Career Advice from a Global CMO with Ryan Bonnici

James Lawrence: I'm here today with Ryan Bonnici. Ryan, welcome to the Pod. 

Ryan Bonnici: Thanks, James. It's great to be here. 

James Lawrence: For those of you that don't know Ryan or don't know of his career so far, I believe Ryan to be one of Australia's leading marketing exports. He started his career in Sydney. IT roles for Microsoft and then ExactTarget. He moved into Salesforce in 2013, where he became Head of Marketing APAC, jumped across to HubSpot in 2015, where in Australia he went on to become Head of Marketing for the region, moved to the US to HubSpot HQ in 2017, where he moved into the head of global marketing role responsible for brand, PR, digital and social. Shortly after that, he was appointed CMO at G2, where he held that role until 2021. Ryan, you consistently get ranked in the Forbes Forbes World's most influential CMO list. You're currently CMO at GymPass, which is based in Brooklyn, or you're based in Brooklyn, New York. GymPass is a $2 billion tech unicorn. Ryan, welcome to the pod. 

Ryan Bonnici: Hey, James. Thank you. And it's funny hearing that. A lot of those roles feel like I need to do a better job at like reflecting on the past and I’m getting better at this as I get older. But I feel like for such a long time my career, I was so like, next, next, I'm moving. Like growing, evolving. And I don't know, it's kind of nice to stop and like, reflect on all the little things and the journey. It's still kind of fun.

James Lawrence: You still look like the 21 year old kid that I met years ago. But you've achieved a lot in not a very long space of time. 

Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, it hasn't been long. And I mean, testament to my very low self esteem from when I was younger that I've dedicated so much effort to trying to achieve, to make up for it. I think I've worked on that self esteem over the years and that's in a better place today. But yeah, it's funny what that can do. 

James Lawrence: Well, I wanted to ask you about kind of the motivation and the drive. Maybe we'll come back into that in a little bit later on the pod, but I think listeners to the pod, marketers, large skew towards in-house Australian marketers. I kind of wanted to start with those first few roles that you picked. Like I think we've known each other for a long time and I think you did a really good job of identifying good businesses to work out good opportunities. How did you go about that? What lessons would you share from those early roles out of uni? 

Ryan Bonnici: I think for me, I started university and then I took some time off and was a flight attendant, which was really fun. And that was never a kind of career path. And then as I went back to uni, I think for me, step one was like getting good grades so that I could get into like good sort of graduate programs or intern programs. And so I was at Sydney Uni and I found out that Microsoft was recruiting and kind of got luckily got into that process and they kind of went from a few thousand people. I think it started the process and they chose, I think, 5 or 6 of us, and that was probably my first legit corporate experience. Before that, I had done marketing for The Cool Hunter, which was like back then, gosh, like in the early 2000, and it still is a really interesting blog and social media space. But there was a lot, I think, more influential back then potentially, or maybe not even to say that there was just less competition, I think, back then. 

Ryan Bonnici: I think I like started to get my experience going there. And then Microsoft kind of really helped me evolve from there. And then when I look back to that, I've said this a few times, but like there's so much I didn't know, like I vividly remember being asked to like do case studies at one point and I was working on case studies. One of our sales teams at Microsoft and I like was too embarrassed to be like, why am I doing a case study? It seemed like now =having been in the industry for something, I'm like, oh my god. Obviously a case study helps you like sell your product because it's like customers that have had success in it. Again, that's so embarrassing. Like back then I couldn't connect the dots like I hadn't been in the industry long enough. And I remember just being like doing it, but not having any clue what I was doing. And I don't know if I do a great job at this today, but I try to remember that when I am working with more junior marketers on my teams because what I take for granted, just from like having learnt over the years is thanks to lots of years. So I think for me, though, early on, what I cared a lot about was like being able to own a number. And I still care about that a lot today.

Ryan Bonnici: I think one of the best ways, as in any role really to grow and move up is to be able to show your impact on something. And so for me, like, you know, at Microsoft, that was really all about how do we get more students into buying Microsoft Office? How do we get more students into buying? So back when there was like the Windows phone. And so it was quite like revenue oriented, which I liked. So I don't really think I was like super smart and how I got there. I just knew that like I wanted to learn a lot. And I figured like, where better to learn the Microsoft? 

Ryan Bonnici: What I did learn there really quickly, in addition to a lot of other things, was that that was just far too big of a company for me to learn really quickly. I think it was like 80,000 or was 80,000 or 300,000. It was a huge number of employees. And so it was incredibly bureaucratic and very slow. And it was really sad because there was some of the smartest people I think I've probably ever worked with in my career at Microsoft. I think it's gotten a lot more innovative since then. I think for me, what I realised really quickly was like I wanted to be in companies that were growing quickly, and I think that helps you in a few ways, right? Like it helps you from like a financial perspective, right? If they're growing quickly and you can contribute at the company, your equity, your salary, it increases and you get promoted quickly because they're hiring quickly. And so it has like some nice benefits there. But it also is an exciting place to work and learn. And, you know, you get given bigger opportunities. 

Ryan Bonnici: And so I think I was really lucky to kind of get in as one of the first marketing hires or I was the first regional hire and then kind of like built some people under me and prove myself out as like, hey, you know, I'm new to managing, but I can do it. I was a fucking horrible, I can say that, marketer or manager back then. I think it's like so hard to make that transition from like being a strong individual contributor to being a manager. It was especially hard for me and I think thanks to like a lot of executive coaching, I really learned that you need to really be able to balance relationships and results. I think for me I was like, so over index on results. I'm a super high EQ person. But for some reason back then in a work context, it was like the results component just consumed my mind. I was so driven on like growing the results that I didn't spend enough time on the relationships. And I think I learned that the hard way and was able to get really good coaching when I was at HubSpot to help me there. But for me, it's kind of like, owning a number. I think like owning a region is a really great thing too. Like if you're an Australian marketer listening to this, I would say I would try and get a job at a US company that is like opening their offices in Australia and they need like a marketing manager. That probably is the most important thing in me getting to where I got to because I think it gave me the opportunity to learn about every single part of marketing really quickly. 

Ryan Bonnici: If you're a field marketer at like in the US, for example, you're running a region and you're just doing like a sliver of it. Whereas when you are a marketer in a region outside of HQ, you're kind of exposed to everything like social media, PR blogging, dimension, email marketing, depending on the company, you may get more or less exposure. But at HubSpot, we ran everything for our region. It kind of like helped me just organically a bunch of these different channels so that when I moved to the US, even though I hadn't been a CMO before, it wasn't as difficult, I think, for me to move into that role because I'd run all of those things at a regional level. That's something that I say to a lot of, even just like marketers over in the US, I'm like, try and get like a regional role in the company that you're at because you'll just get so much more exposure and then you can kind of move on up with the learnings that you get from that. 

James Lawrence: It's good, good insight. In those early days did you have coaching or mentoring or someone you're looking at? Like I think across my career, looking at people that have gone into businesses that are fast growing, industries that are fast growing, not even in marketing. It just creates opportunity. And generally you're going to fare better than if you're in a declining industry or a declining business. Did you come to that realisation yourself or was that something you kind of worked on more strategically with someone else? 

Ryan Bonnici: Um, no. You know what? I think I had a few mentors through the years that I would rely on for very specific things. So as I was moving on up in my career and I think of myself as like a fucking master negotiator when it comes to like salary and compensation. I love to teach with my friends what I have learned over the years, but it's one of the areas where, like I actually did really specifically go out there and look into my network, family, friends, etcetera, and be like, who are executives that have moved overseas? Like speaking to all of them? Like, what did you negotiate into your packages? Like when I was going through that process, like I negotiated everything. So there's really specific things like that. I think that I'm good. When I realised I don't know much about this, let me go all in on that for, for other stuff. I think it was more organic. I don't know if I was like as much of a mastermind as I would hope that I would have been. I think for me, like the mastermind or the strategy piece just came from like this burning desire deep down to be CMO. 

Ryan Bonnici: Like I knew that very early on in my career and like even before I started working, that's what I wanted to do and be. And so I think I wasn't one of those people that was a bit confused around what they wanted to do. I was so focused on that. And so because of that, I think I was able to be kind of strategic, like as things arose. Like I remember at one point when ExactTarget was being acquired by Salesforce, I remember sitting down with one of my team members and being like, okay, just as a heads up, we're going to promote ourselves in our levels on our LinkedIn, so that when Salesforce is looking at our comparison to their marketers, we're going to be hired. I do have a pot on me that's very aware of optics and strategy. And that did work out really well for us. It was kind of a reverse acquisition. Salesforce acquired us, but then we kind of acquired their marketing. And I don't think based on my years of experience and just my age, I definitely wouldn't have been able to do that. Don't think had I have been pretty strategic. And I think part of that's luck and part of that's also like, I don't know, having been bullied as a kid when I was younger, I'm just always thinking that someone is trying to take advantage of me. And I've done a lot of therapy to work on this now. But that was one of those moments. Another CMO at their company is going to be working out; are they going to take me over? Am I going to take them over? Yeah. And it sounds even dirty saying that out loud right now. I don't think I've ever verbalised that before, but I remember being like, No, what? We're really good at this thing. We're not going to just, lie down giving up our patch and give up.

Ryan Bonnici: I think a little bit of a bit of strategy and just being a bit of a fighter. Then also knowing your worth I think also is really important for me too. As I went through my career, I think I was always, again, kind of to my earlier point about really focusing on a number and your impact. If I wasn't getting a promotion and someone older than me in another region was getting a promotion and was on my salary, I would go to my boss and I would point to my numbers and I would point to this person who was older and more senior. And I was going to say, with all due respect, we're doing more efficiency, we're driving more revenue. Why are they getting promoted? I think that helped me move on up over the years. 

James Lawrence: I always have the final question on the pod is always kind of what's that single piece of advice you'd give to an in-house marketer? Not to disparage the guest that don't give this answer, but I reckon some of the the the highest performing marketers and probably 50% of the people that appear on the pod will give that, which is you've got to talk business. You've got to connect it to a business number. You've got to you've got to have something to put your hat onto. What's your advice there? Are you talking one, two, three numbers? Are you talking a dashboard with 74 different metrics? How do you balance that when you know, 

Ryan Bonnici: I think it depends on where you're at in your seniority, right? So as a regional marketer, when I was a director or dimension person, for me it was really the revenue number was the most important one, right? Marketing source revenue, right? So I would always want to show, okay, this month of this quarter, we closed, you know, $100 million in revenue and 50 million of that 100 million was sourced by my team, right? So the sales team would have that all come from our demand and activities. So it's basically inbound versus outbound, I guess. It's not a competition. We all win. We all want to grow more and more revenue. But I think it's really important to be able to show your work right? I’m not the kind of marketer that's like, yeah, we influenced all these deals and I really don't have much time for influence if I'm completely honest. I think influence has a place, but way down the list, after source to me, I care most about source because it's too easy to gain influence, right? Oh, I sent an email to that contact or they came to an event - I influenced the deal. And yes, I'm sure there is an aspect of influence and you can build a really comprehensive and complex attribution model to maybe show that. 

Ryan Bonnici: But I mean, for me, it's all about source revenue or it was at least I think once you get more and more senior, I think at a C level, I actually don't know if I care as much about that anymore. I mean, I care about my team hitting their goals, but I think as a C level, more importantly, your job isn't just to hit your team's goals. It's to help the company hit their goals, right? I think you have to be able to put on your, your executive hat and say you know what? I might miss this goal, but I'm missing it because there's a more important company goal that we need to hit. And everyone will understand that and let's have that discussion as an executive team and then let's change the goals potentially. But remember, having a hard conversation at one point in one of my previous jobs where I was like, well, we're hitting our goal. They're not hitting their goal, they're not contributing their number that they agree to contribute. And my feedback was, look, at your level, they're all your goals. The chief product officer goal is your goal, the chief revenue officer goal is your goal. The chief people officer goal is your goal - we are one team. That was kind of a good realisation for me that you become a little less egocentric, I think, at that level because it's true, right? If we smash our goals and the company doesn't smash their goals, I don't want my team to celebrate. 

James Lawrence: And you know, looking at your career, you've done such a good job of moving at the right time and moving into good roles that have kind of provided that next step on the journey. 

Ryan Bonnici: That's probably something I am pretty strategic about. I think for me, I care a lot about learnings, to be honest. The moment I plateau in a role, and I'll be pretty open and honest with my boss as well. I'm plateauing. I don't feel like I'm learning as much anymore. You can throw stock and comp and whatnot at me, but I actually care less about that because I think that's short term thinking, more money right now. Whereas I think learning and accelerating your learnings is long term thinking. It will make you more money in the long term. There's definitely been roles where I've been offered more money to stay and I haven't taken it because there isn't a role. I'll already have factored that in if I'm leaving. Is there an actual role that I can learn more in at that? Or maybe there isn't. So I think for me it's really about learning. I mean, I think it's weird. My average is about three years with most likely with, you know, I think that's literally the amount I've spent with every company and that's not intentional. It's not like I'm a three year and then I'm an out person. But I think for those companies, it I felt like I had learned all the things that I could learn, right? 

Ryan Bonnici: Like at Salesforce, an exact target. You know, there was, I guess part of how I think about career and learnings;, what do I want to learn? So I always wanted to know B2B and B2C, right? And so I started in B2C at Microsoft. I then moved to kind of B2B with ExactTarget, Salesforce, HubSpot, HubSpot's a little bit B2B/B2C. Just the inbound motion, which I always really liked. So I kind of have been pretty strategic in the sense of I wanted to do B2B, B2C, I wanted to do direct to consumer, I wanted to do Marketplace. To me, I think that the best marketers are the ones that actually don't necessarily have the deepest specialisations, but go pretty deep in all areas. I'm never going to go as deep as an SEO person in SEO, but I reckon I probably have 80% of what I need to know and a lot deeper than most people. And I think if you can do that, kind of like a T shape marketer, but the top part of the T is very deep. My long part for me is revenue is probably what I canvassed about. So yeah, I have kind of thought a lot about that. And, and then the industries that I'm going into and I'll kind of, I'll factor in a lot of things, right? I would always look at G2 reviews because I don't want to join a company that's offering me great money, even if people don't the product because that's again, not going to work out. 

Ryan Bonnici: Similarly, I would always look on Glassdoor to see what's the culture like internally? Because if the culture is bad, that's going to impact the product and the innovation and turnover. Yeah. So yeah, I guess I factored in a bunch of those different things and you know, I care a lot about also the team I'm going to be on, right? So the leadership team at GymPass is really, really remarkable. I feel like such an imposter with all of them. Everyone is so much smarter than I am, which I like that, right? I wouldn't want to be the smartest person in the room, that would be, insufferable because you wouldn't be learning anything. And I'm not that smart anyways. So to me, being around really smart people and learning from the way they think I love. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's good. But maybe that leads a little bit, because I wanted to ask you about kind of what drives you. You think the continual growth and learning is an interesting one, but kind of what you said before about almost wanting to prove to yourself that you could kind of move through and get to that level, is that still the drive? 

Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, it's weird. I had a bit of a reckoning once I became CMO, which is what I wanted to. Weirdly, I'd set myself a goal when I was really little. I think 10 or 12, I was like, I'm going to be a CMO by 30, and I'd kind of forgotten about that. It's so funny how I'm not into that whole manifesting business, but I think there's a little bit to it in some ways. If it's not just a fluffy manifestation, but if it's a deep thing that you're working towards, I think it really helps. But when I got there, it was weird. Initially, I was so happy I was over the moon. And then within a few months I started to feel like the itch again was like, what the hell? I got the job that I've always wanted and I'm unhappy, and I started being like, okay, well, I guess I need to be a CEO next. And then I need to be a VC and then whoa, right? Calm down. You've never wanted to do those things, what's going on? 

Ryan Bonnici: And I was able to kind of = dig deep in therapy and really start to recognise that achievement and money and material things was a huge thing driving me. And I still all those things, right? I think they're maybe less they're less in control of my happiness today, as they may have been in the past. I think the other thing that also kind of has driven me a lot is I've always loved the idea of whatever you do, do it really, really well. Having a two year old son now, you know, if he wants to be a garbage truck driver, I'm okay with that. If he's just like the best fucking garbage truck driver, I don't even know if that's a good thing to think. I don't even know if I would put that pressure on him. But that has always been my mentality in the past. It's like, whatever you do, do it well. If otherwise, what's the point? I think I don't even know if that's fully healthy. But that's sort of been a little bit of what drove me, I think some perfectionistic tendencies and wanting to achieve lots. 

James Lawrence: There's a lot of drive, a lot of drive within there, right? 

Ryan Bonnici: Yeah. It's faded over the years, which is a weird thing, actually. I don't feel as much of it as I did in the past. And I think in some ways it's a bit uncomfortable, but it's also kind of a really nice feeling to not feel like you have to go, go, go all the time. So it's been an interesting transition. 

James Lawrence: What do you think the best marketers do in terms of career progression from your observations you've dealt with? Hundreds of thousands of marketers. Right?

Ryan Bonnici: I mean, so many people. To be honest, one of my peers said this in a tweet and it was so on point. And I think the best marketers, the best thing they do, is they choose the right company to work for. And I don't know, I think that's true of any role, the best sales reps, etcetera. Good marketing will only make a shitty product fail faster in my opinion. There may be some different views of it on this, but yeah. The best marketers really understand the product that they're going to be selling or marketing as a sales, didn't they. And is it the best, can it be the best? What's the goal? And I think once they have identified what are the up and coming companies and products and G2 is how I used to sort of guide myself there. 

Ryan Bonnici: They then work out, is the go to market sales motion? Is it something that I have the skill set to, to be able to execute upon really. I love Airbnb. For example. I'd be at Airbnb, in an instant. Would I be the best CMO for them? I don't have as deep experience in B2C and direct to consumer. It has a lot of marketplace elements and I've got that experience, but I don't know, I'd have to learn a lot. And so I think, you kind of have to match your skills and or your learning abilities, right? So for me, when I moved from Microsoft to ExactTarget, went from B2C to Enterprise, B2B was totally different, but I kind of like jumping in, like I said before, and some new areas and some new industries and some new go to market motions. Because I think once you learn it, you then become so much better than everyone that just does that thing. Because now I can pull on enterprise, I can pull on inbound, I can pull on SMB, I can pull on direct to consumer, I can flow marketplace and you just get exposed. I think more tactics and more go to market frameworks that then make you a little bit better.

James Lawrence: What does a day to day look like? Kind of curious, you know. It's a big, big company. Good budgets, lots of people.

Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, it's different. I think I have about 300 people on my team at GymPass. I guess my days look quite different here than they have at previous companies. It's kind of depends on the stage of the company. When I joined GymPass, the company was like, we're more than doubling our revenue every six months like crazy growth. So I think when I joined, the CEO said to me, you don't need to rush to do anything right? We're growing incredibly well. We're hiring you for 2 or 3 years plus, we're hiring you for what our growth look like in the future, not because we need you right now. We're doing fine. So that allowed me to feel less pressure because teams are hitting their numbers, which is great to see. A lot of it's like working with the team really. I think once you have a team in the hundreds, especially 300, I can't get my hands dirty. I love to. That was a thing that I had to get used to.I love the craft of marketing. It's taken the last few years to actually not write the email copy or to not set up the SurveyMonkey questionnaire. I love that shit. 

Ryan Bonnici: It's a lot of time as I spent working with the teams and I'm really fortunate that I have six incredible VP's under me. And so for me, how do I remove blockers for them and their teams? I feel like a third of my day is removing blockers for my team. And mostly that involves getting alignment between me and another and executive leadership team member around; my team has escalated an issue that you're having with another team. Let me speak to the other exec and let's work out what's going on and then get the team moving quickly. A third of my time is is kind of more operational. Coaching the team, working with them on whatever they're working through. If they're struggling to hire someone, it might be helping them think about job descriptions or if they're, you know, working through a big kind of project on something, reviewing it and just helping them think about it as an outsider to help them do it better. So that's kind of more operational stuff, your standard things like one on ones and employee calibrations and town halls and things like that. 

Ryan Bonnici: I don't think I do a good job at this, but I try to give myself a third of time for me to think about things that are bigger than the reactive stuff because I think that's such an important thing. The more senior you get, you're kind of needing to start to think about problems that are going to arise three, six, nine, twelve months before they arise. When I joined GymPass I noticed that we are very dependent on paid media, we spend a lot of money on paid marketing and it's great it worked for us. But paid marketing keeps getting more and more expensive and you're just renting audiences that way, right? So reflecting on that helped me realise we really need to build out a big organic growth team so that we don't rely as much on paid. Not that we will never stop doing pay. That's a great channel especially if you need to pop up your MQL etcetera because inbound isn't cutting it. It shouldn't be the majority. 

Ryan Bonnici: And then even just thinking a bit more about how many times are we emailing our audience, we have millions for those that don't know, right? We sell B2B first to companies. So a company like Rocket Agency would buy GymPass and then they would give GymPass to all their employees. And then your employees then would choose, if they want to buy a certain level of gym pass, which gives them access to gyms all around the world. So there's that B2B motion and then there's the B2C motion after that. And so we had never really done a good kind of matrix around, how many times are we emailing our database? Because they go into different nurtures different push notification tracks through Braze and other tools that we use and we change pricing plans sometimes. And so we're doing this right now, really getting a deeper insight into are we doing a good job of managing our audience or are we sending certain segments too many columns or too little columns? There's both sides of it. 

Ryan Bonnici: Recently, we were deep diving into reviews online. Pulling together all of our reviews from the Google App Store or the Apple App Store, Trustpilot, G2 and then there's a dozen other versions of G2 that are very country specific as well, right? In Brazil, there's something called Reclaim Aqui. I think in Germany there's different tools. And so starting to focus on all of our regions. That's something that wasn't an urgent thing, but it was more, I really want to get an idea of what our customers and users are saying, and you start to see some really interesting trends. And so I don't know, that's where I try to spend a third of my time. It's realistically probably isn't a third, but that's how I would to maybe spend it.

James Lawrence: And what are you doing for your own professional kind of personal and professional development? How do you keep growing? 

Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, that's such a good question. Once you're in the C-suite, I think of growth in a few different ways. I feel like there's learning more about just business and how businesses operate. I think all of the exact team learns from each other, right? They learn a bit more about marketing. I learned a bit more about finance, about products. We're all kind of learning about our different domains and I feel like I get a lot of on the job learnings that way. I've done a good job over the years at building out a really strong network of CMOs, really amazing companies. I was just texting one recently. I was like, hey, you went through an amazing IPO two years ago. We're going through due diligence, we'd love to kind of pick your brains on all of your learnings. So I feel like that was something that I didn't have immediately when I moved over to the US five years ago. And now I feel really happy with my network of peers that I can lean on not just as a professional but personal friends too. 

James Lawrence: How have you gone? Because I think the network bit is so important for marketers at any level. How have you practically gone about it? 

Ryan Bonnici: I'm like a weird, extroverted introvert. I don't know what I am, but to me, I've always done that. So when I was a field marketer, even a long time ago, I would reach out to other field marketers at other companies and I'll be like, hey, why don't we learn from each other? Let's go to lunch. I would just do lunches all the time back then. And even as a CMO, when I first started, I would take other CMOs out to lunch and just get to know them on a personal level. And I would typically have things that I could share to them that would help them and vice versa. And so I think I'm just not afraid to do cold outreach. And I think it's not about take, take, take. It’s about give and take, right? I'll reach out to them and I'll say, hey, I love that campaign of yours. I had some thoughts. We're doing a really good job on this part of marketing. I think, you know, no offense, but you guys can do a better job here. We'd love to share some feedback with you and would love for you to give me any feedback that you have on our marketing that you see. I'm sure you have opinions. 

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Ryan Bonnici: I love learning and I love meeting people too. And to me, a one on one lunch date with someone who I can learn from and vice versa, so nice and also a really nice way to vent about things too. Connecting with other CMOs early on was so refreshing because all the common aspects of your job that are difficult, you can't typically talk about that with your team or your exact team. And so it's nice to be able to have that as an outlet and to learn from those other people. So I think, yeah, to me that's always just been a really natural thing. I've never really forced it. I think you can force it that I've tried to work on my teams, that I feel that they want to do that, but have struggled to do it. And I'm like, I think a lot of people think it's weirder than it is to reach out to someone you don't know and say, hey, let's get lunch. And I just it's not a weird thing at all. 

James Lawrence: No. And I do it all the time with other agency owners. And I think when I was younger, I would think, nah, the competition, you don't that's not what you do. 

Ryan Bonnici: It's not a zero sum game, everyone. There's so much to learn from each other and if you can be vulnerable and give a little bit of something to them, they'll reciprocate. When I'm building relationships with folks and again, this isn't intentional. This is just who I am. I'm not afraid to share things that other people would be afraid to share. And I think when you're really vulnerable and authentic with someone, it's almost I think it's actually potentially impossible for them to not give that back to you because there's just a social reciprocity. I think it's one of the seven laws of power or influence. I can't remember that book, but it's when someone gives you something, you feel the need to give them something back. And so if you show up and you're vulnerable and you share with an agency founder a struggle that you're having, they're not going to be like, oh, yeah, okay. They're gonna be like, oh, yeah, we went for that. This is what we found. Or maybe they have something different.

James Lawrence: 100% I think that's a great learning for marketers on the pod. Basically anyone on the pod. I think you get it. Get out there, meet people, learn from them.

Ryan Bonnici: It's so fun too. It's so much fun. Then you have those relationships throughout your whole career in life.

James Lawrence: Yeah, perfect. Two more questions, Ryan. The first one, best decision you've made professionally?

Ryan Bonnici: Interesting question. Probably moving to the US. I think it would have to be that. We were talking about this before we started recording, but I just love kind the way the US views tech and growth and I think I'm unbiased in saying this, but I think even when I was an exact target, we always found that the US market was the most advanced, Europe kind of followed Asia, kind of lagged, and then LatAm lagged behind Asia. And so for me, I always wanted to kind of be at the front end of of it all where the the tech was being built and where the strategies are being tested first. And so I think I've learned the most in my career and I've been open to the most opportunities moving to the US. But I think importantly, what I kind of mentioned before is I think the timing of a move that is key. If you are wanting to do something like that, I wouldn't if I have moved to the US at the start of my career, I don't think I would be anywhere near where I am today because I wouldn't have had that end to end regional experience, which was essentially a regional CMO without the title. I think part of it's that I think a big part of it, it's just luck as well, to be honest, in the right place at the right time and just having a good gut feel for which companies are on the up and which companies aren't and think, I've made a mistake once in my career on that front, but most often I'm right. And my learnings from that time that I made that mistake was I wasn't a customer of the product beforehand. 

James Lawrence: And I think other than you're talking about the are you talking about the two weeks you worked for us?

Ryan Bonnici: No, no, no, no, no. Talking about when I was at Web. And you know, whereby lie love the team whereby and love the product, but I wasn't a user of it and I didn't really because I wasn't a user of it, I didn't realise that they didn't really have product market fit. They had kind of a product situation fit, right with Covid. And that really boosted the numbers. But then post Covid, there wasn't as much of that fit, I think. And they pivoted and I think they're doing really well now. So, I don't mean anything bad about that. I'm such good friends with that team, but think to me, I just had Jagger. I was just coming off paternity leave. I was ready for a change and I don't think I gave it as much thought as I had always done previously. I learned from that experience. But, you know, I landed a GymPass, everything kind of happens for a reason. And and I've never been happier than where I am right now. So it's good. 

James Lawrence: It's good. Proud of you. And the final question, which I've already given you, the intro to the best single piece of advice for aspiring marketers. 

Ryan Bonnici: We talked a bit about obviously the revenue piece and owning a number. I just I think more than that really is taking risks. I've always been a risk taker in my career, right? Whether it's negotiating salary with my boss and or it's Salesforce. We were launching this new product, and I took, 25 skydiving because I was like, we're taking them to the cloud. And it was huge. And everyone at the CEO at Salesforce kind of wrote about it and the weekly newsletter helped me get my brand out there and opened up opportunities for me at Salesforce. I'm not a fan of the status quo. I kind of hate actually the status quo. I don't want to be the person doing what everyone else is doing. The term best practice is - I just can't stand that because best practice means basically everyone is doing it. And so it's hard to innovate on something that everyone's doing. And so I've just always kind of been someone that wants to push the needle on. 

Ryan Bonnici: Whether it's a campaign that I'm doing, I just want things to be different. And, and I think when you are willing to do that, it gets you seen internally, you get more attention. And then if the results are positive, which I've been fortunate they have been, then you're getting more attention. And then that's showcasing your great results. It's hard to get attention if you work for an international company when you're in Australia or when you're in a region. It kind of forced me to have to do things bigger and better to get attention, to get recognition from HQ. Not being afraid to push the needle and take some big swings whilst driving impact and think yeah I tell my team is all the time but I don't think you can do those big risks and the big swings if you don't have your fundamentals working right. So for me it's been the first few months in your job getting the metrics that you need to move. So if you need to drive email revenue, if you need to drive social media, follow up, work out the easiest and most repeatable way to hit that metric, and deliver on what the business needs of you. 

Ryan Bonnici: And then you then start to take the big swings because if the big swing misses it doesn't matter then, because I'm still hitting my goals. So I think I've always, really worked hard on getting the fundamentals working so that I could play, and really have fun and think, you know, you were you were kind of working with HubSpot when we launched like the email signature generator, right? This little free tool. It costs us $6,000 to build and generated tens of millions of revenue organically because it ranked number one to signature and stuff like that. I don't think you can get the bandwidth to think about those things if you are struggling to meet your number. So it's meet your number and then take some big bets. Because we're in business at the end of the day, right? The numbers have to be a hit. And then if they're being hit, then there's a tolerance for a lot of other stuff. But if the numbers aren't being hit, it's not so positive. 

James Lawrence: Legend. Well, Ryan, thanks so much for coming on to the pod. You've achieved so much in such a sweet time.

Ryan Bonnici: Yeah, you've done well with the agency. It's so amazing to us. 

James Lawrence: Thanks. I'll get you on at another time. 

Ryan Bonnici: Would love it. I would love that. That'd be so fun. 

James Lawrence: Good stuff. Thanks, Ryan.