Accelerating Value in Private Equity Through Best-In-Class Brand Strategy

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Heather Bennett  0:30

Hello. I’m Heather Bennett, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast featuring middle market owners talking about founding, growing and exiting their businesses on their own terms. Past guests include Jody Jankovski, founder of BlackLine and author of Technology Intelligence. Philip de Souza, founder of Aurora and hotlunch.com And Aneesa Muthana, CEO of Pioneer Service and M&M Quality Grinding. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a team of seasoned C suite executives helping CEOs of privately held companies grow de risk and exit their businesses successfully. Newport is a winner of the prestigious Inc. Magazine Power Partner Award, which recognizes elite B2B companies. To see the list of winners, go to https://www.inc.com/power-partner-awards to learn more about Newport, visit us on LinkedIn or at our website, Newportllc.com, before introducing today’s guests, I would like to thank Matt Brett and Elizabeth Cohen for connecting me to Scott. Scott Markman is the founder and president of MonogramGroup, a premier brand agency specializing in driving value for private equity backed companies and entrepreneurial ventures with a background in design and a passion for building brands in the wild west of PE Scott helps businesses navigate growth, brand positioning and exit strategies through a focus on Entrepreneurial Mindset, Strategy and creative execution. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Scott, and I’m really excited about this episode where we have a lot to cover. Scott. Welcome to the show.

Scott Markman  2:11

Thanks for having me, Heather. Really

Heather Bennett  2:12

appreciate it. Excellent. So tell me about Monogram. How did Monogram get started?

Scott Markman  2:20

Well, couple of foundational thoughts. A I’m a third generation entrepreneur. My grandparents owned a bakery in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where my mom and her siblings worked growing up, and my mom worked until she was 35 my folks just got married later in life, and then the year I was born, my parents started a business in Baltimore, where I’m from, and owned it until about a month before I started Monogram and did the classic, you sure you don’t want to buy the business. And I gave it some thought and just said, you know, it’s I’d worked in it as kid. Is a great company, you know, modestly successful small business, but they loved it, and I didn’t, and I didn’t want to spend my life doing that, so in exchange for not in exchange, but as a result of that, I was already in Chicago. I moved to Chicago for a design firm job, and part of ways, with the owner, after about a year, it just was a kind of a great marriage, and in that, you know, what’s the next? You know, path I take. It was an inflection point. I was 30, I was single. I decided to hang my shingle on. My parents loaned me 20,000 bucks, and it was like, here’s the money we can, you know, peel off to give you give it a go. And I often say that they gave me the greatest gift they ever could have, which was the freedom to fail. And so, you know, with that in mind, I, I first thing I did was to buy a Mac in 1990 cost $5,000 and then had 15,000 the bank, and I had to pay rent and telephone, and, you know, other things. And I I had to sort of network my way into opportunities. I didn’t have a big network here. I lived here for a year, and I think I did 40 presentations in six weeks, and I got a couple of gigs. And, you know, sort of survived, and, you know, a little bit, built the company from freelance practice to a small design firm to a small agency to where we are today. Took on a couple of partners who are college buddies, who have started moonlighting for me in 1992 while making a part in 2002 one in 2006 we all went to Wash U in St Louis, one of the one of the one of the folks Harold Woodridge was became a creative director on in Michigan agencies, a bunch a bunch of them, and, you know, worked in Bud Light, in State Farm and McDonald’s and big time stuff. And Jackie short, my other partner was a corporate research and strat person, and she ran research at Emerita. In the 90s and reported the CEO and big time stuff. And so I bring them up, because what we are the last 2030, 25 years is really the result as much of them as it is me. I have a I have a design degree, you know, I’m a BFA in design, and it’s still a big part of the call it the heart and soul of the agency. But you know, big agency mindset around big ideas and sort of comprehensive campaign thinking is instrumental in today. And what we do, and Jackie’s breadth and depth and sophistication and research and strat as a front end of things is, candidly, what gets us engagements today, and so those two folks, beyond being dear friends or even today, are instrumental in who we are and the why, right? Why do we do what we do? How do we do what we do? What do we deliver? What makes us strong at what we do? How is it valued? I mean, all those things kind of comes from them. So they’re, they’re still, you know, they Harold left the agency 1111, years ago, and Jackie left about six years ago. So, you know, I’m part of amicable party. It was just time to move on and do different things. So you know, we’re still in touch, and in Harold just called 30 minutes ago about something. So anyway, that’s, I guess, the executive summary. I will add one last point before we move on to the next thing, which is we became a brand consultancy, fundamentally in 2006 as the foundational front end of the slice of marketing services that we occupy, because there are lots and what problems do we solve and what expertise do we have? Who do we compete against? It starts with brand. So we like to think we’re as good as the biggest brand consultancies in the world, the landors, the inter brands and Siegel and Gail and litcott and that crowd we self identify into that universe, first and foremost, not all that we do. But if you were going to sort of pick a lane to, you know, swim in in the world of marketing services, that’s where we play. Now we do much more than that, but it’s really the foundation

Heather Bennett  7:32

that’s really good to describe what Monogram is and how it grew. So those early years, we’ll say before 2006 before you really honed in on becoming the that brand agency. What was difficult, like, where, what were the stages? Or maybe the stage at which you were like, Okay, this is something. This is this. And where we’ve last, we’ve gotten through the hurdles. This is a solid business. How did you recognize that?

Scott Markman  8:00

Well, first of all, I was only doing work in Chicagoland, and I didn’t have a network here. I didn’t grow up here, and I lived here all of a year, and so just getting network took years, 567, years. That’s, that’s hurdle to overcome, a hurdle to overcome. B is I sold design services. That’s what I knew and could sell and was good at, but it was, and it was really just my abilities, until I, you know, brought people on and know that it became an us, and that took about two years. So I was a freelancer for two years, and then the world’s today filled with freelancers and who are very good at what they do, and but that’s its own universe, right? It has limitations. It has advantages, but as it is, severe limitations, the second of which was, what was I quote? What? What was I What was the market for? What I could solve. It was graphic design needs, brochures, logos and reports. I did some signage projects. There’s an installation at the World Headquarters for Lions Club in Oak Brook. And I designed a display in their world headquarters for these posters that are a global competition they run for the kids 10 to 14. And there’s a global winner. They get 10,000 entries a year, and I designed the installation that is still there, and it’s been going on for 35 years. It was a really cool assignment. So, but so one of it was a design need, and I, you know, and I figured all that stuff out. So the limitations of bandwidth, contacts and things to sell. Meaning, what were the problems that I could solve? Were the were the boundaries? And frankly, being under capitalized wasn’t like I was sitting on 300 grand in the bank, and I could hire people and get a bigger, you know, impressive space and all the trade. Mappings of being a larger place and sort of grow into it. I had to sort of grow through cash flow. It was, it was, you know, kind of stressful and, you know, anxiety creating at various points of, you know, sometimes we were killing it. Sometimes we were barely surviving.

Heather Bennett  10:24

Well, I definitely want to talk about the capital, like throughout the lifetime. But before we get to that, tell me about your thinking and the process of building through people and what those first we’ll say first 510, years of hiring look like.

Scott Markman  10:45

So the full time staff were folks that I needed to do, the guts of what we do, and, you know, the design talent, maybe an account person, you know, a project manager, that kind of stuff. And then I was very aggressive in using friends to augment what we could do on a contract basis, or people. I was introduced to copywriters, you know, Harold and Jackie. So, you know, we did a pretty big project for the University of Chicago Continuing Studies Department in 1994 to help them fill seats in all the courses they offered and and we had to a bunch of research to figure out, you know, personas and factual and emotional drivers and competitive context and all this stuff. And Jackie did that work, one of the on a freelance basis. For me, I didn’t have the skills to do that. I learned literally whatever I know with in research today, which is 37 years later, I kind of learned at her feet. And we went through, you know, 100 clients. And you know, I’ve sat in on gobs and gobs and gobs of focus groups, and, you know, online surveys, and you know, all of this stuff. But I learned. I learned by doing, and I learned from her, along with another colleague of ours, Dan Bauer, and I feel, you know, I’m very literate in research and strat right now, but I don’t have, I don’t have an MBA. I literally on the job. So I was very conscious to augment complementary expertises and services to our core that was legitimate, not only to sell, but to execute. And so I grew a footprint in our skill set that way, opportunistically, if that makes sense, because I didn’t have them on staff, it was when I, you know, said, let’s respond to, you know, an RFP or somebody has a need. Can you do that? Yes, I can do it, but I’m in the back of my head. I’m like, I need to bring some folks in to deliver on this. But I knew who they were, how available they were, what the cost, and you know, our how we would work together? Excellent.

Heather Bennett  13:08

And that’s such an important strategy, especially when you are growing to really be conscious of the cost of bringing on the expertise as you need it and in the amount you need, not going too much. So let’s talk about capital. What are some of those big milestones for Monogram with capital?

Scott Markman  13:27

Well, you know, at some point, you know, we put a banking relationship in place with, you know, a lot of credit and the usual stuff. But you know, for a lot of time, it’s, it has been cash flow dependent and hiring, you know, full time people. The variable, you know, talent is the easy part. You know, for all these decades, the one of the great things about Chicagoland is that this is a huge market for marketing services. And, you know, this is long before, you know, we had websites and we had, you know, Upwork and all these other kind of things I can work with people in Australia right today, you know, for a long time, that wasn’t really a viable option, so I had to look for local talent that I could procure network into on the same on a basis, where I could engage them. So I built a reservoir of copywriters, and freelance art directors and or designers, and they’re different things. Eventually I had to get a, like, a team of website developers. Even today, we we produce certified websites a year, and, you know, I contract out all of that stuff, but we never had people on staff. I’ve never had a cover writer on staff ever in 37 years, and I’ve never had web developers, even though it’s a core of what we do on on staff, literally, you know, W twos. So we were able to make that work with variable talent. On. So, you know, I’ve always had the mindset to preserve cash like it’s king. And, you know, stuff away money for a rainy day, and, you know, build a cushion and all of those things. So I didn’t have to sweat that stuff out. How many times we have. But, you know, often we did not. And then if we added staff, it was because I could project that I could comfortably, you know, carry a, you know, additional salary. But even today, our full time staff is a lot smaller than our peers, a lot a we’re all senior, so we can execute against a lot of, you know, I’ll call it sophisticated needs, because we’re senior people and how to bang things out. And, you know, we’re very efficient with our time, and how, how you produce the level of work that we do, because we’ve just done all done at 600 times. And so the bodies we do have skewed towards being senior. And so I made a conscious decision, maybe I don’t know, 810, years ago, to have fewer Junior bodies. You know, fewer senior bodies, the more junior, fewer senior bodies and more junior bodies.

Heather Bennett  16:18

Okay, so that begs the question, this was not on my list of questions, but how do you feel with that strategy of keeping the senior talent and being able to use 1090 nines for the junior support? How do you think that’s going

Scott Markman  16:34

to change? That’s That’s not,

Heather Bennett  16:37

let me clarify accurate. Okay, please,

Scott Markman  16:39

do we? We really have very few people under, you know, seven years experience of this agency, and most of us are, you know, 15 to 50 years experience. So, you know, even even though the relationships I have with, you know, video and photography and web, even those contract folks are very senior, and a lot of those relationships go back 30 years. So we’re not, you know, constantly fishing around for things, and we have a need. I know who to go to. We book it and we go and so, you know, our footprint with the 1099, is loosely, double what our full time staff is. And so we can get a lot of stuff done at two hour standard concurrently. I mean, our client has been working on about 25 clients right now. And just, you know, talk a lot of balls, but, you know, because we know how to do it. And so I, you know, I’ve managed to keep the, you know, the cost of the agency down as a result, and the profit up because the model we’ve built, you know, we’ve successfully incorporated AI over the last two years into our core processes, and then have missed a beat. We’ve cut cost and save time and have not compromised I’ll call the level of work we produce.

Heather Bennett  18:07

Okay, that answered the question. So thank you. What were some of the turning points for your company? I know you talked about in 2006 how at that point you refocused Monogram to be very much focused on brand. What were some of the other turning major turning points or major decision points that changed the shape of Monogram or changed which clients that you were working with?

Scott Markman  18:35

So one of the things is that in 1998 I kind of decided to stop being a design firm and announce that we were an agency. And they’re different things, a lot of overlap, of course, but, but in the world of Chicago land, you know, marketing services, you’re either an agency or a design firm. In 1998 and I opted to leave one and become the other. We used to joke that we banned the D word, which was design, even though a lot of we do is design. So we kind of morphed into being a small ad agency because I felt that there was more opportunity to grow more swings at bat. You know, at that time, the Chicago design market was kind of ruled by about 12 firms that really were the dominant, you know, players maybe 15. And I just felt like to push into that was going to be hard, but if we kind of morphed into an ad agency, and we’d ever done a bunch of ad work, that there was, it was just a bigger playing field. So that was inflection point one. Inflection point two is when Harold became a partner, 2002 and he substantially, you know, broadened and grew our credentials, because he had a very successful 20 year run being a creative director and agencies downtown, and worked on big national, global accounts, and also had the chop to do TV and. All these other things that I didn’t and so our footprint and our profile just expanded at that point. And then when Jackie joined and we brought the research and strat at a partner level in house, it was an inflection point. Now, the biggest piece of business that we did for a very long time was a one off public service campaign to teach Illinois consumers about their choices in mobile phone service. And there was a an ad hoc Commission created by the Illinois Commerce Commission, and they put out this RFP, and we won, and had to pull out a bunch of freelancers and a PR firm and all kinds of stuff. But it was, you know, it was a on and on a $3 million campaign. So, you know, in terms of just money flowing through the agency, you know, went like that. And it just announced the world that we were playing, you know, at a different level, very high pro, you know, TV, radio, PR, all throughout Chicagoland, the state of Illinois, is a big deal. And so we, around the same time, we picked up an account which was swing line staplers out of echo brands and Lincolnshire and, you know, national ad campaign. So we start to really push our way into prominent clients of a certain scale and stature and familiarity. And so while a lot of the work that we do, you know, the public would not have heard of we’ve always had certain accounts that were had that kind of star power. And it’s important, because it’s a certain amount of putting the pieces in place. So who are you? What game do you play, and who to compete against, and all of that stuff. And even today, you know, because we live today in the world of private equity, 99% of who we work with no one’s ever heard of. I mean, the in the PE world, our clients are very well known, but not to the world at large. So when you look back on the clients we’ve had over the years, we’ve rebranded Life Fitness, the world’s leading brand and exercise equipment for the world, about 17 years ago, into 60 countries. You know, they’re, they’re a division of Brunswick. You know, it’s that kind of stuff that’s like a pillar to who are you? A game you play the big data, a certain amount of is just name recognition that people can associate with.

Heather Bennett  22:28

Yeah, I definitely think that helps having those, uh, we’ll say client stories that that can open up the door a little bit further for a new client when they’re like, maybe, maybe you are the right fit for what we do.

Scott Markman  22:40

Heather, I will add one other inflection point that at the time did not seem like an inflection point, but now it is, which was our entry into private equity. And it was 1996 and I got an opportunity to pitch a piece of business with 12 guys that had left where they had been working and were hanging their shingle as really the first private credit provider for the middle market ever. That’s all they did. And so I won the business, and we built the brand from scratch on day one. And that firm is called enteras capital, and then had a household name in private equity. They invented this idea of private credit for middle market deals, and today they probably manage about $80 billion and they have about four or 500 employees, and they’re owned by the Canadian government. And I can walk into any private equity firm in America, I don’t care how big they are, Blackstone on down and say, I invented the interest capital brand. That’s all I have to say. And I’m instantly qualified. And I tell a story all the time because, because of that sort of star power. And we worked with them for 13 years. And then when they were sold off by G capital, we did the work again, you know, in 2015 so it’s, it’s, it’s a, you know, historical data point of the the impact we’ve had, and again, the time it didn’t it do it just on the client. But, you know, now, now it’s powerful, very powerful.

Heather Bennett  24:21

Tell me about why brand is so important in the world of PE Sure.

Scott Markman  24:30

So we spend most of our time in the lower middle market versus the middle market, and they’re pretty different, competitors and models and AUM and all kinds of stuff. So I’ll speak to both in a second. In the lower middle market, you know, the private equity is a pyramid. There’s a in a handful of firms the top, the Blackstone’s, the kkrs, the tpgs, you know, ta, Leonard green, all those, those folks you know at the top. Yeah. They’re the ones who buy Party City and, you know, Thoma Bravo here in Chicago. Then there’s the middle market, the lower middle market, but the most amounts of firms, by an order of magnitude, is the lower middle market. We’ve tended to stay there, because it was just where the, you know, the action was. And so we’ve sort of networked our way into that, primarily the kinds of deals that the lower middle market does to, you know, the last even, let’s say five years is a lot of roll ups of fractured markets, of essential services, right? You know, HVAC and roofing and doctors, clinics and, you know, whatever, and and so the business models inherently buy companies in sectors that are strong, you know, a lot of lot of tailwind behind them, leading indicators. Otherwise private equity wouldn’t invest. But those companies and those sectors when it comes to brand, sales and marketing are typically very unsophisticated. You know, it’s their founder led, and it wasn’t, it wasn’t a prerequisite to business success and profit, and, you know, being attractive to for acquisition. And then so there’s an investment thes as well. There’s EBITDA to be generated and multiples to be earned if you do a roll up in blankety blank, great. So for several years, the model was just create a holding company, do some financial engineering, maybe lean manufacturing, install an enterprise software system, all these infrastructure things that the these legacy companies didn’t have you bring them together. They’re worth a lot more. You package it in three to five years and sell it. You know, your cost basis was five or six, and you sold it for nine or 10, and you made, you know, incredible carry. And you returned IRRs back to, you know, your institutional investors, everybody’s happy. That didn’t really happen as much in 2026 or 2025 or 2024 so what they’re looking for are, you know, value creation mechanisms that they maybe would have overlooked five years ago, seven years ago, when they knew exactly how to create value and and create returns. Today, the whole times are longer. That whole financial engineering thing is a little bit gone away, and they’re looking for an edge all the time well, in the in this world that we play in the legacy brands, or even what a holding company can do for something brought together is very limited in terms of the upside. A lot of people make a lot of money just doing holding companies, and they package and sell to somebody else, but the firms that solve the brand architecture and the brand positioning and the face the brand and all these things, and then get all these disparate parts that they’ve whacked together through M and A on the same platform and on, you know, singing the same hymnal is where, you know, looking under the rock for how you can create value beyond the other things that are still in play, brand, sales and Marketing has become a little bit of a hottie, and we understand this world better than anybody in America because of matter, for a long time, we’ve, you know, our client count today is like almost 60 platforms in a crazy array of sectors and and there’s a lot that a lot of complexity and messiness and uncertainty and sophistication. It’s kind of in play all the time, and you’re brought in to be the outside experts, to solve these issues up front, get consensus, and then go build what we hope is going to be a brand that dominates the market, because nobody else is doing this, or they’re behind, or whatever the case. And you create a market advantage right away, and then you you go forth and kill it, and then when you exit, that’s what you sell among all the other assets, your your market power, your pricing advantage, all those relationships, all of that stuff, your advantage in recruiting and retention because of brand, all these benefits accrue.

Heather Bennett  29:23

I love that you talked about it as being value creation. My Newport really talks about how we do a lot of value acceleration. And one of those key drivers, absolutely is brand. Is marketing is understanding the power and the value of the brand. And I do think in in PE now, there is a better appreciation for what that value is and how important it is in brand. But I’m seeing it in other areas, such as, you know, intellectual property, which is also tied to brand. And and then certainly in leadership and the management team, and how, you know it is also tied to brand through their personal brands, and how they’re representing the brand in public. So it’s really good to hear you’re seeing a lot of the same things that that I’m personally noticing when I look into that sector.

Scott Markman  30:19

One of the other macro shifts is that in the business world at large, the importance of brand in business to business sectors has risen up in broad understanding of the role it plays in business success. You don’t hear as much, oh, that’s just for the consumer crowd. There’s a directional truth to that. Of course, you know, if you have a, you know, food brand, and you aren’t spending 10% of your revenue on marketing, and you don’t have a great cmo and all these other factors in place, you’re never going to succeed. Well, for a long time in B, in the B2B, World of industrial manufacturing and services and, you know, I mean software and whatever. There were outlier examples, you know, Intel, insider, you know, other things where they’re brand driven, explosive performance, but a lot of the sectors, you know, industrial parts that go into parts that spin off cash, brand and marketing were just not critical to success. Maybe you need to have a couple of great sales people that could bring in big, you know, contracts and get you into the into, you know, Ford and and, you know, General Motors, if you’re making tier two parts and all of that stuff. But not today, the general understanding of the business world is, if you don’t have a strong brand and the marketing and the sales that kind of not only feed it, but feed off of it, you’re going to struggle. And it’s especially true the lower middle market. Again, what got you from zero to 90 million is great, but that will not get you to 200 million, especially if you’re doing a bunch of add ons. And it’s kind of like requirement is to have a bunch of kids play nice in the sandbox to get to that 200 and you don’t have a strong brand Good luck.

Heather Bennett  32:18

Oh, I couldn’t agree more. We always talk about the fact what you got got you here is not going to get you there. So what do we need to do to

Scott Markman  32:24

help get you there? So have the individual circumstances of these company or companies changed. The world around them has changed, and the expectation of the role of, you know, the accouterments of brand, has been influenced by why? I don’t know, Instagram, Facebook, all that stuff. It’s, it’s, it’s just the role of storytelling and imagery and design has been wildly influenced by these things that we experience in our, you know, our daily lives that you bring into, you know, your job as you know the the P of finance or something, at some private equity on $100 million company that maybe you’re the CFO that has to make these kind of decisions, where do you spend your money for what best outcome? And the CFOs participate in these conversations all the time. I know we present to C suite leadership that is not because they don’t have CMOS. So there’s a committee that who’s the proxy because they don’t have a CMO CEO, CIO, COO, CFO, that’s our client base. Excuse me,

Heather Bennett  33:38

no apps. I agree with that, and having the support and understanding of a C suite or an executive team that understands the importance of marketing and brand and how that can be a major lever in the right direction, in a lot of ways, is absolutely key. So let’s talk about the future. Tell me about the future of Monogram. I know we had mentioned, you had mentioned a new product that you’re about to bring to market. But beyond that, what do you see for the future of Monogram?

Scott Markman  34:10

So over the last two or three years, we’ve quietly exited corporate work. We’ve worked with some gigantic public, multi billion dollar clients over the last five years. And it’s it’s fantastic, but at the end of the day, the market opportunity is tied to private equity situations, lower, middle market, middle and eventually upper is so gigantic and so few agencies understand this world, or connected into this world, that it’s like, Why look elsewhere? I’m not saying we have this to ourselves. That’s not true, but it’s a hell of a lot fewer competitors, and we’re deeply networked into this, into private equity already. You know, I there’s. You know, our name is reasonably well known. I’m connected to a lot of firms. I can drop names, I mean, all that stuff. And so we just said this from work where we’re going to stay because the addressable market in front of us has just exploded the amount of leads and proposals we’re working on right now. Heather is crazy. If you’d have told me 10 years ago, I’d be trying to close 15 things this month. I’d have said, you know, maybe check into a psychiatric hospital. It was, it would have been fantasy land, but that’s what I’m dealing with right now. We do not have this role to ourselves again. I mean, to portray that to listeners, but through expertise and networking and really good marketing of ourselves and working on our own Stratton positioning and storytelling and all you know, we’re our biggest client, then it’s just open season. It’s crazy. Now, what you referred to a minute ago is we’ve been working on our processes and our I’ll call products, for a couple of years now, in service of trying to scale. And about a year ago, a client of ours in the world of private equity, he ran credit for a $30 billion AUM fund, introduced us to somebody he knew in the world of AI, and he said, I think you should talk to these guys. And so they were in New York. And, you know, I’m in New York all the time. And so we just set up a meeting. And, you know, got a one of these, like, share conference rooms and a whiteboard, and just, and just, and just started whiteboarding. So we started with these problems that we’re talking about right in these lower minimum market companies. And how can we solve for that problem using brand and sales and marketing over here? And AI, very abstract, open question. So that led to about a 10 month project last year where this other firm, parallax partners and ourselves collaborated to create a proprietary platform that mashes together customizable, secure, AI and brand in a way that, to our understanding, does not exist elsewhere, and I mean including the large language models. So imagine, you know your group, Newport, for instance, right? And there’s the Newport brand, I see it behind you. And you have what are, you know, brand assets. You have the visual assets. You have all the language assets and story and you have templates to sell, you selling materials and all the just like a library of that stuff. And you have it you Heather at your desk, can sit there and access those libraries in a common interface, drag and drop all kinds of stuff in from the brand reservoir into AI. Now the AI has, first of all, the foundational tools have been curated so that we have walled this off the large language models and the ability to not have somebody’s data leak out, because that’s how Claude learns. That’s what ChatGBT does they learn from the world. And create a dedicated AI platform that understands that company, because it was trained on that company using those assets and a third input, which is our agency. We trained the AI on us for, you know, many months before we built the beta prototype. So we are baked into everything, everything we believe, our experience, our point of view, our expertise, is baked into this. Then we customize it for each client, and then we add all their brand assets in a drag and drop, so that if a company, let’s say, is going to respond to an RFP, you know, Heather’s a sales person, and an RFP comes across your desk, and you need to marshal your your buddies in like, seven states on this, in this, you Know, this roll up, right and and you’re going to respond to the biggest RFP of your life, and you need to write a cover note. Yes, we’re going to respond. How do you deal with on brand? Click, go. How does the system take all of these inputs and learn on itself, and not treat each interaction as a single event and then forgets? So that nine months from now, when you and your colleagues have been using the system, it’s better at being on brand than it was today. How can you use the same system to write the RFP and to bring in things you would bring in from the outside into your secure, curated customer? Minimized AI meets brand platform, and how can you share that out to all of your colleagues and so on and so on and so on and so on. How can you use it for recruiting and retention? How can you do integration comms, not just sales and marketing. How can you build marketing campaigns around this stuff? How can you tie it back to your other legacy systems, ERP and CRM and all of these things. And so it becomes one ecosystem. How can you be gathering data all the way so that you can report back to the board every three months? Then when you go to package the company for sale, all the data is there, and it’s going to drive up your multiples. And we built a thing that does all of this, mg plus, so we’re taking that to market right now.

Heather Bennett  40:51

Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. I’m in the marketing world and getting to learn and talk to different marketing agencies and companies as they start to build these like what you just described, these unique, secure sandbox options and tools to help businesses. It’s fascinating. I’m really excited to see what’s going to happen in the next six months. And this certainly sounds like, based on your description, a really interesting tool, which is cool.

Scott Markman  41:21

It’s not to say that this could only work for private equity owned portfolio companies, but it was purpose built to solve their problems. We started with the problem work backwards, as opposed to, you know, trying to create some unique iteration of AI that was not the intent, but that’s where, a little bit, where we landed. And it was kind of bespoke envisioned that where our expertise and what we believe in met technology opportunities, met the problems of the market. Excellent.

Heather Bennett  41:52

Well, it’s very exciting. We will definitely have to talk about that when you get it launched. I’d love to learn more.

Scott Markman  41:59

We a couple of weeks ago, Heather, we did a webinar in conjunction with one of the publications in private equity called Private Equity Professional PEP, based up in Evanston. I’ve known the publisher for a long time, and so we did a webinar on this a couple of weeks ago. And so I can supply a link to watch the recording to your listeners, and there’s a deck and all that, all that stuff. It’s about 3040, minutes, but it but my colleague Sam Wheatley, parallax gets into the weeds, and the technology difference between the large language models and what we’ve built, and they’re profound, and it gets into like technology over my head, but we build visuals to kind of explain that’s our expertise. And I think it was a pretty effective sort of a primer.

Heather Bennett  42:49

That’s awesome. Thank you. I’m certain the audience is going to be very interested in seeing that, especially in the PE and middle market world. So who are your mentors, What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten, or one of the best pieces of advice that you’ve gotten over the years for building a business, building

Scott Markman  43:09

a company? So I do have a mentor, a guy I worked with in my Baltimore days, named Bob redder, that we’re still in touch, and he’s on our board right now. So Bob taught me a couple things. Number one, the culture you have in the agency. Really, really, really matters. People have to enjoy work, and they want to work together, and they want to serve clients, and that’s, that’s inside out kind of stuff. So I’ve worked in places like Bob’s, where I loved the culture. I worked in place, so I did love the culture. So I had both models to learn from, and also because my parents out of business, and they treat their people, their staff, really, really well, and I learned from their feet as well. Number two is, you have to love the craft. If you don’t love what you’re doing, you’re wasting your time. You know, I’m 66 and I, you know, I get this question all the time, why are you still working answers because I love what I do, and I have lots of friends who were partners of big law firms, and they’ve retired, and, you know, God bless them, made a lot of money and enjoy what they did. But I don’t know too many of them at 63 or four who loved being a lawyer and being a partner at a law firm and all that comes with it. And they burned out, and they just, they were ready to move on to something else. I’m not that way at all. I love what I do, how we do it, why we do it, who I do it with, and who I do it for. The third thing I would say that I learned from Bob is to service the hell out of clients, like it’s the easiest and most controllable thing is service over deliver in everything, and especially just responsiveness, attention detail make them feel good, helping explain. Things that’s a service dimension. You know, why a certain brand story is better than another version or a logo or, you know, whatever? A lot of clients have no experience in what we do. They have no basis of evaluation, so we have to help them through that. That’s a function of service.

Heather Bennett  45:21

I would agree with that my my early mentors, and when I was in CPG always said surprise and delight under promise over deliver every time and in that that’s really stuck with me over the years as being just a consistent way to bring the best to your clients. I do have one last question, but before I ask it, I wanted to point people to your website at monogramgroup.com, or to reach out to you through LinkedIn, and we’ll have all of this in the show notes, of course. Thank you. And then the last question, so what is a hard lesson that you learned while growing Monogram that you’d like other CEOs, other entrepreneurs, to learn so that they can avoid maybe some of those difficult, rough patches,

Scott Markman  46:14

I would say, have patience and take a lot of body blows, and don’t give up. You know, I again, I’m in year 37 and I’m probably at this another four or five years. And even, you know, last week we took a body blow, we lost a piece of business that I can’t believe we lost, and it was huge. It hurts, but you got to, you know, knock back a scotch, go to bed and pick up the fight the next day, and a little bit have amnesia. Or if you have struggles with, you know, an employee or two, I am just riffing here, but it’s if you believe in what you’re doing, then don’t give up easily.

Heather Bennett  47:10

I love that. Great advice. Absolutely great advice. I’ve been talking with Scott Markman, founder and CEO of the MonogramGroup, Scott, thank you so much for sharing your experience and journey, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Scott Markman  47:26

I appreciate the opportunity Heather to talk to you and to your listeners.

Outro 47:35

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