Predicting The Turn W/ Dave Knox

In today’s business landscape, if you want to succeed, you’ve got to swing for the fences. That means being proactive, focusing on innovation, and not being afraid to place the bet.  On this episode of Predicting the Turn our guest is Stu Willson, Co-founder and CEO of Radicle. Stu came on the show to share his expertise on how to be proactive, focus on innovation, and think about bets, and why these keys are crucial to creating value for your business.

BarkBox started with three levels of personalization for small, medium, and large breed dogs. Then one day they got a very important phone call. It was from a customer who needed their box a little more personalized.   Now, they customize about 120,000 boxes each month. So, how do they do it? Matt Meeker, Founder and CEO of BARK, came on the latest episode of Predicting the Turn to talk about his entrepreneurial journey and how BarkBox emphasizes the customer in all they do.

Millennials. Supposedly they’ve killed homeownership, department stores, chain restaurants, and a whole host of other things. But what if they’re not killing the world? What if they’re just forcing it to adapt? Matt Britton was a guest on Predicting the Turn podcast recently and had a few thoughts on Millennials and how businesses should be adapting in response.

Big brands often can’t get out of their own way. That’s why disruption is just waiting to happen in so many industries. One of those industries is cleaning. In this episode, Jon Bostock, former President of Big Ass Fans & CEO / CoFounder of Truman's, shares his experience at GE and Big Ass Fans before diving into the mess that is the current state of the cleaning supplies industry and how Truman’s is using authentic human connection, straight-to-consumer delivery, and safe, quality products to change the way cleaning supplies are bought and used.

After working at Procter and Gamble and Coca-Cola, Tim Kopp made a huge mark on the B2B world. How? The color orange. Tim is the former CMO of ExactTarget. Now, he’s in the venture capital space at Hyde Park Venture Partners. At the time he made the leap into B2B, there were very few CMOs. But he thankfully did it anyway. In this episode, Tim talks about how tapping into the brand colors at ExactTarget was one of the most important things he did. He also talked about how B2B companies can use the best practices from consumer marketing, where marketing is headed in 3-6 years, and the seven different personas of a CMO.

On this episode of Predicting The Turn our guest is Shiv Singh, a former executive at Visa and Pepsi and Founder of Savvy Matters. Shiv talked about the responsibility we have as business leaders to leave a better world for the next generation. How do we do this? By staying savvy.

Everybody organizations similar desires. They want to grow their business. And our guest today, Mark Irace, former CMO of FanDuel, has a blueprint for how he advising companies to get that growth. Most companies he advises want to acquire customers, retain customers, and build a great brand. Don’t we all? Surprisingly, he’s found that the blueprint to do that is pretty consistent across industries.The desires and needs are all the same, but the way to execute the solution is different. On today’s episode, Mark walks us through the blueprint he uses to identify weak spots in companies that want to grow.

What comes to your mind when you think of venture capital? Is it startups, secret back rooms, fancy cars, and slick deals? What if you learned venture capital wasn’t just for small financial firms? What if someone told you that 75% of Fortune100 companies have active venture capital groups? What if you learned that corporate venture capital groups participate in a third of all venture deals and that the number of corporate VCs has tripled since 2011?

Disruption isn’t an option. We can disrupt ourselves, or someone else will. Large companies face this modern dilemma every day. Enterprise businesses can embrace their own disruption by reinventing and transforming themselves ... or they can be surprisingly disrupted by an external force. Rudina Seseri laid out the podcast. She’s been in every camp: She worked at Microsoft, founded her own startups, and is now Managing Partner at Glasswing Ventures, where she’s funding the future of AI, ML, and predictive. In her words: “Today's large incumbents, maybe tomorrow's fallen empire.” But the answer for enterprise isn't surrendering. It’s collaboration. Find out how on this episode.

Love him or hate him, it’s hard to argue with the fact that Elon Musk has captured our attention. Every time he launches a rocket into space or sends a car into orbit, we’re rooting for him. We want him to succeed? But why? Why are we rooting for these seemingly crazy ideas? Because he’s offered a point of view that we can get behind. One that says, “Even if this project fails, eventually, it’s going to succeed and we’re going to get to Mars. So does your company offer a clear point of view? One that speaks to the heart?

In my book Predicting The Turn, I talked about the concept of disrupting the disruptors where the Fortune 500 can take inspiration from the startups that are out there. To see a perfect example of this we spoke with David VanHimbergen Head of Springboard at The Kraft Heinz Company, which is the food giant’s startup incubator, accelerator, and partnership-seeking initiative. “We have to be comfortable with disrupting ourselves or else someone's going to do it for us,” says VanHimbergen. But Kraft Heinz is at the top of the pyramid. Why are they doing this? “For products within the Kraft Heinz portfolio, we've got number one, number two brands, but there's a lot of disruption coming,” says VanHimbergen. “So we need to figure out how do we start building capability and partner with folks on the outside that are building these authentic propositions.”

B2C winners know the math behind performance marketing. But they've also ingested the lesson of brand. There’s been a realization that, you can know the math and run the economics, but it's a long game. You've also got to know the customer and create incredible experiences for them So, understand what the math says from a performance marketing perspective. And understand the experience that you've got to create. Then apply your own judgement to create an experience that's at the intersection of the two. That takes the best of both worlds. Oh, and if you want a role model... Don’t just figure out who’s the best in your space and try to be better than they are. Figure out what space is the best at each facet. Then try to be as good as the best player in that space. This is advice from Jeff Weiser, CMO at Shopify. Predicting The Turn podcast to talk about everything from his journey from strategy and analytics to becoming a CMO, to giving advice to large companies striving to respond to the rise of entrepreneu

If you’re an entrepreneur, time is on your side.  That’s probably not something you’ve heard before, but here’s what I love about legendary entrepreneurs: Everyone else sees obstacles, and they only see opportunity. Scott Dorsey is one of those legends, and he see the constraint of time as a powerful ally That’s just one of the many topics we discussed on this episode Scott lets us come behind the scenes of High Alpha, his latest venture since ExactTarget sold to Salesforce for $2.5B. He dives into how BigCo can adapt to the disruptive marketplace, and use size and strength to complement agility and speed of smaller outfits.

Venture capital is all about investing in disruption. How come the industry itself hasn’t been disrupted? n the venture industry, 9 out of 10 investors are trying to look better, sound better, and know more than the others, and 1 out 10 are actually trying to do something different. How come in an industry so intently focused on funding disruption, the vast number of people all do it the very same way? There’s no one more equipped to handle that question than Paul Martino, founder of Bullpen Capital. Bullpen Capital is an early-stage, post-seed venture fund investing in technology companies that have been funded by super-angels and institutional seed funds. What sets Bullpen apart from other firms are a few strategies they use to maximize their portfolio value and find the companies no one else is paying attention to but should be.

In the tightest labor market ever, people have a ton of options. If you’re not rolling out the red carpet, the talented won’t join. Getting the right talent that knows how to keep pace with the changes in today’s world should be top of mind for every company. Few understand this better than Nick Comydas of Hunt Club, a recruiting firm that uses crowdsourcing technology to find companies the best passive talent. On this episode of Predicting the Turn, Nick outlines how companies can acquire the right talent in this tight labor market and how blue-chip companies need to evolve if they want to keep their talent. He also lends his insight on a few interesting things big companies are doing to adapt, some big trends that are happening in both big companies and the startup world, and finally what individuals can do to prepare themselves with the necessary skills of today.

Every major industry has been forced to focus on innovation. You can’t ignore it, and it’s not just because someone might come by and take some of your business, but you have the potential to be massively disrupted in a very short period of time. Our guest on today’s episode of Predicting The Turn is Joe Medved, a venture partner at Lerer Hippeau. As an expert in innovation and investment banking, he sat down with us to talk about what’s changing in digital media and innovation and how he identifies entrepreneurs worth taking a risk on. It’s almost like identifying an emerging artist; risky but rewarding when your instinct turns out to be right. Because a successful company is about more than just a high quality product, Joe won’t work with a company unless the founder meets a certain criteria.

What does a journalist who spends every single day with CMOs think about how today's marketing leadership can help define the future of business? I grabbed a quick interview with Jenny Rooney, editor at CMO Forbes, while at Cradle Marketers, an event about shaping the future of marketing held at Miami University.

“How necessary is playing in the sandbox?”. “It’s the price of entry to compete as a business professional.” Nimble, digital-first companies are the ones that succeed. Pete Blackshaw has a very unique blend of big company, small company, and public policy experience. He’s been a digital change agent at large companies, a founder of startups, and he’s even worked in the California legislature. On this episode of Predicting the Turn, I sat down to chat with Pete about internal social networks, digital Accountability, the success of CES, the potential future of Cincinnati as a startup hub, and Pete’s experiences of personal growth and development.

Kyle Schlegel gets asked every day what Roger Federer is like, or real, when the camera’s not on him. The truth: he’s exactly the way he is on camera. That’s a powerful level of authenticity and it’s a growing trend. It’s also just one of the big ways technology has changed the landscape for marketing leaders of sporting goods companies. At Brandemonium, I got to sit down with an expert on this topic, my friend Kyle Schlegel, the Global Marketing Director of Racquet Sports at Wilson. He outlined 5 challenges that face large sporting goods brands today, and the 2 practices marketing leaders should be engaged in to become better assets to the brands they represent.

How do you hold on to an entrepreneurial mindset in an industry as established as food, beverages, and hospitality is? To find out, we invited Kevin Burke, Senior Director of Global Marketing - Innovation at Beam Suntory, to join the Predicting the Turn podcast.