How To Build a High-Trust Marketing Agency

Intro  0:00

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.

Susan Kearney  0:30

Good morning, everyone. I’m Susan Kearney, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast, which is where middle market business owners and CEOs talk about finding, scaling, and sometimes exiting their businesses. The episode today is brought to you by Newport LLC, which is a cadre of business founders, owners, and experienced C-suite executives who help business owners build more valuable businesses, exit them on their own terms, in the way that they’d like to for themselves and their teams and their communities. For example, we helped the owner of a professional services company polish up the business as he scaled it, and then exit at a 13x multiple to EBITDA, which was life-changing for him and his team, and a great success, and a lot of fun. You can learn more about newportllc.com Today, I’m excited to be talking with Ari Pirutinsky. Ari is an entrepreneur and a growth expert. We’ll learn more about what that means in his life to being a growth expert as we talk today. He’s the founder and CEO at Steady Growth Partners. So, welcome, Ari. It’s great to have you this morning.

Ari Pirutinsky  1:35

Thank you, Susan. It’s great to be here. I’m excited.

Susan Kearney  1:38

Yeah, this is going to be fun. I want to start this morning by learning a little bit about your professional background. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got where you are today, and in particular, is there a – is there a common thread or a purpose that runs through the course of your career?

Ari Pirutinsky 1:56

I’ll start there and say authenticity, for sure. So, and then we’ll back up, yeah, we’ll start about 10 years ago, which is when I got into the world of marketing. I started off my career kind of ping ponging, figuring out where I want to be, working at a freight forwarder shipping company, and then working at a plastics manufacturer, and I just happened to have found and met this CEO who was starting his agency here in New York, and the energy and the excitement that was just palpable in the office was, it was just undeniable, and it was just something that I was very much drawn to, and thought, hey, I gotta, I gotta work here, and they felt the same. So I started at that agency about 10 years ago, knowing really very little about what I do now, what we were doing then, which is paid media advertising, paid search, and paid social, and I learned everything that I know at that position, I was there for overall. It was about seven years. I did take a break in the middle to lead marketing at a legal tech startup after a fundraising round, a $50 million round a certain day, which was fun and stressful, but the the the the direction was really starting at this company that didn’t have much of a presence that was working with a lot of very, very small businesses, kind of just walking up and down the central avenue, the main avenue here and on Long Island, and just kind of knocking on doors, and it was a fun experience, and it was, it was, it was exhilarating. And then, as we started to get better at what we did, and as we started to publish case studies, we started to get bigger and bigger and bigger clients, and the business started to grow, and it was all fun, and it was great, but as the business grows, and me being one of the first employees at the at the company started to move a little bit more away from the work that was being produced and the end client and started to feel more managerial, which I don’t really love, and that was one of the reasons why in year five I stepped away and I took this position to run a marketing department for this legal startup, which was very high, fast-paced, and it was high anxiety, and it was we have to hit our numbers at all costs, and I learned a lot in that position that I was in for about eight months that I then brought back to the agency, and there was this kind of interesting juxtaposition of the agency valuing the the relationship between the individuals in the company and how that translated into the relationships that were developed with the clients, because it really was a people services business, and then the bulldozer, I’ll call it. Uh, mentality of the startup, which was we don’t really see the person or the human that’s doing the work, just hit the numbers, doesn’t really matter, and ultimately that showed up in like an environment, and it made a massive difference, although they did do a really good job at certain pieces, so like the sales department, which kind of, you know, fits with that type of mentality. So I learned a lot about what is positive about that type of work environment and that mentality, what is negative, and comparing that to what is positive and potentially negative about the opposite, or on the other side of the spectrum type of mentality, and I then came back to the agency. I brought a lot about what I learned at that legal tech startup, and rebuilt the sales and marketing department for the agency itself. Continued to grow that, and then at a certain point turned around and said I can probably just do this by myself for myself and create an environment and a lifestyle that I want now that I’ve been doing this for long enough now that I’ve built the confidence to know that nobody actually knows what they’re doing and we can all just figure it out and I stepped away about, about three years ago, three and a half years ago, started my own agency, and from there I’ve, I’ve, I’ve grown steadily, there’s the name, and it’s, it’s been, it’s been really fun, and now I’m the one who creates the environment, I’m the one who chooses the, you know, together as a team we choose the type of clients we want to work with that match with who we are as an agency and who we are and like kind of how we want to behave, so that’s kind of the progression of where I am now. I know there’s, it’s a lot of, I mentioned a bunch of like kind of, you know, feelings and mentality of how you deliver internally between each other, but how you deliver it to clients, and I would say, like, to me that was the biggest piece of why I decided to go out on my own, because I really wanted to own that and control that and build a life and agency environment that I was proud of, and that I would enjoy going to and working within every day,

Susan Kearney  7:22

yeah, but that’s a risk, isn’t it? Taking that leap away from someone giving you a paycheck to having to build your own business and find your colleagues and find your clients. How did you manage yourself? I don’t

Ari Pirutinsky  7:34

think it’s a risk. I don’t think that’s a risk.

Susan Kearney  7:36

Okay, I

Ari Pirutinsky  7:36

think it’s less. I think it’s less of a risk to stay in an agency, well, really in any business, in any business where you ultimately don’t have the control to make the decisions, because I mean, what I’m not sure what the exact number is, but I think it’s up to maybe 120,000 125,000 tech workers that have been laid off this year due to AI advancements, so I mean, you tell me, Susan, which one is riskier?

Susan Kearney  8:04

I’ve been on both sides of that, and I would say both, but managing the risk is the thing, right, doing your due diligence, thinking it through, really understanding, for sure, and planning for it, but I love your attitude,

Ari Pirutinsky  8:15

yeah, for sure, I will say I’m being a bit, I’m being a little bit snarky in my response, that you know the truth is I didn’t just leave with nothing lined up with no, with no leads, with no clients, while I was at the agency, while I was building up my own personal network, and while I was building up what I was getting really good at, just naturally, a lot of friends, a lot of people that I knew started to reach out. Can you help me? Do you have any advice on this? I, you know, we need some direction. So, over time, on the side of what I was doing in the agency, I had all these contacts, I had all these kind of like consulting engagements that were going on, and that was part of one of the ways I mitigated the risk, and said, like, okay, you know, there there seems to be something here that I can, you know, build off of,

Susan Kearney  9:15

yeah, great way to transition, and so you mentioned authenticity, tell me a little bit about what authenticity means to you, and why it’s important in what you do.

Ari Pirutinsky  9:24

Sure, so I think I think it’s I think it’s Apple who just released a new ad campaign, and the commercial, the TV commercial is a woman walking down the street with an Apple Watch, and there’s all this chatter about help. This person saying, you know, if you eat this type of nut, it’ll, it’ll raise your, your heart rate. And then, you know, she gets on the train, and someone else is saying, you know, if you, if you don’t take 10,000 steps a day, you’ll, you’ll reduce your, your increase your risk for cardio, and it’s. Just all these different, all this noise, this health noise, and the point of the, the, the ad campaign is to say we are your, your, your trusted source, because there’s so much chatter and there’s so much noise that it becomes so difficult to discern what’s real and what’s not, but the reason why there’s so much noise is because that is on the medium for people to market themselves, for people to get out there and get in front of people, whether it’s what they’re saying is true, accurate, even real, and it’s become so important for me to be authentic in the way that, while it’s okay to put yourself out there and get yourself out there, also know what you don’t know, and convey what you don’t know, and be authentic in the way of building a relationship that works for both sides. So, we’re in the people services business, we do marketing services, we run paid ads for our clients, but we’re in the, I mean, we’re in the trust business, that’s what we’re in. So, while there’s so much noise out there, I feel the only real way to build a meaningful relationship with clients that will trust you with their business and the growth of their business and allow us to do our jobs properly is for us to say I don’t know more often and do it in a way that’s confident and do it in a way that is real, and in a way that we can say I don’t know, but I will know. So, let me follow up with you, and let me look into that, and let me take your perspective, and build it into what we’re doing, and I think this idea of the influencer has morphed into the business influencer in the very niche and specific area that wherever you are in a business and I just feel like authenticity, especially with everything being produced by non-humans, just rings so much louder in this environment, and it always has, but I just feel leaning into it even more means so much more now, and I’m not, I’m not letting go of it. I’m just not going to let go of the idea that you must be authentic in order to really build those relationships that are required to build what you want to build and have the life that you want to have, so that’s where I, that’s the position that I come at it from.

Susan Kearney  12:25

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And I imagine that your clients and prospects and partners get their own confidence from that, you know. In my experience in business, the more straightforward and honest you are, the more you tell it like it is, the more you own things, the more people do trust you, and so that’s probably one of the important foundations of your success.

Ari Pirutinsky  12:46

Yeah, it’s one of the things I actually learned from the previous agency that I was working at. There was a CEO there named Isaac, Isaac Braddanski. I’ll call him out, he’s a great friend of mine, and one of the things that I learned in the way that he approached relationships with clients was this rule that when you start a call, when you start a review call, when you want to talk about numbers and metrics, you always start with first what what has gone wrong since we last spoke. Here’s the bad news first. Here’s what we missed on. Here’s where we gave you a hour hypothesis of what was going to happen, and we were incorrect, and then from there you continue on and go through the metrics, the strategy updates, the optimizations, and how we’re fixing things, and I think part of why that’s so powerful is if you don’t start with what’s wrong, there’s a, there’s many clients, will we’re a third party, third party, third party partner. So, when you hire a marketing agency, there’s always that, are they, do they have our best interests in mind, are they delivering on what they are supposed to. So, when you have these conversations with clients, if you don’t bring to the front of the call or the conversation. Here’s what’s wrong. The whole time they’re going to be looking through the lens of what is wrong. What if did they do something wrong? Did we do something wrong? What’s bad, and how can we make it, you know, better. And if you bring it to the front of the call, it then creates that com that we don’t have to micromanage, we don’t have to think and analyze. This is a trusted partner. They’re telling us very openly and honestly, here’s where there were missteps or mistakes. And the truth is that there’s nothing wrong with that. That is what’s supposed to happen when you experiment. That’s what’s supposed to happen when you grow a business. You’re supposed to have those and make those mistakes. I was actually reading an article in the Wall Street Journal recently that talked about the interview process and how interviewers are kind of when a candidate seems too perfect, their brain looks for something wrong and into and they. There was an experiment run where interviewees sitting across the table would at the beginning of the interview accidentally spill their cup of water or spill something on themselves, and those particular interviews were interviewees shared much better than others that seemed on paper and in-person almost perfect, because there was that, that, that aspect of the brain that looks for something that’s wrong was was served. Okay, so this person is a little bit awkward, they’re nervous, they knock the cup of water over. Okay, if everything else is perfect, that’s the thing that’s wrong. Something has to, it can’t be right, too good to be true. It can’t be too good to be true. So I think that blends into the idea of authenticity. Now you don’t have to go and make up something that’s wrong or knock the cup of water over on purpose, but I think that will naturally happen if you have that type of relationship, and also if my team knows that that’s the relationships that we develop with our clients, they are going to handle and manage the work that we’re doing through that lens, which is they’re not going to cover up issues, mistakes, you know, things that were were done wrong. We’re going to bring the client into that, so we can get that perspective, and we’re going to work operationally as an actual team. So I think that’s a lot of what drives and what’s behind, or how we approach that aspect of authenticity and being wrong.

Susan Kearney  16:27

Right, I really like that. I can imagine you retain your clients and expand them over the long term because of that bond and that relationship. So, thinking about the business that you started several years ago, what are some of the challenges you’ve faced growing the business as a first time entrepreneur, and what have you learned from them that are that our listeners might be able to take in and keep them from solving problems themselves?

Ari Pirutinsky  16:56

Yeah, that’s a, it’s a good question. I would say the biggest challenge is, well, the biggest challenge is getting hiring right, and it’s not just the right people, it’s also the right timing. So, for example, we, we signed at the end of, or the toward the end of last year, we signed a big client, a very big client that we had to immediately staff for, and it was a big stress in the way that we knew we wanted to serve with this service, this client we had the know-how and ability to be able to do it, we just needed the resources to be able to do it, and the the push and pull, the constant push and pull on the marketing agency side of growing the business, projecting how that growth looks and bringing on the right employees for that growth is always a challenge, but I think what happens very often is, and like the ping pong thought process back and forth of as I build this team, how do I change or be flexible in the type of service delivery and process as opposed to keeping very rigid, so then I can create a almost productized delivery, and having that flexibility is a big part of that flexibility is the resources to be able to do that, so how do you actually go ahead and do that, and how do you project out, especially when you’re early on in growing an agency, a brand? How do you project out what your needs are going to be, and I think if you sell a product, if you have an e-com site, and you, you’re starting to look at the the sales numbers, and you understand what the projected growth might be based on that. Okay, so it becomes a little bit easier because the roles aren’t defined, because you’re delivering, you’re selling a product, the product delivery is defined, but when you’re a marketing agency and the landscape is continuously changing the service delivery changes, so that definitely was a very big challenge. And then the idea of understanding, okay, so forget about head count, and how many employees are bringing on what type of employee and what type of team member do you want to have that can create and continue to build the environment that I want to manage, and I want to be delivered to the client, and that becomes very difficult as you grow and as you scale, and it, it’s a challenge early on, but it continues to be a challenge as you, as you scale, and I think, as far as I’m concerned, the most important job of a CEO or a leader of a business is actually building that team in a way that they can remove themselves from the work daily, and that’s where the, that’s where the magic starts to happen, and that’s where you should. Are to step away, not my, and I hate the idea of micromanaging, so those challenges kind of all blend in one, to you know, point back to the to the leader, to the CEO, to the person running the company to say, How are you going to solve this issue, so that you can continue to grow the business as opposed to managing those teams, so I think a lot of times some of that challenge leads to businesses growing headcount, and then saying, well, this isn’t working, and my team’s not doing what I need them to do, so I’m continuously still being in the work, and I think it all comes down to training and really giving over the the method, the methodologies, and the philosophy behind why you do what you do, as opposed to this is what we do and this is how we do it. I think the why is what really builds that that environment. So definitely hiring, but also what happens after you hire. How do you train? How do you give over that philosophy, and how do you get everyone on the same page in a way that allows you to grow and be and be flexible. Now, I’ll say one thing, which is I knew that this was a challenge because I came from the agency world. So one of the ways that we approached this challenge early on was as we were growing and bringing on full-time team members, we also did a lot of work at building out an expert network that would allow us flex to be able to add on platforms that might be a little bit more niche, like Pinterest or Reddit, and allow us to augment the team with part-time workers that were have been vetted and are part of our expert network, so there are solutions that you can, when you’re in the people services business, you can, you can bring into, you know, kind of stop gap any of those resource challenges, but definitely resourcing has been the biggest challenge, for sure.

Susan Kearney  21:55

Yeah, I mean, for professional services companies, there’s always, you know, I sitting on a fence between having a little bit of capacity on the bench, which is expensive, but then you have people when you need them, versus hiring in real time, and are you able to find the talent? So that’s, you know, as a traditional problem everyone has to solve, but I’m really quite interested in the point that you just made, which I completely agree with, which is the first step in kind of changing your leadership style as an owner of a scaling business is getting out of the work and instead of becoming a doer, becoming an empowerer of your team. It’s a tough for many owners, it’s one of the hardest transitions that they make, because at first there might be failures, or people do things different ways, and you would do them, and I’m wondering if you went through that, that step where it was very difficult for you, and how you managed yourself as a leader, so that you got to the point where you can empower rather than doing all the things.

Ari Pirutinsky  23:01

Yeah, it’s a great question. The first step is, I mean, for me it wasn’t all that hard, but hire people that are smarter than you, hire people that are better than you at the service that you’re delivering, and if you do that and you go out and find people that are really, really good at what you deliver, and you find high-quality people. It allows you to take a step back and not micromanage, only if you create the environment that your employees are not afraid to make a mistake. They should be terrified to make the same mistake twice, but they should be totally okay with making a mistake once a bunch of mistakes once and I think that my team through the experience of working with me understands that mentality and understands that we have that approach and it goes back to the same mentality of when a employee is new and they’re joining calls with clients and we’re talking to clients in the way that we talk to clients, it becomes evident that that’s just who we are as a personality of a business and who I am and what my expectations are, and my expectations aren’t to have robots as employees, it’s to have human beings and people, and if they’re not making any mistakes, that means that we’re not trying enough new things, and that we’re not expanding our knowledge and experience. And I just.. I hate the idea of micromanaging. I mean, hey, my whole career, I’ve been a personality hire, right? So I’m here to help, I’m here to empower, I’m here to, to, to drive the team to deliver the work, as opposed to delivering the work myself. Now, yes, I did a decade of delivering the work, so I understand what’s necessary for high-quality work, and that’s definitely a precursor to being. Able to resource and hire, but that that aspect of employees really understanding your, like, the business philosophy or the team philosophy. I think that does a lot more than SOPs, or you know, how we, you know, how we deliver the end work, and truthfully, I’ve, I’ve been able to really take a step back and, and create more of that environment now that we have a great team, and now that my team owns 100% of the client relationships, of course, I’m involved, but I think it just comes through that that osmosis of the employees really drinking that up and realizing hey this is this like we have responsibility and we’re expected to deliver on things and it just naturally empowers those employees and naturally empowers the team so I think a lot of that is is is necessary and I think I think there’s a component of consistency, so if, and I’m sure there’s a lot of employees that have had experiences with volatile leadership, and they don’t really know how leadership is going to respond to the same thing that happened, you know, three weeks ago, or you know, so responses are different. Expectations become murky. Set expectations properly, create intention, and allow consistency to show your team how we operate and why we operate that way. And that’s, that’s really it. I don’t, I don’t really think it’s overly complicated.

Susan Kearney  26:38

Yeah, so having empowered your team. How do you hold them accountable? This is a big challenge in many businesses as they grow.

Ari Pirutinsky  26:46

Yes, so the way I hold them accountable is first to make it very clear that they need to hold themselves accountable. So the same way that we hold ourselves accountable to our clients, my team needs to be held accountable internally, so they need to hold themselves accountable and come to me with certain issues, or anything that you know comes up on the other side. If I’m setting the roadmap for our company, and there are certain aspects that obviously have to be delivered by the internal team, as opposed to me, we’re a very close-knit group. We are constantly on Slack. We’re constantly, even though we’re remote work, we’re constantly on calls, and it’s almost like there’s no room to like get through without doing what you need to do, because there’s the rest of the team is involved, and I’m involved, and I mean holding the team accountable is just as simple as that, which is, hey, did you do what you needed to do? Did you do what you were asked to do, or not? I mean, we use a, we use a project management platform called Clickup, and we have a process built in, which is very, very simple, and everyone involved has visibility over it, and we can run the reports, we can do our daily calls to make sure that nothing is outstanding for too long. I mean, we run it in a way that tries to strip away any complexity, so that we can get to the root of what we’re delivering and holding the team accountable becomes just the natural process of how the team delivers, because that’s what they’re coming to our internal meetings with. Here’s what’s on my plate, here’s what I need help with, here’s what I delivered early, here’s what I’m going to be delivering, but I’m late on, and here’s why, and we have that natural process, and I think in the way that we structure, and I structure the leadership, I’m there to support, as opposed to pressure and push, but there’s so like when I’m there to support, I just, the conversation is different. It’s like, hey, man, we need to deliver on this, but I’m struggling. Can you help me out with this type of, you know, analysis? And absolutely, sure, let’s do it. I love getting, you know, involved in the work, and, and when that happens, I feel like I’m empowering even more, and I feel like I’m, you know, getting back into the work and getting a lot of, you know, energy from it. So, yeah, I don’t know, I’m not sure how other businesses do this, honestly, but that’s how we approach accountability. It’s not really, it’s not really something we talk about too often. It’s just part of the natural flow of how we deliver and just like keep each other accountable.

Susan Kearney  29:37

Thanks for that. I’m sure that’ll be helpful to some of the folks who listen to this podcast. Let’s turn a little bit now and talk about you a little personally rather than professionally. Tell me, where were you raised and what was your upbringing like?

Ari Pirutinsky  29:54

Sure, so I was raised, I was raised in New York in a. A town called our county called Rockland County, which is it’s about 40 minutes north of Manhattan on a nice quiet dead end street with a fruit as the name, you know, and it was, it was a nice, it was a great childhood, it was it was it was calm, it was relaxing, it was.. it was.. I think it set the.. I think it set the foundation for me in a way that it provided the ability to have confidence. I think there was.. I had three siblings, my parents were always present, we were. We kind of had this, like, I had this weirdly ideal childhood. Like, I, I, my wife used to joke when we first met. She’s like, “So, but like, what? What was what happened? What bad thing happened in your childhood? Like, where was I? Where’s the trauma? Like, can you help me? We need to find the trauma, there must be, and there just wasn’t. And I think that in the way that I grew up, there were a lot of values set. I grew up Jewish, and I grew up in a religious household, and it was part of the fabric of how we ebbed and flowed in life that there was always this central value that we rotated around, whether it was, you know, work or community responsibilities, or whatever it was, it was always this kind of this this pull back to we we run our lives in a certain way, and there’s values that are non-negotiable, and I think a lot of the idea of non-negotiables and the idea of of that type of of finding what works in your life around those values really set the path for me to say, you know, there’s always a way to take control and, and create the life that you want, if you’re willing to do the work for it, and I think ultimately that was, I maybe didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of this like feeling, and like burning inside of, I, I want to be able to create the life, or I have to create the life that works for me, so that I don’t lose the ability to lean into whatever values it is that I will have when I get older and build my own family, so while there was no trauma that I can look back and say, well, that’s that’s why I am the way I am today, I think it’s a beautiful thing, and I think that the family environment that I was in is very much the reason you know why I am who I am today, and why I’m, you know, doing what I’m doing in the way that I’m doing it today. So, yeah,

Susan Kearney  32:55

when you say the way I’m doing it today, what do you mean, I

Ari Pirutinsky  33:04

Within, within, with intention, with intentionality, I think that we live in, we live in capitalist USA, where it’s very easy to get caught up in, in the rat race of what actually is important, and if you’re starting a business, well, why are you starting the business if not to scale it to the moon, and I think for me part of why I wanted to start my own business wasn’t just the push based on the experience that I had and the confidence in it, but it was the understanding that I have children, I have a family, I have two little girls, and we’re going to have another baby this summer, and I want to be able to build my work around my life in a way that allows me to enjoy my life, lean into the things that really bring me happiness and lasting like content, and the only way for me, at least, to do that was to lean into what I knew I could do, but do it in a way that I had the control to build that lifestyle, so as an employee, there’s always that aspect of you’re on someone else’s clock and you have expectations, or there are expectations set that you need to be responsive at any time, and as you grow in that business that becomes even more extreme and I wanted to be able to be on my own clock and I wanted to also convey to the team that there, while there’s a nine to five mentality, it’s really produced the work. Mentality and fill your cup first, otherwise nothing else actually works, and the quality of the work doesn’t show, and nobody’s happy, and there’s always, there’s always just been, at least in the agency world, this idea of chaos, there’s in a people services business where there’s a lot of different layers and components. It’s very easy for the sales team to promise something that the delivery team can’t deliver on, or you know, it makes it impossible to deliver on timelines, and I think that it was.. I was just. I was so sick of that type of grind, and my team seemed to be very sick of that type of grind before they came to work with us, and the way in which we build the agency, like you mentioned before, we retain clients for a very long time, we’re not looking to take on 20 new clients a month, we don’t want to have a high turn. We want to be able to build deep relationships, and that allows us to fill our own cups and spend time with our families, and spend time outside of the office while delivering when we’re in the office in a way that we wouldn’t really be able to deliver if there was this high-pressure, high-anxiety environment constantly, and that’s a lot of, you know, when, when I talk about my childhood, there was always this feeling of calm, but seriousness. You don’t have to conflate this idea of, you don’t have to do the George Costanza of looking upset at your computer for people to think that you’re working. You can just deliver in a light way, but still take it seriously, and that’s like the everything comes out of, comes out of that. We take our work very seriously, but we’re light and fun with ourselves, and as long as we’re delivering, we are enjoying our lives, and we are, you know, we’re, we’re spending time with the people that we want to. I mean, yesterday, what’s today? Thursday, yesterday I took my mom to a matinee Broadway show, which is a 2o’clock show on a Wednesday afternoon. I mean, does it get better than that,

Susan Kearney  37:20

right? I

Ari Pirutinsky  37:21

don’t, I don’t think so. So, yeah, so to be able to do that, like, I was just texting her this morning, she was, she said, she, she texted me, she’s like, ‘Hey, I’m still smiling from yesterday, and I responded, I said, ‘You know, ma, that’s that’s the whole point of life. What are we doing all this if not to be able to do things like that, so I think that’s what I mean by my way, and again, it really does bleed into the way in which we speak to our clients, and the way in which we’re able to develop those relationships, and it only does because we really find joy in those relationships, and we’re able to find joy in those relationships because it’s not a source of stress for us, it’s actually a source of enjoyment, because we’re delivering good work, we’re creating the environment that allows us to do that without this, like manufactured chaos, and it really fills out the circle of what a full, you know, happy life, successful life looks like, and I don’t think in this, like in this day and age, there’s a reason not to strive for that, as far as I’m concerned. Obviously, everyone has their own goals, but that’s that’s what I mean by the way I want to do things.

Susan Kearney  38:29

It’s interesting, you know, there’s so much talk about, and has been for years, about work-life balance, spending time at work, spending time at home, and how you, you know, kind of put the right things on your plate, and all that, and it seems to me like you’ve turned that upside down. It’s not a matter of work-life balance, it’s a matter of having a life that you bring intentionality and authenticity to, and I really like, I appreciate the way that you’ve taken your own self-awareness and determination to have a life you want and pulled it into the value system and the culture of your business.

Ari Pirutinsky  39:04

Yeah, I, I agree, and I think work-life balance is important, but I think if you, if you approach and you come at it from the angle that that I, I don’t think it’s really much of a conversation, because work, work isn’t this constant source of stress, so when there’s a slack that comes through at night, it’s similar to a text from a friend coming through, and there isn’t this this pressure that you feel immediately, I must get back to this person right away, or I, I, you know, what my slack is pinging. What went wrong? What did I do wrong? It’s different. It’s, we’re just like, we’re just getting things done, and whether that happens at home or not, and there’s the understanding of, you know, okay, you don’t have to respond to this message right away, but very often it is responded to. Right away, and there’s that, you know, feeling and environment there, and I think I think that’s awesome, and I think that that that definitely it definitely it definitely says a lot to me. Now, there’s nothing wrong with stress, just to clarify, there’s nothing wrong with having stress drive you, but I create that distinction of stress, which is stress that comes in turn, like internally from your own company, your own team, your own leadership, and stress that comes from like the delivery to a client and the the actual work that’s being delivered or the stress that’s coming from yourself to deliver that work, so there’s nothing wrong. And when you take your work seriously, you should have some level of stress that I’m doing this correctly, that I’m doing this to the best of my ability. But I think the way in which you handle that stress, the way in which you interpret that stress, really determines if that’s positive stress or negative stress, and I think those have a massive impact on your ability to deliver, and your just overall happiness and satisfaction with life. So, just to clarify, there’s this, not a kumbaya type of, we’re in business, and that’s fine to have stress, but understand the source of it, and what the purpose of that stress is, and I think that’s a huge distinction.

Susan Kearney  41:21

Yes, I do too. Speaking of which, you have a busy life, you have two girls, another baby on the way, married, have other family, have your business, and so on. I’m wondering if there are any life hacks or daily rituals you’ve developed to help you stay organized and on track and have contributed to your success.

Ari Pirutinsky  41:43

Sure, hack is not the right term I would use for anything that contributes to long-term success. To quote Warren Buffett, nobody wants a get rich slow scheme, but if you follow Warren Buffett, and you look at how rich he is, and the progression of where that happened, the vast majority of his wealth was developed after the age of 65 and I think the idea of a hack or a quick tip doesn’t really work, because the whole idea is, whatever you’re doing, make it consistent. So, for me, there are certain, there are certain components that I build into my life. So, a morning, a morning ritual. So, we, funny enough, we, we started this podcast later than we wanted to, because I had a chaotic morning with the kids at home, but that’s only half the story. I had a chaotic morning with my kids at home, but I, it was a non-negotiable that I have to go to the gym and get some of that exercise in before I start work. So, while technically I could have been on time to this podcast, even with the chaos that happened at home, if I didn’t take that me time, but I did, because it’s not something that I look at as if I have time, I’ll take care of myself. I flip that upside down, which is, if I don’t take care of myself, I won’t be able to take care of anybody else, and my family, my clients, my employees, and, and that to me makes whatever it is that you have to do to take care of yourself a non-negotiable. So I think it becomes unique for every person, but for me a non-negotiable is taking time in the morning for myself before I get into the office, and for me right now, that’s that’s the gym. Now I’m sure I’m sure there’s a bunch of listeners, and you probably know of, heard of James Clear, maybe read his book Atomic Habits, and I love these types of books because a lot of it is so stupidly simple that you just need someone to remind you of it, and I think there’s there’s two powerful things that came out of that book for me that changed the way I approach the life hack style or non-negotiables that are important to me, which is you have to do something that’s you have to be consistent, you have to be consistent, as opposed to being as opposed to like consistency beats intensity, so whatever it is that you look at and say I need to do this in order to be my best self, if it’s something difficult, like exercising, or it’s something that requires some sort of effort every single day. The first thing you need to do is you need to break it down into an embarrassingly simple habit to do, embarrassingly simple. So, for me, when I started going back to the gym, and I knew that. Something that I needed to do to take care of myself in order to take care of anyone else. I started by I’m going to go to the gym one time a week for 10 minutes, but I’m going to go that same day, that same 10 minutes, no matter what. And it’s like, yeah, but that’s not going to deliver any like fitness results. So, what are you doing that for? Yeah, but that comes later. It’s not about the fitness results, it’s not even about the results at all. It’s about the act itself, it’s about that habit and the idea of breaking things down into that simply like extremely stupid, embarrassing level of simplicity. Just, it, you, you almost, you, you almost can’t fail, you just can’t. So that is something that, and now it’s an everyday thing that I do.

Ari Pirutinsky  45:48

And over time it progressed into now I go every single morning, and now it’s become like I don’t, I’ll sometimes put on my gym clothes in the morning, and then realize, like, oh, today’s like, today’s my rest day, but like that’s just what I do, it’s just how, and then the other piece that James talks about that really resonated with me was this idea of identity, and a lot of people struggle with identity, or or kind of feel like we’re just grinding and we’re just working, and it’s like you go to work, you eat, you sleep, you wake up, you go back to work, and I think the part of identity and the way that James Clear speaks about it is you decide the identity of the person that you want to be. So let’s take the gym, for example. That’s a non-negotiable. If you want to do that, if you want to be a person who goes to the gym, because that’s who you want to be, then act like the person who goes to the gym every day. Don’t go to the gym every day, but act the other things around that. So, what does your schedule look like, or what are you like? What are you eating or think when you make a decision? Is this the decision that a person who goes to the gym makes? Right, is this a path, or is this.. is this something that someone who goes to the gym every day does, and you start to internally build that identity of who you want to be, and if you match that with the very, very, very simple small goal of making it just consistent in the easiest possible way over time, those things start to match, and you turn around and you, you are the person that you want it to be, based on the identity thought process, based on the identity like decision matrix, and that daily, or you know, consistent habit. So, I don’t know about a hack, but I think, at least for me, it’s the absolute non-negotiable that you know maybe you could negotiate, but you are the one who are who’s deciding that this is a non-negotiable, and I think that that provides you internally with at least for me a lot of confidence, and it allows you to say, okay, well, what else did I think was, you know, hard, or what I wanted to do, but have always been pushing off, or you know, just not feeling like I can be consistent, and how do I strip that down really to the most basic of basic to make it really, really, really simple? So, yes, not, it’s not a, it’s not a fun answer, but that’s the truth. It’s just consistency.

Susan Kearney  48:24

Yep, yep. Thank you for that. Like you very, very much. Last question, what, what is the one piece of advice you would give to your peers, something that you know where you want to save them learning a tough lesson, because you’ve already learned it the hard way.

Ari Pirutinsky  48:45

So, just to clarify, you mean peers, like on in the agency world, like what kind of

Susan Kearney  48:52

folks who listen to this podcast, owners of private companies that are looking to grow and scale,

Ari Pirutinsky  49:00

do Yeah, I think, no, no, the goal. It sounds like a silly response, but know the goal, and I’m saying that because of the hundreds, probably at this point 1000s of conversations that I’ve had with small to middle market business owners, and because we’re a growth marketing agency, we always start with, okay, so like, what’s the goal here? Where do we want to be? And Susan, can you fall out of your chair if I tell you the percentage of, you know, business owners that responded with a blank stare, and part of that is like, I don’t understand your question, Ari. We want to grow, okay? But that’s not a goal, that’s just, you know, you just want to grow. So I think if you start with really understanding the goal, and I mean really, really, really understanding the goal, everything else starts to fall into place. Through that lens and through that vision, and like that’s to me the simplest, easiest advice to give, which is if you can, if you ask yourself, or if someone asks you, what, what is your goal, and you can’t answer with, well, here’s my goal in the next week, here’s my goal in the next month, here’s my goal in the next 90 days, six months, and a year, then you don’t really have a goal, and it becomes difficult if you’re in a business where there’s this constant grind and there’s this constant push just to work, you need to be able to take that step away, you need to be able to take that famously, Bill Gates used to take, I think it was.. I’m actually not going to misspeak, I don’t know exactly how long, but he used to take a good amount of time in his private lake house with just books, no technology, just for thinking, and a lot of some of the big projects came out of, like, at Microsoft came out of those times that he, you know, made available to think, so you really have to think about, like, what, what is what is your end game here? What is your goal, and how does everything else fall into place to really get you there? Yeah, I really think that’s as simple as it sounds. The best, most powerful advice I can give really based on a lot of conversations that I’ve had where it was very difficult for the business owner to actually answer that question.

Susan Kearney  51:31

Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen that look too, that dear, for sure.

Ari Pirutinsky  51:36

I do think one of the things I do think one of the reasons I think it becomes difficult for businesses to actually land on those things is because, like, you were asking before about accountability, because then you have to be accountable to it, and not only do you have to be accountable to it, that means that the whole company is looking to you to push them to be able to deliver and to create the environment that everyone can actually deliver on those goals, so it takes a serious person to be able to really do that, but, but that’s, I mean, that’s the mechanism, that’s actually how you, you know, grow, and especially if you’re growing for some sort of exit, there you go, like that’s, I mean, that’s really everything.

Susan Kearney  52:17

Yeah. Well, my dad used to tell me when I was young that if you don’t know what station you want to get to, why are you getting on a train?

Ari Pirutinsky  52:24

Right, great. I love that. Yeah, well, what are you doing? Oh, I like that. I like that. I like that. I like that imagery. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  52:31

my dad was a great coach for me. All right. Well, this is the Growth + Exit podcast, and I’m talking to Ari Pirutinsky, who’s a CEO and founder of Steady Growth Partners, and it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

Ari Pirutinsky  52:48

Yeah, first off, it was a pleasure, Susan. Thank you so much. I very much enjoyed the conversation. Anyone who’d like to learn a little bit more about us, you can head to our website, which is trysteadygrowth.com You can find me on on LinkedIn, Susan. Hopefully, I’m sure you’ll, you’ll share some links in the bottom of the show notes, but, but yeah, come say hi, come check us out, reach out if you have any questions. If you’re looking for some help on growth marketing, paid ads, any kind of, you know, attribution or reporting clarity. Yeah, we’re happy to consult and be a team.

Susan Kearney  53:28

All right, thanks so much. And have a great day.

Outro 53:37

Thank you for listening to the Growth + Exit podcast, sponsored by Newport, a unique national business advisory firm. If you enjoy this show, be sure to share, like, and subscribe for future episodes.