Marketing Mastery Unleashed: From Wall Street to Healthcare IT and Beyond

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Joshua Kornitsky: Welcome back to High Velocity Radio. I’m your host, Joshua Kornitsky. I’m a professional implementer of the entrepreneurial operating system. And today I’ve got a really, really interesting guest that I spent some time talking with before the show. His name is Patrick Elliott and Patrick is a fractional chief marketing officer, but he’s also a revenue strategist. He’s got more than 20 years of experience across sales, marketing and business growth. After leading marketing initiatives for multiple software companies, he launched his own advisory practice focused on helping businesses create clearer differentiation, stronger customer relationships, and really more intentional growth strategies. Welcome, Patrick. Thank you so much for being here today.

Patrick Elliott: My pleasure, Joshua. Thanks for having me on.

Joshua Kornitsky: It’s really, um, marketing has always for me been an area of deep fascination, but I’m not an expert, so that always makes it more interesting for me when I get to talk to somebody. That is. But tell us a little bit about your journey that got you here, that got you to this place.

Patrick Elliott: Of course. Well, thanks for the opportunity again. I’m really excited to be here. I’ve had an interesting professional journey, and I think that it’s it’s been somewhat unorthodox, but it’s also prepared me really well for what I’m doing now for, for my, for my clients from a marketing strategy to revenue growth standpoint. So when I came out of undergraduate, uh, study, I thought that I was actually going to be a Wall Street guy. I thought I was going to be an analyst. I would have been an average analyst at best.

Joshua Kornitsky: So okay, well, in that universe has sure changed.

Patrick Elliott: It sure has. Yeah. But I did work for a financial firm in the first five years of my career immediately after college, but it was in a business development role. Okay. Where my The responsibilities of the role were basically a combination of capital raising and managing client relationships and and growing value for those clients over time. And when I say clients, I mean like big institutional pools of capital.

Joshua Kornitsky: But what, what a great foundational skill set.

Patrick Elliott: Fantastic.

Joshua Kornitsky: Yeah. I mean, you couldn’t ask down the road. You couldn’t ask for a better start.

Patrick Elliott: Exactly. Right. Um, 22, 23, 24 years old, working with the city banks of the world, big, big teachers, pension plans. Um, you know, obviously wasn’t doing it on my own. I had an incredible, incredible boss, incredible mentor and team around me. But, uh, to be able to start there and really think about the overall growth strategy that you have executing a plan. And again, the title was business development, but marketing and sales were kind of embedded in that in that role. Sure. We were building, um, the strategy for our firm or the part of our firm that we were focused on, which was real estate investment trusts building the differentiation story, building the pitch, um, wasn’t as much air cover marketing there necessarily because this was this was many years ago, but. Right. Um, everything that sort of builds into a marketing sales, BD strategy for, for revenue. I got an incredible education in that, uh, practical education in that really early on. Um, realized though that I wanted to sort of pivot more into kind of a product marketing kind of role as opposed to, to the pure financial services.

Patrick Elliott: So, uh, took an interlude. I got an MBA from Emory University here in Georgia, and then I actually worked for seven years in three different healthcare ventures. I worked wow. Yeah. I worked for a very large pharmaceutical company on $1 billion brand. I worked for a supplies and device company, and I worked for a healthcare enterprise healthcare IT company, which was kind of the first entree into the, the software and technology world. And that that was an interesting journey because it sort of was going from the highest value products, you know, again, billion dollar, incredibly high margin pharmaceuticals, right? A lot of growth to really when I was at the supply company, it was very commoditized products. It was a lot of price competition, but it was also thinking about portfolio strategies, but also, you know, trying to build long term relationships with hospitals and health care systems in, um, in to where you really had to understand the specifics of their, their hospital, you know, health system in, in rural West Virginia versus, you know, fast growing one in North Texas are going to be two different things, right?

Joshua Kornitsky: Well, so you got an education in strategy firsthand.

Patrick Elliott: Absolutely.

Joshua Kornitsky: Yeah. And, and the hard way.

Patrick Elliott: Yes, exactly. I mean, essentially the role that I was in, which was, um, a product marketing, it was definitely a marketing role, but it was essentially a P and L responsibility in that role. And I was working with a couple dozen, uh, really strong account managers that had territories throughout the United States. Again, big hospitals, health care systems. It was actually buying, uh, professional. Uh, protective, uh, protective apparel that became really famous a few years later.

Joshua Kornitsky: Yeah. It was, I was going to say, boy, you were a little early into that market a little early.

Patrick Elliott: Um, but I enjoyed, I enjoyed the people I worked with, but, um, the opportunity to move over to the healthcare IT company through, you know, some networking that I had done. It was an opportunity that I definitely wanted to take very large company, you know, working with the biggest health systems in the world or in the, in the country, excuse me, working with again, some big hospitals, um, a lot of legacy software, but there was some pretty innovative things that I worked on. Uh, one pretty cool thing that I’ll mention, um, that I did work on there was, uh, basically as the marketing lead for a joint venture that that company had with a big, uh, state level blue cross plan out west. Right. And what we were doing there was basically setting up what’s called a value based care initiative where I’ll keep this pretty brief, but it’s basically, um. Working with primary care providers, uh, for value based care or accountable care where, um, you know, using some of the technology that our company had, um, measuring core health outcomes over a long period of time for, uh, the core patient population that would be considered at higher risk for chronic illness.

Joshua Kornitsky: Okay.

Patrick Elliott: And, um, basically working with those doctors through these tools to over a long period of time, are you kind of turning down the numbers in a good way, uh, that are predictive of, of chronic issues that become future high cost acute issues for the health plan?

Joshua Kornitsky: So you still became a data analyst in a way. I had a.

Patrick Elliott: Much, much smarter, uh, a couple, a couple of young guys in particular that pop into mind who were a plus data analysts that were running a lot of that. But from a marketing standpoint, I will say your point is well taken that, um, I think when people think about marketing with a lot of like feelings and messaging and everything. You know, there’s hard data that has to go behind the proof points, we would call it, of like, why.

Joshua Kornitsky: Are we doing? I mean, you, you can turn anything into an exercise in, in analysis of data, the advantage that the size organizations you were working with was that their scale there is data.

Patrick Elliott: Absolutely.

Joshua Kornitsky: Right. And, and I do want to ask a question, though, just before we go further along your journey, um, it sounds like you had the opportunity not just to be working in these massive environments, but it sounds like you were doing a lot of ground level stuff that helped build your interpersonal skills with smaller business owners that would also come into play perhaps now in your life more or along your journey. So it wasn’t just sitting behind a desk looking at reports you were with the providers, you were with the doctors, you were down in those hospitals. And those are the kinds of things that set that data analyst apart from somebody like yourself, because you’ve touched the the end user, so to speak. So and you’ve interacted with them so you understand their needs in a different way.

Patrick Elliott: Exactly. Right. Um, I think that’s, that’s spot on. Uh, I’ve been very blessed and fortunate to have been in several of these situations. I mentioned where it was large companies with resources, but, you know, look, it’s a lot of it’s being in the right place at the right time of being in. I would almost think of them a couple of those instances as like startup environments within a large organization where you have, again, capital, you have resources. And, and yeah, I’ve always been, um, I know we’re going to talk about this a little bit, but the intersection of marketing and sales and being in front of customers, uh, you know, I think back to when I was a kid, so to speak, you know, waiting tables, tending bar, uh, you know, I had an internship between two of my, uh, college years, which was a, um, it was, it was a cold. It was for a recruiting firm and it was cold calling and updating databases. And so I’ve always really. I love being in front of people and just. And just having those conversations and the examples I’ve of the, you know, post, post undergrad journey, you know, I’ve been in doctor’s offices in, in, you know, rough areas of Phoenix for, for the joint venture I’ve been in, you know, work through hospital systems, but I’ve also, you know, I’ve, I’ve spoken with financial, large financial sales teams, you know, using a translator, not in English. You know, if you go back to the financial days and I’ve given presentations to guys who became no joke, became cabinet secretaries. Wow. So I say this not to brag, but I’ve, I’ve found myself in positions and have taken advantage of opportunities I’ve had where, you know, again, not your point. It’s not done behind the desk. It’s done kind of face.

Joshua Kornitsky: Listen, people skills are the most. In my opinion, people skills are the most valuable skills. Yes. If your role in the universe at all is client facing, you’ve got to be able to engage directly, because if you don’t, people do business with people that they feel comfortable with. They they don’t have to love you, but they have to at least be able to talk with you and relate with you in order to do business with you successfully.

Patrick Elliott: Exactly right. And I would say anybody that’s listening to this, if you are in marketing, I don’t care if you use Claude every day to write email, copy and send that email copy out. That’s fine. I’m not ripping on that. But if you’re in marketing, you are in a customer facing role and you must have that mentality. Absolutely. Go about your day to day.

Joshua Kornitsky: Okay, so we’re we’re now in health care and where do we go from there?

Patrick Elliott: At that time, a couple of years into the working for the healthcare IT company, I, um, I really said to myself, I would, I think I’m ready to work for a much smaller company and lead a marketing department for, for a growth company. And I didn’t, it was, I really do think it was, um, it was blessing at that time because this was in early 2019 and I didn’t know I had this this abstract conception in my head. And I quite fortunately got in contact with a company called Revilo, which is based here in the greater Atlanta area. And it was exactly what I was looking for. It was, you know, uh, earning an opportunity and keeping that opportunity and leveraging it in the sense of, um, coming in as a first VP of marketing, you know, there was marketing tactics at that, at that software company that were really successful and built a great base. And it was about scaling it and taking it to the next level. And that’s coming in that’s, um, you know, hiring content, building a real content engine, uh, solidifying a brand, um, you know, building out kind of digital tactics and tactics.

Joshua Kornitsky: And really you were at the cutting edge.

Patrick Elliott: Of that.

Joshua Kornitsky: Because that’s, that was the beginning of all of that really getting momentum.

Patrick Elliott: It was, yeah, it was where there was, there were obvious proof points about the whole, I guess we might call it omnichannel strategy right now. It was clear. And they needed somebody who could could come in and help lead that. And that’s what I was able to do. Now the benefit was, um, I think importantly, as I, before I get to kind of the outcomes is we had the top product and the niche we were in without question.

Joshua Kornitsky: I’m very familiar with Rev so.

Patrick Elliott: Oh, great. Yeah, yeah. Um, fantastic product, uh, the best sales team in the organization, best sales leadership, best sales mentality in the organization and marketing and sales were operated in, in incredible harmony over the time that I was there, which is often a, I would say the exception. Exactly. Right. But, you know, we had a clear understanding of who we were going after. What does a marketing to sales hand off look like? What does, um, true demand generation, which leads to sales opportunities look like? And then, you know, even things about how incentives were designed for marketing team members vis a vis sales team members, there wasn’t this sort of competition being created. Oh well, that was sourced through cold calls that was sourced through inbound.

Joshua Kornitsky: The the eternal fight, as it were.

Patrick Elliott: We looked at it from an influence standpoint of, of, you know, we’re and especially because we had a, we had a, again, clear understanding, crystal clear understanding of who the ideal customer profile was building the programing around that because we had the big questions answered, ICP, customer journey, etc. we figured that out pretty early. I mean, there’s a lot of hard work that then follows that. Sure there wasn’t.

Joshua Kornitsky: But it’s.

Patrick Elliott: When reinvention every three months that a lot of companies go.

Joshua Kornitsky: Through. Listen, it’s what I do with the OS is, is when everybody knows where we’re going and how we’re going to get there. The job’s a little bit easier.

Patrick Elliott: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And, and we did not run on iOS, but there were a lot. There were a.

Joshua Kornitsky: Lot. I just mean from a perspective of clarity. Oh, sure.

Patrick Elliott: Sure. Yeah. But it is interesting because as I’ve learned a little bit more about iOS, there were definitely elements of, of iOS that inspired a lot of how we, how our executives kind of design running the company and how we as department heads would would put that together. And I think that was the cause of a lot of success too. But over the I was there for five and a half years.

Joshua Kornitsky: Wow.

Patrick Elliott: Revenue went up, you know, three and a half X over the time that I was there. Um, that was a team effort, marketing and sales as well as again, great product, great client client success. I mean, the whole a classic, you know, full scale, um, front to end SaaS business to business, SaaS kind of emotion. Uh, we had great acquisitions that we were able to integrate into a true portfolio and the company still, still really doing great. Um, I, uh, departed there at the end of 2024 quite amicably. Um, was with another software company for just a few months. Didn’t work out. That’s okay. Um, but since last fall, I’ve been on my own with four cross advisory, uh, you know, taking this knowledge and experience and expertise I have and taking it to the, I mean, in my mind, the 80 to 90% of American small and medium sized businesses that don’t feel confident in their marketing strategy as a revenue generator. And I’m not just pulling a statistic there. That was a constant contact survey from 2024 that basically solidified that amongst their very large customer base. So there’s an opportunity here, I think.

Joshua Kornitsky: Well, so let’s jump in. Let me ask you, you know, what do you think business owners misunderstand most about marketing?

Patrick Elliott: Biggest misunderstanding about marketing is that it is a couple layers down, uh, within business structure. And it actually is. What I mean by that is it’s a core strategic pillar to your business.

Joshua Kornitsky: Okay.

Patrick Elliott: It is often treated by leaders as essentially a tactical subset of sales. Sure. And you know, people think about marketing as simply as advertising to create leads. They think about, um, you know, you know, there’s over, over the years, and again, I’ve been in sales and marketing. I’ve seen all this. But you know, you get some of the older school sales leaders who kind of look at marketing as their make it pretty, make me a slick kind of a thing. I think we’re kind of past that, that overtly, but there’s still that sort of.

Joshua Kornitsky: I think that mindset very much still exists. You know, there, there is absolutely, let’s just say a old guard. Yes, that still believes that it’s, you know, just hammer the the mailers, just hammer the, the print ads and whatever it is you’re trying to drive will come. I grew up in the car business and in the car business. We used to say 50% of our advertising worked. We just didn’t know which 50%. Right. And it’s that same mindset of, well, you know, we’ll just do what we’ve been doing, uh, louder or more aggressively. Yeah, yeah. And, and somehow this will magically impact a marketplace that’s changed pretty dramatically.

Patrick Elliott: And to that point, the way that I think about this is and this is true for businesses that haven’t been as successful as as they could be in business to business software, to cars, to really anything that that you could imagine, which is if the, the leadership team and the visionary, the CEO, etc., they don’t have in mind or they don’t not in mind if they haven’t, you know, written down and, and made it clear throughout the organization what some of these the answers to these critical strategic questions are. There’s sort of this assumption that there’s an infinite demand, uh, pool out there for us because we’re so great. And to your point, we just have to go spend more money, get louder, just put more, more paper in people’s hands, so to speak, and then, hey, the leads will just come in and, and there are very few. Times in a business’s life cycle. Most businesses just never happens. But there are times where you know you’ve got the widget, so to speak, that everybody wants. And you can, you can.

Joshua Kornitsky: But that’s a lightning strike, not a you can’t bank on that.

Patrick Elliott: 99% of businesses are never in that category.

Joshua Kornitsky: Sure. So you, you made a very important statement to me, uh, about the fact that marketing is, excuse me, a strategic pillar of the business rather than a subset of sales. And as we agree, a lot of people just take this tactical approach to it. How do you or do you help the folks you work with, the clients that you have better understand the value of that strategy? Is that something that you work with them on? Or if they don’t have that, you can’t help them?

Patrick Elliott: No, I definitely work with them on it. And I just to keep it as streamlined as possible. Um, I do think that there are ways to go through this that kind of cut across different types of business and different verticals. So sure, when I mentioned the pillars, marketing, sales, service and operations is kind of how I think about, um, you know, these, these four pillars that all work together to basically launch a launch a product, develop a product, market it, sell it, put it in customers hands, service it over time, and then have a nice, uh, hopefully kind of self-sustaining cycle of being able to do that and growing your business while also effectively serving your customers. So, um, those are, those are kind of the pillar pieces of it. Marketing has really a really important responsibility in a business to answer a few key questions that, again, I think cut across every business type.

Joshua Kornitsky: Will you share them with us?

Patrick Elliott: I would absolutely share them with you. There’s, there’s, there’s the cool thing about this is there’s, there’s no secret sauce. I don’t have anything that’s.

Joshua Kornitsky: You don’t have a magic potion?

Patrick Elliott: No, I really don’t. And but but, um, I think where I have really positive conversations with CEOs that have a lot on their mind is making this, I don’t want to say formulaic, but making it in a way that’s, that’s really digestible to understand. Sure. I basically have ten things that I try to do with every customer. Um, and engagements that I have with them. Every engagement is not going to treat all ten of these with the same, um, fervor depending on how important it is. But sure, these, these key questions are the answers to these key questions are basically within those things. But it starts with who is your customer? Who is your ideal customer profile? When I was at Emory, uh, for my MBA, I’m going to shout out Professor Ryan Hamilton, who was our intro to marketing professor and has become very prominent academically in that space. And he would walk into the class. Um, and he was just, he was a super cool guy. He was, uh, quite young for a professor at the time, especially. And he would come in every, every beginning of every class, 2 or 3 days a week, whatever it was. And, and what’s the first rule of marketing? And we would all say back, know your customer. And that stuck with me. Um, that very simple kind of gesture stuck with me through my whole career. Um, understanding the traits of your customer and why they buy from you and actually not just why they buy from you, but what is the whole journey that they go through from recognizing a problem to what is going to be the solution to that problem to. All right, I’m choosing you as my vendor, you being my client, that whole process, it all has to start from there. No matter what kind of work that a marketing department does. After that.

Joshua Kornitsky: And I’m going to stop and ask a question that I’m putting you in a in a position where I’m just asking you to guesstimate. But I really do think that people need to hear this, because I have a pretty good inclination of where it’s where it’s going to fall as a percentage when, when you first start. Uh, let’s not even say a client of yours when you’re in general conversation with a business owner, what percentage of them actually understand who their client is?

Patrick Elliott: Understanding who the client is, I would say is 5050.

Joshua Kornitsky: Okay. But that that still tells you that half the people are out there trying to either fish with dynamite or with nothing on the hook. Right? Right. And if there’s nothing on the hook, you might occasionally catch a wayward fish that swims by, but you’re not likely to have a week worth of dinner.

Patrick Elliott: No, no. And I’ll give you one caveat to the 50% that do understand it. There’s a great deal of intuition in that there’s not as much measurement.

Joshua Kornitsky: Sure.

Patrick Elliott: Demographic information. If you’re.

Joshua Kornitsky: Demographic. Geographic, psychographic.

Patrick Elliott: If you’re in B2B firmographic, which is essentially demographics for groups, right? Technographic like if you sell software, you need to understand what the integrations might need to be. So there’s a technographic piece of it. This is stuff that a lost art is market research, honestly. And now with, um, all the, the incredible amount of information that can be distilled through AI tools. A lot of market research can really be handled by that. But even that, even using sort of the natural language prompting, there is a, a somewhat formulaic way that you should go about market research and, and answer that. So I actually bring some of those things that I’ve learned. I’ve never been a market researcher, but I’ve been around a lot of them. So I’ve been able to kind of take in some of the learnings that I’ve had from, from those experiences. And, um, you know, one of the first questions that I will ask a CEO or a business owner is like, what do you know about your customers? Can you pop open the CRM and can we download a list? And can we start to figure out?

Joshua Kornitsky: Well, and that’s one of the, one of the advantages of living in. In the technological time that we live in is, is if they’ve got a CRM, which depending on the size business at this point, most have some form of something capturing client data. Um, the fact that you can use third party tools to parse and help you find or isolate or identify unique features that as, as a whole, you may not have realized that suddenly, you know, just something like a zip code analysis can tell you that, that you make more money out of these three zip codes than all the other ones combined. How is that going to influence how you decide and where you decide to advertise?

Patrick Elliott: Correct. Yeah.

Joshua Kornitsky: Um, so let me ask you this about the customers that you work with. First is, is there a specific size that you’re trying to stay around just so that people understand that?

Patrick Elliott: Yeah. I think that, um, working with customers Really up to 25, $30 million of annual revenue. Okay. I, I think there’s opportunity for somebody like me to go that high. I would say that there’s a bit of a more narrow band of to where the marginal impact, so to speak, of what I do. Um, can, can really help. And that’s probably more like upper limit of 10 to $15 million. So like think single digit million, if you’re in the, if you’re listening to this and you’re in the single digit million and you’re kind of, uh, spinning your wheels at that space, I think that’s a great opportunity to, to bring in some of the things that I can do because, um, if you’ve, if you’ve built up a really solid base of business at that level, you’ve done a lot of things, right. And you, you, you obviously have a product or a service that people want. You have a, a good team operationally that’s been able to put this in place. And then you, you know, you the visionary, um, you’ve got those elements of, of I think I know where I want to take this business, but then it just becomes a question of, of how and what’s the next step?

Joshua Kornitsky: Well, and, and so you and I are, are dealing with roughly the same types of customers. And, and, and this is not a crime and this is not a bad thing. They are because of their success, they are coming into unknown territory. And the value that we both are able to provide them is, is guidance in this new territory to help them get to where they want to get to. But there is no you had made the statement before that. There’s sort of that gut feeling around who their ideal client is, and that’s true. But but based on my own experience, who my ideal client is and who, frankly, my ideal employee is at 5 million is usually pretty different at 10 million. And if you’re at 15 million, you are now managing something and leading something that’s on an exponentially more difficult and different stage than where you were when everybody could fit around one table at the restaurant.

Patrick Elliott: Of course.

Joshua Kornitsky: You know, and, and the fact that there is no organic growth of your knowledge as a leader or as a founder. Now you can put yourself back into school. You can certainly hire experts. Um, one of those is much more likely to lead to rapid growth. And look, if you want to do it yourself, go do it yourself. But that’s a very long path. That’s, that’s going to law school instead of hiring a lawyer.

Patrick Elliott: Mhm.

Joshua Kornitsky: Um, so when you look out into the marketplace today and the types of clients that you’re able to help and the folks that you’re talking with, um, are you finding a receptive, uh, demeanor people are looking to, to harness the skills that you’re bringing?

Patrick Elliott: Yes. I think there’s there’s an appetite for this for sure. Because the, um, there’s kind of a couple different things. The realization of exactly what you said is when, you know, you kind of stair step up revenue levels and you get to that next one and whoa, I have a whole new set of opportunities, but I also have a whole new set of challenges that I wasn’t anticipating or that I.

Joshua Kornitsky: Couldn’t even know existed.

Patrick Elliott: Exactly, exactly. So anytime you can talk about a, a, a different way of approaching one of the elements of your business, uh, that is tailored for that new frontier that you’re in, I think good, good CEOs are going to be receptive to that. Uh, additionally, um, we’re just, we’re in an odd period right now of, of the, the, the labor market and, and jobs and being able to find the kind of people that you want that have the right kind of skill set. And I think marketing is definitely one of these and where I would. Well, here’s where I why I think that is, um, say your CEO say, uh, you know, a, a services company that has, you know, $8 million in revenues, maybe growing 10% a year. Um, they are, you know, bringing a couple other things to market. They, they know that they’re going to need pretty concerted multi-year go to market plans, marketing and sales to launch these products, expand into new markets, etc.. Um, you know, they’re competing for the top marketing and sales talent with companies that are a bit bigger than them. So they might not be able to, you know, pay top of market rate.

Joshua Kornitsky: They can’t buy the, the talent, the talent.

Patrick Elliott: Um, and then they also will, they will often find that they’ll bring in somebody who, and give that person the, the kind of departmental head title and they have been a killer. Individual contributor.

Joshua Kornitsky: I know this story.

Patrick Elliott: A little mentor. You know where I’m going with this. Uh, and they’re just they’re not, they don’t have the, the core experience to really, um, they just, they don’t have the years on them to, to know how to approach things strategically as opposed to tactically.

Joshua Kornitsky: A great individual contributor is without training is almost never a great leader without experience.

Patrick Elliott: Experience.

Joshua Kornitsky: And, and, and training because leadership, uh, with all due respect to those who, who believe that we are, we are born with certain talents, but to be an effective long term leader, you need training. You need to work in an environment that fosters the right behaviors. Because when we used to say in the car business, the first 90 days were the most effective for every salesperson because they had not yet been taught shortcuts and bad habits by the more experienced people. Write, because the reality is they followed the process until they outsmarted the process, and invariably things would fall off because they had outsmarted the process. That had proved very effective for the first 90 days. It’s an interesting cycle. And and what you’re touching on from my perspective is, is to some degree, culture and culture to me brings up my one of the tenets of EOS, which is core values. And in what I’d like to ask you, if you, if you don’t mind discussing it, is about how you see core values making an impact or an influence or a difference in the types of companies that you’re working with. Um, are they using them in their perspective when they’re hiring? Are they using them in the way they’re doing business?

Patrick Elliott: Uh, yeah, I, while I don’t quite have the measurements on this, I think this is an intuition point that, uh, probably your listeners would agree with is that the businesses that have core values and actually operate by them. And those are two different things.

Joshua Kornitsky: Yes, they are.

Patrick Elliott: The ones that have them and operate by them are by and large going to be successful provided that operationally, they’re they’re running reasonably well. You know, if people have worked for big companies where, you know, you walk into the marble lobby and you see maybe the core values on.

Joshua Kornitsky: Chiseled in the stone.

Patrick Elliott: Exactly. Right after you go through the, the, the, you know, badge scanner or whatever. Um, those, those are the bigger an organization gets, the harder it is for those to be real. Take it back down to the example I made $8 million company, let’s say maybe they have 25, 30 employees. Um, where they have an opportunity is, you know, is their interviewing is they’re bringing somebody into the organization. They talk through what the core values are and they’re, they’re, I think it is important, you know, from, from even from like an ethical and a, and a, and a, um, uh, moral standpoint or whatever. I think a visionary does have to kind of, uh, talk through like, why am I doing this? Why is this this?

Joshua Kornitsky: What does.

Patrick Elliott: It matter? Why does this matter? That kind of stuff is super important. And you need to make sure that you’re clear with people coming in that that is kind of underlying everything. But I think taking it a step further, the core values also have to incorporate a, um, embrace of the problem that your company is trying to solve. And then an expectation for everybody that is particularly touching the customer of this is how we go about solving that problem. And I think, you know, you have to kind of really busy executives, really busy small business leaders, you have to really kind of dig a little bit with them because a lot of it, again, is intuition for them.

Joshua Kornitsky: But sure.

Patrick Elliott: A core values that are driven by a recognition that there is a population of those target customers that are out there that have a problem. And we at, you know, at this table, so to speak, are going to go solve that problem. The how and everything you get, they’ll figure out. But it’s, it’s the I went into this for a real reason, right? And if you keep that reason in mind, and then you get buy in from the people around you and make them feel a part of it and reward them properly and incent them properly and everything. Those those are the types of businesses that are going to be the most successful.

Joshua Kornitsky: And you gave us an example before, if I can put you on the spot a little bit, and we don’t need to go into the private matters of it. But you said when you were with Rev that the sales and marketing team had a harmony that you had not seen previously. My words, not yours. That they worked together well. Do you think that was from from just a cultural perspective that that they were aligned. It didn’t. I mean, obviously there was a lot of factors.

Patrick Elliott: There are a lot of factors. I think the, um, I won’t lie, there’s benefit of, of the, the leaders of the company, uh, have all, all have strong personal relationships with each other. So I’m not going to pretend that that’s not important.

Joshua Kornitsky: No, but that’s where culture comes from. Is, is, is the relationship with the leadership.

Patrick Elliott: And, and we had, uh, Rivera has, has, I don’t say had still going strong has, uh, very explicit core values that are part of the onboarding process. They’re part of, you know, every, every company meeting, they get read out. We, there’s actually annual awards, there’s six core values and there’s, um, annual awards that, uh, well, there’s monthly for, you know, one, one employee and the whole company gets the monthly award at the, at the all employee meeting. But then every year, six awards for the six core values.

Joshua Kornitsky: And that’s awesome.

Patrick Elliott: These are very sought after and, and huge recognition points for the, for the employees that that win them. Um, I would say the other thing, I’m going back to kind of the customer orientation with this though. Sure. Um, what was the, the core customer for revenue software products are small, medium sized business owners for the most part. Um, there’s definitely some large, almost enterprise level customers, but um.

Joshua Kornitsky: That’s their niche.

Patrick Elliott: It is their, the niche, the, it’s billing and customer management and professional services automation software for companies that are, uh, that very much consider themselves entrepreneurial and they solve a specific problem and our ability to, I think, even build personal relationships with those customers and build that trust with them. Um, and, and, you know, hear the incredible stories. And again, marketing takes case studies. So the awesome stories about how we were here and now we’re here. And you guys were a huge.

Joshua Kornitsky: Catalyst to, to right.

Patrick Elliott: And then, you know, you think about you, you take that to its, to its logical conclusion about like, okay, so now this company is bigger. Now they’re creating more jobs, they’re bringing more people on.

Joshua Kornitsky: Helping more families.

Patrick Elliott: Helping more families a lot. You know, a lot of these are a lot of the companies come out of sort of the legacy of the local telecom within their community. So they’re, uh, giving, putting more back into their community through foundations and things like this. These were examples of, of customers that we had. So it was very easy for us to, um, work hard knowing that we were serving a lot of those, those types of, of clients. And I think that any business, again, if you have the passion as a leader about there’s a problem that I’m trying to solve and you’re sincere about that, it really shouldn’t be that hard for you.

Joshua Kornitsky: To, to.

Patrick Elliott: Well.

Joshua Kornitsky: Well articulates the wrong word because that that is, that assumes a level of wordsmithing. It should be something you’re able to communicate.

Patrick Elliott: Communicate internally, your own employees. If you have a passionate communication, you know, someone who’s sitting across the table from you who’s 23, 24 years old, they’re just getting started. You know why? Here for me as a young employee. Well, here’s why. And as a visionary, as a leader, you should be able to sit across from them and.

Joshua Kornitsky: Couldn’t agree.

Patrick Elliott: More.

Joshua Kornitsky: Yeah. And I think that it speaks volumes about their culture that here we are X number of years later. And everything you’re saying is, is as a former employee, for whatever reason that you departed, uh, nothing but reflective of, of the quality of the organization and their culture. Absolutely. That says a great deal not only about you and your character, but the organization that you stepped away. Um, you know, there’s, there’s never really a good reason to bash any previous employer of yours if they’ve done you wrong. That’s a different story. But they certainly didn’t sound that way here. What I’m really going with, and as my father always taught me is, you know, uh, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. And you’re clearly saying things that illustrate the value and the strength of what I’d like to broadly zoom back out and say culture and core values and the impact that they make. So I appreciate you taking that diversion with me as an EOS implementer. I’m always curious to hear other people’s perspectives on it, but there’s actually a really large elephant in this room, and I want to ask you about it. And the elephant in the room, particularly when it comes to marketing and when it comes to strategy, are you familiar at all with AI?

Patrick Elliott: I’ve heard of it, yeah.

Joshua Kornitsky: Have you? I have. I understand it’s a thing. Um. So let’s start by asking you, how do you view AI with with regards to your space of marketing and strategy?

Patrick Elliott: I view it as, uh, an amazing force multiplier.

Joshua Kornitsky: Okay.

Patrick Elliott: I regard it as a terrible boss.

Joshua Kornitsky: Okay.

Patrick Elliott: And what I mean by that is, I think to be frank, that there are people that are doing the sorts of things that I do that have outsourced a lot of their thinking to it. And it is not a it is a organization tool of thoughts. It is a speed tool, a production tool, but it is not a sentiment thinker.

Joshua Kornitsky: It’s not a thought leader.

Patrick Elliott: No, it is not. No, it is not you. You, you know, I’m speaking. I would almost speaking to an avatar of myself. Not that I feel this way, but you know, somebody who’s doing what I’m doing. I would look them dead in the eye and say, you have got to carve out your own thinking. You’ve got to be able to speak extemporaneously on the kind of things that we’re talking about. And you have to be able to, you know, put write a paragraph down off the top of your head of your own words. That is like, put grammatical review aside. Like.

Joshua Kornitsky: Sure, the technical aspects of it, no one’s going to question. And if I may quote ChatGPT, that was both brilliant and insightful. Patrick.

Patrick Elliott: I have a.

Joshua Kornitsky: I love the fact that they always kiss your butt just a little bit.

Patrick Elliott: I have there’s some some. Well, as a quick aside, there’s some pretty funny memes out there of, um, people that have instructed their LLM of choice to not flatter them so much. And they’re posting like, I think they’ve kind of trained the LLM to insult them to some comedic effect.

Joshua Kornitsky: So that that’s always, I’ve seen some of those too. I, um, when, when I transitioned to a new one because I’m using three different ones for different things. Uh, I will have the other ones prepare a brief so I can upload it into the new one. And I always tell it that I want to be challenged on everything. Um, and it’s what’s really interesting about that is how much it irritates me, but I’m really glad that it does because I, my learning style, I’m going to learn more when my assumptions are questioned than by blanket agreement with how brilliant that a piece of technology thinks I am, I view them as a collaborative tool.

Patrick Elliott: Yes.

Joshua Kornitsky: And and to your point, they should not be leading the charge. They should be helping you, making make sure to use the, the, the war metaphor that that your flanks aren’t exposed, that you, that you aren’t vulnerable to things that you have not thought of or to be frank, may never have occurred to you. Mhm. Um, I think from that perspective, they can add a lot of value, but I think, I think marketing in particular, and let me turn this into a question rather than a statement. Do you think marketing in particular at the entry level has been negatively impacted, um, by the misunderstanding of what AI is capable of?

Patrick Elliott: I think that it has, uh, from a tactical standpoint, for sure, in the sense of it. Um, let me, let me paint a picture for you here. So the hardest thing in a creative role is starting with the blank sheet of paper. Sometimes, literally, if you’re brainstorming. But then certainly on your screen, the, you know, the blank, if it’s a Google document or if you, you know, if you use HubSpot to start writing some emails, is that like, you know, right here, start writing here kind of thing that is, that is the hardest thing because getting going, once you get going and get in a groove, um, you’re, you’re, if you’re talented and capable at your job, you know, basically in creative productivity, once you get past that initial writer’s block, you’re all set. But how long it takes to get to that writer’s block can, can be hard, especially if, um, you know, there’s a, there’s a pretty well-established psychological, um, precept that you have to tell somebody something seven times for it to really stick.

Joshua Kornitsky: I teach it to my clients.

Patrick Elliott: So what does that, how does that relate to the marketing communication piece of things? Is Zap and I’ve run into this too. You get fatigued with your own ideas because you feel like you’re saying the same thing over and over and over and over again, but somebody out there is going to be seeing it for the first time. Even though you’ve been writing content about this in different flavors for six months, because that’s the whole point of your, your value proposition. You’re trying to communicate. Um, what I, what good, uh, well-executed AI can do is, um, write all this stuff out for, you know, you can write six months worth of stuff for you if you want it to around the same, same idea and have it be different enough that you know it, it will fill that content calendar for you. The problem I think that I see people doing is they will just lift and shift right off the l m and they will put it into LinkedIn. They will put it into absolutely.

Joshua Kornitsky: And it’s garbage. Well, well, it can be garbage because it still requires, I presume, a critical eye.

Patrick Elliott: It does. And, and I think that, you know, the word differentiation has come up. I think once or twice since we’ve been talking. And it’s easy for me now because I’m I observe, I communicate, and I observe communications for a living. And to me, it’s become so obvious now when people have that, that sort of like paragraph, paragraph bullets, you know, it’s not this, it’s this. And I really stress to clients, I stress to people that are doing the kind of things that I’m doing, you have to take the extra time to whatever, whatever it puts out for you. Um, really take a red pen, so to speak to it and make sure that it fits how you would say it. And is it saying things in a, um, human enough form? People kind of contrast the AI and the human, but you have to have a certain humanity. And not just that, but you can train AI on your on your brand voice. Sure. But again, if you have real ownership, especially if you lead a marketing department, the brand voice should be flowing through your head all the time. So you need to be able to put things together that, all right, this is our brand voice and, and where the danger of people sort of outsourcing that whole thing to AI is, is, is the sameness, the sea of sameness. But then it’s also, um, you know, as things evolve at your company over time and you’re kind of just doing the same, you know, input or prompt output post, prompt output post, it’ll just become noise. And many, many companies are doing this right now to their detriment.

Joshua Kornitsky: Well, and you and I talked about it before in a different context, but it’s still applies is that that need for that human touch. And, you know, I, I take a, the backwards approach, I, I will write it myself and then put it into, have it tweaked because absolutely, uh, large language models great at finding a more succinct way to make a statement that may have taken me three sentences. It may be able to do in one, but the idea came from me and, and the wording. Absolutely. I, I’m the, the son of a, of a retired librarian. Uh, words really, really matter. And sometimes you can say the same thing three different ways, but one of them really clicks and, and that’s what I’m always looking for. There’s a great book, but also, um, a purchasable MLM. Uh, I don’t know if you’re familiar with smart brevity, which was written or created by Axios. And it’s, it’s a corporate messaging methodology and now tool. Um, I don’t subscribe to it, but I’ve read the book and that’s what it’s about. It’s this idea of, you know, here’s, here’s your major headline, the lead. Here’s your 3 or 4 bullet points. Click here if you want to read more. As silly as it sounds, they they systemized that kind of approach. And it’s a book that I found valuable because, uh, I’m in my heart. I’m a writer. So why say with 20 words what I can say with 275? You know, I like to, to expound and it keeps my communication LMS keep my communication much more concise there.

Patrick Elliott: I love that that example. And I’ll, I’ll give you one more too. There’s a consultant named Donald Miller who developed the Storybrand idea.

Joshua Kornitsky: I’ve read the.

Patrick Elliott: Book. Yeah, yeah. Um, I just so people know I, I use storybrand elements as I help build messaging for, for my clients. Um, the, I’ve heard him speak a couple times and, and he has this idea of cognitive overload is how he puts it. And it’s basically the we all have so many stimuli hitting us at any given time. And obviously there’s more than there’s more stimuli every day, but even just take it down to kind of the biological sense we’re going through every day thinking about, you know, survival, so to speak. What is it that we need to do to, to, you know, keep ourselves going, basically.

Joshua Kornitsky: Right.

Patrick Elliott: And if you give somebody a message that is too complicated when they already have all these other thoughts swirling it, there is that sort of okay, a couple of words now, you know, twice as many words. I, I can’t even I might be able to read the words, but getting from here to here, uh, is, is too much with everything that’s happening. And I think that where a lot of advertising agencies and, and marketers will get a little too, they will get too clever. They’ll, they’ll be, uh, you know, they’ll fall in love with like the snappy tagline or whatever it is, but it won’t explain to people.

Joshua Kornitsky: What the product is or what it does.

Patrick Elliott: Well. And I put aside actually what the product is and what it does. How does this help me? How does this help me? Again, it’s it’s somewhat metaphorical, but how does this help me survive the day, if you will.

Joshua Kornitsky: Right.

Patrick Elliott: And that I think the the brevity idea plus the story brand. I mean, look, there’s a reason that B2B websites all are structured the same. Now, some of that is algorithmically with SEO, but it’s also, you know, companies have kind of figured out.

Joshua Kornitsky: How we read.

Patrick Elliott: How we read and how we absorb the information. And, you know, again, the problem, the, the, the bridge statement, the three bullets and then the, what’s the next step? There’s, again, there’s a reason that you see it everywhere because it works, right?

Joshua Kornitsky: So last line of questions. And I feel like this, I feel like strategy has been at the heart of this entire discussion. But from your perspective, I wanted to ask you what separates companies that grow from those that stall? Because you’re not just helping people with marketing, you’re helping people with a broader business strategy. Correct.

Patrick Elliott: That’s right.

Joshua Kornitsky: Because you can’t just say for the next six months, we’re going to do this, wipe your hands and say, see, in six months, everything’s great.

Patrick Elliott: Well, I mentioned earlier that, you know, knowing your customer, knowing that customer’s journey is the foundation of everything. Okay. So you might have that down cold. What are you going to do with this knowledge? That’s when you start bridging into, uh, you know, building content for that customer to consume and then demand generation, which is all right. How do we turn this into leads and more precisely, sales opportunities, opportunities for our sales team to, to sell, um, the businesses that are not as successful in the short run are the ones that don’t effectively, And economically invest their their time and their dollars and their efforts into those, um, channels where that ideal customer is figuring out, you know, what their steps are going to be, they’re going to lead them to you as the product or service vendor. So if they don’t get that right, meaning like, um, I love the idea of, um, you know, I don’t know, well, putting out a bunch of podcasts or something like that, like digital media. Well, if you’re, if your target customer is not in a position where they’re consuming a lot of digital media or they’re, they’re not, you know, you, you are advertising on, um, within channels that they’re not consuming, they’re going to miss out. They could be, you could be perfect for them, but they’re going to miss, miss you in the short run. Right?

Joshua Kornitsky: Because if I’m only releasing on VHS.

Patrick Elliott: Yes.

Joshua Kornitsky: Right. And they’re all streaming. It could be the most insightful, life changing information in the world, but it’s not in a platform that’s accessible.

Patrick Elliott: It is. And I understand where you’re going with that. I’ll even say like, we talk about like hyper local businesses and it’s like, I’ll be really cool. If I could get into like the Spotify, you know, podcast network and start getting picked up on podcasts. Well, what if you, the only thing that I listen to on AM radio, just as an aside is, is the couple local sports channels here in Atlanta. What if I’m the target customer and you actually am radio? Yeah. Am radio put that on there and they might be able to find find you there. Okay. Yeah. I’m going to call them not understanding kind of in the here and now how to do that is is what causes us is stall in the longer run. I think this is this is also kind of where the whole two to 2 million to 5 million, five to 5 to 8, 8 to 10, etc.. If a good business leader, a good visionary has that, you know, here and now problem for marketing and sales figured out. Now we need to start looking at six months down the line, 12 months down the line, 100%.

Joshua Kornitsky: That’s and that’s strategy.

Patrick Elliott: That’s strategy. Being able to get out of the day to day of the business and thinking, all right, how is how is my customer evolving? How is economic? How are economic realities evolving? I need to think about, I mean, now I’m going far afield of marketing, but supply chain, like all these things where, all right, the context that drives the strategy is changing. I understand that now. And once the strategy, uh, needs to now change, then we can figure out the downstream marketing stuff out. But you have to constantly be thinking about, um, you know, what that future looks like for you because having a lot of success today does not guarantee that.

Joshua Kornitsky: Anything.

Patrick Elliott: In anything. I mean, you could, you could have just the most awesome widget, uh, that you saturate the market with and then, all right, Everyone’s bought this. I mean, you’ve got a nice drinkware that I can see ahead of me there, like a lot of these, um, um, you know, fancy metal cup companies.

Joshua Kornitsky: You’re hard pressed to get new markets.

Patrick Elliott: Exactly. Well, and, you know, the trends change and. All right. We need to think about what the next next frontier is going to be. So, um, the companies that kind of become one trick ponies are the ones that aren’t thinking about, all right, what if we’re so successful that, um, you know, we kind of short circuit our future success? We need to think about what’s going to come next.

Joshua Kornitsky: I, I have a, my oldest friend, uh, worked for Microsoft for 17 years. And he was there during the time that Bill gates was active CEO and I asked him once many years ago, you know, because he’d been in meetings with Bill gates, like, what does he do? And his answer was kind of enlightening. He said he spends all of his time thinking about where Microsoft’s going to be in ten years. And at the time, I don’t think I understood that, but I do now. And the great irony of Bill gates, because I come from a technical background, is many, not all. Many of his technological visionary statements ended up being more accurate than not. It just wasn’t brought to fruition by Microsoft. Many years before the iPad, I was in technology sales, selling Microsoft Windows tablets, and they were literally an iPad with windows that did everything you needed it to do. They just were too early and had too many other issues. But they were out there and in that happens to be the one that I always remember. He had always forecasted that some type of tablet PC would change the world. And it did. It was called the iPad.

Patrick Elliott: Right.

Joshua Kornitsky: Yeah. You know, and, and that you keep using a term that iOS uses as well. Patrick visionary and a visionary is best served. Usually its the founder or one of the founders of a company. They are best served when they have the time to look into the future. Instead of being in the business, they get the ability to be on the business. And I think you and I are aligned in that because the more that the more freedom they have from the day to day restrictions, the, the they’re not always going to see with 100% accuracy, but they’re much more likely to steer the ship in a good direction if they’re not encumbered with everything else that’s going on.

Patrick Elliott: Correct. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And look, the visionary, if you’re a visionary out there, don’t feel like you have to do this alone. I mean, surround yourself with strong people where they have their day jobs, where they have to run their departments or what have you, but tap the information or tap the knowledge that they have in their head. Tap the knowledge of the people that are on the front lines, working with customers every day to kind.

Joshua Kornitsky: Of absolutely.

Patrick Elliott: Work the knowledge back up the, the organization, if you will, and make sure that because I talked about, I’ve said ideal customer profile multiple times, that doesn’t stay static either.

Joshua Kornitsky: Oh gosh.

Patrick Elliott: No. Better make sure that you’re you’re understanding positive or negative changes that that profile is evolving to that positive or negative for your business.

Joshua Kornitsky: Through our entire dialog. The one thing that has been abundantly clear is it all starts and ends with the customer. Absolutely. And if you’re not, if you’re not speaking to them in, in a way, in a, in a way, in a place, in an environment that catches their attention, that solves a problem they believe they have or identifies a problem for them to connect with. That’s that 50% that’s just going out the window. And it’s probably more than that, right? I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. Patrick, I, I can’t thank you enough. What’s the best way for people to get Ahold of you? If they want to learn more about how you can help them?

Patrick Elliott: Absolutely. Well, thanks, Joshua. Thanks for having me. This is.

Joshua Kornitsky: Absolutely.

Patrick Elliott: Uh, the easiest way to learn more about me is to go to my website, www.advisory.com.

Joshua Kornitsky: And we’ll post that.

Patrick Elliott: Thank you. And you can email me patrick@advisory.com.

Joshua Kornitsky: And I’m sorry, was it spelled out or the number four?

Patrick Elliott: Thank you. It’s the spelled out FFOFOURCROSS advisory. I’m not going to try to off the top, my head.

Joshua Kornitsky: Listen, I I, I work for EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, and I can tell you after four and a half years, I can spell entrepreneurial, but I usually have to fix one letter.

Patrick Elliott: That is a good use case for AI, right?

Joshua Kornitsky: Yeah, right. Exactly. Right. That’s if it’s I do a lot of whiteboard writing, and I’m always shocked when it’s not underlined in red, because that would be very helpful for me. Um, again, my guest today has been Patrick Elliott. He’s a fractional CMO and the founder of four Cross Advisory. We’ll share the link to get Patrick’s website and his email address when we when we publish the podcast. Um, Patrick is really a revenue strategist with more than 20 years of experience across sales, marketing and business growth after leading marketing and marketing initiatives for multiple software companies, which he told us all about today. He launched his own advisory practice focused on helping businesses create clear differentiation, stronger customer relationships, and more intentional growth strategies. And I think you did a great job of illustrating that today, Patrick. Thank you for for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom. And I look forward to having you on again in the future.

Patrick Elliott: My pleasure, Joshua. I look forward to it as well.

Joshua Kornitsky: Thank you again. You are listening to Joshua Kornitsky. I am a professional implementer of EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. This is High Velocity Radio. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.