Ben Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Bronwyn. Bronwyn, welcome to the show.
Bronwyn Pope00:05 — Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Ben Ard00:07 — Yeah. Bronwyn, I'm excited. We've had a good conversation before we click the record button. This is a fun subject. I think this is an experience that we're going to talk about that every marketer either will go through or is at least adjacent to and should be understanding of, and I think it's really fascinating, but before we dive into it, Bronwyn, let's talk about you. Let's let the audience get to know who you are. Your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff. Let's let the audience kind of understand who we're talking to today, if you don't mind.
Bronwyn Pope00:35 — Sure. Yeah, thanks. So as a child, I wanted to be a reporter and that was my goal. I went to college for print journalism back in the day and did work at various newspapers and my lifelong goal was to be at the Associated Press. And I did that for a year and then moved to a different state and ended up working at a big PR agency and learned that I really liked that variety and learning about different clients and writing for different kinds of things. And writing is really my background and my passion.
And so eventually I worked my way into healthcare marketing and I've worked in a few other industries, but most of my grown up life has been in healthcare in one form or another, and I've really enjoyed and continue to enjoy using my skills somewhere that I feel really passionate about where I'm serving my own community and that I'm working with people who are also caring for their community and I can support them. And it's been a great ride. I've really enjoyed what I've done and I figured out a way to use my skills that I feel really good about.
Ben Ard01:41 — I love that. That's so cool. Well, Bronwyn, you have this cool experience that you have been in the position where you are the first marcomm hire at a business and you had the experience of growing and expanding and building the team, going through the changes that naturally occur in that process. That's what we're going to talk about today. What to do, where to start, how to grow, what that experience looks like for anyone who may take that opportunity on to be that first hire, who has to say, where do I start? What do I do? All that kind of fun stuff.
So to kick things off, Bronwyn, tell us about the experience. Tell us about being that first hire and then ultimately let's start with the first 90 days. You're trying to wrap your head around, okay, what in the world do I actually do now? What did that look like and where did you go? And what do you recommend there?
Bronwyn Pope02:32 — Yeah, no, it's a great question. I mean, it's been my favorite experience. So I've done it twice. Once many years ago, got a job at a nonprofit and was the first marcomm hire. And more recently now I've done the same thing at a for-profit and those experiences have been very different.
At the nonprofit, I was coming right out of having worked on the agency side. So I had a lot of great contacts. So my position was funded and created, but there wasn't any budget for marketing communications. So I did the Midwestern pull yourself up by your bootstraps without any funds and I contacted a graphic designer and said, I have $3,000. If I give it to you, can you make me templates that I can use as not a designer for everything that I want to do in the first year. So like a template brochure, flyer, sign, banner ads of different sizes. And that's how I spent the money. And then I just spent the first year doing everything myself, learning about the organization and figuring out who they were.
It was Special Olympics Minnesota in the state of Minnesota. And at that time, many of the Special Olympics statewide branches weren't necessarily using all of the power of the brand of the international organization, but it was available in a three ring binder on discs that you couldn't put in your computer and download. And so I just started using those. I mean, here's resources available to me at no cost. I don't have other staff or money and was able to take those tools and use it to solidify the really powerful brand in the state of Minnesota and then permeated across everything the organization did throughout the state and then start to create marketing communications. Everything from internal communications to standardized communication with sponsors, donors, templates for decks so that they all were branded and looked the same and really looked at the people around me and figured out what do they do every day and how can I make this easy for them? And making it easy for them allows me to control the brand. They're not creating it themselves. If I've given them templates for everything, standardized language, they don't have to do that work. It makes their jobs easier. That's not their area of expertise and allows me then to build a consistent brand.
And that worked really well. And as the organization grew, I was able to grow my team and then start to hand off specialty pieces of that. I worked on the website by myself. I think initially some of the web pages were several thousand words, just one giant paragraph. And so whittling that down and proving that their engagement and understanding was higher with better communication and then eventually was able to over a six year period, build a whole department and staff and really leverage the power of what we were doing to support the organization as it just happened to be at the same time, really growing quite quickly to the wonderful stable, large organization it is today. And this month in June of this year, Minnesota is hosting the Special Olympics national games in the state of Minnesota. I'm still involved with the organization and it's just amazing to see how well they've done, and I'm proud of the time I spent there.
Ben Ard05:53 — When it comes to those first 90 days, what I love is you said, okay, I've got a small budget and I've got what I can ultimately, like, I know I'm going to need to make a lot of materials. Let's get the templates. Let's make them look professional. Let's get that figured out. I love that use of time. I love that use of your budget. I think that's super smart.
Then you said you were lucky enough to have the team grow and scale. So when it's growing and scaling, first of all, how did you know you were ready for your first hire? How did you get approval? How did you justify it? And how did you decide ultimately what to hire for? I mean, obviously you're taking on every one of the marketing activities. How did you specifically target and find the right one to really start out with and justify it?
Bronwyn Pope06:41 — Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think what's really important is, I mean, this is true for me in all areas of communication, really, is to think about not what I want and not what I need and not who I am necessarily, but what does the organization need, what do they need from me and what's the ROI behind that? I mean, it's kind of great that that first experience for me was on the nonprofit side, because it was really clear. I didn't want to use any money unnecessarily, I wanted to be really frugal, wanted that money to go towards the athletes as it does and it should, and I'm just a frugal person. And so I wasn't interested in just hiring to take work off my plate.
And so knowing that if we had a webmaster, we would be able to create a special site for our fundraising that could massively grow the sponsorships. And if we had someone handle social media, who was more skilled than me, these are not my areas of expertise. So I was just grinding it out, figuring it out, doing the work that I could, but if we had those two things, those people would help support the organization, grow at the pace that the organization was trying to grow and bring in the revenue that the organization needed. Those positions would pay for themselves immediately. And that was, man, 20 years ago. And I think the second webmaster that I hired, she's still there. And she's still just rocking it and doing amazing things. And I think that's really important.
I'm not a person, you know, a salesperson by nature who's looking for like, what can I get out of this, but I want to do what's right for the organization. And the best thing is to parse off what the organization needs and the thing that I'm the least good at that will have the most benefit for the organization. And so those aren't hard sells. I mean, when you put those facts together and are able to show, I think we can generate this much more revenue. We know we have the data that shows we're losing people when they come to the site. Site doesn't work very well. Doesn't look great, all of these things. And then if you plan it right and you're willing to wait, sometimes you have to wait. You don't get what you want right away. You got to build a case for it. Bring in experts.
I'm very much a champion of, if ever working with leadership anywhere, like go out and talk to your peers, other executives at other companies. This is what I'm thinking and seeing. This is what I'm recommending, but if you have friends in other industries or in this industry, like ask them for their opinion. I'm happy to get feedback from a board or from other leaders. And maybe they're doing something that I haven't thought of. So I think that makes it easier. I'm not like trying to get something. I'm trying to do what's going to be best for me, but also for the organization I work with and for the people that I work with, let's make their life, let's be the easy button.
Very often marketing communications, you're very rarely at an agency. Mostly you're inside some other organization or company where you are a support department for the overall organization. You're supporting sales or you're supporting staff in the field or you're supporting facilities or locations. And so when you think of it as being a support of the overall organization, I think it's easier to make those decisions and you get more buy-in from leadership because you're presenting your case in a way that makes it clear that you're trying to help.
Ben Ard10:11 — I love this. I love your determining ultimately who is going to join the team first, what they're going to do. I love the idea of like, what's going to benefit the business. Where's the ROI? You have the metrics. You have the data as the team scales, right? It's maybe the first hire, then the second, things move along. Your role starts to shift, you know, where you're originally that individual contributor, you're the doer of things and the builder of strategies. When it starts to transition, when did you move out of like the IC side, if at all, and how do you start to justify spending your time more on helping lead and direct the team versus actually having your hands in everything you're doing?
Bronwyn Pope10:53 — Yeah. That's a great question. I would say many places that I've been, including the two places where I've had this experience, I've started often with paid internships. I was an intern many times, I believe they should be paid, and then looked to see if any of those people were people who could be the first hire, who could grow with a department that was small and maybe didn't have a big budget and then you start with maybe some generalists or people with multiple skills, more generalists like myself who could help me in maybe multiple ways. And then as a company or organization grows and it's really clear, you need to keep pace with the more sophisticated needs, whatever they are, depending on the size of the business or the growth strategy, then you got to bring in experts.
And I find it so fun and fascinating to hire people smarter than me. I want to create an environment that's the best version of anywhere that I've been an employee and leave all the things behind that I experienced as an employee in my life that I did not enjoy. So I want to create a really positive workplace where people are really excited to be together. So it's both a personality fit and skill set. And I'm most excited when I look around my team and it's a group of people who are really smarter than me in what they're doing and collaborative, super important that they're collaborative. I mean, you've got one social media person, one web person, a couple graphic designers, they should be, they don't have to be best friends, but they should be chatting, getting along, excited to collaborate and learn from each other. Cause that's how I am. I'm super collaborative. And I find that great.
I have a few times had a little anxiety about, I'm just going to meetings and I'm not creating anything, but really as a leader of a marketing communications function, you are creating, even in the way that the ideas that you have, the expertise you bring to decision-making, the long-term thinking you have, and if you're a leader, you're mentoring and helping the people around you grow. And that's also creative and it really fills my cup. I'm so excited. I just had someone leave my team who started in college as a graphic design intern, so good. We turned her into a full hire when she graduated and after three years, she left the team because she wanted to move to a different part of the country. And I could not have been more excited for her and what she has ahead of her in her life, being in your twenties and moving to California. And so it just makes the whole thing feel better. I want her to grow. She leaves. I'm sad, but we'll find somebody else cool and exciting who knows more than me. And we did.
I mean, I was in college when the first design tool came out and we were using it on the college newspaper where I was the editor. And so I did that. I don't even know what it was called, but it was pre Adobe InDesign Suite or Creative Suite. And so it's exciting to see how that's evolved. And I know enough to be dangerous to ask the right questions, but I think the hardest thing for me is always letting go fully of the reins, not because I don't trust the people around me, but because I am by nature protective, the mom of four kids. And so I always sort of over index to sheltering the people around me. And then they remind me, like, I'm a grown up. I can handle it. And then I back off and say, all right, go out there and live your best life. It's fine. Just call me if you need me. But that's the thing that I struggle with the most is that I don't need to protect and shelter grownups who are skilled. And if they get in a situation or they just have trouble with a client, an internal customer, whatever, then that's my time to step in and figure out what the disconnect is. So they're good about, usually the teams that I work with are good about saying like, I can handle this. You don't need to take care of me. I'm good.
Ben Ard14:49 — I love that. That's awesome. Well, it's definitely a transition that everyone has to figure out at some point in time, regardless if you're in a small team or a big team, as you progress in your career in marketing, there just is this tendency that eventually you're going to stop being the doer of things as much as you have teams and groups of people around you and things of that nature.
We're almost out of time, Bronwyn. And I am excited for this episode to get into the hands of people. But one final question, tactical advice. I always like to end the episodes where we give some tactical advice for anyone who is, and I want to focus on this part of it, because I feel like this is super interesting, for anyone who is transitioning out of an IC role into a management role, who wants to nail it, who wants to really understand it. And maybe it's someone who's been in this position for years. What can they do and start doing today that will help them either adjust better, better enable their team, or ultimately just manage to really provide more value to the company in the different way that they're now being asked to provide that value?
Bronwyn Pope15:57 — Yeah, I think that's a great question. You know, in most of the places that I've worked, the people that I worked with, the roles were really clearly defined, smaller organizations, et cetera. I now work at a very large hospice company, St. Croix Hospice, and our growth rate has been incredible in the eight years that I've been here. And so what I've really learned has been the magic, the secret sauce to me building a team, this is the other place that I came as the first marcomm hire, is to look at the group of people, whether it's two people who report to you or 10, and really meet with them, understand who they are and where they want to go, and then be willing to be flexible about where they are.
Let them pivot inside the team, let them cross work to train each other, not only so that you have backup if somebody's out or whatever, but I've had people now in the later part of my life where I've used the strategy who have literally moved across my team into roles that I never knew they were interested in or that they had the skill set for, but I was willing to let them try. And I always ask anyone who works with me, what's something you don't get to do that you see somebody else doing that you want to do? What is the job you want to have eventually? And then figure out ways to give them those opportunities.
And usually what happens is that I find a greater strength in my team, people who work here are more loyal and energized because they have the freedom to grow and move, they're not stuck in a channel. And you then get this great camaraderie and culture that's really healthy and positive and people feel like they're really supported and they have room to grow. And then what happens is that they grow, they work hard for you and they feel like they have the opportunity to move across different channels.
I had a person who started at this company who worked at the front desk and then they were making a change there. And I was asked if I would bring her on my team and her background was in, she had gotten a degree in law enforcement. And I thought, this young woman wants to come to marketing, and I met with her and she was smart and clever and interesting. And so she came and did sort of an admin role and then she raised her hand to learn more about internal comms and she's now in charge of internal communications. She's a great writer. She's phenomenal. If I had kept her in a silo, I never asked her, what are you good at? What do you think you want to do? And let her make a move that didn't show up on paper, I never would have had the phenomenal person on my team that I have today.
Ben Ard18:20 — I love that advice, finding the passions and the talents that may be dormant in your team and really giving them the opportunity to shine by giving them experiences that they may not have otherwise, really just being curious about what's going to make them happy and this is how you get the best quality work out of your team. I love it. I love everything we've talked about today. Bronwyn, this is so cool. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Bronwyn Pope18:49 — Yeah, you can find me, Bronwyn Pope on LinkedIn. Yeah. Then I'm happy to connect with people, happy to reach out. I talk to people in all kinds of different industries and I love talking about our work and learning from others and sharing anything that I can. And I really appreciate this. Thank you for having me on.
Ben Ard19:04 — You bet. For anyone listening, Bronwyn's LinkedIn profile will be linked below in the show notes, go there, click the link, tell Bronwyn that you said hi, you came from the podcast, all that fun stuff. Bronwyn, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today.
Bronwyn Pope19:18 — Thank you.
