform, it's going really well and you're making tons of money, and you might triple your spend there. But then when you look at total results, a lot of times what you find is that really you're just getting more ads in front of people that we're going to buy anyway. So, what's really happening is sales are not increasing that much overall. But your spend is, and the company profit is tanking. It happens all the time.

Callan Harrington  13:16

So how much did your early career- So, you were seven years as a CPA? Is that right?

Tom Bruce  13:21

Yeah. About eleven, actually, yeah. 

Callan Harrington  13:23

Eleven years as a CPA? I guess, how did you get into that just in general?

Tom Bruce  13:26

Well, let's see, I went to college, didn't know what I wanted to do. Except I knew at a young age, I wanted to own a business. Like a real young age, my dad owned a business. My mom started a nonprofit. And it was a pretty neat nonprofit, it did a nice service in the city of Dublin, it was like the Dublin Latchkey program. And it grew, like I mean, she had over 100 employees and a lot to manage. And so, I watched their lives. And I thought that was pretty cool, pretty attractive, that I felt like they had something meaningful, they contributed in the world. And that's- I just wanted to sort of follow that path. So, when I got to college, I'm thinking about what kind of major I want to get into. And I feel like accounting might be kind of boring and difficult, tedious, detail, you know. And so I'm kind of trying to avoid it. And I start in finance, but I ended up talking to this guy that is a pretty successful business guy, and he said, "I think you should do accounting, because it is the language of business." He goes, "look how many guys that are running the big companies around the country are their CFO, and there's a reason for that." So, I thought that made sense. So, I made the change, went into accounting. I got out of accounting and worked at a small CPA firm.

Callan Harrington  14:37

How did you like that, given that you're- When you think of the strengths finder as futurist and strategic, how did you like the work of accounting?

Tom Bruce  14:46

Well, I mean, initially, I would say I didn't all that much. So, I found ways to change it. So, doing taxes and doing financial statements is a look at history. And, I mean, that's definitely not futurist work, obviously. So, what I started to do was take that information, and then I would go meet with the business owner that was our client. And I would try to help them see, based on what you did, you know, over the past six months or so, here's what you could do differently. So, it might be, for example, seeing that they hired some new people or added new facility. And what I was able to show them is, hey, you made these choices when you were at two million in sales. But really, you need to get to like three and a half million before you really come ahead as a result of those additional investments. And they might have had a plan to keep growing sales, but it was only really going to get them to 2.5. So, they realized, wow, we need a more aggressive plan to make this whole investment pay off. So, I started to do that kind of work that looked ahead. And then that got me in conversations with the business owners all the time. And that was super fun to me. So, just kind of found the path.

Callan Harrington  15:55

Okay, couple questions unpacking here. If I'm hearing you, you didn't love the initial work, you didn't like just kind of grunting out the work of just doing the accounting? And I should also clarify for our listeners, accounting, for people that love it, the fact that you can, there's always a solution can be some of the most satisfying work that's out there. And sometimes that can be in an Excel spreadsheet. Personally, like this feels pretty good. But my question is, did you just start doing that? Was there somebody that was like, "hey, Tom, go out there and be strategic with them?" Or did you say, hey, I see some things here, I'm just gonna take the shot, and then offer this advice and see where it goes.

Tom Bruce  16:35

Yeah, the latter. And in fact, there was resistance to it. Because what I was ultimately doing, I mean, now there are established CFO for hire services everywhere, it's not hard to find, but at the time, there were not. And that's what I was sort of paving the path for was CFO type of work, and some sort of part time capacity, but there was no model for it, so I didn't really know how to offer that. But I knew it's what I wanted to do. So, I just kept pushing in that direction. And, you know, my boss was, he was cool. He was a good guy. And he, he knew that the clients were getting some value, and they seemed positive about it. So, he gave me a little bit of latitude to do that. But it was limited, for sure. And so eventually, I ended up leaving and starting my own practice. And I really didn't have that much experience it. I think I knew enough to start a practice, and figure out how to get some clients, but didn't know how to run a business. And so, I went out and got some clients, and I was doing this CFO for hire type of work for them, and I was a lot happier.

Callan Harrington  17:37

So is this kind of fractional CFO type of work?

Tom Bruce  17:40

Uh huh.

Callan Harrington  17:40

So, you mentioned you were a lot happier? Here's something I always find that's interesting, and this was definitely the story with myself, is that one, the safety net, you're in a really safe career, right? You probably could have found CPA work forever and never had to worry about a job ever. But you had this entrepreneurial itch, and you had this pain, but the pain, one of the things I find interesting on the show is some people have the pain in that this is a problem that I'm experiencing at this company. Actually not too much different than later in your career with Znode, where you solve this problem internally, then build a business around it. But sometimes it's internally, where it sounds like with you it was: I wanted to do this work. This work didn't exist. But I knew my expertise within accounting and finance that people do want this. So, you went out and just created that, is that right?

Tom Bruce  18:28

I did, yeah. And at the same time, I realized that everybody was getting on QuickBooks, that was the time of QuickBooks adoption. And they rolled out a QuickBooks certified advisor program, right about the same time. And I noticed that, and so I was the first guy in Columbus to sign up for it. I just got super good at setting people up on QuickBooks and solving their problems. And, and a lot of times, they were using QuickBooks and then using another system and re-inputting their data into it. It was psychotic. I mean, the amount of extra labor that was going into that, even like whole CPA firms were doing that at the time. And so I just got into the business of eliminating that extra step. And just running everything through QuickBooks, and then it saved everybody a bunch of time, and so that was my niche for a while.

Callan Harrington  19:14

Did you fall into that right away? How long did it take for you to find that?

Tom Bruce  19:18

Yeah, I mean, I kind of found it as I was on the way out the door at the first firm, yeah, which was great. I didn't know that it was going to turn into something somewhat significant for me, but it did. And I started to grow that business a little bit, but because I didn't know how to run a business, I kept saying yes to everything that clients wanted, you know, whether it was tax based or some health care plan taxation issue, or setting up QuickBooks or CFO go forward planning. And, you know, you can never build a business that way with- at least not when it's small, because you can't hire people that know how to do all that stuff.

Callan Harrington  19:55

That's one of the most consistent themes on the show, in general. And I did the exact same thing. I knew this. I knew, like, as a revenue leader I knew niche and then expand later. I didn't do it. I took everything under the sun. I was spread super thin and trying to find people that were experts in every single particular area. And it can happen over and over and over again, how important it is to narrow that focus. I'm curious to ask you on this, do you think that you would have gotten to the same place had you just niched earlier? Do you feel that you had to see a bunch of different things? And then say, okay, I've seen this now I can narrow in.

Tom Bruce  20:32

Yeah, had to experience the pain. I mean, consequence, I don't know, it's something I feel like I've talked about a lot with my kids. But consequence is the greatest teacher, right? I mean, unfortunately, I can't just tell you a lesson that is one that you really need to believe fully to the core of your soul. In order to make decisions based on that belief, you have to experience it yourself. And so, like when I went to college, my first semester, I got to 0.5 grade point average. I mean, that's not what my parents were looking for, you know, and it's not what I was looking for. And I never did it again. I got my head on straight right after that. But I had to feel that pain of completely failing, just screwing up bad, to decide for myself, I was never going to do that again.

Callan Harrington  21:17

I'm curious when you started Conversion Path, did you do it again? Or did you did you narrow in right from the beginning?

Tom Bruce  21:26

Yeah, I narrowed in pretty quick. One of the nice things, when I started Conversion Path, I've got these little rules of business sometimes that I reference. And one of them is, it's ideal to not do something really revolutionary. Of course, I'm breaking that rule now. But, you know, basically, I wanted to get into a business where people are used to buying this service, and there's an established model for it. It's profitable. People are used to paying somebody to manage their pay per click ads. And so. all I have to do is go in and convince them that I can do it better than someone else. I don't have to convince them that they should pay somebody to manage pay per click ads, they're already doing that. They've already been convinced to that. So, I only have to sell on one thing, not two. And that makes the whole process a lot easier, from a selling standpoint.

Callan Harrington  22:14

That doesn't get talked about very often, right? I think everybody, and I'm not saying one way is better than the other by any means, but I think one of the things that I see all the time is, you know, you've got to do the zero to one product. You got to do this thing that never existed before and raise as much capital as possible. And I'm not saying that that's- I think sometimes it goes the other way where people are like, don't do that. Like, why would you want to do that? Well, if somebody wants to do something unbelievable, do it. But at the same time, if you want to be a business owner, there's tons- Like, insurance agency, great examples, some of the best business models that are on the planet. You can go in there and have a great career doing that. Was that essentially kind of what you were saying, like I want to go into something that I know this is, I've got my little unique flavor to this, and then I want to go after it. Is that essentially what you were referring to?

Tom Bruce  22:15

Yes, it is. It's definitely the path of least resistance to getting to just simply having a successful business that pays the bills and keeps food on the table, you know. And I had two kids at the time, so I didn't want to take a ton of risk. But I mean, I definitely quit my job, and went cold, and all that. But I did not want to take even more risk of trying to build some massively revolutionary product that I had to convince people that they wanted it in the first place. That's a tougher thing to do. And I'm trying to do that now in the business.  Well, I think because when you see that there's something missing in the market, and it really needs to exist, and you come up with that solution, you just develop a certain passion for bringing that to market. And you just feel like you have to do it. And I feel that way, very much to the core of my existence. I feel like that when I came up with this latest product, which is an attribution software and service, it needs to come to market. The way that people are doing things with the measurement systems that exist today, with Google Analytics and Google ads, or Facebook ads, the measurements are very broken. It's just not right.

Callan Harrington  23:28

Why?

Tom Bruce  23:28

What was that feeling like internally, right? And I've heard this before, but you mentioned that "I had to do it." Was it this anxiety? Was it this fear of missing out? Was it opportunistic? What was that feeling like? It was a little bit of hope and optimism, because I felt like, hey, if I can bring this to market and drive some success with it, then it's going to create a lot of opportunities for people that work with us. It's going to help the companies we serve, and it will change the landscape. It will it will fix a wrong and so that makes me pretty happy. And then on the other hand, I had this feeling of dread because I had achieved a position in the business just by selling you know ad management, doing it the old way with some broken measurements. I was doing well enough in the business that I really didn't need to take on something like this. You know?

Callan Harrington  24:59

Did you you get bored?

Tom Bruce  25:01

Yeah.

Callan Harrington  25:02

And was that a big kind of driver where it's like, okay, we've got this on autopilot, we'll probably be able to continue doing this forever, theoretically, right, still making changes and adapting to the market.

Tom Bruce  25:13

Yeah, yeah.

Callan Harrington  25:14

And then the boredom set in?

Tom Bruce  25:15

I mean, I think there was a little bit of that, some boredom, for sure. I think you're onto something there, that I probably haven't even thought about that much, to be honest. But I think the bigger motive for me was the fact that we knew that if we just kept managing ads, I mean, Google, Facebook, they're automating the ads increasingly every year. And so, you have to differentiate in order to add value. I mean, the firm's that manage PPC ads, as it gets more and more automated, the difference in value that they provide, if they're still just managing ads using the same measurements, decreases, and there are less levers. So, they're still levers, there's still value. I'm definitely not saying that they're not valuable anymore. They are. But at some point, if they continue to go down this track of automation, it's possible that it may be less so. And so the area where I knew we could make a big difference is fixing broken measurements. When you look at Google Analytics, especially as an e-commerce brand, I mean, the degree of accuracy at which it's showing you which channels actually drive your sales is about 50%. Kind of like running billboard ads, in the old days, you know? People felt like it was- they had about a 50% accurate measurement of how those perform. And it was very broad, you know, it wasn't very detailed and specific. With Google ads, it's very detailed, you can get things down to the click problem is half the time it's, it's crediting the wrong click for driving a sale.

Callan Harrington  26:41

One of the things I'd like to kind of go back to is when you said you had never been a business owner, what were the things that came up? Were kind of the surprises like, oh, man, this is tough, I didn't think about this. What were the some of those immediate punches in the face?

Tom Bruce  26:56

Yeah, they probably vary depending on which business. I've started a few. The first one when I didn't have any clients, and I just sort of quit my job. Sitting around the house and realizing that I didn't have work to do, and I had to figure out what I should do with my time to try to go get work. That's a pretty anxious experience. And it takes some time to develop any level of comfort with that. I mean, until you have clients, you're never really going to be comfortable, because you're not really making it. But once you start getting clients and you got some revenue coming in, you're paying the bills, your comfort increases. Then a big client will pull the plug, and say they're going a different direction, and your anxiety's up again, and then you keep going through that cycle over and over and over again. And after a few years, you get big enough where you don't have quite as much anxiety around that.You still have som,e but not as much as the beginning. And you're a little bit more insulated from it just because you're bigger. So, that was one of the things that I think is challenging is just the personal comfort with being an entrepreneur, and dealing with those ebbs and flows that you don't get when you're in a job.

Callan Harrington  28:03

How did you normalize that meeting? A lot of people go through this on kind of that roller coaster of I've got clients, I don't have clients, I've got clients, I don't have clients, I've got more clients, my floor goes up. Was it more of a time game? Or were there specific things that you did to even that roller coaster out?

Tom Bruce  28:22

Yeah, I mean, I think that it probably is somewhat of a time thing. Just you know, you sit in a difficult situation for a longer period of time, and you get more comfortable with it. I think that's my best guess of the answer to that question.

Callan Harrington  28:36

Yeah, I mean, I've found it personally, for sure. And that is like one of my biggest piece of advice is I took my foot off the gas on sales. We had a lot of clients, I took my foot off the gas, and I should know this, like I've been revenue leader my entire career. The only thing I have ever thought about for the past fifteen years was new pipeline, and I took my foot off the gas, and so went back on that rollercoaster. So if I'm hearing you correctly, it's over time, it's almost kind of like everybody, more people know what you do. You've got happy clients, those happy clients start talking, and then it just starts to kind of snowball. Is that correct?

Tom Bruce  29:10

Yeah. Yeah. For us. Ours took off because we invented an algorithm in shopping ads that was really powerful. And we could basically hijack the whole Google search page and the shopping ads. And that is a very meaningful thing to show someone. And so when they saw it, they knew we were doing something unique. And so after that happened, the business really took off. I mean, people just referred us, and it went to a whole new level. And so that was a pretty fun and exciting experience. It wasn't just overnight. It was a lot of hard work, and all that, but it was definitely in a positive trajectory, and we didn't have to do any selling whatsoever. So suddenly, we were a company that most companies that would be that size in our industry would have salespeople, and we had none, but we were that size anyway because of what had occurred. And so then, that algorithm, it still works and it still is beneficial to certain brands, but it's not a slam dunk like it used to be. So, we can't really lean on that as much as we used to as being just the sole driver of why people should hire our company. And so that's part of the reason that we started to work on a pivot in the direction that we're going now. But now I can see, you know, we're at this certain size, and we need bizdev. It needs to be a part of what we're doing going forward. And also, it's a healthier company, if you've got bizdev, you know, because you can do things like if you got a client, that's no longer a good fit for you, you can replace them.

Callan Harrington  30:35

Right. And when you're small, you could make those choices because you're deciding to be small, that's okay. But if you're big, and you've got employees and everything else, sometimes you got to keep those clients, if you don't have that, if I'm hearing you correctly.

Tom Bruce  30:47

Absolutely.

Callan Harrington  30:48

What were some of those stages as you grew this? You've been doing this for almost twelve years now with Conversion Path, and you've got a big company now. What was it that, as you're on the way up, what were some of those stages where- So right now, if I'm hearing you, it's like, okay, now our stages, we need to unlock our next level of growth, we need a business development machine. What were some of those bottlenecks on the way up that you found that prevented you from hitting that next level of growth?

Tom Bruce  31:20

So, I think that one of the things that I always started to realize once we got past like, ten people, was that usually, the limiter is you, you know, the business owner, and the decisions that I was making were often really the limit, you know. Do I have the right people in the right roles? Do I have the right structure to support clients? Do we have the right incentives contractually that, you know, retain clients for longer periods of time? Are the decisions made, ultimately going to support where we're trying to go? And sometimes, I mean, I'm definitely the limiter. And so I've been slow. As a result of the success we had, with our shopping algorithm, I've been a little bit slow on getting to building out a bizdev function. That was our limiter over the past probably two years. And I'm definitely aware of that. And so that's why you know, we're working with you and glad to be and making some progress. And soon we'll have, we'll have a healthy bizdev function, before we know it. I'm sure you know, it's going to take time to get it right, and have it be consistent with our personality as a company, and not just be more noise in the industry, which is such a prevalent thing, right? In our industry. We're marketers, so everybody's got something to say, and is really good at getting it out there. And so, there's just tons of chatter. And so that causes everybody to ignore it. And people are pretty well trained to do just that. So, we got to cut through that noise. So, we got what we have is sort of a tall order from that perspective.

Callan Harrington  32:49

Absolutely. So, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's: you were the bottleneck in some of these pieces. And in order for you even starting at ten employees, you started kind of delegating and removing yourself from some of these functions in order to get to that next level. Is that right?

Tom Bruce  33:05

Yep, definitely. And that's something I have not struggled with as much as a lot of leaders that I've talked to. They struggle a lot with the letting go. And I'm not sure why I'm a little more comfortable with that. And maybe it's just because I only have so much time, and I know that I need to spend my time on making sure that our product is differentiated, and that it actually drives value. And that alone is a- that's a full time job.

Callan Harrington  33:29

Where did that kind of trust come from? Was it a trust of, or not almost necessarily even trust. Was it motivated by trust? Or was it motivated by pain? Or was it both?

Tom Bruce  33:41

So, you've probably read E Myth Revisited?

Callan Harrington  33:43

Yep. Absolutely.

Tom Bruce  33:44

So, I mean, one of the things they talk about a lot in that book is that most people who start businesses are entrepreneurs, or technicians, and the majority are technicians, just because the percentage of the population that are truly made to be entrepreneurs is like single digit. It's just not a lot of people that are wired that way. And so ultimately, most people start a business because they're really good at something. Plumbing, building speakers, whatever. And so they get into that, because they think they can do it better than the guy that they worked for before and make a living doing something they have passion for. And so, those are the people that have a really hard time letting go. And I think I'm much more wired to be an entrepreneur, and I think I kind of landed in the ad space, and I love it. It's a super cool industry. I'm really glad that I made the move from accounting finance to the ad space. But am I an ad guy, like at the core? Like, is that how I would identify? No, not really. And that's why my job has completely changed like six times over. I don't even log into ad accounts anymore. You know, I've got people that do all that. But I log into different systems so that I can see the bigger picture and work on the strategy and overcome some of the measurement problems that our clients deal with that are limiting their sales.

Callan Harrington  34:55

So, you're working on what's coming. You're not working on what's there right now. 

Tom Bruce  35:01

Yep.

Callan Harrington  35:01

And given that that your strengths were futurist and strategic, does that make it that much more fun for you to be working on that work?

Tom Bruce  35:10

It does. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. And I'm excited about the ground that we're breaking. Because we're aimed at a different dartboard than most agencies that we see serving our ideal client profile. Most of the time, they're optimizing to what Google ad says, drove sales. And we know that's not right. Or they're optimizing to what Google Analytics says is driving sales. And again, we know that's not right, so that there are decisions being made for their clients that are not really optimal. They can't be. And so that's what we're wading into is actually aligning with our clients actual impact to sales and profit in total, as opposed to what a broken measurement system is claiming is happening.

Callan Harrington  35:54

One of the things I find most interesting about this whole story is the fact that especially what you're hyper focused on now, you know, before, from what I'm hearing, it was this, you know, we had a really good way to crack the algorithm of Google within shopping. But now, it's much more around- And not to say that wasn't profitability then, but it was a marketing advantage. But now it's more on that finance side. Do you think you would have been this successful in this business if you didn't start out on the accounting and finance side?

Tom Bruce  36:30

No, not even close. I mean, I would have, I think made some of the same, I guess I'll call them mistakes that a lot of practitioners make. I think what has happened, especially early in this industry, after ads were first invented, and people were trying to figure out how to create agencies to manage them, what seemed to be really common is they would take the person with a marketing degree and pull them into, hey, you're gonna manage these ads. Well, it's a super left brain exercise. I mean, it's all numbers, and analysis, and understanding ratios of numbers. I can't believe how much I use algebra in this job. And you know, those people, that's not what they were looking to do, when they chose to go into a marketing degree. They're usually more creative thinkers, you know, and so they get pushed into something that, in a lot of ways is probably not going to be their greatest competency. And so I jumped into the ad space with just a lot of experience on the left brain side of things, and thinking, and I'm just very analytically oriented. And that was super helpful.

Callan Harrington  37:31

Makes total sense. When I'd first done marketing, my number one thing for that side was, I need somebody highly analytic, because I'm not. I'm much more on the left brain creative side. And I needed that and because otherwise, I would have just burned through money. If I was the one doing it, I would be burning through money. Tom, the last question I have for you is, if you were to give advice to your younger self, what would that conversation be? What would that advice be? Age is totally up to you.

Tom Bruce  37:59

Oh, you know, probably, ultimately, if you're gonna build a business, and you're gonna work with multiple people, I think aligning with people who have similar values to you is pretty clutch, you know. Integrity, like I won't partner with anybody until I've worked with them for at least a year. And ideally, it's more like three years, just because people have different levels of integrity and different values. And you can't assume that it's- you really can't assume anything about that. You need to let people's actions speak, not their words. And so by working with somebody for a couple years, you're going to run into like a hard thing at some point in time and see how they handle themselves when that occurs. And the people that handle it well, are the ones that I want to align with, and I feel comfortable working with for a longer period of time. And so I've got some people I work closely with that, you know, really fit that mold. And that's why we're we're still going at it.

Callan Harrington  38:51

I love it. Tom, thanks for coming on the show today.

Tom Bruce  38:53

Yeah, thank you.

Callan Harrington  38:58

I hope you enjoyed Tom and I's conversation. I loved talking about his trials and tribulations of growing his business. Growing a business is frustrating, and 100% worth it at the same time. If you want to learn more about Tom, you could find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you could find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, and I'll see everybody next week.