Mike Julian

Our biggest problem is that as a small and growing company, we don’t have all the staff that we sometimes need. As CEO, I run marketing but I also run legal, finance, procurement and basically everything else. I was only able to focus on marketing when I had just a little bit of time here and there. We were doing the bare minimum for marketing, and most of it was just getting dropped. We needed someone to hand off a whole bunch of marketing work to do so that our audience size and lead generation wouldn’t languish.

We first brought Kai in to do an assessment on our media properties and recommend how we could grow them. His role expanded to take over a bunch of our marketing, including:

• optimizing and overseeing our marketing websites (including personalization, conversion rate optimization, and content strategy)
• improving our SEO rankings (getting us to #1 and #3 for a high-value keyword)
• handling all of our email campaigns and email marketing
• paying attention to our analytics and providing insights on what they mean
• driving the marketing build out for product launches (including a SaaS, a guided assessment, and an information product)
• writing sales copy for our services and creating marketing collateral Kai handled the project management and execution, while also coming back to me with recommendations and more ideas for us to discuss.

Having Kai focused on our marketing increased our capabilities by quite a bit and has helped our lead generation and audience growth. It took a lot of work off my plate and saved me a bunch of effort, which allows me to focus on the things that I need to focus on — the things that only I can do to move the company forward. Kai is also super easy to work with. I cannot overstate how important that is.

What I like most is that Kai looks for problems to solve. He comes to me on a pretty regular basis and says something along the lines of “I know you care about these things, but I also found this other thing that you should also care about, what do you think?” And 90% of the time, we do it. He pays attention to the company in ways that I want people to do, but that only other entrepreneurial people can. He treats the business as his own.

— Mike Julian, CEO, The Duckbill Group