Geoff Henshaw's guest appearances

Geoff Henshaw

This is Content.

Marketing BS with Edward Nevraumont

Semil Shah

Lori Bush

Nick White

Hiten Shah

Cameron Herold

Tom Seery

Jeremy Wallace

Steve Johnson

Peter Fader

Lindsay Pedersen

Fred Swaniker

Adrian Salamunovic

Joel Klettke

Stuart Wood

Brian Watkins

OwlTail

My guest today is Geoff Henshaw, former CMO of Stoko. Stoko manufactures and distributes kneebraces built into athletic wear that is comfortable enough to use everyday. Yesterday we explored Geoff’s career at Shoes.com, 1-800-GOT-JUNK and more. Today we focus on how he was growing the Stoko brand. Note this episode was recorded Geoff was still CMO of Stoko. HE is now looking for his next CMO opportunity. Feel free to reach out to me if interested and I can put you in touch. You can also listen to these interviews in your podcast player of choice: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed (for premium episodes).TranscriptEdward: This is part two of my interview with Geoff Henshaw. Today, we're going to dive into how he is growing Stoko. Geoff, can you start by describing what Stoko is and what they do?Geoff: Yeah, for sure. Stoko is a company that creates supportive apparel. Our first product launched in October of this year. It's a compression tight with the same support as a conventional knee brace.Edward: Is Stoko a product or is it a company? Geoff: Stoko is a company. Our first product is called the K1 as in Knee 1.Edward: Is the idea that you're going to introduce a series of these products that are all related to bracing the body?Geoff: Exactly. We found that with knee braces, specifically—the knee brace actually from a technology perspective—hasn't evolved or changed meaningfully in about 50 years. People's relationship with knee braces is obviously horrible. People emotionally despise their knee braces. Through four years of research and development at the University of British Columbia, this product was created, which is incredible. Thinking of a compression tight, almost like a tighter version of a very tight Lululemon tight. It's got over 50 meters of cabling going through the garment. That cabling is connected to two dials in the waistband. You put the tight on, you can click the dials in the back, you can turn them, and your legs are fully supported.As you can imagine, the application is huge for a number of sports across North America. Since our launch, we're just hearing tremendous feedback from both elite athletes and weekend warriors like myself.Edward: Who uses it? Is it people that would normally use a knee brace, or is it more than that?Geoff: Great question. When we looked at the product, we looked obviously at the end-user. We believed that the time that they would be using the product would be in relation to when they'd had a knee injury. There's a lot of technology in the product, so the product costs are quite high, to be honest. What we believed is that we needed to sell it at a $400 MSRP. We believed in that MSRP price. We needed to compare it against a knee brace.One of the things that we are finding is that elite athletes, particularly, we've actually got it on a number of national team freestyle skiers and snowboarders, young people that never had a knee injury in their careers. They are terrified of knee injuries, and they're starting to use the product preventably, which we're really excited about because obviously, that's a huge market. For the general population, we felt like the value proposition was strongest for people that had—either recently or in the past—a knee injury and they're not happy with the knee brace solution.Edward: Does it totally replace a knee brace? It is more comfortable than a knee brace but as effective as a knee brace?Geoff: Exactly. Customer utility is highest when you're looking at brace support. It has all the support of a conventional knee brace, but the level of comfort is so much better. I don't know if you wear a knee brace. Do you wear a knee brace? Edward: I have at times in my life, but I don't now.Geoff: Okay. The level of comfort is like 9 out of 10 and a knee brace would be like a 2 out of 10. That bracing support plus comfort equals something called compliance, which means that you're going to be wearing it more. Therefore, you're less likely to reinjure yourself or get injured in the first place.Edward: Is it preventative? The elite athletes that are using it as a preventative measure, do we know if it actually is preventative, or is it just a matter of it makes them feel like it might be?Geoff: Well, I'm going to avoid the legality in that question. We believe that it protects from the potential of future injury. There's a bit of a placebo effect also where you can feel the cabling actually holding your leg in place if it's moving into a compromised position. I would say that certainly early indicators are that you could imply that it could be preventative. But certainly, there's a lot of legalities as you know as a marketer, so we need to be really careful about that claim.Edward: Is there any downside? Does it limit mobility at all to be wearing this as an elite athlete?Geoff: No, there's literally no downside. I just got an email from a kid on the Canadian freestyle team. I'm saying kid, I think he's like the early 20s. He just is now sitting 13th in the world in freestyle skiing. He said he's been wearing it every World Cup run that he's been doing. Certainly, there are no limitations, which is really the beauty of the product.Edward: But he doesn't wear it when he goes out for a run around the block?Geoff: Yeah, he wears it. Compression is huge right now. The idea of really pushing yourself is obviously important. But I think things are now really starting to shift towards recovery. There are compression benefits actually in the product also. For someone like that, if he's actually wearing it on his flight home because it benefits him from a compression perspective and a recovery from the flight. He's kicking around wearing it day to day because, as you know, it's a common fashion to wear compression tights underneath shorts just like skateboarders do and professional basketball players do.Edward: Where is the path for more products? Do I just go through the joints in the body and say you’re going to have an ankle one, an elbow one, and a shoulder one?"Geoff: Great question. Our vision is that we have our product for every athlete in the world. We consider anyone who has the ability to walk or to move an athlete. That really helps inform our product roadmap and it also helps form our pricing. Our pricing is really sharp. And our product roadmap would consider joints in the future that have a high incidence of injury. That would include ankles and shoulders, for example. But certainly, we're focused very much on the knee right now.Edward: Start with one before you start jumping to the next. What does your distribution look like? Is it all direct to consumer?Geoff: Yeah, the primary channel is direct to consumers, and that's commerce specifically. But we do see a huge opportunity around retail. We're starting with specialty retail because oftentimes, people are going to specialty retailers to find a solution to this problem that we have. We've found it to be sort of a logical intersect. The second area that we're looking at is around medical professionals. That includes, for example, physiotherapists where they, from their clinic, can actually recommend their patients to purchase our product to help them with an injury that they have.Edward: But you have not gone into that. So far it's 100% ecommerce?Geoff: No, we've actually pushed into relationships. I’m in Vancouver, so we pushed into relationships with a couple of national retailers in Canada. More on the specialty side, which we're really excited about, and then we have medical professionals currently referring our product to their patients. They would refer a patient, and then we would provide them with a commission based on that transaction.Edward: That referral though is still done through the website or some sort of platform?Geoff: Yeah, that transaction occurs on the platform because really their core business for medical professionals in treating patients, obviously. If they're getting into fitting and returns, that's not going to help their business. At that point, they hand it over to us and we're able to interface with the customer from there.Edward: Are there any concerns around the doctors themselves? If they get a commission from you every time they push this out to their patients, are the doctors themselves worried about the conflict of interest of them getting paid to push a product?Geoff: Yeah, very much. Again, we launched this in October, what we’ve heard back from that group of medical professionals is they are very patient-focused and they'll do the right thing for their patient. If that includes referring our product, they'll absolutely do that. It's been interesting because I would describe their reaction to a referral fee as being indifferent. What that's meant for us is that as an organization, we've had to invest more heavily in product knowledge and product understanding. Oftentimes, that means that those medical professionals actually have to wear the product themselves before they're comfortable referring it on to their patients.Edward: Does it come back to your Coastal Contact days of providing free products to the physiotherapist with the hope of getting a revenue stream?Geoff: Yeah, totally. One of the things that we found is that because people have had this tough relationship with their solution—being a conventional knee brace, for example—there's a multiple on each product that we sort of seed.They're wearing it, then they're liking it, and then when appropriate are recommending it to patients. But then they're also telling others in their network, family, and friends about this great product really is incredible. Ultimately, that solution feels better than paying Google and Facebook for acquiring new customers.Edward: It's always better when you have a marketing channel that isn't in an auction to the highest bidder, but obviously harder to build, though, too. I could turn on paid search tomorrow, but if I want to build a network of physiotherapists, that's a lot of work over a lot of years.Geoff: Tell me about it. Trust and scale are critically important for that particular program, for sure.Edward: How do you scale that? Do you have a sales team that's calling on all these? It’s not really sales because you're not selling them anything, but like a community relations team that goes and calls on all these physiotherapists across the country?Geoff: Yeah, we have an outbound team that is looking to set up product knowledge sessions. I think, for us as a startup, looking to immediately automate or scale things, that wasn't really (in my opinion) a great solution because you need to get in there and figure it out yourself first and have these one-on-one interactions. Ideally, you want a few people to go first. That's really important because it creates a little bit of a flywheel effect where you can then point to other people that have joined the program and then that I think adds and builds a little bit of trust for future people who aren't going to join the program. As we build that out now, we're at a stage where we're looking at digital channels to generate leads for our sales team then to speak to.Edward: Yeah, it's always a challenging thing because you have this upfront cost of getting a physiotherapist on board, but you don't know what that revenue stream is going to look like or what type of physiotherapist to get on until you've invested it for a considerable period of time.Geoff: Exactly. With that said, within physiotherapists specifically, generally, they have a binary opinion towards bracing in general, so we identify that first. And then the second part is to understand what percentage of their patients that come through their practice have, for example, a knee injury currently. From there, we can rough out whether we think this is a good partnership to pursue.Edward: What does it look like? You get a physiotherapist on board and they're excited about working with you. How many products will physiotherapists sell in the next month or 12 months? Have you even thought up through that?Geoff: That's a great question. Generally, we believe it would be close to 30% of people that are coming through a physiotherapist would be appropriate for our product. That's kind of the way that we think about it.Edward: That's because 30% of physiotherapists are dealing with knee injuries, 30% of their patients?Geoff: Exactly.Edward: You mentioned a little bit before about when someone tries this thing, they tell their friends and family about it. That type of viral coefficient is, first of all, fairly common in unusual products and it's fairly common in apparel. You're both an unusual product and a piece of apparel. How do you accelerate that? Do you make sure that you have a really big logo on the side of your pants?Geoff: The logo on the K1 tight is something that we're always talking about. Currently, it might be a little bit too subtle. That said, you can actually aesthetically see that there's kind of cabling within the tights, which actually looks cool, and we believe sparks conversation.The things that we really look at are through the customer journey or athlete journey, as we call it. What are opportunities for people that have purchased the product to actually share their experience? Obviously, if you look at the unboxing, that's an opportunity. A small card saying, hey, if you love this, tell members of your family or friends about it.The second is obviously digital. Even within an automated welcome series, post-purchase, and if we see someone has given us 9 or a 10/10 from an EPS perspective, we will send them an offer that they can distribute to members of their family or friends to really encourage that advocacy. Edward: Have you estimated what that viral coefficient is? For every product that you sell or every customer you acquire, how many more customers are you getting over the next 12 months from that customer telling people?Geoff: My gut tells me it's three. Edward: Well, that seems really high. Geoff: It does seem really high, but if you talk to and I probably talk to a customer at least once every two days, they have had something dramatic happen in their lives, which is this knee injury. It's impacted them from, oftentimes, being able to do something that they have a spiritual relationship with, which is exercise. The solution that they have is either wear a brace or not wear a brace, neither of which is particularly compelling. We're providing them with this incredible solution that they will then wear doing this activity that they have this great relationship with and often there's a social component. That is just ripe for them to talk about the product that they're wearing.Edward: Even so, most people who have knee injuries don't have a lot of friends who have knee injuries, or do they?Geoff: Great question. There are particular sports where the product is particularly relevant. The two sports segments that we're looking at right now—and we're actively focused on—are ski and snowboard.Edward: If you could get someone on a ski team, it quickly spreads to the rest of the team.Geoff: Exactly. If you get even within skiers and snowboarders, certainly, there's a ton of, unfortunately, a knee injury. Those opportunities for people to talk about the solution that they have are right there.Edward: My wife gave up skiing just before we met. She had a big accident at Whistler, and she hasn't skied since because she's so afraid of hurting her knee. Do you think this is going to change her mind? Now she can put on one of your pants and start skiing again?Geoff: I'm going to give you a promotional code, so that should help even more.Edward: If it gets her back on the ski hill, I'm happy to pay full price.Geoff: The other nice thing is that—depending on who your insurer is—it should be reimbursed.Edward: Geoff, you do a bunch of retargeting. How do you account for incrementality? How do you know how many of those people would have come back to you anyway?Geoff: Good question. I think retargeting is certainly challenging within a digital marketing mix. For us, in all transparency, we haven't proven that out with Stoko yet. One of the things that you can do pretty clearly is also looking at what you're more established competitors are doing. If it looks like they're doing heavy retargeting, you can probably make a bit of an assumption that, okay, this is a high consideration purchase. People are going to be coming back to your website multiple times and checking out what their options are. We started with that kind of thesis and then started to invest more heavily in retargeting. Obviously, there's a number of different channels that you can look at from a retargeting perspective—everything from Google to Facebook to [...] et cetera.Right now, we're fairly heavily invested in retargeting. I think what I have found is that certainly, you want to look at the full journey of your customer. To me, the best test for retargeting is what happens when you turn it off. I think one of the nice things is that we're at a stage as a company where we can run those tests. We're not looking at attributing 15%-20% of our revenue to retargeting. We can do it in a fairly binary way where we're, okay, let's turn off retargeting and see what happens. I think that's generally the best way to test retargeting personally.Edward: That's one of the nice things about when you're a small enough company. If Coke turns off the retargeting, they have no idea what it exactly did to sales. When you're small enough, you can see any given channel, you can actually see the differences that happen. Geoff, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. Before you go, can you tell us about your quake book and how it changed the way you think about the world?Geoff: Yeah, for sure. It's actually an author that I've been reading this year. He's a Canadian called Joseph Boyden. What he looks at is First Nations experience in Canada, really starting with their first relationships with European settlers. For me, obviously, a lot has happened this year. But for me, it really helped me understand the condition of First Nations in Canada, which is not great, not good. It helped me understand how things that happened generation after generation after generation ago impacted where we're at today. That it's important to acknowledge those things to understand how we could even attempt to make things better.Edward: Thank you, Geoff. I really appreciate your time today.Geoff: Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com/subscribe

Interview: Geoff Henshaw, former CMO Stoko, Part 2

My guest today is Geoff Henshaw, former CMO of Stoko. This is part 1 of the interview where we explore his career at Shoes.com, 1-800-Got-JUNK, and more. Tomorrow we look at the Stoko business and how he is creating a new category of “everyday injury prevention wear”. Geoff is currently looking for his next CMO opportunity. Feel free to reach out to me if interested and I can put you in touch.TranscriptEdward: My guest today is Geoff Henshaw. Today we cover Geoff's career and path to be the Chief Marketing Officer. UBC, Coastal Contacts, Shoes.com, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Geoff now oversees all of the revenue for Stoko. Stoko was founded in 2017 and manufactures athletic wear with built-in orthopedic knee braces. I'm excited to have you here today, Geoff. Geoff: Thanks for having me.Edward: Geoff, in 2016 you oversaw brand and retail marketing for Shoes.com and then you were promoted to running all of marketing. How did you get that promotion? How did they move you from running part of marketing to running the whole show?Geoff: The Chief Marketing Officer was no longer with the company, and I was familiar with the marketing functions that were driving revenue for Shoes.com, so I had the opportunity to move into the role. Edward: What skills were you missing? You've never run all of the marketing before, now you were. What were your gaps?Geoff: I think Shoes.com is obviously competing in a very competitive space, which is shoe online retailers so competing with Amazon and Zappos. The area that I was missing was (I would say) the hard marketing skills. I just hadn't necessarily practiced as much as I’d like to. That would also be on the performance marketing side. While I was there, I had the opportunity to really learn from a guy, Brad Wilson, everything there was to know about controlling unit economics, understanding the impact of pricing, and how to think about your overall marketing mix.Edward: When you got there and you had to pick up those skills, why did they trust you to take on that role? Because performance marketing is usually one of those—it's not the most important, but it's the most obvious and the fastest feedback cycle on all of the marketing functions. To put you in that role without that, was there a risk? Why take the risk on you, just because they knew you well?Geoff: Yeah, I think definitely a part of it was that I was a known entity. Roger Hardy oversaw clearly where I was at previously and then oversaw Shoes.com. Having that relationship certainly helped. I think I was also very clear on the things that I didn't know and had also assembled a team of strong operators around me who can certainly step into those functions where I can lead and manage them from starting at objectives and strategy. Then leaving and leaning on them for the tactical execution.Edward: I want to go back and talk about your path to getting there. Your first role out of business school was at the General Manager position. Many people aspire for the GM role, but you just started there right out of school. How does a newly minted CMO get a country manager role?Geoff: It was an interesting role in that it never existed before and the country manager role for Canada, for Coastal Contacts at that time, that was the country they were generating the most revenue so it's an important role. I think the areas where I was able to land that role and then enjoy and perform well on it were getting clear on the objectives, the strategy, ensuring that all the key stakeholders were supportive, and then getting after it, which I think everyone really appreciated. It's something that I've leaned on that formula for my entire career.Edward: How do you get started in that role? If I’m a new MBA coming out of school, did you go out and look for GM roles where you can jump into a GM role right away, or was it a coincidence? How did you find that?Geoff: It was kind of a coincidence. I was in Vancouver, Canada and I completed my MBA at the University of British Columbia. At that time, I was interested in Management Consulting or working for an ecommerce startup. Management Consulting basically in Canada is limited to Toronto. I wasn't interested in commuting to Toronto or living there again.I found that I was very focused on local opportunities, and just through the MBA program, I was referred to this open role that was available with [...]. I just did my homework and came with the focus and energy that they were looking for, and they decided to take a risk on me.Edward: Were they planning to hire a newly minted MBA for that job, or did you impress them with your skills and they took somebody with less experience than they were hoping for?Geoff: Yeah. They had a culture of hiring MBAs. There were a lot of MBAs on the marketing and the leadership team. They were willing to roll the dice on me.Edward: Talk a little bit about what you did in those roles over at Coastal Contacts, especially around customer acquisition.Geoff: The main thing I did was look to get a deep understanding of not only the target customer but who the most profitable customer was. With that disability into that customer, it becomes a bit of—I would describe it as—a rallying tool for an organization where you can build out things like personas. You can talk about net promoter score, and you can ground organizations and team’s activities into the experience of the customer.With the Canadian market and then with what we call the Commonwealth market of Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, it kind of focused on the customer, our value proposition, where the organization was properly positioned to drive that value proposition, and then rallied teams, activities, and behaviors around driving and stimulating a great customer experience of driving that top-line revenue.Edward: You also gave away a lot of free products.Geoff: Yeah, and it was a really interesting insight, which—full credits to the team—started before I got there. Their insight was clearly, at that time, had a net promoter score north of 80 if I recall, which was far and above the industry average for net promoter score. Based on that insight, we were able to say, hey look, we're delivering this incredible experience to people, and our product cost is actually quite low.In fact, our product cost is below what our acquisition cost is. We also anticipate that there's going to be a huge opportunity for recurring revenue. People have insurance benefits that they can rely on to purchase new prescription eyeglasses one time per year or once every two years. There's a great opportunity for recurring revenue with glasses, contact lenses, and sunglasses. What we decided to do, in a limited way, is starting to roll out testing around the first pair free. Again, the hypothesis is if you deliver this incredible experience where people get their first pair of eyeglasses for free, you're essentially removing all barriers. There's a good chance that they're going to come back again for more prescription eyeglasses or contact lenses and even better, they're going to tell their family and friends about it.Edward: Let's jump ahead to when you left Shoes.com and you joined O2E Brands. O2E is best known for those big trucks plastered with 1-800-GOT-JUNK? After spending a lot of your career to that point in ecommerce, how do you go about learning a service business like that?Geoff: Great question. I think O2E, Ordinary to Exceptional brands—the focus on home service verticals and their franchise. They are on the opposite end of the spectrum from our Shoes.com. It's super fragmented, Geoff’s truck service can startup a business tomorrow and be driving around and digitally advertising.The things that I focused on were the customer, how to think about the customer, and how to get insights on the most profitable customer and connect the marketing function. That means the structure of the team, KPIs, to understanding the customer. I think my admission at O2E when I started was essentially to modernize the marketing function at the organization.Edward: How do you get to know those customers in a real visceral way?Geoff: I think there's a number of different tools, but generally, the way I think about it is if you can align with your internal stakeholders on who that most profitable customer is, that's step one. The second part is if you can spend some time getting to know that customer, that's important. Part of my onboarding at O2E and working on the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? business specifically was I spent a ton of time in major cities across North America just actually driving around on the trucks. I was one of the guys, in full uniform, and we were going out and doing jobs for customers. From there, I was able to understand day-to-day on the job what it felt like to be on the truck, understand the experience that we deliver to our customers. One of the things that became clear was that people generally were getting specific jobs done.For example, they were moving out of their home and they required our services, or they were moving into a home and they required our services. What was interesting there, Edward, is that activity throws off a digital signal. That's a life event that's captured within Google audiences. From that basic insight, we were able to target groups of people that were moving and we were able to target them with our message and then design customer journeys that were super relevant to people moving. That allowed us to drive that top length growth and a great customer experience. Edward: One of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos is about how when data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are often right and you're doing something measuring it wrong. Did you find that at all? When you were doing this customer research, you're doing all the analytical parts, but then you also went on the road and visited and met the customers. Did you find those anecdotes and data disagreeing, or did they usually just come together and they supported each other?Geoff: That's a great question. I think the thing that getting out there, observing, and being with customers helped me understand and helped us make some adjustments specifically to the 1-800-GOT- JUNK? value proposition. That people aren't out there shopping for junk service. You might be shopping for shoes or for skis and you might visit a number of different sites. But generally, for junk removal services, you’ve got a specific job to do. That insight in itself allowed us to understand there's a handful of things that generally people need.For example, they're moving in, they're moving out, they might be renovating, or there might have been something dramatic that happened like a death in the family. Oftentimes, those activities, again, you can target them digitally, which is really exciting. But the thing that changed for us is that we understood that generally, the person that's looking for that service is high intent versus before, we might have viewed it as simply someone is coming across our service and were top of mind and that's why they're selecting us. No, actually, someone’s having an event happen in their life. Edward: Geoff, what were some of the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Geoff: That's a big question. That made me pause. I think there are a few things. One thing was at Shoes.com, that was a job and a role that I had returned back from Sydney, Australia. I moved back for that role. When I joined the organization, it was tough. We were competing in a very competitive category. Ultimately, Shoes.com went through a period of heavy financial distress and was ultimately acquired by Walmart. But through that period of financial distress, we needed to lay off people—people that I really cared about and it was pretty emotional. I felt like I had failed them to a degree and it was just disappointing because many of them I consider friends and I’m still friends with today. That was probably the hardest part for me and my family.I think the second part is just dealing with [...] interesting because I know you’ve got a concept that things happen to you between when you're 10 and 12 and that's really impactful. I think it's still how you deal with conflict. It's still something I continue to work on to this day and just making sure that things like getting exercise, sleep, staying hydrated, and keeping your energy up to the day, are all important factors so that when those times of conflict come up during the day, and they can come up (in my opinion) very unpredictably, you're able to deal with them in the right way.Edward: I once had a VP at Amazon explain to me in the early days how close they came to going bankrupt. What he explained to me was when you're taking off in an airplane, if you've never had that experience of the airplane brushing the top of the forests, then you never get the intensity you need to go make the plane take off and fly. It sounds like you had that experience at Shoes.com. Unfortunately, it sounds like you hit some of those trees in the way you go, but did that experience catalyze you for later on in your career? Do you think you would have the career you had if that hadn't happened if Shoes.com had been a lot more smooth?Geoff: It's a great question. The analogy that I probably use is going a day skiing and not falling. When I go skiing with my kids, if they don't fall it's like, were you actually trying as hard as you could? I can confirm that we tried as hard as we could. We did a lot of things wrong and a lot of things right. I think what I learned is going through that experience was really hard, but I think the things I took away from it are (to your point) I will hold on to those for the rest of my career.You can definitely start to identify those signals that are warning signals much more quickly. You can act in a way that you know you need to act because oftentimes, they are urgent and you need to react to them quickly and you know those are the right signals to be acting upon. My next stop was O2E Brands. I was able to apply a lot of what I had learned at Shoes.com. Over the course of three years, we closed double the size of that business. That was right when COVID hit, but it was definitely on pace to double, to get to close to $500 million in revenue.Edward: Geoff, what are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?Geoff: I think the things for me are building out lists of priorities the night before the next day. My wife absolutely hates it because I'll sit on the bed and just write it down in my master notebook. Here are the top three things for work, here's the top one to three things for family, and then here's the top one to three things for exercise that I want to do the next day. I just find that that allows me to start the next day without having to think through what I need to be doing. I can just start. It also allows me an opportunity to look at a larger list of things and just understand, are there patterns or trends that are merging that don't allow me to get through the things I want to get through. To give you a quick example, one was I definitely wanted to continue to read as much as I could in the evenings. I found that I wasn't able to reach a particular goal of mine related to reading. The reason why is because I was looking at my phone and I was like, that's just completely useless time. After 9:00 PM, I don't need to be looking at my phone. What that led to me doing was just putting my phone in the closet so I don't look at it anymore and I can spend some time reading. Edward: When you put those goals, are they only daily goals, or do you have a system for doing them longer than daily?Geoff: No, I actually had someone, [...] who introduced me to this concept just before I did my MBA. He talked about thinking about your life in 10 years and writing out a rich 4-6 sentence description of what you would love for your life to be like. Then mapping out in 10-, 5-, and 1-year increments anchored to that 10-year vision what would be your goals, and those goals would be connected to your family, your personal life, your own physical wellbeing, and then professional.Then setting what my three goals are going to be in five years and then setting out what are my three goals going to be for this year. Then three goals in each of those categories—nine goals total. All of those daily goals are anchored to a roughly 10-year plan.Edward: Do you go back and review that? You've been doing this for ten years, can you go back and look to see what you've done versus the goals you set 10 years ago?Geoff: Yeah, it is crazy actually. When I first did this exercise, I, for example, set salary goals for myself and my family goals. We didn't have any kids. I wasn't married. I started doing this about 11 years ago and everything came through, which I know they're obviously talked about, but honestly, it was stunning when I looked at it. Just writing those goals down is so powerful. Edward: Geoff, this has been fantastic. We'll pick this up tomorrow. We'll talk about Stoko. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com/subscribe

My guest today is Geoff Henshaw, former CMO of Stoko. This is part 1 of the interview where we explore his career at <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>, 1-800-Got-JUNK, and more. Tomorrow we look at the Stoko business and how he is creating a new category of “everyday injury prevention wear”. Geoff is currently looking for his next CMO opportunity. Feel free to reach out to me if interested and I can put you in touch.TranscriptEdward: My guest today is Geoff Henshaw. Today we cover Geoff's career and path to be the Chief Marketing Officer. UBC, Coastal Contacts, <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Geoff now oversees all of the revenue for Stoko. Stoko was founded in 2017 and manufactures athletic wear with built-in orthopedic knee braces. I'm excited to have you here today, Geoff. Geoff: Thanks for having me.Edward: Geoff, in 2016 you oversaw brand and retail marketing for <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a> and then you were promoted to running all of marketing. How did you get that promotion? How did they move you from running part of marketing to running the whole show?Geoff: The Chief Marketing Officer was no longer with the company, and I was familiar with the marketing functions that were driving revenue for <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>, so I had the opportunity to move into the role. Edward: What skills were you missing? You've never run all of the marketing before, now you were. What were your gaps?Geoff: I think <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a> is obviously competing in a very competitive space, which is shoe online retailers so competing with Amazon and Zappos. The area that I was missing was (I would say) the hard marketing skills. I just hadn't necessarily practiced as much as I’d like to. That would also be on the performance marketing side. While I was there, I had the opportunity to really learn from a guy, Brad Wilson, everything there was to know about controlling unit economics, understanding the impact of pricing, and how to think about your overall marketing mix.Edward: When you got there and you had to pick up those skills, why did they trust you to take on that role? Because performance marketing is usually one of those—it's not the most important, but it's the most obvious and the fastest feedback cycle on all of the marketing functions. To put you in that role without that, was there a risk? Why take the risk on you, just because they knew you well?Geoff: Yeah, I think definitely a part of it was that I was a known entity. Roger Hardy oversaw clearly where I was at previously and then oversaw <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>. Having that relationship certainly helped. I think I was also very clear on the things that I didn't know and had also assembled a team of strong operators around me who can certainly step into those functions where I can lead and manage them from starting at objectives and strategy. Then leaving and leaning on them for the tactical execution.Edward: I want to go back and talk about your path to getting there. Your first role out of business school was at the General Manager position. Many people aspire for the GM role, but you just started there right out of school. How does a newly minted CMO get a country manager role?Geoff: It was an interesting role in that it never existed before and the country manager role for Canada, for Coastal Contacts at that time, that was the country they were generating the most revenue so it's an important role. I think the areas where I was able to land that role and then enjoy and perform well on it were getting clear on the objectives, the strategy, ensuring that all the key stakeholders were supportive, and then getting after it, which I think everyone really appreciated. It's something that I've leaned on that formula for my entire career.Edward: How do you get started in that role? If I’m a new MBA coming out of school, did you go out and look for GM roles where you can jump into a GM role right away, or was it a coincidence? How did you find that?Geoff: It was kind of a coincidence. I was in Vancouver, Canada and I completed my MBA at the University of British Columbia. At that time, I was interested in Management Consulting or working for an ecommerce startup. Management Consulting basically in Canada is limited to Toronto. I wasn't interested in commuting to Toronto or living there again.I found that I was very focused on local opportunities, and just through the MBA program, I was referred to this open role that was available with [...]. I just did my homework and came with the focus and energy that they were looking for, and they decided to take a risk on me.Edward: Were they planning to hire a newly minted MBA for that job, or did you impress them with your skills and they took somebody with less experience than they were hoping for?Geoff: Yeah. They had a culture of hiring MBAs. There were a lot of MBAs on the marketing and the leadership team. They were willing to roll the dice on me.Edward: Talk a little bit about what you did in those roles over at Coastal Contacts, especially around customer acquisition.Geoff: The main thing I did was look to get a deep understanding of not only the target customer but who the most profitable customer was. With that disability into that customer, it becomes a bit of—I would describe it as—a rallying tool for an organization where you can build out things like personas. You can talk about net promoter score, and you can ground organizations and team’s activities into the experience of the customer.With the Canadian market and then with what we call the Commonwealth market of Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, it kind of focused on the customer, our value proposition, where the organization was properly positioned to drive that value proposition, and then rallied teams, activities, and behaviors around driving and stimulating a great customer experience of driving that top-line revenue.Edward: You also gave away a lot of free products.Geoff: Yeah, and it was a really interesting insight, which—full credits to the team—started before I got there. Their insight was clearly, at that time, had a net promoter score north of 80 if I recall, which was far and above the industry average for net promoter score. Based on that insight, we were able to say, hey look, we're delivering this incredible experience to people, and our product cost is actually quite low.In fact, our product cost is below what our acquisition cost is. We also anticipate that there's going to be a huge opportunity for recurring revenue. People have insurance benefits that they can rely on to purchase new prescription eyeglasses one time per year or once every two years. There's a great opportunity for recurring revenue with glasses, contact lenses, and sunglasses. What we decided to do, in a limited way, is starting to roll out testing around the first pair free. Again, the hypothesis is if you deliver this incredible experience where people get their first pair of eyeglasses for free, you're essentially removing all barriers. There's a good chance that they're going to come back again for more prescription eyeglasses or contact lenses and even better, they're going to tell their family and friends about it.Edward: Let's jump ahead to when you left <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a> and you joined O2E Brands. O2E is best known for those big trucks plastered with 1-800-GOT-JUNK? After spending a lot of your career to that point in ecommerce, how do you go about learning a service business like that?Geoff: Great question. I think O2E, Ordinary to Exceptional brands—the focus on home service verticals and their franchise. They are on the opposite end of the spectrum from our <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>. It's super fragmented, Geoff’s truck service can startup a business tomorrow and be driving around and digitally advertising.The things that I focused on were the customer, how to think about the customer, and how to get insights on the most profitable customer and connect the marketing function. That means the structure of the team, KPIs, to understanding the customer. I think my admission at O2E when I started was essentially to modernize the marketing function at the organization.Edward: How do you get to know those customers in a real visceral way?Geoff: I think there's a number of different tools, but generally, the way I think about it is if you can align with your internal stakeholders on who that most profitable customer is, that's step one. The second part is if you can spend some time getting to know that customer, that's important. Part of my onboarding at O2E and working on the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? business specifically was I spent a ton of time in major cities across North America just actually driving around on the trucks. I was one of the guys, in full uniform, and we were going out and doing jobs for customers. From there, I was able to understand day-to-day on the job what it felt like to be on the truck, understand the experience that we deliver to our customers. One of the things that became clear was that people generally were getting specific jobs done.For example, they were moving out of their home and they required our services, or they were moving into a home and they required our services. What was interesting there, Edward, is that activity throws off a digital signal. That's a life event that's captured within Google audiences. From that basic insight, we were able to target groups of people that were moving and we were able to target them with our message and then design customer journeys that were super relevant to people moving. That allowed us to drive that top length growth and a great customer experience. Edward: One of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos is about how when data and anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are often right and you're doing something measuring it wrong. Did you find that at all? When you were doing this customer research, you're doing all the analytical parts, but then you also went on the road and visited and met the customers. Did you find those anecdotes and data disagreeing, or did they usually just come together and they supported each other?Geoff: That's a great question. I think the thing that getting out there, observing, and being with customers helped me understand and helped us make some adjustments specifically to the 1-800-GOT- JUNK? value proposition. That people aren't out there shopping for junk service. You might be shopping for shoes or for skis and you might visit a number of different sites. But generally, for junk removal services, you’ve got a specific job to do. That insight in itself allowed us to understand there's a handful of things that generally people need.For example, they're moving in, they're moving out, they might be renovating, or there might have been something dramatic that happened like a death in the family. Oftentimes, those activities, again, you can target them digitally, which is really exciting. But the thing that changed for us is that we understood that generally, the person that's looking for that service is high intent versus before, we might have viewed it as simply someone is coming across our service and were top of mind and that's why they're selecting us. No, actually, someone’s having an event happen in their life. Edward: Geoff, what were some of the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Geoff: That's a big question. That made me pause. I think there are a few things. One thing was at <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>, that was a job and a role that I had returned back from Sydney, Australia. I moved back for that role. When I joined the organization, it was tough. We were competing in a very competitive category. Ultimately, <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a> went through a period of heavy financial distress and was ultimately acquired by Walmart. But through that period of financial distress, we needed to lay off people—people that I really cared about and it was pretty emotional. I felt like I had failed them to a degree and it was just disappointing because many of them I consider friends and I’m still friends with today. That was probably the hardest part for me and my family.I think the second part is just dealing with [...] interesting because I know you’ve got a concept that things happen to you between when you're 10 and 12 and that's really impactful. I think it's still how you deal with conflict. It's still something I continue to work on to this day and just making sure that things like getting exercise, sleep, staying hydrated, and keeping your energy up to the day, are all important factors so that when those times of conflict come up during the day, and they can come up (in my opinion) very unpredictably, you're able to deal with them in the right way.Edward: I once had a VP at Amazon explain to me in the early days how close they came to going bankrupt. What he explained to me was when you're taking off in an airplane, if you've never had that experience of the airplane brushing the top of the forests, then you never get the intensity you need to go make the plane take off and fly. It sounds like you had that experience at <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>. Unfortunately, it sounds like you hit some of those trees in the way you go, but did that experience catalyze you for later on in your career? Do you think you would have the career you had if that hadn't happened if <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a> had been a lot more smooth?Geoff: It's a great question. The analogy that I probably use is going a day skiing and not falling. When I go skiing with my kids, if they don't fall it's like, were you actually trying as hard as you could? I can confirm that we tried as hard as we could. We did a lot of things wrong and a lot of things right. I think what I learned is going through that experience was really hard, but I think the things I took away from it are (to your point) I will hold on to those for the rest of my career.You can definitely start to identify those signals that are warning signals much more quickly. You can act in a way that you know you need to act because oftentimes, they are urgent and you need to react to them quickly and you know those are the right signals to be acting upon. My next stop was O2E Brands. I was able to apply a lot of what I had learned at <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a>. Over the course of three years, we closed double the size of that business. That was right when COVID hit, but it was definitely on pace to double, to get to close to $500 million in revenue.Edward: Geoff, what are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?Geoff: I think the things for me are building out lists of priorities the night before the next day. My wife absolutely hates it because I'll sit on the bed and just write it down in my master notebook. Here are the top three things for work, here's the top one to three things for family, and then here's the top one to three things for exercise that I want to do the next day. I just find that that allows me to start the next day without having to think through what I need to be doing. I can just start. It also allows me an opportunity to look at a larger list of things and just understand, are there patterns or trends that are merging that don't allow me to get through the things I want to get through. To give you a quick example, one was I definitely wanted to continue to read as much as I could in the evenings. I found that I wasn't able to reach a particular goal of mine related to reading. The reason why is because I was looking at my phone and I was like, that's just completely useless time. After 9:00 PM, I don't need to be looking at my phone. What that led to me doing was just putting my phone in the closet so I don't look at it anymore and I can spend some time reading. Edward: When you put those goals, are they only daily goals, or do you have a system for doing them longer than daily?Geoff: No, I actually had someone, [...] who introduced me to this concept just before I did my MBA. He talked about thinking about your life in 10 years and writing out a rich 4-6 sentence description of what you would love for your life to be like. Then mapping out in 10-, 5-, and 1-year increments anchored to that 10-year vision what would be your goals, and those goals would be connected to your family, your personal life, your own physical wellbeing, and then professional.Then setting what my three goals are going to be in five years and then setting out what are my three goals going to be for this year. Then three goals in each of those categories—nine goals total. All of those daily goals are anchored to a roughly 10-year plan.Edward: Do you go back and review that? You've been doing this for ten years, can you go back and look to see what you've done versus the goals you set 10 years ago?Geoff: Yeah, it is crazy actually. When I first did this exercise, I, for example, set salary goals for myself and my family goals. We didn't have any kids. I wasn't married. I started doing this about 11 years ago and everything came through, which I know they're obviously talked about, but honestly, it was stunning when I looked at it. Just writing those goals down is so powerful. Edward: Geoff, this has been fantastic. We'll pick this up tomorrow. We'll talk about Stoko. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://marketingbs.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">marketingbs.substack.com/subscribe</a>

Interview: Geoff Henshaw, former CMO Stoko, Part 1

Today I invited Geoff Henshaw.   Geoff is the VP of Marketing for O2E Brands. He was previously a marketing leader at Clearly.com the innovative ecommerce company that was a pioneer in selling contact lenses &amp; eyeglasses online that rapidly grew to over $300M in revenue. Clearly.com eventually was sold to Essilor International for $445 million.  Geoff was also the head of marketing for a short-lived ecommerce shoe retailer shoes.com.  Geoff shares how operational excellence set apart Clearly.com and the tough lessons he learned at Shoes.com before they folded operations.   If you’re looking to improve your ecommerce strategy, this is a great episode to listen to.   Links: Geoff Henshaw on LinkedIn   I'd like to hear from you:  What topics should we cover? Send me an email or reach me on Twitter @marcbitanga  Did you like the episode? Rate it or submit a short review.    Connect with me: On LinkedIn On Twitter @marcbitanga On Instagram @marcbitanga

Today I invited Geoff Henshaw. Geoff is the VP of Marketing for O2E Brands. He was previously a marketing leader at <a href="http://Clearly.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Clearly.com</a> the innovative ecommerce company that was a pioneer in selling contact lenses &amp; eyeglasses online that rapidly grew to over $300M in revenue. <a href="http://Clearly.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Clearly.com</a> eventually was sold to Essilor International for $445 million. Geoff was also the head of marketing for a short-lived ecommerce shoe retailer <a href="http://shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">shoes.com</a>. Geoff shares how operational excellence set apart <a href="http://Clearly.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Clearly.com</a> and the tough lessons he learned at <a href="http://Shoes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Shoes.com</a> before they folded operations. If you’re looking to improve your ecommerce strategy, this is a great episode to listen to. Links: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffhenshawmktgleader/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Geoff Henshaw on LinkedIn</a> I'd like to hear from you: <ul> <li>What topics should we cover? Send <a href="mailto:marc@agencio.ca">me</a> an email or reach me on <a href="http://twitter.com/marcbitanga" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter @marcbitanga</a></li> <li>Did you like the episode? Rate it or submit a short review.</li> </ul> Connect with me: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbitanga/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">On LinkedIn</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/marcbitanga" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">On Twitter @marcbitanga</a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/marcbitanga/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">On Instagram @marcbitanga</a>

#11 How to Run a High Performing Ecommerce Marketing Program | Geoff Henshaw