Mitch Solway
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

Hey Kirsty! Those P&G lessons were pretty solid for sure. Thanks for letting me know that one stuck with you too.

In terms of managing the need for short term revenues and 3 year success there were typically three things I did.

First, before I even started, in my interview/research process I spent a lot of time with the CEO understanding their vision. If I was going to work for a CEO it was really important for me to not only be clear about where they were going but also what their expectations were. So, the conversation and process started before I even started. For me, in addition to sharing values, a good CEO is one that lives strongly in both the here and now and the vision.

The second was a building in branding to our executions. Having done this a number of times I knew that a business that scales needs to have pillars to stand on after a few years. We all wanted “sustainable” growth and that meant that as we went along we had to establish pillars of growth — things that not only worked, but added more the bigger we got. For me, so much of this was about building a brand. At the end of the day winning businesses have brands that form deeper connections and offer way more value to their targets than competitors. Attraction, conversion and retention are so much stronger when you’ve attracted someone that WANTS your brand vs someone that just buys it. Having this mindset from the get go and establishing what that brand was (or growing into it) meant that as we built it into all our marketing executions so that in addition to driving performance, each execution was also building the brand. PR and storytelling was also critical early on. So, I kinda call this cheating because we were nailing our short term executions but baking in branding and storytelling that was creating exponential value along the way.

The third thing was simply being relentless on building and “spreadsheeting” short term bottom-up targets and plans. I found that the best way to hit short term targets is to get 100% clear on what they are with your CEO, pick the one key metric, and then you HAVE to build a bottom up plan that shows how you are going to hit those numbers. If I could show, on a spreadsheet, each strategy and tactic and quantify how each item would contribute to hitting our short term targets and how they all rolled up to the grand total then at least I knew that there was a way! Often we just start down a path of “let’s see”. For me, I always wanted to start with a “what do I think will work and will it be enough” because I needed to know, for myself, that if I executed the result would be hitting target.

A bit of a long answer to a short, but great, question. How did I do?

    Mitch Solway

    Written by

    Fractional CMO for Startups. Former VP Marketing at Lavalife, FreshBooks, Vidyard. Visit http://thinkmitchthink.com to learn more

    Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
    Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
    Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade