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[00:00:32] Jason S. Bradshaw: Today, she's an international keynote speaker, fractional chief marketing Officer and chief strategy officer, a strategy consultant and author. She sat on the boards of numerous organizations and she was the co-founder of Copy House that she helped grow to a team of over 30 people doing over $2 million a year in revenue.

[00:00:55] Kathryn E. Strachan: Thank you so much for having me. Just a small correction there. I was the only founder, so I was a solo founder of my business. I grew it from myself to a team of 32 with 2 million annual reoccurring revenue on my own. So just to add there.

[00:01:16] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, the new book, Scaling For Success: How to Build a Brand that Breaks Barriers. I was checking out some of the reviews online and they're absolutely phenomenal. Must read for any entrepreneur. The kudos for you is widespread, doesn't matter where people buy the book. I've got a copy of it and absolutely loving it. What made you take that step though, to write a book about starting and scaling a business?

[00:02:48] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. And who would you say is the ideal person to pick up a copy of the book and read it?

[00:03:25] Kathryn E. Strachan: So Copy House grew so successfully because about five months in maybe? We hit the pandemic. And when we hit the pandemic, so I started building the agency in January 2020, and the pandemic obviously happened in March, 2020, which was obviously not great timing. But what I did and how we grew out of that and how we survived and then ultimately thrived was by investing in our positioning, investing in ourselves, and investing in our marketing.

[00:04:44] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. Interesting that you say you've done work with brands that have been around for decades and they really haven't paid any intentional focus on their marketing practices. And I would say probably in their brand development, in that process. Why is it that so many organizations have this lackluster approach to marketing? It either happens by accident or if they do have a marketing department, it's not necessarily always has a seat at the table, so to speak, when it comes to the big decisions. Why do you think marketing does sometimes get that second tier seating?

[00:05:42] Kathryn E. Strachan: Most B2B companies are also often set up by your more technically minded C-suite. So they're normally set up by like a CTO or CIO, people who have actually built that product that they're selling they're normally more technically brilliant, but then therefore also more introverted and less likely to like fully understand the value of marketing. And, are also more risk adverse profiles and personalities. Marketing is a little bit of a risk, especially when you first get started because you don't really know what's gonna work. There's a fantastic saying that " 50% of my marketing works, I just don't know what 50% that is". If you can't articulate it 'cause you don't know it very well, that like you pay this, you're gonna get that, then, it's really difficult for those more risk adverse C-Suite to sign on for it.

[00:08:22] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, so it was remiss of me. I should have asked upfront though, how do you define marketing? Because there are some different answers out there. So how do you define marketing?

[00:09:38] Kathryn E. Strachan: Now, when we think about audience, one of the things that I often get the brands to do is to think about not just like the people who buy, but also investors. So if you're one of these companies that lives on funding grounds, building that profile of the investor who is gonna be the perfect investor for your business, is part of that. Building the profile of your perfect employee. So who do you want to be as part of your team? Not as an individual, but what do they look like? In a personality type, in a mindset, like who are they? Because your marketing can solve pretty much any problem in a business. Whether it's getting investment. Whether it's hiring. Whether it's retaining your staff. Whether it's selling your product. Most of the time it is used for selling the product, but it's worth thinking about all the different stakeholders that you need to build relationships with to have a successful business.

[00:10:36] Kathryn E. Strachan: Yeah. I normally run a workshop with my clients to help them define this. I'm actually running a workshop tomorrow with one of my new clients to help them map out who it is that we're targeting and who we're going after. I think it's important for you to realize, like right off the bat, that you don't sell to everybody. Nobody sells to everybody. Even like the B2C brands that are selling thousands of products do not sell to everybody. Sephora, doesn't sell to everybody. They sell to a lot of people, but they don't sell to everybody. So starting with being really clear on who it is that you are working with and not being afraid to really niche. Niche down or be specific on who it is that you're targeting. But taking the time to sit down and like really think about them because one of the things that you see a lot is like very surface level profiles. So you see oh, we're targeting like CTOs. And I'm like, okay, great. What type of organization do they work in? A CTO that works in a big corporate versus a CTO that works in a startup is gonna be a very different breed of animal. Who are they? What's their appetite towards risk? What are they thinking about? What are they awake thinking about at 3:00 AM? B2B is very emotive. The things that we're awake thinking about at 3:00 AM are far more likely to be tied to work than they are to be tied to something in our personal lives. The emotion in B2B is really high. There's a lot of stress. There's a lot of like responsibility. There's a big risk with these decisions because if you put in a multimillion piece of software and it doesn't work, you're probably gonna lose your job. So there's a lot of emotion that goes on here. So it's really important to understand this emotion.

[00:12:27] Kathryn E. Strachan: And then once you've done the workshop to set that hypothesis, you need to test it. You need to have conversations. You need to speak with people who match that profile- both that already know your company, but also ones that maybe don't- to see if these assumptions that you're making are actually correct, or if you need to alter or adjust 'em, change them.

[00:13:36] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And I always wonder why is it that organizations want to sell to everyone? In terms of being able to deliver a message that is effective. If you're trying to message to everybody it's very difficult to get that right. So when someone's niching down, when a business is niching down or getting really specific about who they serve, what are some of the pitfalls that they can do when they're looking at that niche or creating that niche? What are the, some of the lookouts that they should have?

[00:14:29] Kathryn E. Strachan: I did this process with Copy House actually when the pandemic first started, because up until the pandemic, we had done like travel recruitment. We had done like all sorts of industries. We didn't have a clear niche at all. And when the pandemic happened, we lost a lot of travel and recruitment clients. Those are industries that were on their knees. But we had always done a lot of technology and financial services content. And what I did was I looked at what we did well. So we did technical content very well. And, in the market, especially at the time, 'cause this was before the big tech boom, there weren't a lot of other agencies that did this well. It was also something that was really needed because these brands, specifically look for content marketing agencies that have financial services experiences because it's so hard to get them on board and like up to speed. You don't wanna be working with somebody who doesn't understand financial services at all. So there's a need for it. There's a market gap. We do it well. We have the skills. We have the abilities. Okay. This is gonna be a good positioning for us. Let's go hard after that. And it did really prove to be a positioning for us. I've helped a lot of brands do this since, and it is really a combination of looking internally- what do we do well? What do we have the skills, capabilities to do? What does a market need? That's an important one because, you might be brilliant at something, but if nobody's gonna buy it, then you know you're not gonna be successful. And, are we gonna be facing a lot of competition? You can go up against a lot of competitors, but you're gonna have to be aware that you're gonna have to invest heavier in marketing. The more competitors you have, the more like shared voice that's already taken. You have to compete harder for it. So it's not that you can't go into these competitive industries, but you should definitely be aware of who you're competing against.

[00:17:00] Kathryn E. Strachan: I think when it comes to brands trying to sell to everybody, it's often, a lack of leadership and vision at the top level, but also a presence of fear. They're scared that if they just do one thing, they're putting all their eggs in one basket, but it's much easier to cut through the noise if you really clear on what you do and who you do it for.

[00:17:57] Jason S. Bradshaw: So based on just the small conversation we've had already, it's quite clear that a marketing manager, marketing leader has a lot of different things that they've gotta juggle, to get it right, to cut through the noise, to get attention on the organization.

[00:18:21] Kathryn E. Strachan: Yeah, I think it's a difficult question 'cause it depends on the organization. It depends on what you need as a company. So there's not just like one good marketer. It's about like where the company is, and their growth journey, and what they need to get them there. A very good example of this is when I first hired a marketing manager at Copy House. I thought that I wanted the best out there. So I wanted somebody who was very senior, had a lot of really great experience and that actually ended up not being the right move because when you hire somebody very senior, they want to do the strategy. So the more senior marketer, the more strategic they are, the more that they want to be involved in strategy and not the execution.

[00:20:50] Kathryn E. Strachan: So what you want to do is think about what you need the most of. Where you can supplement? Maybe you already have some like skills in-house? So this client that I'm building the job description for already has like a web developer. Okay, great. Our marketing manager doesn't need to do web development. They can just do marketing and content marketing. So really looking at where you already have skills, where you have skill gaps and you know where you're prepared to spend on budget, and like where you need the bulk of your support. It is really helpful to get like a strategic person in, as say fractional, to do this overview for you. If you've never done marketing before and you don't really know what you're doing, 'cause it's a difficult thing to get right. And the hiring process is not the easiest if you haven't done it before. So one of the things I often help clients with is to help them define what this job description looks like, and then help them to find the right person for it.

[00:22:00] Kathryn E. Strachan: What I find a lot of brands do when they hire- that first marketing hire- is they hire somebody like really junior, like a marketing executive, but they don't have a marketing strategy in place. They don't have any marketing insights. A CTO Founder has just decided, we need marketing. Okay, great. Hire the cheapest marketing person you can possibly find. And then they just dump that on them. And they're normally fresh out of university. They don't really know what they're doing. It's not nice to them and it's not nice to the brand either. It sets them up for a really bad experience.

[00:23:00] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. I think also based on what you were saying, even if you were able to find that unicorn that could do 110% of the requirements of the role, their best value may not actually come from that 110%. You might actually be hurting yourself by trying to get a unicorn that can do elements of everything. Whereas opposed to having someone that really can target in on those areas that are going to drive the needle forward and then have other people specialize in the other areas.

[00:23:50] Jason S. Bradshaw: Why do you think personal branding is so important in 2025?

[00:24:32] Kathryn E. Strachan: But if you look at any of the major tech companies, they have front leaders. Everybody knows who Steve Jobs is. Everybody knows who Bill Gates is. And this is because that's how you get that trust, that credibility. People do not build emotional relationships with faceless organizations. You don't. It's like having a personal attachment to a computer. Maybe in the future as computers get smarter and can mimic some of that human behavior. But typically you don't have personal relationships- most people don't- with inanimate objects. And a company, a faceless company is an inanimate object. Nobody knows any of the people who work there. Nobody has a personal relationship with it. You just have the company that is pushing out content about what it does and it's features and it's products. That's not the ingredients for an emotional relationship. What a personal brand does is it gives you a leader or an anchor even that people can build that relationship with. There's some really interesting stats out there about how the human brain actually builds relationship so you don't have to spend one-on-one individual time with people to have that relationship. If somebody consumes up to eight hours of your content, they think that they have a personal relationship... at best friend level with you.

[00:26:08] Kathryn E. Strachan: And I've seen it firsthand. I've also helped a lot of my clients, both at the agency and now, to build those brands. So I've seen it from their perspectives as well. But it opens so many doors.

[00:27:17] Kathryn E. Strachan: I've built pretty much my whole entire career through my personal brand. So I started building my personal brand on LinkedIn about seven years ago when I was working as a freelance copywriter at a digital agency. Somebody reached out on LinkedIn and asked me if I'd write them some blogs and I was like, oh yeah, okay. And also at the same time oh, I can make some money off LinkedIn. If I invest in this, I, it will bring some more opportunities for me. I started getting active all the way back then and it's opened so many doors for me. It's brought in pretty much all the new business for the agency. All the employees pretty much as well in some shape or form. And yeah, massively accelerated my own career. I think it's a massive investment in yourself. So even if you're not doing it for the company, you should do it for yourself.

[00:28:13] Kathryn E. Strachan: I've just gone through this massive transition away from the agency, having sold and exited it. Now as a single one person band, which is an interesting transition, that's massively helped me to do that. It's helped me to find my new fractional clients. It's helped me to continue to have speaking engagements. It's helped me to launch my book. I did an Amazon bestseller campaign for my book where we needed to sell as many copies as possible within a 24 hour window. Like it was a pretty intense thing. So I just sat on LinkedIn, messaged all the people who had engaged with my content on previous posts about the book. Hey, can you buy a copy of the book? Hey, can you buy a copy of the book? LinkedIn actually kicked me off that day 'cause they thought I was a bot but it was me. It was me.

[00:29:10] Jason S. Bradshaw: Makes lots of sense. Kathryn Strachan, congratulations again on your book, Scaling For Success: How To Build A Brand That Breaks Barriers. We will have in the show notes, of course links for and how people purchase a copy of it. Where else can people follow your work?

[00:29:49] Jason S. Bradshaw: Fantastic. We'll be sure to share the links in the description of this podcast episode.

[00:30:02] Kathryn E. Strachan: Build your personal brand.

[00:30:09] Kathryn E. Strachan: Thank you for having me.

[00:30:13] Jason S. Bradshaw: Hey, just quickly, I wanted to reach out and say thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of Chats with Jason. I'd really appreciate a five star review on your favorite podcasting app, or if you're watching along on YouTube, give me a thumbs up and show that you like this video and be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on the awesome content and the great guests that we've got coming up for you.