Point of View: Bruce Law
Sprout Marketing, founder and president
Bruce Law left the New York advertising world, came to Utah and helped market Novell during its heyday. He soon found he had caught the startup bug when helping launch one of Novell’s spinoffs. After leaving Novell to help grow a number of Utah companies such as NextPage and Knowlix, Law saw a great need in the state for outsourced marketing teams and founded Sprout Marketing in 2002.
Law is now considered one of the brightest marketing minds in the state and has the data to prove it. In just over five years, Sprout Marketing has helped launch more than 400 products for 100 companies resulting in $250 million in increased revenues for its clients.
Business Connect: What first prompted you to launch Sprout?
Bruce Law: In 2001, I was working for NextPage as the VP of marketing and happened to sit on the Utah Technology Council (UTC formally UITA) board. UTC was struggling with its identity and decided to host a roundtable with about 30 key executives to see how UTC could better serve them.
The three main points that came out of the meeting were raising capital, finding talent and changing the business environment in Utah. A fourth item that came out of the meeting was the need for sales and marketing talent. For some time, I’d observed many Utah tech companies that needed help with sales and marketing, but the data point validation at that meeting gave me the justification I needed to launch Sprout Marketing. I went to all of the VCs in town to let them and their portfolio companies know about the new type of agency I was creating with Sprout Marketing.
BC: How is Sprout different from other marketing or ad agencies?
BL: Sprout is basically a marketing and PR team for hire. We are positioned to help small- and medium-size companies validate their market position, then launch their product or service. The VCs I talked to said that their companies were in need of such a service as they’d had a difficult time finding and hiring expensive full-time VPs of marketing who could work with limited budgets and get traction for their companies. So I said, “Let’s collapse it all including marketing budget, team, resources and head count — all into one affordable package.”
You can usually hire Sprout for less than it costs to hire a marketing VP and you don’t need the long-term commitment involved with hiring a VP. You can turn us off or phase us out at any time. It’s a way to wade into the pool without just plunging into the deep end.
BC: What types of companies are your ideal clients?
BL: Many smaller companies don’t have any type of marketing plan, but they know they need one. Sometimes, the company has focused mostly on sales and always planned to get to marketing, but just hasn’t had the time. Or, they may have a marketing plan they’ve cooked up in their heads but it doesn’t yet exist. We can bolt on to that kind of organization and take them forward.
BC: What mistakes do you most often see companies make?
BL: Too often I see what I call “random acts of marketing” — companies that get a bit of cash from somewhere and say, “Let’s try this.” Six months later, they’ve churned through $50,000 with nothing to show for it.
A random act of marketing is like starting a new book vs. adding a chapter to an existing book. With random acts, nothing builds to any sort of conclusion. It’s too easy to fracture your message instead of make everything feed into one specific theme.
At Sprout we like to show clients that if they can look at specific approaches then spend money in certain ways, the revenue growth will happen. If you don’t approach it that way, you’ll just spend a lot of money and be disappointed.
We have a three-pronged philosophy: 1) We help with the foundational elements — brand, customer, messaging, identity, Web site; 2) We then focus on the plumbing — all the ways customers interact with the marketing machine; and 3) Once the plumbing is in place, we’re ready to go outbound and get people to beat a path to the door because we’ll be able to catch leads in the plumbing consistently since the foundation is right.
I find companies forget the first two, then they try a swing-for-the-fence move like getting on the cover of The Wall Street Journal or launching a huge ad campaign. Without the first two items in place, it’s hard to track anything or be able to effectively act on inquiries. Too often, you just spend a lot of money but don’t see anything change after it’s all said and done.
BC: Your clients average a 20 percent increase in leads after 90 days. How do you get that success in a short timeframe?
BL: Once you get really good at doing this type of marketing you start to see similarities across almost all industries — the same principles still apply. The way we go about bringing these companies out of obscurity is often the same regardless of the product so we don’t have to start from scratch with each new client. This allows Sprout to be quickly effective while helping out their bottom line.
I don’t like to be the kind of consultancy who says, “Here’s your binder and your bill. Good luck.” I want to take everything from strategy to execution and see the revenue line go up. Any good marketer tracks his or her success by increased revenues.
How to Hire a Star Employee
Inc. Magazine
How to Hire a Star Employee
By: Timothy Harper
The CEO looked at the young guy he was considering for an executive position. Then he looked at the guy's wife. "What," he asked, "are your husband's strengths as a leader?" Nicole Wigton was taken aback for a moment; she hadn't expected to be interviewed. She paused and then replied, "Well, he's never asked anybody to do anything he wouldn't do himself."
That was the moment Jim Thornton decided to make Mike Wigton an offer. It's typical Jim Thornton. He has a way of mixing a traditional analytical approach with often unorthodox methods to reach big goals, in this case rebuilding the senior management team at Provo Craft and Novelty. Provo Craft was founded in 1964 as a single store in Utah; it sold paper, fabric, glue, buttons, and other materials for do-it-yourself home and school projects. Over four decades it grew to become a leading manufacturer, importer, and supplier for a broad range of arts and crafts. But Provo Craft, based in Spanish Fork (population 28,000), about 50 miles south of Salt Lake City, was showing its age. Its product lines had become stale and profits were meager. Its management structure was cumbersome and inefficient. Sensing weakness but potential, Sorenson Capital, a private equity firm, bought the company and hired Thornton to fix it.
When Thornton, then 38, took over as CEO in late 2005, Provo Craft was still run more like a neighborhood store than a company with 1,200 employees and $120 million in sales. Executive positions often went to people who had been promoted simply because they stuck around. Twenty people were considered top management, including the maintenance supervisor. "We needed to bring in a layer of truly senior people," Thornton says.
Thornton decided to narrow his search to executives who had experience at bigger companies and were looking for the chance to advance rapidly in a smaller setting. He himself had relocated from Chicago, where he had been president of the consumer-products division ($800 million in sales) of Apogee Enterprises (NASDAQ:APOG), a publicly traded glass-technology company, before coming to Provo. But attracting top talent from big corporations to an underperforming company in a decidedly unattractive industry in a sleepy little Western town would be a tall order.
Thornton, a Utah native who had welcomed the chance to move his young family home, recognized that he had to recruit executives willing to give up big-city sophistication and embrace the community's orientation toward family. "I needed to recruit not only the executive but the entire family," Thornton says. He decided he would invite applicants who were under serious consideration to bring their families along to Utah for a few days of hiking or skiing, including the kids and sometimes their grandparents. And Thornton wanted to include spouses in interviews whenever possible.
Relying on a mix of recommendations from executive search firms and people he found through references, Thornton interviewed 40 to 60 candidates for each of six senior positions from mid-2006 to mid-2007. He pitched Provo Craft not as a creaky old company selling yarn to Midwestern housewives but as a "40-year-old start-up" that was dropping low-margin inventory such as paper and stickers in favor of new computerized products such as the Cricut, a $400 tabletop version of a $20,000 industrial cutting system used for creating paper or fabric patterns in scrapbooks and other decorative art forms. The six men Thornton finally hired came from companies like Honeywell International (NYSE:HON) in New York and AT&T (NYSE:T) in Seattle. They say they were persuaded to join Provo Craft the moment Thornton told them he expected each one of them to move on to become a CEO at another company within five years.
But Utah was a hard sell. Mike Wigton was typical. Wigton liked the idea of joining forces with Thornton. Based in Chicago as an executive for Banta, part of the RR Donnelley (NYSE:RRD) printing empire, Wigton was restless for more responsibility. But he and Nicole were uneasy about moving their kids so far from their relatives in Wisconsin. As non-Mormons, they were also concerned about fitting into a culture dominated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Wigtons flew out, and Mike spent the day with Provo Craft managers. He and Jim Thornton played pickup basketball. Nicole toured the headquarters and warehouse, lunched with her husband and the senior managers, and checked out the local neighborhoods.
When the Wigtons met back at their hotel that evening, the phone rang. "Hey, how about coming over to the house to meet my family," Thornton suggested. "We'll order pizza." He wanted to give the Wigtons a glimpse of what their home life might be like in Utah, and he wanted to hear about any misgivings they might have. As they ate their chicken pesto pizza, the Wigtons chatted with the Thorntons' four kids, the oldest of whom was in high school. The kids told the Wigtons how they liked their schools, how they ran around the neighborhood playing with friends, how they loved the views of the Wasatch Mountains and the short drive up to the ski resorts.
Later, the adults settled into conversation in the basement family room. Jim and Lise Thornton, both Mormons, were direct. Yes, they said, non-Mormons will in some ways always feel like outsiders; at the same time, newcomers typically welcome the chance to live in a place where the streets are safe, the schools are good, and neighbors really do welcome newcomers with a plate of homemade cookies. "We talked frankly about the culture," Wigton says.
Thornton urged the Wigtons to make a return visit to get to know more people in the town. Thornton also offered to pay for Wigton's parents to make the trip. Three weeks later, the Wigtons returned with their kids and with Mike's parents, who gave their blessing to the move after a cookout in the Thorntons' backyard.
Mike joined Provo Craft as the director of new business, and a year later, the Wigtons say they have no regrets. The added responsibility at work, the prospects for faster advancement, and the family-oriented outdoor lifestyle are all exactly what Thornton promised. Thornton is satisfied, too. Sales at Provo Craft are up 40 percent over the past two years, to a projected $220 million in 2008, and pretax earnings are on track to triple to $35 million. Without the new team, he says, the turnaround would have never happened. Thornton also knows that at some point the team members will probably be gone, off to bigger jobs elsewhere. Then again, they may just stick around for that view of the Wasatch Mountains. Life is pretty good in Spanish Fork.
