Conducting a Brand Diagnostic

593. Scott Markman

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Scott Markman

Will Bachman  00:02
Will Hello and welcome to your All right, we’ll start again. Okay, here we go. Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Scott Markman, who is the founder of monogram group. We’re going to be talking about what they do today. We’re also gonna be referring to a resource. We’ll include a link in the show notes, a resource that Umbrex produced, which is the Umbrex diagnostic guide to branding Scott. Welcome to the show.

Scott Markman  00:34
Well, thanks so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure. I’m not sure this irrelevant. You want to include this, but part of our kind of early conversation was that about a year ago, I jumped into the podcast pool and started my own podcast. And so in addition to having been a guest several times, I now on will side of the fence. And so it’s pretty cool to sort of be back on the interview side of the fence having spent a year of my life doing what will does. So thanks. Shout

Will Bachman  01:07
out. Let’s give a shout out to your show. What’s the name of your show?

Scott Markman  01:10
It is called Beer Stories for Private Equity. And so while the you know the audience profile, you know that listen to this podcast is different than mine. There is overlap, obviously, and and so we lean into issues related to the private equity sector and the firms, the companies they own, and the consultants and so on. Okay?

Will Bachman  01:34
And the thesis of your show, do people are they like required to consume one full beer while they are a guest on your show, is that little?

Scott Markman  01:43
It is if they don’t, if they don’t have a beer or a damn good reason, we cut the conversation, and it is a part of the our playbook. At about two minutes in, we stop, we identify the beers, we get the and then one camera you have to, you have to take a slig aside. Yeah, it is part of the playbook,

Will Bachman  02:03
alright? Love it. And so tell us a bit about monogram group before we dive into the discussion today. To give us a little bit of background on your firm, sure,

Scott Markman  02:13
so I’m the founder of the the agency. We started 1990 so I’m finishing year 35 so I’ve been at a long time, classic entrepreneurial story started at a coffee table in an apartment near O’Hare back in the day I moved to Chicago in 1988 back when Jim McMahon was still quarterback. And you know, the glow of the 85 bears was still alive and well. So kind of moved here for a job. Didn’t work out too well, and few months later, decided to hang my shingle. I came for an entrepreneurial family and my parents had a small, modestly successful business in Baltimore, where I’m from. And so I grew up with the business being the third child in the family, and had a sense of kind of what to do, why to do it? Why not to do it? All that good stuff. And so I’m kind of a born entrepreneur. And when we talk about the kinds of companies that you interact with, or that I do, that’s that kinship is really important, because I understand, kind of the mindset and the passion and the challenges of entrepreneurship, so kind of just slowly built the agency. Over time, we had a couple of evolutionary steps from a design firm, I’m a corporate design education into becoming a full fledged agency for some years, and then, like the last 20 being in the world of brand, those inflection points came out of taking on a couple of partners who were college buddies and who had moonlit for me for for a number of years, practical and partners, and they brought different skill sets and mindset to the Table. One was a big Michigan Avenue agency, Creative Director worked on big global brands, you know, Oscar Meyer and Bud Light and State Farm and all that stuff. And the other was a corporate market research professional who’d worked at Ameritech, one of the baby Bells and ran research there prior to, kind of getting her golden parachute when SBC bought Ameritech and then joined us. So in 2006 when Jackie the second partner joined, it was like, what’s the Venn diagram of a corporate designer and an agency, a creative director and a corporate researcher? And the answer was brand. And so we kind of settled on selling brand expertise and brand deliverables to the market, and that we’ve been that way for almost 20 years now.

Will Bachman  04:46
Okay, so what is the actual service you provide? Do you design logos and branding guides, or is it broader than that? Tell us a bit about your services.

Scott Markman  04:56
Sure. So there is a reason. Research, insights, positioning strategy, ideation around who or what is a brand today versus tomorrow, being able to clearly define it and articulate it. And then, how do you build out the content, the agency, creative side to, you know, build this kind of ecosystem and content to a certain strategy, and I’ll call it set of, you know, creative standards. And then think about building a reservoir of of assets and then taking it to market, launching it, and sort of plotting out in advance how it will evolve over time, and correlating it to the selling environment, regardless of the geography and sector and and whether their channel partners are involved, one of the interesting challenges, but also opportunities with brand. And it’s a common thing, whether you’re a startup all the way up to Starbucks. Any company only has one brand, but you have incredible complexity about audiences and competitors and go to market, you know, inflection points and again, channel all that kind of stuff, and you have to be able to solve for addressing anybody’s question, who are you? What are you going to do for me? Why should I care? Why you? Why should I vote with my our wallet, and why should I continue to re up on that? That’s what brand really addresses. But again, when you have for Starbucks, you have consumers, and you have employees, and you have, you know, coffee growers, and you have Wall Street, and you have social media and all these different audiences that a company like Starbucks cares about. You only get one brand. So how do you address specifics? What are you gonna do for me, because the employees sort of don’t care about the coffee growers. What are you gonna do for me as an employee, you know, it was a barista versus a coffee grower in Colombia, right? You get one, you got one brand, one company, and you have to be able to sort of address those needs and not contradict yourself. There’s a lot of complexity and messiness that brand strategy and thinking and architecture and creative is meant to solve. And it’s that kind of world that I just described, you know, in a few words, that is really the work that our agency does.

Will Bachman  07:31
Yeah, and how do you define brand?

Scott Markman  07:36
So we use a couple of kind of short phrases to define brand. And by the way, to to the audience that’s listening to this, if I queried 100 people and said, What is brand, you will get 100 answers. No two will be exactly the same. And the delta, you know from here, it’ll be gigantic, right? The most common would be a logo. I would tell you, we believe that logo is the last thing. What brand is, is really two things. It’s either the, we use the word DNA, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s connecting to, you know, Simon Sonics, advocacy for, you know, what is the why people buy, why you do things, not what you do and how you do them. So, so what is the DNA of the brand or the organization? Because it will impact everything, right? Literally, everything. It should, and if it doesn’t, there’s a problem. And the second definition of brand is, we say brand is the everything. There is not a thing about any of our clients that I can’t and the client should be able to tie back to brand, regardless of how many steps removed it is or how abstract the the the client may think that is, you know, finance, pricing, investments, organizational structure and behavior. How do you go to market? How do you sell your products and services? Why you how are you tasked with cross selling and upselling? What’s your what you know, what’s the design of your products? How do you market them? All of these things are can easily, directly or indirectly, be tied back to brand.

Will Bachman  09:28
Tell us a bit about your clients, because you have a very particular focus on on private equity. Tell us a bit about that, sure.

Scott Markman  09:34
So we have worked with very large global brands for about 20 years. Life Fitness, world’s largest exercise equipment we branded for the world back in 2009 you know, Division of Brunswick, about at the time $750 million brand sold in 60 countries is, you know, even today, our work is out there. Mintel, you know, one of the great market intelligence companies in the world, out of London. We rebranded them for the world. About 12 years ago, our current largest clients a company called Sensata, a New York Stock Exchange public company, probably four and a half billion dollars in revenue annually operating, you know, every country on the planet, world’s largest maker of sensors that go into vehicles and other related technologies, right? So we re imagine their brand to a very interesting spec last year. So we have our share a big global public company unrelated to private equity clients and history and understanding and so on, having said that we spend 80% of our time directly or indirectly tied to private equity. Our history with private equity goes back to 1996 when again, you’re six of the agency, and I’m just trying to, you know, get new clients and all the usual stuff. And my next door neighbor worked with a bunch of guys who worked in the world of private credit when that was not a thing, it was barely a thing. And they were leaving a company in Chicago called Hell of financial that did the credit side of private equity deals when private equity is a sector, my fingers over here about that big and they had this idea that they were going to focus on private credit for middle market private equity deals and start to steal share from Merrill Lynch and big banks, Chase Bank, and so on so forth. And these 12 guys left, and my next door neighbor worked with these guys at their old firm, and said, Hey, my entire department just left. Maybe they could be a client of yours, because they’re going to need what you can do, and so on so forth. I said, Great. So I was introduced, pitched the work and got it. We created a brand called today in terrace capital. So in terrace capital today probably runs 75 billion of assets under management. They are owned by the Canadian government, and they probably have five 600 employees, and I so so today will in 2024 I can literally walk into any private equity firm in America, all 4-5000 of them, and say one thing, I invented the Antares Capital brand, which is true, and I’m instantly credentialed because they became so successful and so Big. So at the time, this is before websites were a thing. Email was barely a thing. Cell phones were barely a thing. They did good old fashioned print advertising in the trade journals to kind of introduce themselves and go to market and so on so forth, along with an army of guys who sold well, it took off. They crushed it from year one. And so our name started to get passed around. This, this niche, categorical private equity, which today three or 4000 firms. Maybe back then it had 300 I don’t know, and we started to get phone calls, and that was a thing to help firms do X, Y and Z. So we got introduced and kind of pulled it into this world almost 30 years ago. So fast forward to today. As we built out this practice, we’ve had 90 private equity related clients, between private equity sponsors, private credit, meaning lenders, family, big, family wealth offices and industry consultants. We’ve had 90 clients in addition to that. And my personally, in the last, I don’t know, seven or eight years, have conducted over 500 executive interviews that are related to the work that we do. So that has been investment bankers. It has been representatives and institutional capital, pension funds, foundations, insurance companies, hired guns, CEOs, founders, slash sellers of businesses to private equity. So when you think about sort of the insights and understanding of who are these folks, how do they again, relate? What are you gonna do for me, that that whole, you know, very narrow, what are you gonna do for me? Why should I care? In the world of private equity, there’s literally nobody in America who understands this ecosystem, along with the work that we do in the brand work and whatnot. Then Then we do because we’ve just done so much of it. Now, on top of that, our client count today, in the companies they own in the last 10 years is about 40 portfolio company side, which is its own thing, but obviously joined the hip to the PE firms. So you’re talking about 130 clients. And in the world that. We live in will, there’s something called competitive conflict, translated, if you’re Leah Burnett and you work for Ford, you can’t work for Chevy. And that’s extremely pervasive at all levels of the agency world, for obvious reasons. And private equity is completely the opposite. It is a badge, badge of honor. And again, they reward name dropping. And I’m not a Name Dropper, but I walk into any private equity firm in America, and after an terrace, I say, you know, here’s my list. And they go, I know those guys, those guys and those guys and those guys. Oh, aren’t they great? And do you know this guy and all that kind of inside baseball stuff, I’m instantly, instantly, instantly credentialed to have a relevant conversation.

Will Bachman  15:46
Now, when you talk about this, are you doing the branding work for the PE firm itself, like the brand of the PE firm, or of their portfolio companies, or both both?

Scott Markman  15:58
Okay, so for many years, our business model was to get the gigs with the PE firms or the, really, again, lenders and, you know, call it the firm, the immediate ecosystem. Today, we we’re doing a lot of that work, but it’s really, it’s almost secondary to our strategic and financial interest, because the portfolio companies is the monstrous addressable market. Yeah. And if you know, we’re in the midst of, kind of really pushing hard into that world and of having success, I mean, it’s we’re in, you know, year two into really putting our chips on the table, on the port co side, but I’m really out to create a relationship with a PE firm, and hopefully it starts with the work for them. Let’s start working together. Let’s, let’s build trust. Let’s, let us prove ourselves, all that stuff. But ultimately, the carrot here is getting into their portfolio, because then it’s, you know, it’s Lifetime Customer Value. It’s ongoing revenue relationship building.

Will Bachman  17:05
Talk to me a bit, and maybe you give a sanitized example of what it’s like to work with a PE firm itself on their branding. It seems, from a naive perspective, that you know P firms, they’re all kind of doing similar things, right? They have a bucket of money. They’re trying to buy some companies. It’s one thing to portfolio companies. There have all these different products and services, but the P firm itself, how do you think about differentiating them and their personality, and why me, and Why Choose Us and so forth, to either invest in if you’re a limited partner or if you’re a employee, to go work there or portfolio company, why they should take your money? How do you think about differentiating these firms that are kind of functionally doing a similar thing?

Scott Markman  17:55
Yep, it first of all, I will confirm you know your question, the underlying reality of that, of that question, it is 95% true, the sameness and the overlap in this category is by design. Private Equity is by its very nature, risk averse and template driven by design. It’s not accidental. In fact, you aren’t that way. You’re not going to make it wildly different than venture, right? Venture is swing for the fences. I’ll take a struck out. If I have two grand slams, I’m seeking the next big thing, Uber, right? If Uber is the ultimate example, then everybody, the whole category is around the people, the investment profile, the the structuring of investments, serious, A, B, C, D, all that stuff is is around swinging for the fences and and grabbing unicorns, Right? Private equity is the polar opposite. They are pattern recognizers. They are risk averse. By nature. If you you know, I went to three private equity conferences this year, I could almost describe down to the thread, what everybody’s wearing. And that’s fine. It is what is, but it’s a it’s an indication of Persona and behavior and belief in what’s required, or a precursor to, I’ll call it success and belonging, the the insight, the, you know, the emotional drivers of this are people that are looking to create a career, you know, obviously create wealth for themselves and their colleagues, but but fit into a certain persona and mindset, and so risk aversion, to a almost an exhaustive level, is an underlying reality of private equity. Now, as a result, when you think about the messaging and the brand and the WHO ARE YOU side of that and you. Have the proliferation of 1000s of firms, and new ones are being created every single year because their amount of partners or VPS will, you know, create their own and, you know, it just grows from there. And so they are instinctively driven or incentivized to kind of, kind of do what everybody else has done, but it’s just with their own shingle, their own name, and, you know, blue street capital or something, you know, something that feels very templatized. And so we walk into that all the time, and are asked with, as you just said, how can you identify and articulate what makes us different? And I my answer is always we can? We know how to do it, and we will. We are very good at being able to identify small but meaningful things to agree upon and to amplify and to build around, given the fact that 70% or is 65% what you’re ever going to say to anybody is pretty much the same as 500 others, just like you. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just the reality of what we walk into. But we’re really good at sitting back and listening and picking at the pile and kind of go, Ah, there’s something there. Let’s talk about that. Let’s expand upon it. Do you believe that? Can you imagine that being the top of your branding message pyramid that we’re going to, you know, build stuff around, yes, and sometimes there’s one person you gotta get Yes. Sometimes it could be six. That’s fine. And then, yeah, can

Will Bachman  21:42
you give some examples? Not, I mean, could be your clients, or could not be your clients of just, maybe just rattle off a few PE firms and like, what for you is their branding or positioning that, like, how they’re seeking to be distinctive, should be well known firms like KKR, TPG, or could be firms that I haven’t heard of before,

Scott Markman  22:06
sure. So one thing, since you threw out TPG and KKR and Carlyle and the usual suspects, there are levels of private equity like anything else. Think of it as a pyramid, right? And think of it as probably having three levels. The top is the KKR as the world, and it’s all defined by AUM assets under management. Think of the top as maybe having 50 firms, right? Thomas Lee and Clayton Dubilier and those guys. Then there’s the middle, middle market firms like win point here in Chicago, or medicine, Dearborn and folks like that, we play for the most part, in the lower strata of that lower middle market. Why it’s, as Willie Sutton said about Whitey rob banks, that’s where the money is. That’s where the money is. I don’t mean exclusively, but relative to a number of firms in terms of opportunities and stacking of clients. That’s where the money is. It’s in a little remote market, because they’re the most amount of firms by a factor of, you know, 20. That’s number one. So number two, anybody I would tell you about, and as an example I’m giving you, I promise you’ve never heard of and that’s fine. They’re very successful. They’re very common in their profile. So the firm I have in mind is a long time client of ours named prospect partners. Okay, they’re in Chicago, again. We can look them up. Prospect partnersdotcom we got to about five, six years ago, when they were transitioning from first generation of two founders into second generation of three partners, and they had had some stumbles, and so they were open to reimagining their brand from scratch and and we did all that work and work with them ever since, terrific company. So what came out of our due diligence and conversation was that prospect partners invested in deals on the smaller almost one foot below the lower middle market, as defined by EBITDA, you know, overall scale of company and so on so forth. But let’s just say EBITDA, a vast majority of even lower middle market firms would take a pass at a lot of the deals that prospect partners does. They’re too small, so they’re almost like sub lower middle market in terms of who they go after and why, and they and they leaned into at our council, a defining aspect of what makes it different and better, and what they look for, what their expertise is, and the outcomes they get by the size of the deal and the profile of who they invest in. They’re generalist investors, meaning they only, they don’t only stick to industrial they don’t make some health care, whatever their defining characteristic is the size of the company, but. What it takes to build infrastructure. They’re not very massively M A driven, you know, a model these days, very common are these holding company roll ups, right, fractured markets like roofing or something. They don’t do that. That’s not really their model. But they’re very good at finding a company, obviously, that is very put together, spins off cash growth potential. But the things they’re going to do to invest in and involve that company to then sell to typical low middle market, or even middle market, most of the firms don’t want to bother with. It’s just not how they’re going to make money, what they feel comfortable with, if it’s in their investment model, their investment thesis, these guys take on things that most people wouldn’t deal with, and they leaned into and said, We’re expert at that. We have a track record. We know who we’re going to sell to and other factors, and know us for that. And invest in us with your capital. Join us. Because if you’re a young associate or a vice president or a biz dev person if you’re looking to sell your company, this is what you should understand and why we’re the best choice. It all ties back to not exclusively, but but at the top of the messaging pyramid, size of deal and all that comes with it, because they’d be the first to tell you there are a lot of firms that just would never take a look at these companies, let alone put a bid together.

Will Bachman  26:28
I just while you’re talking there, but looking at their website and they have this positioning of we speak entrepreneur, we act entrepreneur, we so nice. It

Scott Markman  26:41
will be our language. That’s we put the words in their mouth. And again, there’s implication to entrepreneur. Again, there’s certain language in this in this world, you know, founder, owner, operator, entrepreneur has an implication of smaller by design, yeah, and a vast majority of PE folks will not use that word. They’ll use founder. They will, they will think about entrepreneurially owned, meaning family or individually owned, or a couple of partners. But the implication of entrepreneur is meant for better, for worse, meant to be smaller than, you know, if, if a company’s 200 million in revenue, and, you know, 16 in EBITDA, or I just read here, it’s entrepreneur smaller than that. And it’s a different it’s a meaningfully different thing, all right, it’s COVID. I know

Will Bachman  27:39
Attention all companies with EBITDA between three and 10 million boom, right?

Scott Markman  27:44
But I will tell you that they, you know, they lean hard into three to five. There are a lot of lower middle market firms that just are kind of, they really want five to 10. And the difference between an EBITDA 10 and EBITDA three is pretty meaningful. It would

Will Bachman  28:02
definitely be meaningful to me,

Scott Markman  28:06
right? Yeah, me too. But I mean, the the all the characteristics, the flaws, the the opportunity to invest in all that messy stuff in a $3 million EBITDA on a 10 million are pretty different. Yeah, let’s,

Will Bachman  28:22
let’s talk about this resource you kindly offered to kind of react, to offer some additions, or some suggestions or some war stories about this resource that Umbrex. Umbrex published, the Umbrex diagnostic guide to branding. And that’s your whole space. So I know you’ve taken a look at it. Would love to hear you know your reactions to it, any any where would you like to start?

Scott Markman  28:47
So the first thing I will tell you will, and I don’t know whether you author this or that with others, it is as comprehensive a document around this topic, this subject matter, as I literally ever seen, it is spectacular, and the rigor and depth and breadth around which to think about, you know, a pretty big topic, but that, you know, a lot of business people tend to sort of put into a small box is crazy. Now, again, I know you live in the world of management consultants and folks that you know either probably have come from, you know, very global, big, sophisticated, best in the world kind of places, right? But this is a 56 page deck filled with 10 point type and the the degree of minutia is a. Made my head spin, and I wasn’t quite sure if I was given this how I might use it. Is a colossal brick wall to be climbed. Okay, so I don’t know if I can share this with you on the screen, but I have it in front of me. I can just sort of little bit read through this. Yeah,

Will Bachman  30:21
you can go ahead and share it and share it and and if you and if you have some stuff to share, we can also include in the show. Just

Scott Markman  30:27
go ahead. Yeah, that’s fine. So I just took some notes, right? This is sort of, you know, the heart of what I’m describing there’s a lot of great framework kind of thinking here around the broad topics and the I love this, I’m again, I’m going to liberally steal this with your permission. This idea of nascent, mature, developing, optimize is brilliant, a great way to rate a brand on sub topic factors, right? I love brand, strat, communication, marketing, customer experience. That’s sort of how we think about this, because again, for the most part, we’re brought in to solve for B to B companies and a lot of industrial companies, manufacturing, distribution, even services, right? That’s loosely today, the world we play within. And so the way to break that stuff down into, who are you today? Where’s the company evolving? Because M A such a big part of private equity driven sort of paths, right and and the competitors and the go to market and customers, and, you know, that kind of universe, this is a fabulous way to think about this. I will tell you that the one thing that we typically do not think about in a weird way we probably should is corporate responsibility that feels very much like public company kind of lens. And maybe or maybe not, it was thought of that way, right again. Major hats off for being able to kind of go A, B, C, D, upon a lot of factors, you know, nascent, mature, developing, optimized. I love that. Here’s where you kind of lost me, and it’s about 30 pages in a deck, yeah, is again, I tried to put myself into your shoes and the, you know, the consultants on your platform or and where they came from, and that framework of, you know, if somebody worked at McKinsey and their client was Ford Motor, or, in my world, land or inter brand, you’re the biggest branding shops in the world. And you know Ford, you know a division of Ford hires land or McKinsey or whomever, and you get, you know, three, four months to do you know. You assign six to eight people, and you get paid a million bucks to produce 250, page deck and to wrap your arms around this degree of rigor and detail in terms of what is demanded by that kind of client, was expected by the kind of consultancy, what they’re looking to get out of it, and how they will deploy it, or put it in towards next steps and blah, blah, blah, I get anybody below that. This is 60 miles to detailed. Now, could this be the framework to look at levels A, B, C, of complexity and rigor, and, you know, whatever, and you know, take the foundational aspect of this, but into $150 million company who are Philistines when it comes to any of this stuff, and really only cares so much because they want to do so much about it. But you could take the foundation of this and just compress it, streamline it into a degree of detail and time and money and actionability that is commensurate with who they are and where they’re going, which is sort of the world we live in, you know, it’s the executive summary level of of what you’ve done here, phenomenal. But to apply, you know, again, if one of your consultants, or a small consulting firm, and say, I’m going to take, you know, 30 pages of, you know, a couple 1000, you know, data points and analyzes, and then go, what do you do with that, and how do you present it, and how was it deployed? What do you do with this? I would love to hear you know, the thinking behind this, because, again, exhaustive level of detail. Yeah, no. Thanks

Will Bachman  34:59
for. Of feedback so listeners the just to kind of give you an overview of the document that Scott’s been talking about, is the to help support a diagnostic of a brand, of a company, this document breaks it down into five major categories, and then each one of those categories, there is somewhere between five and six or eight subcategories, right? So the major categories are brand strategy, overall, communication, number two, marketing, number three, customer experience and number five, corporate responsibility, right? And then with each one of those, there’s several different sub areas. For each of the sub areas, there’s 28 of them. There’s a one page, sort of one page guide for that, with a maturity model that Scott was referring to to help say, for that particular area, how would you rate it, right, anywhere from nascent to to optimized. So the the concept of this, of this particular resource, was that many people may not, you know, use try to go through the entire thing. The idea is it’s more of a resource that you could draw from, right? So, if you were looking, just say, at the communication function of a company and how it affects branding, you could pull out the relevant slides from that section. Or if you were just saying, Hey, we’re going to look just at the brand strategy, you could pull out, Oh, there’s one page just on brand positioning. So you could pull out just that one slide. So we wouldn’t really expect a consultant to use this resource to say, Oh, let me march through all 28 areas and do this guide. But it’s more to pull out to serve as sort of a resource to support that. And there’s a more exhaustive way of using the guide and a more high level way. So you could kind of go through the 28 and really in an hour or two to sort of check the boxes and get a sense of, you know, where your strengths are. Or, you know, you could do the four month version Scott, the way you suggested, I’d love Scott. Maybe to you to react to. Are there any of those topics, of 28 sub topics that you’ve you know, that you’ve kind of typically look at that you’d like to share an example of how you evaluate one of your clients on brand architecture or on their brand messaging or brand equity. Love to hear you kind of dive in on on one or more of those areas.

Scott Markman  37:43
Yeah. So I’m going to pull up a document. So just give me one second that. Here it is that I’ll I’ll share on screen now that we just developed fairly recently in response to one of our PE firm clients, where we’re working on three platforms at the same time, uh huh concurrently, and the the brand, architecture and strategy model are different. Think of a BC, A is holding company to in a in a fractured roll up situation, and we are working both at the operating unit level as well as the old and company level. But you know, they’re, they’re, it’s a little bit of, you know, the strategy behind it is very particular. Rather that’s typical to hold a company, then we’re dealing with one where they’re taking four foundational companies, and from day one, they’re going to create a master brand nationwide, rig, come together and build a powerhouse nationwide in this category, the third of which is a very complex hybrid, that there’s a foundational brand. They’ve already done a series of add ons, and they are going to be eventually building a regional powerhouse, national, unified brand. But the steps in that journey are very bespoke and hybrid for a lot of reasons. So the models that we and the strategies the playbook are all very different, working on all three at the same time. And so the partners sort of said to me, Well, how do you how do you decide, kind of what to recommend, and why? Okay, so this is a couple of weeks ago, so we developed this document that I’ll share now in response to that, and then a little bit to you know, kind of share with clients and prospects. So to us, this is philosophical as well as practical. That brand is the tail and the investment thesis is the dog. When we were brought in by private equity folks, whether they’re partners or vice presidents or directors of value creation or, you know, the leaders the C suite leadership of the portfolio company, they’ve already figured out their investment thesis is, I don’t give a damn what I say. We’re not going to change that. We are meant to amplify that and make it the best it can be. In terms of time, efficiency, investment efficiency, greatest value creation and exit, right? That’s what they come to us for, and so it’s a means to an end. That’s why we say it brands the tail and investment uses. The investment thesis is what it is by the time that they have closed the deal that’s already in place, not that they’re inflexible, but it’s like not going to radically change, right? Unless the world blew up or something. So what we did was we, along the lines of what you did will, was we developed our own four buckets, brand architecture, factors, what are the options? Number two, what are the assets and the sophistication of any of the brand or brands that we walk into a platform along with that own acquisitions? What are they walking into? What do they have? How good are they? How does this stuff fit together? Right? The third of which are business factors. You know, are they going to open up new plants. Are they going to be adding add ons that are going to change their whole positioning and value proposition? Are they going to be open up new, you know, going from the East Coast to the West Coast? Are they going overseas? Are they developing new technologies? I mean, that’s business stuff, right? Then there’s the PE firm factor. What do they believe in? Because there’s certain PE firms who say all we do is holding companies. Thank you very much. And if you can help us in that great if not, move on. There are certain firms and very open mindset about this stuff. We want you, Mr. Brain consultant, to tell us what to do and why? Let’s get consensus. So let’s go pursue it given certain factors. So we need to know what we’re walking into. So we look at these four factors, and there’s, I think, 29 in here, you know, which to what, to me, is exhaustive, but it’s, you know, an order of magnitude less than your document. Then we said, Okay, if you put a gun to our head and say, which is the two, three or four in each of these buckets that you think are the most important, whittle it down further. And we did this here. I think they’re four, six on 11. You put a gun to our head, these are the 11 we’d focus on. Now, are we right? I don’t know, but it’s, you know, we did our best swing at taking 29 down to 11 and I, and again, in a compare, contrast to your document, even 11 is about all that a cell you know, a founder of a PE platform, or hired CEO or the director of value creation or partner at the PE firm, that’s about as much complexity as they’ll probably handle, relative to brand as anything against other things. They think about between nine and five, you know, and they think about a lot of stuff. You know, private equity is like their heads are exploding with priority and responsibility on a daily basis, and every day it changes. So listen, getting these folks to listen to that brand in any given day of the week is hard because they’re you’re competing for their attention priority. So even 11 things is like a certain degree of rigor and best practices and experience to arrive at what the hell to do, because they are get cut to chase people.

Will Bachman  43:27
Alright. Well, Scott, is is this a document that you are open to sharing? Can we include a link to download this in the show notes? Yeah,

Scott Markman  43:36
after the show, after the recording, I’ll be happy to just email this PDF and please share it widely. It’s, you know, it’s our name is, is on it, of course, but, or is it, you know, I probably need to add our name to this. I did not, but to be shared by third parties. Happy to I mean, please, please. That would be fantastic.

Will Bachman  43:55
Alright, I love the layout here. It shows the the branding and design ability of your firm, nicely laid out.

Scott Markman  44:02
We are, we are sick in the head, as it relates to design, like I can not do, well designed documents.

Will Bachman  44:09
So I’m curious in terms of the opposite in the spectrum, the very like the most abbreviated version of a branding diagnostic. When you first sit down with, let’s say you’re being brought into a portfolio company of a PE firm to, you know, to do a bit of a branding assessment. What are the first questions that you ask the company to help get a sense of their current state of their brand? Sure.

Scott Markman  44:38
So there are two due diligence and research processes and components that are critical to our you know, way we do things, the first of which is we insist upon an in person, half a day information gathering and whiteboarding session with all the leaders. That matter, right? Could be three people could be 10. And we we put together an agenda with all the major kind of inputs that we need to learn. They’re typically, I don’t eight, the kinds of things that any consultant would would ask for. And so what are we looking for? We’re looking for interaction. We’re looking for a behavior. We’re looking to responses to certain kind of questions, interaction with each other, even the physical environment of the room, if it’s at their at their facility, right? Because we are astute people, and we notice certain things that are between the lines that are going to come down in the road as being important, again, the design of a space. It’s extremely important when, when they take you on a tour, let’s say their factor of their factory, their manufacturing facility, that maybe is the next room. How do they do that? So, so it’s a lot of this qualitative between the lines things, not just factual. And that’s, you know, because we’re but, you know, we’re a bunch of creatives as well as, you know, business thinkers, but the creative side of us, you know, is noticing things that other people want. That’s number one. Number two is we do a detailed set of, you know, Zoom interviews like this, about 30 minutes, typically. And we’ll do a certain beyond the leadership that we’re in that intake meeting. We’ll look at maybe customer experience people, sometimes even people on the shop floor. We want to get a cross section of an organization and help people respond to the same questions given their tenure. And I’ll call it responsibility within the organization, so we can triangulate, you know, not just what the leaders tell us, right? So we do that, and then we go out to their external audiences, customers, channel partners, suppliers, and we may do 12 to 25 of those. And oftentimes the most insightful stuff comes from the outside. We’ve been doing this for years, and we know how to conduct these interviews and to get what we need to get, and then sift through, you know, the all the data, along with a pretty exhaustive, competitive audit. So think about those. Are three legs of due diligence. Mentioned

Will Bachman  47:14
that you talked to these third parties. What is like your one go to question when you’re talking to those third party suppliers or customers or that you find is like the gets the most insights. You’re

Scott Markman  47:29
going to laugh when I tell you this, because it’s the most elemental, disarming question. It’s always the last question to every single interview, and it’s really simple in a couple of words today, what’s the brand? Oh,

Will Bachman  47:44
what sort of responses do you get to that?

Scott Markman  47:47
From the low end of, I have no flipping idea, to something around, again, a logo. Oftentimes it’s very but the answer is, typically in the middle, big middle, it’s going to be very kind of factual, what they do, the products and services that they sell, as opposed to, you know, how we would sort of think about brand. Now, the real answer is, if we query 20 people, we get 20 answers. I went to Vegas, will and you wanted me to bet my life savings on an outcome. It is that any one of these exercises, the amount of people we query will be the amount of totally different answers to the simple question, what’s the brand? Take it to the bank. All right. All

Will Bachman  48:44
right. Scott Markman, thank you so much for joining today. Monogram group. Where can we find you? Online?

Scott Markman  48:51
Funny, you should say that monogram group, M, O N, O, G R, A, M, G, R, o, u, pdotcom, and then you can find lots of info about the agency and our clients and case studies and and service offerings and markets and user stuff,

Will Bachman  49:08
amazing. Okay, we will include that link in the show notes. Scott, thanks for joining today. Well, appreciate

Scott Markman  49:14
it very much. You.