Anthony Domine, Pathmaker Brands: Leadership parallels between running a religious organization and a business

[Music] everyone welcome to another edition of founder wisdom podcast today we have anthony domini with us he is ceo and founder of pat maker brands anthony can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about pat maker yeah thanks for having me charles as you said uh founder of pathmaker brands started it a year ago um largely just based off of my passion for marketing and

branding and the strategy around that and really what that does for organizations the clarity that comes from knowing your brand and i became a you know sort of brand certified guide several years ago and ever since i found that amount of clarity and how to help people define those messages get clear and then pull that forward into marketing strategy i've just always been looking for excuses to

serve people with that so that's why i started pathmaker yeah pretty cool and uh serve is the keyword here your background i mean you've been an executive pastor you've been chief of staff also which is pretty cool tell us a bit more about that experience yeah so um i grew up in church it's always been uh an integral part of my life the earliest memory i have

of church with with my my parents was we were at a set up tear down church at a community center and i remember setting up and tearing down chairs right so serving at church has always been a part of my life and um yeah five years ago six years ago my wife and i felt led to serve at this church and it evolved into the role of executive pastor and leading people we had about 25 people on staff over 2000 people going to the church on the weekend which is a wild experience there's a very unique kind of leadership and experiential challenge that you're solving when you're leading paid staff unpaid volunteers while also trying to serve the people that call it their home and also a lot of opportunity when it comes to leadership

development and how you help people grow in their skill sets and connecting all those things together so it was i learned a lot i learned a lot about hard conversations i learned a lot about conflict i learned a lot about clarity and role definition and expectations through that season as well as continuing to stay focused on as you said what's critical about serving people and staying focused

on that even when organizationally it gets confusing and i guess uh this type of business very much led by christian values um and i can try to picture uh the environment and the the setting it must be nicer than a business is it like better flowing or is there more conflicts as well like tell tell me a bit more about the business because i don't know the

date today about running a church yeah i know and most people don't you know i was talking with somebody uh not too long ago about the the stress and the challenge of being a leader in a church and i was just telling them i was like most people are never gonna fully understand because they're gonna assume what do you do during the week don't you just make

a church trip and have it on sunday seems like an easy job um i would say one of the things that makes it uniquely challenging is that uh it's it's a good and a bad thing that everything in your life is in one bucket so the one of the biggest challenges of you know being an organizational leader at a church is that your whole life is now framed by this one thing this one mission so that makes it really hard to have boundaries and i don't even just mean physical boundaries when it comes to oh i'm at the church this day i'm at the now that's part of it the hardest thing is the emotional and mental boundaries because you're just thinking about it all the time and because the mission that you're on is

so good you know it's you're adding such value so it's sort of impossible not to obsessively think about it and it makes it really hard to stay healthy mentally emotionally spiritually and even physically and then the other challenge is uh you know you're you're working with volunteers and leading volunteers is is a real unique kind of challenge okay is it a paid role the chief of staff

yeah well i mean big is relative i suppose um it certainly was the biggest role i've ever had leaving that amount of paid staff and hundreds of volunteers and stuff um but you know there are definitely bigger roles peter drucker was it paid like oh my was my well paid yeah yes yeah yeah i was okay okay and yeah managing volunteers they well i think um yeah

the motivation is there from these individuals um but also there are some limits right because they need to to you know get money in their life and pay their expenses so i guess it's it's kind of limited but um would would you say that it's a higher quality of human not that you're managing uh non-volunteers and it's a different type of business it's a marketing business what

was the difference in the difference between both organization and the quality of employees yeah that's a great question um i would say my time leading in church has made me a significantly better leader okay because when you're leading volunteers you are forced to learn the skills that are driven by empathy empowered leadership meaning what does this experience look like for a volunteer or do they love their

work do they not um which largely determines whether or not they stay engaged so then bringing that into a paid space is not entirely unique there are organizations that think this way but many don't and it does limit the type of experience from a business perspective you can provide for the quality of their life but i've definitely brought that into my career post church world and i

am still obsessively focused on my work environment being a great place to work holding people to high expectations but clarifying my standards trying to serve them in their experience and working with with us a path maker so it does change your world view and how you you serve the people that you lead because if you spend all of your time in the business space you have very

tangible carrots and sticks and those are way easier to use to motivate people but they're not sustainable ways and they're not healthy ways to motivate people as opposed to inspiring people towards a mission inspiring them to higher standards calling them to a a bigger and grander mission than themselves those are things that make it a great place to work or that's what i'm trying to do wow

yeah very cool experience indeed and that led you to chief of staff at uh advise and boost media and as you told me the experience there was uh was more or less interesting but you learn interesting lesson there right yeah so i actually launched pathmaker as i was leaving my church job and then i got connected with with someone else who runs a similar business in the

church space and the long story story we decided to kind of merge our businesses together i moved my clients over so we could build these two companies in concert one was a business focus one was a church focus now he had already had the church business um thriving and i was planning hey let's build this two doors to the same house essentially um and yeah became the

chief of staff uh working closely with him on it and uh yeah i don't want to say anything disparaging but uh essentially there was a lot of issues with paying staff myself included um and a lack of transparency in the the running of the business what did you learn from that uh i would say the two biggest things i learned the first is learning how to trust

your gut and taking action on it um wow that's a powerful one yet i've got that lesson too many times over in the the past couple years you know when the the gut tells you no um and listen to your system and just you know don't do it but in some situation i found that you know that's that kind of fear i wanted to take it head on and i needed to do the thing although my gut would tell me like no you're i want to put the fear down at all cause basically and yeah i'll do the experience is not always pleasant then i i can still say afterwards i've um relinquished my my fear i i got the victory over my fear what is the equilibrium between following your gut and facing your

fears wow powerful question um well you know when i think about gut malcolm gladwell has a book called blink which is an amazing book that sort of just explains this thesis that your blink your quick fast reactions is actually your body and brain doing a lot of difficult math you know a lot of bringing in all these variables and making decisions and a lot of times people

don't trust their blink assessments because they assume because they're fast they're worse but they're actually not worse they're actually really apt you you have learned survival mechanisms and all this kind of stuff so i think a big part of that is better understanding your gut your gut is not always right either and maybe you had a bad taco and and you're feeling a little goofy you know

you you just need to deal with your bowels um but you know kind of testing your gut experimenting understanding with with what it feels like in different ways and fear is a part of your gut reaction to things and and then i think within that too there's healthy fear and then there's unhealthy fear healthy fear is telling you this is a red flag right and then there's

unhealthy fear which is uh anxiety in essence right you're you're trying to predict the future you know you ought to do something and and you're so afraid to do it that you don't do it and i think it really then comes down to is this healthy or unhealthy fear and then going to the why of that the core of that which which very well could be i know i should do this but i'm afraid then it's like hey you gotta just stick it out um which a lot of founders and and you know myself included oh my gosh i've had a lot of dark moments in this past year um or you get to that core and you go um no this is a fear that's telling me i ought not to do this and

to trust that and to to actually be brave enough courageous enough to have the hard conversation take that action quit the job fire the employee change the business model whatever things you need to do that your gut's telling you to do when you know you ought to do it sure yeah the equilibrium question is always a tricky one because it ought to be answered in kind of

percentages and in specific situations for example i have a another upcoming iron man and yes sometimes i get stressed about it so yeah my my gut tries to protect me from that uh awful 16-hour day just hustling and trying to get to the finish line but um it's always worthwhile i think um and in any bad experiences as long as they don't last too long you know

and take too much of your time money and energy um you can learn like specific lessons out of them and you can think some more but indeed like what i got from listening to you is that the the gut is and like you said the the algorithm is like incredible all the math that goes on you know and the body knows that it's kind of paired with the brain with your past experiences and man there's so much wisdom in there so yeah but that's that experience led you to you know pat make your brands which has a very cool website like i told you and how's that doing nowadays who do you target and how's that how's that business going and where do you see it going the next couple years well because i know

a lot of people that you're talking to on your podcast here or all of them you're talking to and listening to our founders entrepreneurs and you know kind of on this journey i think everyone listening will understand it's a mixed bag i told someone if you choose to become an entrepreneur you need to be comfortable not sleeping because you're they're not sleeping because you're too excited or

you're not sleeping because you're too scared so either way you're not sleeping and so i would say that's where we're at with pathmaker you know it's still a baby company where it's in its infancy if you're familiar with the startup j curve talks about several phases of the startup life i think we're very much in the morph stage where we're we're kind of evolving our product and

trying to figure it out and not trying to be too prescriptive on what it is um and ultimately i think the biggest challenge that we have with pathmaker right now is i know our flywheel which is the jim collins concept of how you you get an organization to move that there's this natural progression of how things feed itself our natural flywheel is going to be delivering great

work for our clients and because our work is so public it's going to then naturally progress into more clients because people then ask hey who does your stuff right that flywheel though takes a long time and and i've been surprised with how long our sales cycle is i thought with our price points being as as competitive as they are that our sales cycle would be faster people

would be willing to just go yep let's do it let's start tomorrow uh but it's our sales cycle takes two or three months so yeah i mean we're in a season right now i'd say where our margins are thin our business model is is developing but it's it's secure we're delivering good value but it's not as good as i want it to be but we're on the path so it's it's an exercise in aggressive patients of being intentional each and every day making it one percent better but also being patient and knowing that it's going to take time for us to really develop the machine that we want yeah for sure i can relate to lots of what you were saying and yeah two to three months cell cycle that um seems to fit with

your price point here typically who are you targeting what who's your well i think that's part of the challenge right we're so we're so young that i don't really know we're experimenting with lots of different targets um i'd say the broadest definition of our target is between you know companies that are 10 to 200 in size that are 2 to 10 million in in revenue and it's

a ceo or a cmo or you know surrounding titles that are that feel the weight and responsibility of driving their marketing machine but they can't do it alone and our business model is designed to um kind of help them run that machine keep things you know delivering month over month and our one of our goals is to really give business leaders visibility into that machine when a

lot of times it feels like a black box so it's really anybody who feels like they're just kind of overwhelmed with keeping the trains running on time when it comes to their marketing yeah you mentioned that your work is very much public and i'm all in with the open source uh movement slash philosophy slash mindset um how do you how do you go with like testimonials and

case studies do you have your client sign a contract saying that hey if we're successful you will allow me to use that material how does it go yeah good question yeah we have a line item in our contract that essentially says um both the client and path maker brands own you know the the creative to be used and i even specify in our most recent iteration of

our contract um which i sent out just this week for the first time that i just say specifically pathmaker brands has the right to leverage the work produced in marketing because i've had a lot of questions you know our clients come back and say well how are you going to use it you know and they rightly are trying to understand the the assumption that i'm making or

that they're making on am i going to use it for another client am i going to you know whatever reproduce their work or or whatever but i've just started to say hey um you own this 100 but pathmaker reserves the right to use this work for marketing got it um i'm senior packages here which are quite interesting um how do you go with the unlimited uh graphic

design unlimited video editing i call it all you can eat so it to me that that business model is i mean when it gets profitable is like when a client gives you less work kind of um and they're like just too busy with other things and then you know like you have less work and as a result you you can get more money why did you and i i mean on the other side of the equation if um i'm a null you can either type of client i can order a bunch of work from you and probably profit on my side from you know giving you so much work although i'm pretty sure you have in your contract some limits why did you choose this uh business model and then i'll have another follow-up question

after that yeah so i chose it because i don't want my clients worrying about how many graphics they've asked for when you're talking about driving the overall marketing machine and there's so much you're trying to keep up with and i asked for three yet or seven and i can't remember and i've been that client before and it's so distracting um and you're so afraid of those hidden

fees right it's like get an invoice back and it's triple or whatever i thought it was to be that's that's a painful moment as a business leader and i want to save them from that pain now how do you do the business model i'm largely figuring that out right now my hypothesis and what's proven so far with our small client base is a few things one we're

not promising a certain turnaround time okay so the balance between turnaround time and unlimited that's where i think it kind of gets impossible to deliver that in value because then there are two things that happen one your expectation is sort of impossible to manage but the worst thing that that happens in my mind is i create a culture for my creative talent that sucks because now they're

they're my my creative graphic designer on my team that's assigned to some account they get a request that comes in at 3 30 p.m they have plans to have dinner with their friends that night but now they know they only have 24 hours to deliver a graphic and they asked for a booklet you know or something like you know really complicated now they just ruined their plans

and now my culture is suffering because of the turnaround time now if you want to make that graphic request we'll do it and we have very high standards for how quickly we deliver things meaning we're going to go as fast as we possibly can now they're going to be some clients that that's not good enough for they don't they're not a fit for us that's fine but

i do want to deliver them the freedom that they can ask for as much as they possibly need and we will do our very best to deliver it and those that understand and appreciate it they're going to be great with that model now the other side of it is how we vet talent is that they're fast and they're good the second piece is that we are continuing to build and we already have very good systems for efficiency on task lists so a good a good fast graphic designer can then come into an efficient task list and see their list of tasks and rip through them right because they're they're being their economies of scale there and then the third thing is when we kick off an initiative our first like two to three months depending

on the scope are really in determining the one of those pieces of the brand is the visual brand so when we get really we work really really hard on getting clear on what that vibe is that people want first very specifically with examples so that when we get into mass production we have things to pull from but also we're not doing a ton of back and forth

and iterating which also saves time and efficiency on the machine got it why did you decided to go um wider than uh narrower and like more precise for example with stop leads i do cold email for sas and marketing agencies you seem to offer copywriting at legion websites why did you decide to go wider i really the vision i have which i'm sure the product suite will

change over time right we're really in that morph season so as i learn really what the market values and whatever i'm here to evolve and get tighter but really the vision i want to deliver which the video on the homepage shows in a goofy way is i want it to be a marketing department in a box i want you to be able to outsource you know your marketing team and scale it quickly and stay flexible with your costs because that gives you value but it's also better for the creatives so what i what i am most excited about like my sort of like subversive mission in the whole thing is i want to serve the business leaders but i also want to serve the creative community and i want designers and video editors and and

website developers and copywriters most of them if they're true creatives they don't like clients they don't like dealing with clients they don't want to talk to clients they don't want to sell clients they hate sales a lot of creatives hate sales they're not and i'm not trying to pay with a broad brush but a lot of them are not great business people they don't want to worry

about finances they won't worry about taxes they don't worry about you know payroll and and invoices and all that stuff um so that's cool come into this creative world we're going to continue to work hard to create this awesome remote creative culture you get to set up at a coffee shop and design graphics all day and your your workload is is secure and your payment is consistent

and you still get the flexibility of that that life so all that to say is my vision is to deliver this kind of intermediary dashboard and asynchronous communication that allows business leaders to have that visibility in that marketing department in a box while also protecting creatives from um pain in the butt clients what are you i i've been thinking about deploying um vp cells fractional vp cell

service but um my thoughts on the on this specific service was that okay maybe i might commit too much of my time i think i'll still be selling my time that i don't want to sell my time at this um level and you know the implication will might be a bit bigger in my case i would recruit closers i would recruit sdrs for some companies and i found that this service although kind of cool it's kind of cool because you can get to know a company in a better way and get data out of it that you can um pro you can use to propel your other businesses i thought i thought that you know it wouldn't be that much interesting from an economical uh perspective what are your thoughts on um fractional services in

your case fractional cmo yeah really good right so so um as you scale up in price with pathmaker that's largely me determining how much time i need to spend yeah when you're buying at the lower price points you're buying the machine right you're buying the dashboard you're buying access to the team you can make requests form submissions whatever i don't touch that right and and that's a

part of how we keep the costs low right is you can come in and make requests and it goes to asana and it goes to this or that and the designer executes and comes back that's a machine right and there are cogs in the machine and it runs with machine like efficiency fractional cmo or vp of sales work i think can work but the price point has to be right and there has to be really really good clear expectations and boundaries set now one of the biggest challenges with that in my my experience is you can set the expectations all you want but that client is going to have a really hard time not just seeing you as their full-time vp of sales yeah so their expectations for your time and what that means are

going to be very hard to clearly define yeah i do think there's a world with the right client and the right scope and the right price point where you could have and i'm planning on this a very small set of clients that really see you as more of a full service member of their team and the expectations and performance are aligned i just think you have to

price it right and you have to be honest with yourself about how many of those you can take on which is probably like two maybe three yeah because i think it would be like a sub part time roll probably you know at least 10 hours per week at at most in my case to make it real and even like it's just not appealing but let's say 10 to uh 20 hours um and yeah they would expect you know for you to answer the messages quick which is also a challenge you'd probably need an assistant uh to take that what i could possibly do is the hr side of things so either paired them with um a cmo and i i could call it fractional cmo i take 50 uh the the fractional cmo takes another

50 and that could be a way and there would be technology in the equation that would be assistance and efficiency so that they get you know the real uh cmo service or vp sales in my case um i think that's the way i would go with it but yeah it's certainly uh an interesting topic and it's kind of very niche um my dad which is a marketing consultant he did that gig for a couple of companies there the past couple years and yeah i guess he he learned he learned interesting stuff with that another thing that may suck if with fractional cmo types of jobs is that you get paired with a team the existing team the team is you're not you're not kind of fully accepted you know you will be their leader so

you might get into leadership um problems and also the quality of the staff you you don't have the full rights you know to fire them and so forth so you could hit these these obstacles but i want to kind of shift topics here and um well a good way to shift topics would be talk about two bugs behind you personal curiosity first uh the tim cook one that i had on my list um it's yeah it's apple you know one of largest companies in the world top five most probably if i check them in stock um in stock valuations and total market evaluation right now but um tell me about uh what's what you learned from the tim cook book and his management style and what he he did since uh steve uh passed away

yeah it's it's an interesting book it's not my favorite uh biographical book it's you know you read like phil knight shoe dog for example that's my name it reads it's so fun to read and it's so you know illustrative this one's more like like it reads like a textbook you know it's like this is what happened then this happened now um for whatever it's worth what i

what i was curious and i assume most are is you know what does it look like as a leader to come in after this you know hyper creative genius and then to to you know push to propel the business forward and i think it's a really powerful case study in the power of systems efficiency consistency uh supply chain management right it was a big part of what

tim cook focused on i think rightly and then in the supply chain management i think part of what's powerful about what he did was he not only focused on improving the supply chain but he focused from a systematic perspective but also from a experiential perspective for those key cogs in the supply chain because you look at these key you know elements of china and you know wherever

else um a lot of those companies are largely dependent upon apple right as a primary customer and so they will do whatever they have to do to make apple happy and there was some crazy stuff happening at these these like you know uh sweatshops right where they're delivering foxconn right what's that foxconn uh people cards like the big manufacturer and people jumping from the windows then yes

with nets yes yes well first of all okay so that that to me was one of the stories that stuck with me too is they had people committing suicide and their answer was to put up more nets change your damn you know environment you provide provide counseling services give people antidepressants like do the don't just put nets out that's just like that's almost encouraging people to jump

yeah it's just kind of the weird chinese culture like yesterday i was watching this video of uh i'm not sure if she saw that one but the man coming out of the car with like kovid and uh them kind of uh holding on to his his hands and kind of shielding with a mask and uh spraying him with like this stuff you know like it's like they're they first treat the problem in a very rational and cold way and and well that's good like on the short term but i i think they should fix also the root problem of of the well the root of the problem and yet like when you think about that culture like you said uh you know making it a nice uh place to work and so forth increasing the

the work conditions but yeah it's like the chinese culture i've been there and sometimes it's it's very cold and systematic and you can still feel that the communist uh in in the culture the communist part in there yeah no i think you're spot on with that and that was something that i think you know that was something i really learned from the shoe dog phil night book

was how he really explained the difference in the culture now that was japan obviously which is different but the takeaway is just the influence of a country's culture and how different they are in terms of business practices and how you work internationally um which i do a little bit right we have some some members of our team that are in the states and some that aren't and

it's interesting i feel like i've kind of just a little bit started to experience different cultures um and how how these you work and those relationships and uh it's powerful something to pay attention to second book behind you um armada yes that's a that's a cooler one so tell us a bit about that one ernest cline baby ready player one ready player two um yeah i'm a

cinephile um i think and so i i grew up i'm a a group i was born in the 80s but i grew up in the 90s but i loved 80s movies so um all of those you know back to the future star wars starfighter all that stuff so i fell in love with ernest cline through ready player one and then eventually ready player two and so then i was just looking for any excuse to read any of his books and armada for those of you are familiar with the book and the 80s it's like a lot like the last starfighter which was one of my favorite books growing up and had some of that plus ender's game kind of in there so yeah i loved it i loved earn it i love um i love

all of ernest klein's work and then i also just recently read project hill mary which is um the the author who wrote the martian this is his most recent book so i i always try to i don't do a good job of this pretty much most of the time but my target on the board is having a good fiction book and a good non-fiction book i'm reading um kind of kind of balance it out and i love sci-fi that's like i don't like any other kind of fiction to read yeah same here sci-fi um so like how would you describe yourself as a leader and what habits have you acquired uh to make you successful in business in the last couple of years i will tell you the kind of leader i um the kind

of leader i want to be is is a servant leader that is focused on my employees and i look at that through two lenses one is that i want to create an environment where there's clarity where they know what their expectations are and that i bring people around me that want to be held to a highest standard but done in in love and i know love seems like a really strong word um but i really do want that to be the target that i create meaningful relationships with my employees and um that there's that balance right that one-two punch between affirmation and conflict and i want both i want i want to have people on the team that i'm affirming and telling them they did a great job when they did and being very specific

about those things but then also confronting them being like hey we really have to close this gap this week i was just having a hard conversation with a member of our team i've been working with for a long time and we dropped a ball this week and we've been dropping this ball consistently and i kind of called him onto the mat a little bit and just said

we cannot continue to drop this ball do you want to do this role or do you want a different role he said he wanted to and i said great i believe in you what do you need to succeed right so it's kind of that one-two punch of of i'm gonna i'm gonna hold you to a high standard but i'm also here to help you achieve that and if you don't wanna be held to a high standard it's probably not gonna be fun working with me because i i will not settle for subpar experiences now i'm not expecting perfection but i am expecting that we learn from our mistakes i'm okay with making mistakes i'm not okay with making the same mistakes yeah um so i think i think that's one of the key elements of

the culture is it's not a it's not a should have culture it is a next time culture um so really working hard to develop that um i forget the second part of your question well like it's your philosophy is kind of um a good father philosophy i'd say so like push um push for greatness but with love always with love and and empathy and you know i can feel that i pictured myself as you were talking if you were my leader for example and that that's what i would feel you know uh just that most humans i think um you need to find the precise ones that wants to be pushed because lots of them they want to settle for complacency and just working just getting their pay you know and going home after that

checking netflix and having a nice weekend i think most human settles for that how do you make sure find these a plus players well the best advice i got was work together before you work together so finding opportunities to work together on some kind of projects on a trial basis i think is is the most powerful way right you can interview people and you should you should

have interviews and good questions but until you actually have an excuse to work together for some period of time on something you're just not you're going to really know what that's like so that's a big thing right is having a hiring process that allows for opportunities for kind of scope work working together before you work together i think is you know 30-day trials 60-day trials 90-day trials

whatever i think are great we we scale up our pay so generally speaking we start hourly and then we go to contract and so on from there so that helps us a lot with that i think that's a that's a key thing right now be as clear as you possibly can on the front end so i was just on boarding a new employee and i was just letting them know like hey my expectation because they were they were apologizing because they started at like 10 30 instead of nine or something because they were working on some other personal project and and uh i told them i was like i don't care i genuinely don't care when you work but i do care that we had our deadlines so you don't have to apologize for starting

at 10 30 but my standard and expectation is that we're going to deliver and the trains are going to run on time so if i start to see that's not happening i'm going to ask you about your work rhythms but i trust you so you're good man already the end of the podcast in a couple of seconds where can people find out more about you anthony pathmakerbranding.com

my name is anthony domini find me on linkedin and uh yeah let's connect all right thank you so much anthony have a good day you too man bye [Music] you