The demand for marketing operations talent has exploded. But the supply of talent is scarce. What should organizations be doing to bridge the gap?

In this episode of The Revenue Engine Podcast, four-time CEO and founder Toby Murdock, shares what he’s doing to serve as a bridge between underemployed professionals and talent-seeking marketing employers. He also shares his inspirational advice for those looking to build - or accelerate - their career in digital marketing and in marketing operations. 

🔗 LINKS

Connect with Toby on LinkedIn, or at the Highway Education website.

Follow Rosalyn on LinkedIn.

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The opinions expressed in this episode are the speaker's own and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Sales IQ or any sponsors.

As a four time CEO and founder with a diverse background in business development. Product marketing, product development, and so much more Toby knows more than a thing or two about starting building and scaling a successful business. Currently, Toby Murdoch is working on building highway education, a unique business that bridges underemployed, less experienced professionals with marketing employers, looking for talent.

And what makes this business even more special? There is a focus on improving opportunity and inclusion for individuals that are often underserved and underrepresented

So welcome Toby. And thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to unpack your story and learn more about what you're building.

Your backstory leading to founding highway education. I mean, you've had such an incredible and broad background, right? As a founder, a CEO, I think it's like four times as a CEO. Yeah. With experience, you know, in business development, you've got product marketing background. You've got product development. I mean, So such a diverse background. So maybe, can you share more about your career journey and some of your experience prior to highway education?

That was my first, but , that's pretty as, as far away from like tech as, as, as we can be most recently, I started a company called cap compost cap compost was a content marketing software platform for B2B marketing organizations. And it's very much in the Ella club, Marketo Salesforce, etcetera ecosystem.

So I was pondering, I'm like, Hmm, I've I've done a few software businesses, but then I. is the universe crying out for another sell for business? I'm not sure if it was, you know, like I didn't hear the universe crying for that. And so I decided to, to try to do something with a little bit more of like a human impact instead of a bits and bites impact and That's why I, I started Highway.

With highway education, like, was there some kind of, you know, aha moment or some kind of situation that led you to start the business?

And there was evidently a lot of Tuml in our society. Just thinking about that, I was like, okay, how can I make some kind of impact on that front? And I think certainly underneath a lot of that frustration was people who, you know, aren't getting a shot into kind of the in terms of professional and financial opportunity that, that others are getting.

Right. And so I was thinking about that on one side and then my experience in the post working with a lot of MarTech and. Leaders, you know, they'd always be distressed about how hard it was to find talent and how there was such a talent shortage. And they couldn't find people with enough skills to, to fit an experience to fill these jobs.

And so. The juxtaposition of those two observations is what really drove it to me. You know, like why is it that we have one hand, you know you know, turbulence in our society, cuz people aren't are frustrated cuz they're not finding opportunity. And I, and, and assuming and believing that there's a lot of people with lots of potential that can do great things, but just can't find the opportunity on one side.

And then on the other that there's employers who are frustrated. Because they can't find, you know, the, the qualifications and talent that they want. And so something in our educational professional development system is missing. And so it's just. To me, that was just like a sitting duck of an opportunity to make impact is how can we satisfy the needs of both of those groups by, you know, acting as this bridge.

And so that was sort of my thinking behind starting highway.

Yeah. You know, a marketing operation space and then obviously companies need help with identifying, hiring that talent. Yeah. So can you maybe talk a little bit more about kind of the business model, you know, how both companies, as well as individuals, how they benefit and sort of how you bridge that together?

So with boot camps, you recruit people to a school it's a really intensive, but relatively short durations say around four month full time training program. And. Critically, you don't charge students anything up front. You make it all conditional that they only owe you tuition. If they get a job in our case, it's paying 55 grand or greater, and then they can pay you in, in kind of monthly payments they're after.

So you're trying to make it affordable on that side. And so you bring them in, you train them and then you reach out to employers and, and recruit them and do a whole set of matchmaking to make all that work. So. We've succeed in that, but I felt like there's limits to that as well, because I found that when you're reaching out to like an aspiring young professional or middle aged professional, whatever it is, even though we don't church switch up front, they need to quit their job, work with us full time, figure out how they're gonna support themselves in trust that everything's gonna work out well for them in, in the end.

and that's a big ask. I I've found, and it really limits the number of people who you're able to bring in. And as I try to grow what we're doing, it didn't seem sustainable. So we've changed the model. And I told you this was gonna be a long answer, unfortunately, but we've changed the model to where we hire them from the beginning.

So now we recruit we hire them right from the get go. What? And so the first few months when we're training them, we're paying them. And so we are now much more committed financially to everything we have to put out, or, yeah, we gotta put out a lot more money up front. And and then similarly we bring in employers because these.

You know, marketing up specialists as they become, or on our payroll already, we can sort of make it easy for our employers and say, Hey, you don't have to go all the way in and hire this person. You can just pay highway and hire them as a contractor which is an easy way to start. And then we have opportunities or the option for employers to flip that contractor into a full-time employee at a later date, or right at the beginning, if they choose.

So that's our new model. Just, this is the where right now in the first cohort of the new model it's really been interesting just to be very candid, you know, to make the whole thing work, you know, we're a B Corp, so we're somewhere between a business and a charity, you know? So we're, we're the nice thing I like about B corpse is you.

Charities reply nonprofits rely on donations. We rely on the business working and I like making businesses work. So it's much my preferable preferred thing. So we have a legal commitment toward our social mission, but we have to make the business work. And part of making the business work is satisfying our clients, right?

Like satisfying employers. They need to have job ready. People who perform really, really well. And even though we do a lot in the months where we do the training folks, a huge factor is. What's their capability. What's their life experience. What's their potential before they've come to see us. And the cool thing I've seen Rosalyn is as we've evolved this offering, it's much more compelling to the talent side.

And so we're able to significantly increase the quality of the talent that we're able to bring in the program. And I'm excited to see how that impacts the employers side. I think they'll be quite delighted. So. Long answer to your question about our evolving business model, but that that's where we are today.

Having evolved from a boot. To this model where sort of like a staffing agency with a training program on the front end of it. It's also a model that I stole from the software industry. It's called higher trained, deploy. I is the approach and that's what we're doing that.

I so very interested in continue to watch how that yeah. How that progresses me too, for sure. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, there's definitely that shortage right? In talent in operations. Yeah. I mean, there's a shortage. In all areas of revenue, operations, right. From an experience and then expertise perspective.

But, you know, I guess specifically from a marketing ops perspective, like what are you seeing in the market right today in terms of that talent shortage? Yeah. Are you seeing the same?

So 93% that they fell into it. Yeah, which is neat for all these pioneers people like yourself and others who sort of got the industry growing and going, but it's no way to sustain the talent needs of the industry for its next stage of growth. Like, like, so we have in our country, we got like mechanical engineering as a professional field and there's dozens of institutions who trained people in mechanical engineering and they pumped that out.

And same thing in architecture or same thing in dentistry or whatever. Right. There's nothing equivalent in digital marketing in general, or specifically in marketing operations. So while, you know, demand is through the roof, no new supply is being generated. and so that is placing massive strain on the system.

And so our report gets into more details about burnout, about turnover, about people who are senior and senior goals feeling dissatisfied because they can't delegate anything. Cuz there's a lack of junior people in the industry about spiraling and outta control. Wages and whatnot. So there's all sorts of problems that are besetting the industry as a result of this, you know, imbalance between runaway demand and no new supply being generated.

In training and you're not really set up as a training organization. Your whole investment in that training gets squandered, like talk to tons of people who've been burned in that way. So the incentives really aren't there for. Individual employers to invest in this training. So what they do instead is they go and poach another, you know, six, six years experience, senior manager, who's making 200 K and they offer her, you know, 250 K and, you know, they just get that person an overburden, that person, not just with senior work, but also with the mundane tasks that are part of the job and the cycle continues.

And it it's just getting worse and worse in the industry. But never fear highways here. So we're, we're, we're here to solve that.

When it comes to sourcing and retaining mobs talent, you touched a little bit on kind what they're doing wrong, but are there other things that you think they're doing right? And maybe other things that they're doing.

Right? I mean, and so, you know, the they're responding to the market and MOS people's compensation generally is at a, a good rate of increase, which is great for MOS professionals. And it's the smart thing to do, you know, when any, it's sort of like housing in the us, which we won't spend a lot of time on, but.

Markets, you know, supply is artificially constrained. You have to respond by you know, increasing pricing. So that's been a logical and, and, and well warranted response to, to doing what they're doing. Let's see, trying to automate more and more is obviously a smart response to that situation that they're doing well, but, but still something has to change. We're we're, we're at a kind of unsustainable trajectory. Yeah.

Right. I wanna start a career in marketing ops. Like what advice do you have for them? Yeah. Like how do they know. If marketing ops is even the right career path for them, like what questions should they be asking themselves?

Yeah. And then I'll talk about what you couldn't do if you wanna. Head down this pathway. Perfect. So I've spent a ton of time talking to marketing operations leaders about what attributes they're looking for, where I'm not talking about like specific experiences and skills, but much more generalized kind of capabilities over and over again.

I'd be curious your reaction to this Muslim, but Over and over them, they say curiosity, they say curiosity, they want curious, critical thinkers. They want people who wonder about how things work and are willing to take something apart and figure it out and build it up again, you know, because they want people who can be.

Kind of self-directed in jumping into the jungle of, of a MarTech stack and figuring it all out and being able to fix and manage and maintain and monitor it all, you know, independently, obviously it's part of the team, but you know, not handheld through the process. So they want people who apply the scientific method and, you know, we will.

We'll tinker with stuff and figure out how it works. So that's, I would say one, are you innately curious? Are you a problem solver? Are you a critical thinker? Right? That's that's attribute number one that I've heard from MOS leaders beyond that it's this hybrid role, right? You have to have enough, you, you don't need to be a coder, but you need to have an affinity for tech.

You need to understand a lot of tech concepts. QA or what a database is and how fields are related and, and whatnot. So you have to have an affinity and kind of an ability around. But also you have to be a business thinker, right? You have to enjoy business problems. You need to, you know, think about customer journeys and strategies and being accountable for performance and metrics and whatnot.

So in addition to this curiosity, it's this blend or this hybrid nature across the kind of business tech spectrum that I think is the, the other thing you should be assessing for yourself. Then it gets really hard in terms of how do you actually get to do it? You know, I'm also spent a lot of time looking over job postings and maps.

I've been spending a lot of time doing that. And even at the most entry level, the most entry level, it says two years experience required. Three years. Experience required. People don't, as we were saying, they don't want people who aren't job ready. They want people with existing experience, but it's this classic chicken and the egg phenomena of you know, if you, you gotta get your first job to get the experience, to get the job, which is unfold, right.

This is the dynamic, which is kind of putting such strain on the industry. So what would I do? It's hard. You can't like grab your own Marketo instance and start playing with it because that's right. A Marketo, it's not like other software tools like Google analytics, like anyone can grab a free instance and start playing with it and do whatever.

Even Salesforce as a CRM, as you know, as a rev op person, you could do a free instance, but the major enterprise systems, Oracle. Oracle qua that is Marketo Parda you can't even do it unless you're throwing down thousands of dollars. So it's really hard to get your hands into these things. Closest thing you could do if you're, you know, junior and trying to get into this is something like HubSpot, but it's freer in expensive instances are kind of limited in, in what they can do, but that would be a place to start and.

I don't know, then you need to get experience doing live stuff with live data, because even if you're playing with like an empty instance, that's not gonna get you that far. So it's, it's hard to break into. You could get, you know, really courageous on Upwork and build your way in, in to, to getting some experience that way through taking on projects.

But you can see all the barriers and hurdles there are to getting started in. Sector, which is why, you know, the only way people in was like, well, I was an SDR and I happened to sit next to the mops person and I was looking over their shoulder at Marketo and they were struggling. So I did some stuff and that's how I started.

Like, this is what we're down to in the industry for generating new supply. And this is why the, you know, Th things are so strange.

Yeah. But, but to your point, we have those traits kind of those soft skills, that natural curiosity, the ability to kind of think process wise, be able to take something very high level, you know, high level. Thought and be able to kind of break that into digestible pieces that you can actually go execute upon, right? Yeah. It's kind of an operational mindset more so than anything else.

That true business partner. And so I spend a lot of time kind of sharing advice, you know, tips, things that people can do even to just move the needle slightly. Right. One super simple example. I always tell people it's like, look, when someone asks you to run a. It's like, instead of just writing the report, figure out what are they trying to solve?

Right. What answers are they trying to what answer are they trying to get to? What questions are they trying to answer? And then think about what's the best way to present that and not just send a report, right. Instead, take the time to analyze the. The information, glean the insights, provide a story, you know, share an opinion, you know, some of those kind of little steps that people can do to just start to add more value and become, understand the business better.

But I mean, I think, you know, given your exposure to so many different organizations, you know, obviously you've talked to many professionals in this space. Do you have any tips or yeah. Maybe tricks that you would offer.

Just do a few questions, like who is your customer? What's your problem? How do you solve. And how do you, how is that solution better than anyone else? And mm-hmm and then you could do a fifth on, like, how do you measure, you know, the value you're generating, but you could even just stick with those four and anyone, and any part of any business is involved in that value proposition.

And I think always thinking and considering what that value proposition is and having hypotheses writing it down, collecting it data in terms. Your, your hypotheses and refining it, even if you're in a big company where you really can't change the value proposition, but you just understand it better, right?

You under you understand better who you're ized, you understand better what their problem is. You understand better how you're solving it and how to communicate that. And, and because to the extent that you have all of those elements of a value proposition, well aligned in business, then. Execution is easy.

Cause the wind is like blowing into your sail so strongly that, you know, it's like, well, to extend the metaphor, it's like executing. Like it doesn't matter how well we steer the rudder or pull on the sheets, you know, in the boat. It, and so, but to the extent though, those aren't well aligned You, there's not a lot of wind and you gotta like get out the oars and start paddling and stuff too, which is a lot harder.

So I, I think, especially if you said you wanna kind of migrate from the tactical to the strategic, like how can you think at that strategic level and always think about that value proposition, cuz to me. That's the essence of a business. And so to, to, you know, put on that hat and be considering those questions on a regular basis, I think helps elevate you to that more strategic level.

Then inclusion is just, we particularly wanna focus on people from more disadvantaged backgrounds, whether that's a function of race or gender or being a veteran or. You know, college history or family college history or, or, or factors like that. And the cool thing I've seen Rosalyn, so is again doing this, we have a mission, but we're not a charity, right?

Like, so we, we have a mission and we have to report on it, you know, to the state where we're, where we're registered, but. We're not a charity. Like we have to, we have to deliver for our customer's business value, but I I've started to see more and more how actually those are working synergistically as opposed to being like two separate things that we work on.

And, and it's this way. So, you know, a lot of. we're also looking for, and our people is drive right commitment to, to dedication, to making things happen. And and especially you can get, and we gen we we've had people in the fifties in their fifties go through our program. So we look at all age range, but generally we're more at the younger end of folks.

And sometimes, you know, when you're dealing with younger folks, and this is just a truth, like they don't have a ton of experience. They haven't necessarily developed that, you know, that adulthood level maturity and, and commitment, and they're just. Kind of where they need to be to, to execute and perform as a professional mm-hmm

But we're finding that as we serve our inclusion mission, we're also finding that drive criteria and capability. We have just one part about it. We we've had almost half the people through our program have been either immigrants or children of, I. For example, but when we're evaluating, assessing not just from a social mission basis, but from a business criteria business, we mark that as a positive, because even if they're young, there's a lot they've had to overcome and, and they've already exercised significantly that maturity, that drive muscle, that commitment muscle through their existing life experiences, you know, , you know, put another way, you know, as they became an adolescent and maybe a college student, not, although not everyone got to our college students, they weren't just to be, frankly, they weren't necessarily like partying and then having a lot of fun.

Like they, they were, you know, holding a bunch of jobs while they were doing it, getting through all that. And, but see, this is a positive for, in terms of their prepared. To perform well, you know, with, with our employer clients. So it's been. We didn't really know how all this was gonna go. Yeah. But it's been neat to discover that as we've moved further and further in, into both, you know, satisfying our, our business objectives and our mission objectives,

Others will be able to learn how to accelerate revenue growth, right. And really power that revenue engine you know, as a serial CEO and founder, right? From your perspective, like what are the top couple of things, maybe two or three things that, you know, you think other CEOs or founders should really be thinking about today, right.

To establish that right framework for growing their business.

And you have to give your customer customers. they don't, they, they wanna make up most of their mind before they talk to you. And it's not, again, the blog posts and the eBooks anymore. It's they wanna test and experience your offering, you know, whatever that is, you know, easy to do, obviously if you're a software company, but harder to do if you're a non-software company, but you gotta do it anyhow.

Right. You gotta figure out a way to do it. Like I, I'm just thinking of myself my own. Business, you know, we, I used to, when I would reach out to employers, I'm like, Hey, let's schedule a call with me. And now I'm what I'm doing is I make claims and you know, my messaging that I'm putting out and outbound and inbound, you know, channels.

And then, then the, the next step or the CTA is to go prove my claims go. Look over a roster of all my candidates, go inspect their portfolios, go see the projects they've done. Go listen to their videos, explaining why they did this instead of that in Marketo. Go. So it's just like, you know, go have an experience.

So I make, you know, you make, you, you have a value proposition, you have messaging where you're expressing that value to a customer. They wanna go from. From consideration of that message to evaluation of that message as quickly as possible. And, and so how, how, even if you're not a software company and can't do the whole product led growth model, how can you provide experiences that allow them to evaluate your claims as quickly as possible and with as little friction as possible?

I think that's the more and more, obviously the more and more that you have that kind. Customer journey the better and better your, your revenue engine's going to operate.

Although I'm not buying anything right now. So nobody needs to outbound to me, no outbound reach, but always interested in kind of figuring out what's out there. But then on the flip side, you know, my role has always been enabling our sales team and our marketing team, right. To go out and prospect yeah.

As well and getting them the right tools. But yeah, the simpler, you can make that buyer. You know, journey and just the ability to quickly assess if that's, if your solution is right for me, that's then by that's the time by the time they reach out, they've already made a decision and it's probably to come down to just a couple of things, maybe the relationship, that conversation that they have with you, the interaction, right?

Yeah. If do they trust you? And then price a lot of times or timing

And I think the challenge and for software companies, that's pretty easily achievable for non-software companies. I think that's where the challenge is. And how can you be a, how can you creatively provide them? To still immediately assess the validity of your, of your messaging's claims.

So that would be one big one. I also learned a ton about leadership and, you know, I sort of grew up in more of an old school. You know, top down kind of approach and applied that as I became into more and more leader leadership roles and learned quite quickly how ineffective that is and had to learn a lot about that.

And, and, and try to evolve and, and grow myself in terms of what I did. So that would be a big one. And then I think of business, I'd go back to that value proposition stuff. You know, when you start in the journey of entrepreneurship, it's generally gonna, unless, you know, you're really fortunate, gonna be a decade long journey.

So you really wanna really wanna. get an idea as much as you can, before you go deep in is like, is this, you know, what are the odds of the, the success? And I think lots and lots of investigation around that value value proposition early on for an entrepreneur is big. There's a book called the mom test.

And two, what is the one thing that you really want everyone to know about you?

So I'm pretty soft on the home front, I guess would be the surprise. What is that what you want everyone to know about me? I mean, what I'd want all the listeners to know about me is that I'm the CEO of a program that can provide them the. job ready, affordable, and diverse talent. They're looking forward to staff their, their marketing operations function.

This episode was digitally transcribed.