Alice Chan on Today's Realities for Consultants

Mixing Board Studio Session

Alice Chan is an entrepreneur at heart and currently the Founder & Fractional CMO at Flock Marketing where she creates marketing strategy, bulletproofs the go-to-market approach and manages day-to-day marketing execution for companies large and small. She’s founded and run businesses, and worked inside early and late-stage startups. Her career began in communications and PR in London arriving in Silicon Valley just in time for the dotcom boom (and bust). She has a passion for marketing and communications and starting fires. A ‘specialist generalist’, she has worked with a wide range of B2B and consumer tech companies, holding numerous fractional CMO roles, as well as global comms leadership roles.. 

In this Studio Session, Alice and Mixing Board Founder, Sean Garrett, talk about Alice’s personal evolution from comms to marketing; when you should call yourself a fractional leader; the economic backdrop to the current job market; and how to be a marketing team in a box.

SG: What are you doing now and how did you get there? 

AC: I’m a fractional CMO and have been working in marketing for a decade, having spent the first two decades of my career in communications. It feels like everyone is calling themselves fractional these days and there's no value in that word. It just describes the amount of time you spend. Back in 2014, I would have described myself as an acting or interim marketing leader. I would have had responsibilities for all the marketing output of the companies that I worked with, participated in management meetings and reported to boards. 

SG: With the term fractional, is there any distinction now that you feel is different from interim? Are interim and fractional effectively the same thing, or is there a distinction between the two?

AC: 10 years ago, there may have been 50 or a hundred of us on the West Coast working that way. Everyone else was in a full-time role or working in agencies. To earn the position of being an interim or an acting leader, you had to have a track record behind you. Today, you scratch the surface and find people calling themselves fractional marketing leaders or CMOs, and the last job they held was social media manager, and they’ve never been a consultant. Quality control that seems to have taken a back seat. I'm a little concerned for the Valley that the focus of reducing cost and managing spend has led to some pretty mediocre marketing decisions being made.

Just checking the box and saying, "Oh, I have comms in place, and I have marketing in place,” is enough. We all know that that is not enough. If there is any benefit or value to fractional, it should be that I can still get really, really high quality talent at my table for the budget that I have. Let's say you can afford 25% of that talent and not 100% of that talent – well, the more senior you go, the more you should actually get out of it, and the less time that talent has to put in. Their value is in the transfer of knowledge, not the hours they spend grinding out the work.

SG: How else is today’s market different from when you first started consulting?

AC: I've been consulting and working for myself since 2010, and for the first four or five years I did it purely in communications. I had a virtual comms agency called Bird PR. Back then nobody was doing virtual agencies. We were cobbling together Skype,Outlook and Dropbox, and nothing was seamless and smooth the way it can be today.

I was always very clear from the beginning, I didn't want to be a contractor. I wasn't trying to be a freelancer. I am a consultant. I always say I'm a consultant with a small “c”, because really I'm an operator. I'm not going to spout a bunch of great strategies you could do and good luck, hope you can get it done. I want to be able to consult and then help get programs up and running and off the ground, and delivering results.

That is a little bit of the difference between then and now. There's also the economic backdrop of today. The pandemic unleashed a lot of people who no longer want full-time jobs where they are asked to commute to the office everyday. Working from home gave people a lot of confidence to say, "Oh, I could work remotely. I can be effective. This can work. The lifestyle piece is important for me."

Especially in technology, again we're seeing more waves of layoffs. People need to earn a living and they’re asking, “Can I do it this way?" To anybody considering this path, don't just slap fractional on because everybody's using it. 

Be really clear about taking a step back and asking, where do you want to be in a year? Where do you want to be in two and five? Are you doing this because you have to for now, until the economy recovers? In which case, be clear about that. And in that case, I would say you're probably more of a freelancer or a contractor looking to plug in. You could be filling in maternity leaves, you could be filling in for launches where teams need to add on a little bit more brain power and muscle power to get through certain periods.

Typically, after rounds of layoffs, large companies do tend to engage contract help more. I haven't really felt that this time around. And obviously, we are against a backdrop of some changing laws over the last five or six years, especially in California, about how big organizations are allowed to use temporary help. I don't know how much of an impact that has. But if you are very senior and you're thinking, "I'm a few years from retiring and I don't want to take another big job, but I want to work. I want to be a consultant." You're going to have a lot to offer. You're probably not going to be wanting to be hired to churn out tons of blog posts and filling in gaps. You'll want to offer something strategic and valued.

SG: That's the rub though, that that would be great if that was true. If every organization understood the value that someone senior can bring from a strategic perspective, that could manifest itself on all sorts of levels. But when you're an individual, and you're walking into an organization who's looking for quick fixes, or filling in the gaps after layoffs – how do you make sure that the organizations that you walk into use you properly?

AC: First of all, I'm going to try and understand what their problem is. They're probably not going to come to me because they need a small gap filled. Over the years, the companies that I've worked with are often venture backed startups, Seed through Series C. If they're later stage, they have probably hired two or three marketing leaders at this point and not quite got it right. Often Founder/CEOs don't quite understand what type of marketer they need. Marketing is not that straightforward these days. What is the go-to-market motion that is going to be most successful for the company?

There'll be a couple of “mistake” hires, not really through the employee's fault, just the wrong match. So the CEO feels comfortable bringing someone like me in because it's not a permanent decision that they have to make. I have the opportunity to take inventory and audit what has been happening, what the team makeup looks like, what the budget spend has been, how successful the marketing has been in supporting sales and the other objectives of the business. In the pre-work, before we even commit to an engagement, I'll describe to them the process that I'll be taking. They'll make a decision that, yes, this feels like what we need.

SG: When you go through the pre-engagement process and say all the things like, "This is who I work with. This is how we work. This is my approach. This is what we do. I don't do this, I do this. I focus on this big thing over here and not these small things over here." And they say, "Awesome. We love you. Everyone tells me we need to hire you. You're incredible." And then on day one, it's: "Hey, you remember all those small things that you said you didn't do, actually we need that.” How do you manage situations like that?

AC: My positioning is, I’m a marketing team in a box. I’m the leader of that effort. But if on day two it's like, "Shoot, you know what? We actually have a product launch in six weeks and I don't have a product marketing manager to take us through that." I'll bring one in. I am clear to say, fund me out of headcount, but I'm going to need a program budget. If I need to bring in 10% of a PMM, 10% of a content writer, or 20% of a social media manager, I'll bring those people in. That will get funded from the marketing program costs that we need.

It doesn't tend to trip me up because I do say, I'm an operator. We are here to get things done. But at the same time, I'm going to stay focused on the vision, mission, and north star, making sure that we’re anchored, and that we’re working against that. I keep a pretty firm hand on the reins so that tactical work is in line with a broader objective. We don't just spin in circles on small tactics.

SG: What is your technique for saying, "No?"

AC: Well, I've learned over the years that every time you say, "No," you tend to get asked to leave. So I have to decide if I'm okay with that or not. I'm not very good at saying yes to things that I don't really want to do!

SG: That makes you very rare in this industry.

AC: Well, it might make me very unemployable! It depends on what I'm being asked. I've missed out on some major paydays because I’ve asked too many questions. When we all have time and space, it’s easier to get a little bit of distance between the imperative of needing to work and earn a living and staying true to our core values and who we are (which is frankly a constant balancing act). 

I’m not the best fit with leaders who need their teams around them to keep telling them how great they are. That's not when you hire me. You hire me because you’re really clear about a very steep mountain that needs to be climbed. When you need someone who really can figure out the right route to take and pull everyone along. That's when we do our best work. 

That means that it's not always a fit for everything. Sometimes you don't figure that out right away. One of the things I love about being a consultant is that it’s no harm, no foul if it doesn't work out and it's been three months, we haven't ruined anybody's lives, including our own, in the process. I believe 100% that I leave every client way better than I found them, even if it's not a medium or a long-term fit.

I start every engagement understanding the positioning of an organization and making sure it resonates. Are we standing in the shoes of our customers and do we feel what they feel? Can we relate to them on that level? And a lot of companies want to skip that step. I can't do the work that then leads me to say, "I leave you better than I found you," if we don't start there. 

One of the trends I'm seeing at the moment is that I'll talk to companies that very clearly need help. They'll have no marketing help whatsoever, and they want to immediately hire a demand gen person because they’ve got to get leads and that's all they care about. I understand that. But they don't realize that there is a process to getting there. It can be a quick process, it doesn't have to be laborious. 

What I’m wrangling with right now, is being able to say, "Yes, I'll do lead gen for you." But behind the scenes I’m still deploying my process and just calling it lead gen. Because I know what happens, I've seen the movie manytimes. They'll hire a demand gen consultant or freelancer, and they’ll do very little for them because they’ll have nothing to work with. That function doesn't operate on its own.

SG: I can’t think of many instances in my career where I’ve run into someone I worked with five years, 10 years later who basically said, "No, this didn’t work." Nine times out of 10, they were like, "You were right." Maybe just the timing wasn't right, it wasn't the right moment for us to figure that thing out. But we figured it out three years later or we figured that out in retrospect.

AC: To put an even finer point on it, the timing wasn't right for that person to hear it. That’s the difference. I work with a lot of first time founders, and it's not always the most rewarding. I joke that I'll be the first marketing person in and the first one out. Because you're telling them a lot of things they have never heard before, and they may not want to hear right then and there. But I've absolutely had the same thing happen, five or six years later, "In the rearview mirror, everything you said to me makes so much sense." 

SG: There's a lot of senior people right now, who are sitting in in-house roles, and they're looking at what you're doing and saying, "Should I go into consulting? Should I make this move? Should I do this? Maybe it's a three month thing, maybe it's a three year thing, maybe it's the rest of my career thing.” What is your advice to them?

AC: I got exactly this exact message in my LinkedIn inbox yesterday. This person said, "I have the opportunity to be promoted to CMO within my organization, but I'm wondering if I should switch gears and go to work with startups." I said, "Stay where you are!" For now, I would wait out the next 12 to 18 months and get the experience especially if you haven't held that title before, do the job, it will make you a better consultant in the long term. I've held in-house roles, done consulting, and run agencies. The jobs that I’ve had inside of companies have always made me a better consultant. 

Of course, it depends on who you are. If you were at the very, very top, then you're going to find opportunity. You'll have boards that you'll be invited to join and large organizations will be wanting to add you to their advisory teams. If you don't have that blazing-hot sizzle and you have the opportunity to earn a living – and that is important to you – I don't think now is the time to make a big change. The market is so crowded. There's so many people being forced to take that career turn because they got laid off and there's nothing to immediately jump into.

You and I have ridden the waves of some considerable downturns. I've been doing consulting work now for 14 years, and candidly, it's never been harder. Being senior in my career right now and wanting to consult, that feels harder to me too. Because “mediocre” is okay right now. If I can check a box and say, I've got a marketing person in a seat and I'm paying them the lower end of the market rate,and I can tell my board and tell sales, "Oh, there's someone doing marketing. It might not be amazing, but it's there." That’s where we are at. 

It's especially disappointing, in the startup world. The point of being in the startup world is that you can raise the bar, you are challenging the norms, and you are doing different things. The big companies, rightly or wrongly, do have a little bit of that reputation of good enough is good enough.

SG: You mentioned that your first 20 years were spent in comms and then you made this transition to marketing. Is that actually a transition or is it more of an evolution? Now looking at comms in the rearview mirror, and obviously comms in the nineties is different than comms now. How would you describe the differentiation between all these things? 

AC: Personally it's an evolution. From the outside, depending on the person's point of view as they look at my career, they might look at it as a transition. To me, it was an evolution that I wanted to embark on. There was a period where so much was shifting, there was so much technology coming to play, Martech was exploding. The big explosion of shared, owned content that really made a big difference. If you go back even to when you were starting with Twitter and those things made such big shifts.

I just felt that comms wasn't keeping up. It was frustrating to me, partly because clients were still coming and saying, "I want the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and oh, we launch in two weeks." Clients weren't changing their perceptions of what comms could do. But I think comms has to take responsibility for not reframing how it was viewed at that point in time – this would've been around 2010-2012. 

You saw the ad agencies, the marketing agencies, and the creative agencies, they were very quick to jump on some of these trends and to do more with it. Even in the last  year, we've seen Generative AI explode. It was advertising that jumped in right away and were like, here's an ad that we produced with Generative AI. They're just quick to embrace things. 

That made me want to better understand the full breadth and depth of marketing, and what skills you needed to be successful as a marketing leader. Because there is so much breadth to what marketing covers these days, there's going to be a particular area of personal strength and experience. As a leader, your job is to fill in those gaps with the team that you build around you, depending on the go-to market motion. 

If you come from comms, for me anyway, it's been a little easier to lean into those account-based marketing plays where it's very content oriented. The message, the stories that you tell, that's obviously so much of the background of where we come from. Versus coming at it from the demand-gen side where computational mathematics matters. Not to say that I don't understand them, but I'm always going to hire someone very strong on my team who is going to lead that, someone who likely won't be strong on brand. We’ve seen the pendulum swing to both ends, but both are important and you have to balance these things out.

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