Ashley Kent: Balancing Business and Life

In this episode, host Tom Noser interviews Ashley Kent, founder and CEO of Clearstart, a boutique marketing growth agency specializing in venture-backed health tech companies. They discuss the challenges and joys of running a business with 15 employees while raising two young children, the evolution of marketing strategies in venture-backed businesses, and the impact of AI on marketing practices. Ashley shares insights on transitioning from founder-led sales to scalable systems, building repeatable marketing strategies, and the importance of maintaining strong client relationships amidst rapid growth. She also reflects on personal growth and resilience during tough times, providing inspiration for fellow entrepreneurs.

00:00 Introduction: Balancing Business and Family

00:13 Meet Ashley Kent: CEO of Clearstart Creative

00:48 The Journey of Clearstar

01:46 Challenges and Joys of Managing Business and Family

03:06 Understanding Clearstart's Marketing Approach

03:46 Phases of Growth for Startups

06:00 The Role of Marketing in Venture-Backed Companies

17:29 The Impact of AI on Marketing and Business

30:24 Challenges in Product-Led Growth (PLG)

31:45 Balancing Work and Family Life

34:48 Building a Female-Led Business

35:58 Hiring and Work Ethic

38:25 Managing Burnout in Fast-Paced Industries

40:25 Strategic Focus in Business

50:03 Personal Reflections and Challenges

54:38 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Tom: [00:00:00] Can you still enjoy life while running a business with 15 employees and raising two little kids? How do you grow a business past the point where A CEO does all the selling? And what role does marketing play in venture-backed businesses? These are some of the questions I ask Ashley Kent, founder and CEO of Clearstart Creative, a marketing growth agency working with venture backed health tech companies to achieve hypergrowth.

Clearstart is a product focused marketing agency. It takes a whole customer lifecycle approach from acquisition to renewal and expansion. As Clearstart's, CEO Ashley focuses on hiring great people who will build great relationships with clients. The key, according to Ashley, is to act with the dedication of an in-house resource while having the talent of an agency.

Ashley was recently in Nashville to take her 6-year-old daughter to her first concert when we caught up.[00:01:00]

Tom: Ashley, it is so good to see you. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Ashley: So great seeing you. It's been a while.

Tom: It has been a while, but it's many good things have happened in your life since we last spoke. I was like, I don't know, company number five or six for Clearstart and now you guys have thousands of customers.

Ashley: Not quite thousands, but one day. One day. But it's been a great, it's been a great journey. You say it's great, it's good, it's bad, it's, it's business. So

Tom: Yes, it is business, but it's fun. Yeah, I'll just, I've never been happier. I've never been happier having a business. And you have two kids and you have 15 employees. Are you able to enjoy your life with all that responsibility?

Ashley: Good question. People, there's this huge wave of people talking about forming [00:02:00] hobbies.

And I started thinking to myself about what is my hobby? And it was sad when I was like going to dinner with friends. And that's when, but honestly, that's just the stage of life that I'm in right now. And, I'm a foodie, so that can work for now. Hobbies, I guess will, be a later thing when you don't have a six and 4-year-old and you're not actively growing a company.

Between working out, eating some good food, hanging out with my family, there isn't much more time for much else. So that's about where I'm at.

Tom: You seem like you're happy just looking at you. You seem you're you seem like you're in a great spot.

Ashley: Definitely doing well. It's nice not being with kids with diapers. So that makes life

Tom: Yeah, that is a big change.

Ashley: Lot easier. Potty trained, they're fully in school. I'm about to experience my very first summer though of a child who is in elementary school and not in daycare throughout the summer.

So we'll be doing the camps and seeing what that's as a full-time working mom with a full-time working dad. So that'll be exciting. But, it's just all new [00:03:00] chapters that we figure out.

Tom: Let's go back a little bit so we can 'cause I think the journey of how you got to here is so interesting. Tell me like how you, first of all, what is Clearstart and tell me a little bit about how it started and how you got to where you are now.

Ashley: So Clearstart. We're a boutique marketing agency, and I say marketing even almost lightly 'cause I like to think of us as more of a growth agency. Where we partner specifically with early stage, typically seed to series a venture backed startups.

It used to be, all the startups, SaaS based. Now we've really zeroed in on our health tech companies that we work with. So we work with venture backed health tech startups to be able to really come in at two different inflection points. Typically one is what we call the crawl phase.

So typically when companies are just launching their company, they have their idea, they might even have the product, mostly built out, but really have some inklings on who their target [00:04:00] audiences are gonna be, the ways that they're gonna be going to market, but have not validated any of that. So coming in with them and helping them through that validation period to be able to determine.

Who are our actual target audience that have the willingness to buy and then what are the channels in which we're gonna be able to reach them all the way up to another inflection point is where we call it the walk phase. Usually this is where someone has been doing more founder-led sales and has been scrappy and figuring it out on their own.

They're starting to see some traction, but there's absolutely no scalability in what they're doing. If they were to bring on a sales team, a marketing team there would be no repeatability. They've been able to do what they've done because of who they are as the founder. So how do you start to build out more scalable marketing and sales systems for growth, essentially?

So if you were to raise additional capital, put fuel on the fire, would it be repeatable? And we can come in and help build out those systems for you.

Tom: Let me see if I can repeat that. Slightly past seed capital to where you've got something where you have kind of a theory [00:05:00] of we think this audience will buy this thing, and then you guys help them validate that theory.

Is that right?

Ashley: Exactly.

Tom: And then you go all the way up to people who are like, okay, Anna, the CEO has been doing all the selling, the rest of us are just delivery and we want to grow beyond that.

Ashley: Exactly. You have revenue in the door you're seeing repeatability, you're seeing willingness to buy.

But if, like I said, say you were to bring on, four salespeople, what would they do? They're gonna start to look at you and start to say, how do we approach this? What are we doing? Where are the leads coming from? They operate different than founders. And so you have to have repeatable systems in place, and you have to remove yourself as the founder of being the core reason why you're growing.

Tom: There are a lot of companies that are in the, I don't know, 10 to $50 million range and even more than that, that are essentially it's all founder sales. And so this is an area where people struggle. So how do you make that transition from all the sales is the founder to you actually have a sales [00:06:00] system?

Ashley: One key element is also the, just the type of company that it is. So if you're, doing more of a lifestyle business if the founder is the person who is the reason why it's doing what it's doing, this isn't a company that you could eventually sell. If you're working with venture backed companies, yes, the CEO the founder is gonna be really important to growing the machine.

However, they shouldn't be the core reason why. It's gonna be successful at the end of the day, it's the systems that they're building in the VC world, they're about exits. And so it cannot be centered on one central person. So it's just the way that this is measured is a little bit different within the VC space versus just maybe a, someone who's building a really sustainable company that is doing really well.

From a revenue perspective. We're talking hypergrowth. With hypergrowth, you cannot have one single person be the whole reason why it's growing. So with those companies coming in there what we'll do is essentially perform a very deep dive audit into everything [00:07:00] that they're currently doing. So really starting to understand before I even get into the systems that they're doing their CRM, their, what is your sales motion?

All of that. I have to really understand the business. And so spending time really understanding their revenue models how they have been approaching going to market, where are they currently getting their leads all the way down to really understanding the product that they're selling.

So that means, starting talking with the founder, starting to interview and getting the demos with the product team, if there is maybe one or two sales, people starting to get their perspective on what's working well, what's not working well. And then actually starting to dive into the systems that they have.

So maybe they have a CRM that they're leveraging loosely. And starting to dive into the actual data that's there. I would say 90% of the time the data isn't great. And so it's. Even more of like qualitative data of diving in and seeing, how are people moving? Who's in the pipeline right now?

What are the conversations that are being had? What are the touch points people are [00:08:00] doing? What are the actual emails that are being sent and received? And starting to see how are people, receiving what we're putting out there. To be able to just understand the current process. And then, looking back, and typically at this point, a lot of people haven't invested much in marketing.

We work with a lot of healthcare companies. So maybe they've gone to some conferences, but they have absolutely no idea the return that they've seen on that. They've posted, a blog here and there and a social post when a new person joined the team. But there's really no strategy behind that.

So trying to understand, where marketing can fit in, whether it is more, they're needing top of funnel support or at some point it's just maybe sales enablement. We're able to identify the highest value kind of area that we wanna fix first within here that's broken.

Tom: Yeah. And start to

Ashley: optimize and then work backwards from there.

Tom: So when you and I worked together, you guys were very action oriented, and you could tell I didn't know what I was doing, and so you didn't wait for me to make decisions. You guys just went ahead and did things [00:09:00] and it was very helpful. I have to say I didn't understand marketing then. In many ways I still don't, even though I'm married to someone who's a marketer, and she's really good at it. I pretend I'm your old grandpa and you're, explain to me what is marketing and why I should care, because there are an awful lot of CEOs who are old grandpas who don't think marketing's worth anything.

And so tell me why I'm wrong.

Ashley: It's interesting you say this, 'cause I've been thinking about this and I've been including this in my prospect calls, whenever talking to a founder that is coming to us for marketing and it's really helpful to get alignment on the front end of how the CEO views marketing asking that question of, how do you see marketing, impacting your business and what function do you want it to play within there?

Some people may say, we see it as a core revenue driver for us. You're gonna be bringing in leads. Some people will look at you and say, you're here to make all of our things look pretty and sound better. So it could be, coming in, they see you as just [00:10:00] a output function of, we need this one pager, we need this, deck redone.

You're gonna make it look nicer, sound better, make it more effective for a sales team. So that's more kind of sales enablement. And then some people may be, saying you're here to just generate brand awareness. We want the world to know that we exist and that we're out here. When you start with that question and you get that answer, say you typically fall into those three buckets.

It's interesting within there you can actually drop all of those at certain points of the funnel. And they're just thinking about very specific parts of the funnel. So if someone's saying that we see you as a core revenue driver, they're gonna say that they expect when they bring you on, they're gonna see an increase in revenue in some way, shape, or form.

I love that approach because then we get that ability to be extremely strategic with the founder and to be able to just go and implement and say, okay, here's the part of your funnel that is broken right now. So say it's a SaaS platform, you have been actually bringing in new leads, like pretty well.

You get 'em onto the [00:11:00] platform, but people are using it for two days and then dropping off and never using it again. So your churn is super high. If we were to go and spend a bunch of money bringing more people into the funnel and doing a bunch of efforts, to drive top of funnel, you'd just be pushing them off a cliff essentially.

Plenty of founders, like if they came in and they say you just want, we just wanna be known, and to bring more people in. It's gonna be a misalignment there. And 'cause I'm gonna be advocating for No, we need to fix. The fact that we are losing customers today and what can we be doing from a marketing, sales, customer support perspective to make sure that we're reducing the churn product as well.

Yeah. To make sure that we're retaining those, fix that first and then can start to figure out, okay, now what's the next part of the funnel that we, okay, we fix that. Say it's, churn has decreased. Now let's move into another part of the funnel that we can fix. And so that's on the revenue side where I really like to focus and that's what makes me excited.

For someone who just thinks marketing is fluff, I would say that's where you fall into that middle of you just make it look [00:12:00] pretty. So then it becomes that if we turned it off tomorrow, would it really impact our business? Probably not. Like our stuff may look a little crappier. It may sound, not as great, but at the end of the day, if you can hustle, you can probably push through, some of that.

And so if someone's gonna see us in that light. They're gonna fire us. As soon as, something turns in the company, they are tight on cash. We're gonna be the first to go. So I've always said to my team, we have to make sure that we are impacting the business and every single thing we're doing.

We're not just making it look pretty.

Tom: Now, you, a lot of your clients are venture, is that right?

Ashley: Correct. Correct.

Tom: Yeah. Okay. And venture's an odd duck in that sometimes revenue's a really bad thing. And so I can totally understand why some venture founders would be like, we just need to be, we need a buzz, we need an investment story.

We need people to know that we're here 'cause we're selling a dream to, some degree, you know the space better than I do. I'm [00:13:00] cynical, but to some degree, I think in venture you're selling a dream. And so what do you do in that situation where they're like no. Don't talk revenue.

We do not want revenue. What do you do then?

Ashley: I would honestly say, pushing back on that was very much the case. I'd say between 2015 to 2020. Okay. People were investing in dreams and ideas much more. So it has changed significantly. Revenue and finding product market fit. What people were investing five, $10 million in ideas back in the day.

Now that trend is still happening. I would say particularly for a lot of AI solutions, I've seen people just throw out money for people that have four pilots just secured. If it's a AI solution. But it's been pretty wild to see the grip that VCs have right now on their capital and how they're not allocating it.

Even if companies have revenue they now they're looking more into those kind of, do you have a sustainable, repeatable motion? Or once again, are you just [00:14:00] relying on these humans that you have in here? So it's the systems, it's the revenue. But yeah, on the front end, you're definitely trying to convince people of this dream, but it's interesting how, people aren't really investing anymore in dreams and ideas.

They want you to actually have some tangible. Results that they can invest in at this point. And it's getting harder and harder, which is, it's really challenging as a company. So that's where it is fun with these early stage companies. Like we're not just jumping in and just trying to, create some buzz about them.

We are looking in there and saying what we do is not gonna be like fun, sexy, pretty. We need to get our first customers in the door. So what are we gonna do to be able to do that? The world may not even know about you, but we're gonna do some very targeted outreach to start to validate those customers and start to learn what we need to do.

So then when we start to go broader with our message, we're actually reaching the right people.

Tom: Can, will they accept other? First of all, thank you for politely telling me I'm out of touch, which is great. [00:15:00] I'm sure I am outta touch anyway. When can you take another metric besides revenue and say whether it's user growth or whatever, there, there are all kinds of different ways to measure people's activity in, in software and use that as a proxy and or just like to show progress.

'cause I think what you're saying is it used to be you could spin a yarn and then sell that story without much else to another buyer. Now it's no, we actually have to have shown some form of progress. Revenue is a type of progress, but it's not the only kind of progress. Or is it even, more private equity ish than that where it's no, we only, we don't care about anything other than money.

Ashley: Yeah, utilization rates are great. It shows that people are actually using the product. Within, like I said, I'm in healthcare and so I would say. One, your pipeline does really matter. So even if you haven't [00:16:00] closed the revenue, being able to say we have x number of health systems that are currently in our pipeline.

We are in discussions with these payers. As we all know, these are all extremely long sales cycles. You have these pilots that are going, so like you said, it may not be hard revenue, it could be potential future revenue that's within there. That, and then I would just say too with how crowded the space is, what sort of moat are you building around your product of differentiation and what does that look like compared to the market?

That's another big one that I've seen a lot of VCs starting to look at just because everything is. With ai, with everything. Things are just popping up left and right. So what is the moat that you're building around yourself to win in the market? And so I would say I've seen it's funny in healthcare, I actually call it this the Flintstones car.

A lot of the products in healthcare are, oh yeah, you've got they sell this big thing that it's gonna do, for you. But at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of [00:17:00] people behind the scenes, making it all happen. And it's valid because you don't wanna invest in technology for something that people aren't gonna use.

And so let's, validate it first, but that's a lot of what people are selling. And what does that look like to be able to build out and validate that people are gonna use it. There's retention. Can you reach your target audience? Can you get the inroads that you need? And then can you find some repeatability in there?

And that can be another metric, but I'd say from the moat perspective, that's something else just really big I've seen within the space recently.

Tom: That's I'm glad you brought up the topic of ai. 'cause one of the things I want to ask is and it's interesting you don't sound like a marketer when I, you sound like a an investor, a business owner, or dare I say, a product person.

And and I mean that in the best possible way which isn't to say anything bad about marketing as I said earlier, I don't really understand it. But anyway, let's talk about AI and how, 'cause one of the things you talked about, like sales enablement, there is a degree of production, [00:18:00] which is commonly associated with marketing.

And it used to be that production was required people. And you recently staffed up quite a bit. Do you have any regrets? Are you thinking I probably could have done some of this stuff with an AI.

Ashley: Definitely not. I, I look at AI as a way to optimize our time and to make us more efficient.

I am in the people business. We are in the services business where we are building relationships and, I actually say I'm in the matchmaking business half the time with a team that I have. I'm looking at the personalities of my team, their background, their experience, and then pair them with the founders that it's gonna work the best with and it's gonna be the best relationship for.

One of the things that I have realized is, almost back to your question of, you don't sound like a marketer. I think one, because just my experience, my very first experience within a startup, I was the first hire, so I had my hands in product sales, capital, raising all the different things. So [00:19:00] I always operate with that lens and understanding whenever I'm approaching a company, I never talk about marketing regular, like with clients. If I'm like prospecting, anyone, I'm trying to understand their business. Now I know all the marketing levers I can pull from that. But it's not until I understand their business and can look from this view that I can then decide, all right, here are the things that we need to do to be successful.

But back to the AI question, no, I need humans to be able to do this to be able to operate this and to have these relationships with people. We still have businesses and they're still humans within there. AI is incredibly powerful. I use it every single day and everything that I do, it has allowed me to, digest massive amounts of data.

It is a great way when I have a creative block that I'm needing to work through and help to ideate through things. But at this point, I definitely do not see. Where I would have less team members because of this, due to just the nature in which we work. And, just the relationship [00:20:00] nature of that would be really sad and lonely and the content would be empty.

And, so it's a layer on top of what we do to make us more effective. And we as a team, just yesterday, were talking about what should our AI tech stack look like? And really starting to invest in that so that we can be more efficient with our time. We work with startups, they wanna move freaking fast.

So how do we start to remove roadblocks and move even faster with ai? But still with that, human component of being able to understand and dig deeper AI may not push back on you like we would in a meeting when someone says, Hey, why aren't we doing, X, y, Z? This is why.

Tom: That's fascinating.

Do you mind sharing a little bit about your tech stack, which you guys are thinking right now?

Ashley: This is a, trying to figure out what it's gonna look like. Yeah. Sort of things. I definitely use, I mean I'm using the paid version of Chat GPT a lot here recently. I've been having a lot of fun with the image generation side of it.

Which has been really interesting from [00:21:00] just an ideating perspective. I went through a whole naming process with a client where it helped just spark a lot of ideas that we had. I was able to really quickly as we went through the naming had it mock up what a name logo could look like, so that the client would be able to get a picture for it.

It's hard to understand in black and white how it could look like in reality, so it just throws it up on a billboard mockup, like all these things that would've taken us weeks to have to do and, I did it in 30 minutes. So it's pretty wild to be able to, and it helped the client get to the decis a decision really quickly.

And we're able to do that. Otherwise that's the primary one we use. We use all of the AI note taking for what we're doing on our client meetings to be able to really clearly be able to capture everything that the client is saying and record that our action items to dos, but then also leveraging it as well.

If we're working on sales collateral and we just spent a whole session talking through the pain points that they're experiencing, what are customers saying? Where are they holding back? It's capturing all of this and how do we wanna leverage that to [00:22:00] apply it to our new copy going forward? And then obviously with the human element of editing behind that.

But there's a lot of just ways that we can leverage tools, but there's so many that we're not tapping into right now. Some that one I'm really curious and just haven't had a chance to be able to work through Clay. It's the. Sales outreach tool that is completely AI enabled. I think probably with you we use like Apollo, which is another really strong one, but yeah.

Ashley: Play is really strong and identify your ICPs, it's gonna go and start to craft like different lines per ICP, based off of, that's gonna be very segmented. It's just stuff that was just back in. It's funny, the other day I was thinking to myself, I was like, just do this.

You still just write this stuff. And, and I think that now there's almost a, there's a balance. I saw another article that was like, AI is making me, just dumber.

Tom : Yes. It's,

Ashley: yeah. It just, you start to second guess a lot of what you say. You but it is strong and is powerful.

And I do think it helps, but like, how can we make sure that we're [00:23:00] still remaining humans and what we're doing? 'cause humans at the end of the day respond to humans. Yeah.

Tom: It's a little bit like like a kid in the sense that my children make me think I'm dumb all the time. And I'm grateful for it because there's so much that I learned from them.

But then I have to remember that my 25-year-old is 25. And sometimes it's not best for me to completely leave him alone. Teddy did this we had this project together and it made me laugh and it made me think and it's not useful in the way that I thought it was gonna be useful, but it sparked a whole bunch of other stuff.

But anyway, what I'm trying to get to is just it's not comp Teddy's trustworthy, but he can go down a path that I don't intend him to go down. And it's not it's my fault. I'm like, bad at guidance. Same thing with these ais. It's if you take your eye off them, they're gonna go, they can go down a path that you're not, you don't want and you don't anticipate.

And if you completely trust the work that they come back with. It might not be the right thing. So anyway, they [00:24:00] require management, they require oversight just like a human team does. Are you experiencing anything like that?

Ashley: Oh, 100%. It's never gonna be completely accurate and you need to be making sure that you are providing that oversight.

And I love that you said, just like a human, it needs checks and balances. So does the ai. I do think that some people probably are just grabbing it, dropping it into a content calendar, not editing straight from there and you've gotta have that checks and balances on, whatever it is as a human, it's tech, to be able to make it as effective as possible. 'cause that's the goal at the end of the day. It's not about, yeah, just checking something off the box and saying, oh, we got this social post out, we got this blog out, we got this. It's, is it actually effective and is it accomplishing the goal that we want it to?

Tom: I like your approach to, mark to your work, and I'll use marketing as a general term as communication. Like you talked about relationships, you said how important the relationships you have with your clients are, and I'm assuming you're encouraging your clients to have positive [00:25:00] relationships with their customers.

If you, is there a moral obligation that you have to sometimes remind your clients that they shouldn't abuse relationships with their customers?

Ashley: In which way?

Tom: Sometimes when we think about how to generate revenue we tend to take a kind of clever approach of if I kind of trap somebody into something, then I can charge them, I can tax them, I can charge them a, some sort of fee because I've trapped them.

Like we talk about getting your competitive mode. You're inside my castle, you can't get out. And so now I can really turn up the heat and charge as much money as I want. Tell me about that

Ashley: kind of just focusing on closing the deal versus the that, that's certainly,

Tom: yeah. I think in smaller companies, yes. It's like my friend who says a CEO will say anything to close the deal.

Ashley: But can you actually deliver the value that you've promised and then you've now tossed it off to your team to deliver on that value and Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a moral, element two, [00:26:00] one, are you abusing your team because you've overpromised and it's gonna underdeliver, and so now your team is gonna have to work, 15 times as hard to try and deliver on this thing that you've promised.

It, that is what happens all the time and early stage venture companies like I said it's the Flintstones car, right? You've got these human, they, they're promising this, AI driven, blah, blah, blah, that's gonna, do whatever. But it's really just these humans that now it's okay, we just sold this.

It's gonna increase our capacity to now we're gonna have to review, we've been reviewing 1500 patient records and now it's gonna be, up to 2 million.

But your team didn't grow and your tech didn't change, right? Now it's abusive on that front. And so how are you making sure that you're one, protecting your team?

And I think really good CEOs do that. And I've seen really good CEOs that are always thinking about that, of, it's not just okay, our revenue increase and we're gonna do this, but I expect you to work with the same resources that you have. So how are they quickly starting to adapt to that to make sure that they can deliver on it?

And then from the client perspective, one of the [00:27:00] things, it's actually a question that we get a lot. They're like, how upfront should we be about where we are?

Tom: Oh, that's a great question. That's a great question. What do you tell them?

Ashley: You know what's funny, I'm in marketing and sales, and so I think there is a level of, from awareness.

Just getting them in the door through promising the vision of what the product is gonna be. If I were to say, we are the a Flintstones car and it's, really shaky, you're, you may not get their interest, period. So what can you do to be able to attract their attention, attract the vision of what you're trying to accomplish, but then when you are in the actual sales discussions, do not oversell what you have because that is the quickest way to lose a customer.

You go into the, we're in healthcare, you go into these pilots, you are gonna underperform every single time. Like we, you are in there to actually show results for them to then increase their relationship with you. So be very upfront with where you are. Make sure that you're resourcing your team accordingly so that they aren't being abused and you've over promised something that they can't deliver on.[00:28:00]

And, be, I always say honesty, once you're in those, like those early stage sort of relationships, be upfront with where you are and what you're able to deliver. And there's a lot of people that, actually will really appreciate that and they're gonna end up getting a much more custom product because they're working really closely with the team and, they get to kind of mold what it's gonna become.

But if you come in and say it's this, really buttoned up product. I've seen this happen on some of our companies. Once again, it's we threw them into a funnel, we converted them. They used it one time and never touched it again. And that wasn't helping anyone. Yeah. And we paused all top of funnel efforts once that happen.

Tom: It's interesting that you take a whole, so you're not just interested in customer acquisition, you're in a lot of your companies are SaaS. Is that right? And then are you seeing. Product led growth in these little companies work well.

Ashley: Yeah. It's been interesting to see it start to creep into healthcare.

Healthcare has been historically sales led.

It is, you go, you hire people that have a really solid [00:29:00] Rolodex that can make the introductions and the health systems and the employers and, whatever it may be. And that's been the way in. At the end of the day, you are selling to humans, especially with kind of all of these, new products that have been coming out with AI, scribes and things like that within the health tech space. Those have started to pave the way of PLG within healthcare. That's been really interesting. And I've been running some tests with a few different companies to be able to do this. Now the thing that I cautioned the company that we were working with when we approached this, and this was actually the push off the ledge sort of story.

The product wasn't totally there. When you're doing PLG, you have to have such a buttoned up system, and this is where you have to then also start pulling resources away from actually making the product really awesome and good in your development team. That's spending time over there. Yeah.

So you actually have to pull product into helping build out that marketing funnel. Within there. So how are we, yes, from a marketing perspective, it's looking at what are the different channels that we're driving the [00:30:00] target audience to our site to then be able to convert on a, a free account that you know, then has to upsell.

But then what is the user experience? And typically, once again, that's product led. They're creating an account. That's something that product has to create. This isn't anymore convert on a form and talk to a sales person. They create that free account. Once they're in the platform, what do they actually get access to?

How is it walking them through the platform? If there isn't a human that's gonna do this for them and onboard, can it do it? Or are they gonna go in there and be super confused? Have no idea what the steps are. Drop, there's so many drop off points that can happen when you're doing PLG. And if you have not thought through the user experience really thoughtfully to make sure that is completely buttoned up.

And then from the marketing perspective, what are all the different emails that are going out? What are the touch points? From a sales perspective, someone signs up for a free account. What triggers sales to then start to reach out to that person? Someone's in the product, four times in one day, they're using it a lot.

We send an email, at that point to be able to upsell them, into the paid version or whatever it may be. Like, there's so much more that has to happen there that's more automated, it's [00:31:00] system oriented. And if you haven't set up those systems, your PLG will fail every single time.

You can't use the human glue anymore. So I do always warn companies. I think they think it's the easier route 'cause they're like, we don't have to use humans. Our product can sell itself. It's just so awesome. But humans, we have such a short attention span, and if we do not realize the value in an instant, we bail every single time.

If it's hard to use, we bail. And so making sure that you have a super buttoned up, user experience from all the, from the moment that they learn about your product to they convert, they sign up. It's not done. At that point, your product has to sell itself. And then also, how are you.

Descending your sales team and marketing and all those other touchpoint to make sure that they stay and pay at the end of the day.

Tom: I, I wanna pivot for a moment. You're in Nashville with your 6-year-old daughter and she, you are going to a show tonight. And I think that's great. I'm curious about what you want your [00:32:00] daughter to know about business and are you, first of all, are you thinking that way at all at this stage as an entrepreneur and business owner?

And also do you think the world is any different for her than it was for you at that age? But the expectations of girls and, is anything any better or is it pretty much the same?

Ashley: I love this question. It's interesting. So we live on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee which is in Chattanooga. Which is a very small sort of Mayberry community. It's where I grew up as well. And it's interesting I grew up with a mom who was at home and, it was amazing and wonderful. We, did all the fun activities with her all the time and, so she's growing up with a very different experience than I did.

But I actually ask her the question all the time, do you like that I work? Because actually even now, like where we live, things haven't changed a ton. There are definitely more working moms on lookout. But [00:33:00] I'd say I'm more in the minority at this point, especially the older my children get.

And she's and it's funny, she actually says, “Yeah, because we have money.” So it's a, but she's not wrong. It does help, in that capacity. But I don't want that to be the only thing that she takes away. When I took her now to our office here in Nashville, it was actually so cool.

I was just walking her through, giving her the tour of everything we work out of the industrious coworking space, and it's here in Germantown on the river in the New H District, which is like really cool. Took her out and her eyes were just huge and she was just running around and was just like, this is amazing.

This is so cool. And so I just think it's so cool for her to be able to be exposed to this and to see that, and my team is all women. So she's sitting right now with my team and she gets to see these other really hardworking women. And I just think it's just really cool that she gets to grow up.

With a mom that's doing that. And obviously, moms that are staying at home, that's also super admirable. I don't have the patience for that. I really love what I do and, love using my brain in this [00:34:00] way. But it's cool to be able to expose her to this. And she's so smart too.

So like I just see her kind of, growing up this way as well. But it'd be interesting, what it would look like if we lived in Nashville still, versus where we live now for kind of what everyone else around us would be doing too.

Tom: So it's you mentioned that you're first of all, it's great that you gave your daughter that memory.

My dad owned a business, I have a memory of going to his office in 1976. It was this thing called Op Sail, and it was a bunch of ships, tall ships, sail ships were coming into New York Harbor to celebrate the bicentennial. And so I have a fond memory of dad taking me into the office and. Same sort of thing as your daughter about this is so cool.

So you've given her something that, which may be a vivid memory of her whole life. And anyway, but you made a comment about having an all female business and as I remember, that was a deliberate choice. Is that correct?

Ashley: Deliberate [00:35:00] I love that we, employ women and it's a great place for us.

But just, I think in general there just seems to be a high concentration of women that work in marketing over men. Now I would absolutely not hire a male. We had a male designer at one point that was, on our team. And it just comes down to though, I'm looking for people that are extremely hardworking can build those relationships with our clients.

Like I said, this, there is such a human element to this. When I'm interviewing people, I'm also looking at their soft skills. I'm looking at how they work with them. And so it's not deliberate, but I would say it's just, you look, in general, a lot of marketing agencies tend to be this way.

It's funny, on the paid ad side, you see a lot more males on that side. And I think because that's such a data-driven side versus the creative. So it's just where I think females land. But even within that, I'm looking for character traits. I'm looking for, personality traits, how they work, their work ethic.

Those are the things I am deliberate about.

Tom: How do you, hiring, how do you interview for that? How do you interview [00:36:00] for work ethic?

Ashley: You can't, at the end of the day yeah, like gut, does this person see I do behavioral questions when, I'm doing interviews to try and see how they approach things.

You can tell those people that are the go-getters and that's a lot of who I have hired. They just have that. It factor about 'em, it's almost just like an intangible gut feeling. But I also do a 90 day, probationary period at Clearstart for that very reason.

'cause you don't quite know until someone's actually in the role how they're gonna thrive. I typically hire a lot of people that have never worked in an agency before because of the way that we integrate ourselves with clients. I want them to be act like they're in-house to the companies and care the way that in-house people care about the companies.

And a lot of agencies keep their clients at arms length and it's more transactional and I don't want that feel. However. That, I would say is the hardest transition for people that have been in-house. They have the [00:37:00] space and the time to think.

And to, work on a bunch of things.

When you're in an agency, you're doing this across multiple clients and you have to care about each one. It's extremely fast paced. So you either have to really enjoy this or it's not gonna be a great fit for either side. That's the whole point of the 90 days is like, dude, is this gonna, it sounds fun in theory.

Is it fun in execution? And allowing them to be able to determine that as well is super important.

Tom: It, you're asking people to take quite a risk if they're leaving a job and say, come work with us, but we're not guaranteeing you anything.

Three months, then we'll decide.

Ashley: No job's guaranteed. You can be let go at any point.

Tom: Very true. Yeah. You feel like you're just being more upfront about it. Yeah.

Ashley: I'm very deliberate. Talking about how hard and fast paced it is. I think setting those expectations, I think when anyone's looking at a role, they'll say, I can do anything, and my creative director actually, when she's interviewing designers, she says, if you think about the fastest paced job you've ever had, multiply [00:38:00] that by 10, which you think it is fast, multiply it by that. And and we brought on a designer who she's phenomenal, but she said, she was like, I was like, I thought I worked fast.

And then we came, I came into Clearstart and I was like, wholly crap. This is way faster than anything I've ever seen. And it's just, it's because of the industry. We are an agency and we work with startups. Those are the two fastest paced industries you can possibly be in. To that point too, a huge thing that I am very cognizant of is burnout.

Because. Startups and agencies are two of the highest industries for burnout. So really thinking through how do I protect my people and putting things in place to make sure that they are taken care of. And a big part of that is making sure that they are reorienting how they're thinking, making sure that expectations are very clear with clients and what we're working on, what we're not working on.

We're not just a vending machine. We're not just an intake function. We are working on the thing and the singular thing that matters right now in this order, and then moving on to the next. And that's [00:39:00] the best way for us. We can make it super effective. We can track it, we can see how it performs, we can iterate, we can punt it, and then we can move on to the next thing.

And that's gonna be the way that we protect ourselves so that we aren't just doing everything.

Tom: That. Exactly. Don't do everything. I, what you just described to me sounds like an anti-fat culture. There's responsiveness in my opinion is a real problem because if you get used to me responding to you instantly for an email or instant message, whatever, I'm training you to have that expectation and now I have to live up to that expectation.

And I find it's funny that the days, sometimes the days when I do the most busyness are the least productive days. And if I have a day, and sometimes I have a day that feels slow, but I got one really important thing done and I did it well, and to me it's like that's so much more [00:40:00] impactful than the days when I'm.

Running around busy. I don't know. You're nodding your head, but it sounds a little different from what you were describing. How do, how does that work in, the thing about a a startup is you're running outta money every day. You get up and we have less money than we had yesterday.

And so there is a sense of panic about that.

Ashley: Yeah.

Tom: How do you keep your head?

Ashley: There's two different paths you could take. And this happens a lot in marketing. One, I could be really freaking busy turning out three blogs a week. We're gonna post this many socials here. We're gonna host a our own podcast over here.

We're gonna do, we're gonna go to this conference here and we're checking the boxes of everything. And we're so busy and we're doing a lot. But are those things like when you come to the point of there's a lot of stress and anxiety with growth, if we do all those things and we're super [00:41:00] busy, are any of those things actually going to help the company?

Probably not. No.

Tom: And so what is, I could speak from experience on that.

Ashley: Exactly. So what is, if we did nothing else, what is the one thing that we think is actually gonna get us a step closer to where we need to be as a company? And can we do that really well? 'cause even just executing one thing really well, can occupy all of your time versus doing six things, barely scratching the surfaces.

We just got out the door, we threw this into Chad, GBT, we, check check. But none of it is actually effective. Reorient all of your energy and effort into the thing. And that is the point of being strategic. You have to know what that thing is to be able, but most people don't. Most people don't.

Most of the time we don't. No, you don't. And that's why you have to work with people that do. And

Tom: For those at home who can't see, Ashley pointed to herself.

Ashley: I watched a video [00:42:00] yesterday. I talk, hear the word strategic all the time. I sure yeah. Hate the word strategic. I say it to myself and, but what the hell does that even mean?

Tom: Good question. Yeah.

Ashley: I watched this video yesterday to be able to, also send to my team and, reorient us. I think so many people live in the weeds. Yeah. And they immediately go to tactics. They immediately fall there. And this, video I listened to, it was talking about how it's like the ladder theory and it says those that are strategic, climb to the top of the, imagine a ladder in a forest.

They climb. There's a bunch of people underneath there like chopping a bunch of trees and doing a bunch of stuff down there. The strategic person climbs to the top of the ladder. They look over the trees and they say, guys, we're in the wrong forest.

Tom: And to be honest, everybody says, shut up.

Ashley: And we need to be in an entirely different forest altogether. And we, there is one tree in this other forest that you know is [00:43:00] gonna be, much more fruitful than, what we're spending our, all of our time and energy on over here. And that's the point that I try and get across and try to communicate to clients and when we're able to do that.

It is one, you're not running in 5,000 different directions.

Tom: Yeah.

Ashley: You're actually focusing on something. I had a team member, we just did this with a client actually, and she was like, this was so much fun because I actually started to see results. Yeah. Before we were just getting stuff out the door.

Now I started actually seeing the fruits of our labor and it was right. It was giving us positive results for the client that, got everyone excited.

Tom: I wanna talk through that and I think that's really important and I want to dig into that a little more in more detail.

I'm gonna use my own business as a case study, so there was something you said to me years ago, which was very helpful and insightful and I wasn't able to act on it. And so you said, Tom, you're doing a newsletter, you've got a Substack, you've got a podcast, you've got your writing [00:44:00] books but you're all these things, you can't do any of them well 'cause there's just, you and Anna and so what are you gonna focus on?

What are you gonna pick? And my answer was I don't want to pick. I like doing all of them. And so I, I didn't, but you're, when I go and I look at the numbers of whether I want, don't look at books, sold numbers. It'll make you it's very highly depressing. And anyway that's a whole other podcast, but, when I look at whether it's listens or whether it's poo subscriptions or anything else, none of them to me are meaningful.

None of the numbers that I get. From my activities tell me anything, they all look the same. And so am I a failure that is just the content's not that interesting, so that's why nothing happens. Or is it something else? And then if you ask me like, where do your customers come from?

I'd say lunches. My customers come from me sitting down face-to-face with somebody typically having a meal. Understanding what their problem is and then [00:45:00] winning their trust that we can do something about it. So should I, should all of my energy just be in make sure you have a bunch of lunches.

Just set those up. The rest of this stuff doesn't matter. That's more or less where I've landed, but how do I know, that's you're, because you're saying there's a way to know what the best activity is. How do I know?

Ashley: I think you just answered your own question. You talked yourself through that.

You started kinda did. Yeah. Yeah. You started talking through kind of the different activities that you're doing, and my next question would've been, where are you actually starting to see and feel some results? And so whether it's a lunch, I think what you've identified there is this is because of your business and the nature of it and the hands-on ness of what you do.

It is highly relational. All the books, all the podcasts, all the things that you're doing I think that can absolutely help when it comes to just credibility and, all of those things that you need when you're going into [00:46:00] this, but it is most likely not gonna be the source unless you're really focusing in on this specific podcast and how are we growing this with the exact target audience that we're looking to reach?

How are we gonna get the most reach with this? How are we gonna convert people through this? What, if we're on this podcast, what is the resource that we're giving out to people that's free? That they can hit your site, they can convert on your site. Now you have them in your funnel and you're being thoughtful throughout that whole process.

We're just talking, like we, we don't have a call to action. We don't have all of those things. And it's also a lot of work to build out all those funnels, to do all those things. And I would say look at the resources that you have available to you and, if you're seeing that having, really great conversations with people is the thing that kind of gets your hook into them and then makes them build that trust with you.

I would try and find more and more ways to talk to people more, get in face to face with people. So whether that is, starting to ask for introductions, starting to reach out to people on link to find people here in Nashville that you think are doing really interesting things and ask them to go to lunch.[00:47:00]

Ask them to grab a copy. Say you wanna, pick their brain, you wanna learn more about what they're building, no sale, just connect what are the other places in Nashville or elsewhere that are small communities that you can start joining to, actually start to have those discussions and conversations and build those relationships.

And that's where I would spend my time. If you're looking to. Because at the end of the day, you don't have a sales marketing team. You don't need you can't be building out all these funnels. You can't be doing this. So what is the thing that you can do? And that those are those areas. And what are the things you've seen have worked well?

I try to find as many possible opportunities I could to get face-to-face with people in small settings. So whether that's all the way down to a lunch, if it's stuff at the National Entrepreneur Center, if it's, joining some organization, whatever it may be, that's where I would use my time because that's what you can do.

It's not scalable, but you're not looking for scale.

Tom: No, we're not looking for scale.

Ashley: Exactly. You're looking for the right people.

Tom: We're looking for the right people. We like the people we've got. [00:48:00] That's that's very helpful.

Thank you very much. See Ashley, it's been a ton of fun.

I hope you have a great time tonight with your daughter. And, yeah. What's the difference between your daughter and your son? Do you see any yeah, tell me about that.

Ashley: They couldn't be more different. Charlotte is extremely theatrical. She loves music. Her outfit tonight, you would die.

She's a purple sequin dress with a sequin, cowgirl hat and cowgirl boots. She is destined to be an influencer. Yeah. She she is dressing the part.

Mason is just the biggest athlete you've ever met. I have very stereotypical kids, I think, honestly.

He is someone he can hit a ball, hit a golf ball. He is just naturally great at all of that. He's also funny as hell and just cracks me up where Charlotte's, she's just. She's just who she is and this big personality loves to perform. Also can be a little shy though at times too.

It's funny. He's just ah, I'm out here. I'm who I'm, [00:49:00] so someone once said to me when I was pregnant with my son, I like, I just kept pictured picturing that I was gonna have the exact same child over again. And they said to me, they said, but what sibling do you know that is like the other one?

And I was like, you're great question. You're so right. Like we're all so different. Yeah. And it is just, that's how it is. They're all just their own little people. But it is cool to see little pieces of yourself. 'cause I was the one on stage and, dancing and singing and doing all the things.

So it's fun to see that in her too. But I was big in sports too. I always, I had to pick between the two.

Tom: Not an easy choice. An easy choice. It's funny 'cause it's like you're you're making so many difficult things look easy. Not easy to start a business, not easy to be a boss, not easy to grow it.

All those things are hard. Raising children is hard. Having a solid marriage is hard, but they're all a lot of fun. And I'll just say from the distance of Nashville to Chattanooga, when I look at you, you look like you're doing all of them very easily.

Ashley: I don't know if it's totally the [00:50:00] case. I am very much human.

I'll be transparently these last two, three months, six months honestly have probably been the hardest six months of my life. We've gone through the biggest changes, within our company that I've ever experienced, team, client, everything. And I have pushed through and 'cause I have to at the end of the day.

Yeah. I do have people that rely on me, but, don't let the, facade fool you. It is hard as hell to do this and it will push you in every single capacity. I have grown a ton in the last six months. I have learned a ton. I'm learning to give myself grace. I'm very hard on myself and I'm always trying to find ways to improve and do better and, which I think you have to as someone who's running a business, but also learning to give yourself grace and recognizing the wins that you have accomplished.

I, I know social media and all the things that can, put it out there that everything's buttoned up. I am, crazy on the back end, having to figure it out and sometimes have literally just been treading [00:51:00] water. But I. Just know that there's always just a period in life, that not everything's gonna be perfect all the time.

And so it's about getting through those, making sure that you're surrounding yourself with really strong support system. And just know that like it will get better and it's just a part of life.

Tom: I love that I should end there, but I can't, I have to know what was the crisis? What was the thing that, that you said made stuff tough?

Ashley: Probably the hardest thing that could ever happen. I've had, I had my whole core team leave over the course of two weeks. We lost some of our core clients largest clients over the course of two months. And this was all around the same time. So I had to quickly onboard new team members, train them have to backfill revenue, like for this team that I have.

And keep all of that afloat and stay really strong throughout all of that. It truly was, I think the hardest thing I've ever gone through. And it's what I've been going through the last two months to be [00:52:00] totally transparent. So anything that you see that's on social media, like it's not always true.

Like I have had many sleepless nights, I have had tears, I've had, all the things. I've had more stress that I've ever had in my life. But I'm starting to see the other side. And I think it's just all things that I'm seeing the reason for it. I think in the time it was, it's so hard to see the reason, but once you start to see the reason for all that's what allows you to keep pushing forward.

But yeah, no, losing your core team and core clients within a span of two months is not for the faint of heart. While just keeping it all up and alive with two kids and a husband like you said. And

Tom: That's right.

Ashley: I've never, I've, all my friends say, they're like, we haven't seen you in forever.

So that tells you anything.

Tom: I've been working. Yep. Exactly. But you seem to love it. It's, that's the thing. It's just I love what you said about, I see the reason and I think that pain is pain. It's not it's easy to think, why [00:53:00] am I doing this? Why don't I just stop?

And I honestly think sometimes we're supposed to, I think sometimes when we're in pain, it's sending us a message that we are supposed to stop. But that doesn't seem to be the true. In your case,

Ashley: I had plenty of times I was like. Fuck it. We're throwing in the towel, we're done burning it to the ground.

My my leadership team has gotten the calls of I'm burning the whole house down. Yeah. And then, shortly thereafter something happens. It's all okay. It's not as, bad as we all seem and doom and gloom and, don't let things just happen to you. But, yeah, it's a, there have been times I've definitely wanted to burn it to the ground, but I do, at the end of the day, I absolutely love what I do.

And I, there is such a need in the market for what we do, and it's really fun to just meet new founders, hear what they're building. And so while I lost a lot of clients that, meant a lot to me. I, I get very invested in my clients. And just [00:54:00] emotionally, everything I like, I. I act like it's my company, all of them.

Which is what I think has made me successful is like the amount that I care. And, but I think that was also like a hard thing. Like I was so invested in those companies that I couldn't be running mine as effectively because I was so invested in their success and not mine. So it was some of those painful things that needed to happen for me to be able to be where I needed to be.

At the end of the day, it was as painful going through it, but now I'm learning of how do I safely distance myself yeah. Yeah. From them so that I can be who I need to be for my team and not just for the companies that we're serving. So

Tom: I love that idea of I'm so invested in the success of my clients that I forget about my own success, but it's so much fun to talk to you again.

It's so much fun to see you. I just I'm so grateful that Ella introduced us and that and it's been so much fun to watch your growth.

Ashley: I appreciate you having me on this. It's been fun reconnecting, and we'll do it again in two years. See [00:55:00] what happens.

Tom: I love it. I love it.

Ashley: All righty.

Tom: Enjoy the show tonight, Ashley.

Ashley: We'll do it.

Tom: Fortune's Path podcast is a production of Fortune's Path. We help service and technology businesses address the root causes that prevent rapid growth. Find your genius with Fortune's Path. Special thanks to Ashley Kent for being our guest music and editing of the Fortunes Path podcast by my son Ted Noser>

Look for the Fortunes Path book from Advantage books on fortunespath.com. I'm Tom Noser. Thanks for listening, and I hope we meet along Fortunes path.