Project Management for Marketers

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer podcast. I'm here today with Gavin Watson. Gavin, welcome to the pod.

Gavin Watson: Thanks, James. Pleasure to be here.

James Lawrence: It’s good, good to have you on, mate. So Gavin is currently Senior Marketing, Creative and Retail Industry Lead for Asia Pacific and Japan at monday.com. Gavin, you've got over 20 years of experience, essentially all in that tech marketing kind of space.

Previously worked at Outfitter. io, Automation, as well as a stint or quite a long stint at WPP. So I think today, I wanted to get into, I guess, the intersection of marketing, marketers, technology, processes, systems, like, I guess you get to see from under the hood, right, with so many different businesses as to how the best performing marketing teams are using technology to kind of help them behind the scenes run campaigns and get project management and those types of things moving, but also then how technology is then kind of infusing marketing.

How they're actually running those campaigns. And also I guess you see the struggles and pitfalls of prospective clients coming to you at monday. com and the types of problems that they're struggling with. So, big topic, but I kind of felt that maybe a really good place to start is just to talk around the main challenges that marketers are facing at this kind of intersection of project management, technology, automation type space.

Gavin Watson: Yeah, I mean, it definitely is a big one to try and chip off a bit. Solve that problem. I think if we solve that, we're doing well. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think if I look at the fundamentals, what marketers and their teams are trying to do, they're trying to go from a strategy and then execute on that.

And I mean, ultimately, that's what most business, most organizations are trying to do. But what I see consistently is for all best intentions, a great strategy is put together. But then. Executing on it and being able to execute on it with the speed that the market. Dictates and once now, and also all the complexity that are involved, like there's so many different channels that marketers are working within.

There's so many different data points that technology has come into a lot of organizations with the right intentions, but someone put it quite a interesting lot of the other day. They said it's almost like there's tech diabetes out there. There's such bloat of technology that's in organizations. And so.

Getting in and around all of that to get the information out of it that you need to actually get the processes put in place has actually become really difficult.

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Gavin Watson: So that's one side of it. Then the other side of it, you've got organizations that are still operating in a semi manual way. So over time they've grown organically, but the business hasn't been able to keep up with putting new systems and processes in place.

So there's still Operating in a semi manual way as well.

James Lawrence: We have quite a diverse listenership of the pod. It can be interesting. Like what are the symptoms, the common problems, I guess, that some of the smaller marketing teams would be having. So I'm thinking a one person team or one to five working as a pod, you know, the types of challenges they're struggling with, but then if you move through to, I know, Because you guys do run the gamut, right?

You have a really good small biz offering, but then you also do work with very, very large enterprise businesses. So what does it look like at the, um, the bigger teams, right? Where you've got marketing teams that are in the hundreds and I imagine there's a very different level of complexity there. So I think maybe if we could speak to both and also good just to talk about I think storytelling helps us as marketers to understand it to all humans.

So I think, so happy to hear about how different businesses are solving different problems that you've worked with over the years.

Gavin Watson: Yeah, I mean, it's again, really interesting question. I think it, it depends on a number of different things. Like the smaller teams that we work with, they're obviously managing and doing a lot internally themselves.

Gavin Watson: When you get up to the larger teams are often working with external agencies, external parties. So you've got. competing priorities and collaboration and communication, you know, is the key when you start expanding out. But if I start and look at the smaller level organizations, they're doing so much.

Gavin Watson: They're trying to They're trying to get new products to market on new service, new offering. So they're trying to do a lot with what they've, what they've got. What we're finding is that people are looking for one key platform that can solve a lot of what they're trying to do. So as a company, Monday originally started out as a project management tool.

Gavin Watson: We've evolved from there and saying that a lot of our customers, we've got over 200, 000 customers globally. Started creating a CRM solution in Monday and then on the other side, we're saying obviously marketing and and those sides of things happening. So at that smaller scale, companies and organizations are trying to find if they can one system or a system that can plug into other tools that they've got that can help them solve a lot of what they're trying to do.

Gavin Watson: But above and beyond that, it's given the visibility, no matter what level of the organization that we're talking to, be it small, medium or large enterprise, the common thing that I hear and the common question I ask is, what visibility do you need? You've got all these tools, or you're still working in a manual way.

Gavin Watson: What is not working for you, and in most cases it's visibility. What they want is visibility as to what's happening through the business, what's happening externally once they put content or campaigns to market, and then what's happening with third parties. So, traditionally what's happening is tools and systems are coming into place, and then you've tried to get the reporting out of it afterwards, which, you know, I was talking with someone recently and they said, by the time we get the reporting, it's three days old, the data's old.

Gavin Watson: So We actually can't leverage that data. So a lot of what we focus on at Monday is let's look, first of all, what do you want to get out of it? What is the reporting and the data that you need? Let's work backwards from there. So with a lot of the smaller teams that I talk with for them, I find that a lot of the data and a lot of the information stuck in spreadsheets or stuck in email or stuck in chat tools, which.

Gavin Watson: A great for the intention that they were there for, which is very one to one, but getting all that into consistent format and then bringing other data sources in becomes difficult for them. So, Monday is solving that at that level. And also then if they're looking for something that can have like a CRM can then have, you know, if you've got ticketing and stuff coming in, if you've got projects that you're working on in the marketing and creative and the campaigns and the kind of stuff.

Gavin Watson: Linking that all together so you've got one holistic view as to what's going on. That, that's where they get value and they get immediate value. And

James Lawrence: I think it'd be good to talk enterprise next. But when you're talking kind of, um, visibility data, what like, I totally appreciate the idea that it's, it's worked backwards.

James Lawrence: You know, what are these, what sort of visibility you need? Then let's see, you know, what, what tool and framework works best around that. Monday. com has evolved, right? I'm sure when you go out and say, who do you work for? You say Monday. com, people think project management, right? And then I think it's about.

James Lawrence: The business is broader than that now and it's kind of that's an education piece that will take time, but are we talking visibility into internal metrics like, you know, briefs and deliverables and approvals and whatever else, or are we talking visibility into essentially the holy grail of marketing metrics and closing the loop and attribution and performance from a, um, an outward facing campaign kind of approach?

Gavin Watson: Yeah, no, 100%. So Monday caters to both. So if I look at it from the, yeah, project management perspective, you know, we've got customers like mydeal. com obviously started out as pure play. Online retailer got acquired by the Woolworths Group. So they're using Monday for exactly that. Incoming briefs, looking at resources, then looking at, you know, who's going to start working on that.

Gavin Watson: Resource management is a hot, hot topic. I mean, obviously, going in and out of COVID. What I found with a lot of organizations was that prior to COVID, there was a lot of workload being pushed on workers, and there wasn't a lot of visibility. The expectation was that that work would get done and pushed out no matter what it was going to

James Lawrence: take.

James Lawrence: Coming

Gavin Watson: out of COVID, there's a very different mindset. Now it's about making sure the health and the work balance is there on the workers. So having the visibility of that is, I'm seeing, becoming top of mind. So Monday can cater to that as well. Yes, all the internal works around getting content produced.

Gavin Watson: We've also got, you know, ways that you can mark up and annotate on content. And if you've got a digital asset management system, push it to that. Or Monday can cater to that as well. Then on the other side, the metrics coming externally in, so from Facebook, from SEMrush, from Hootsuite, we can actually bring those in.

Gavin Watson: We've got, um, direct integrations or APIs that can bring those in. So again, if I go back to the reporting, above Monday, you can have a dashboard. And that dashboard is bringing all that data on what's happening internally up into giving you visibility to it. And then on the other side, you can bring external metrics in.

Gavin Watson: So we've got customers that are using both levels of metrics. So they're able to look at what's it taking us, what's it's costing us, how long is it taking to Work on what we're doing internally, like producing content, getting briefs, and then how is that performing once we get it out in market?

Gavin Watson: And I see that organizations, and particularly for marketers and CMOs, having that data in real time is so valuable because it's showing them all the trends. Okay, this campaign we've got a market, it's actually doing really well. Let's maybe produce some more content around that or This is actually not trending as well as what we thought.

Gavin Watson: Let's maybe pull some of that budget and actually put it to another area. So the energy equation definitely concated

James Lawrence: above. And we were talking before recording, there's going to be marketers, I'm sure, listening going, yeah, sounds good, but the company's already signed off on a three year deal with, you know, Salesforce or with HubSpot or whatever else, or we love using those tools, those platforms for certain elements.

James Lawrence: So maybe if we could talk, don't have to talk about specific other platforms, but like how. Monday would potentially integrate in with like and how some of the use cases there and some of your clients and how they're using different tech platforms and bringing them together.

Gavin Watson: If I look at that It's really about understanding what's working well for these organizations.

Gavin Watson: And yeah, you're right. They may have a particular solution or system in the business that is working well, or has been so embedded into the business. Like you look at an ERP or a financial system, they are heavily embedded into organizations. So trying to replace the disrupt, that makes no sense whatsoever.

Gavin Watson: So from our perspective, in the way that we work and our channel works, it's about. Mapping out what is the key stack? What do we need to integrate with or work alongside? I mean, we've got large retail organizations that we work with and we work across most or all of their different entities. They're running large other pieces of technology.

Gavin Watson: We're just integrating and working in with that. And I think from the marketing perspective, the most common thing I see where Monday It fits into either enterprise, mid market, or at the SMB level, it's the planning part. In a lot of cases, that's done in spreadsheets or it's done manually. And that's where Monday can really play and cater to that, irrespective of what the other tools are that are being used.

Gavin Watson: You can come in and plan out and map out. What are the campaigns? What are the activities that we're doing this week, this month? Who are the teams that need to work on it? What are the tasks? Have the automations, have the reminders there. But again, rolling that back up into a dashboard so you can come in today, first thing in the morning, have an automated report that shows here's where we're up to.

Gavin Watson: Here's some bottlenecks I need to jump into and resolve. That's all there at your disposal and I think that's what no matter what level of the channel I talk to that's what marketers are looking for. They just want the visibility and be able to, you know, make reactions to that as soon as they can. Is that often how

James Lawrence: a relationship will start where the tool will start to be used by a discrete person or a discrete team within an organization and then it kind of goes from there?

James Lawrence: Like I know that was always the Atlassian model, right? Which is always just get one dev in an organization kind of. Loving it and using it and then it kind of grows like do you have just marketing teams running Monday? Whilst the company broader is running a whole bunch of different systems. That's amazing, James.

James Lawrence: You've figured out our, uh, figured out our secrets. Well, we're going to have to chop this bit out of the pod. You're, uh, I think you wouldn't be the first SaaS business to be looking to that as your strategy, right?

Gavin Watson: Yeah. And I mean, a hundred percent. I mean, I don't really like using the term, but land and expand.

Gavin Watson: That's definitely what happens with Mondays. So, we start out in a team, in a small team, that starts using it for what makes sense for them.

Gavin Watson: Really quickly, other teams get exposed to it. And again, it's often through the reporting or the dashboarding or it's through sharing tasks. Once those other teams get exposed to it, yes, they want to understand how they can use it as well. It is definitely the way it works. What I'm also finding now though is that, Once we start talking to a team and understand the other parts of the business, they work with both internally and externally.

Gavin Watson: So back to the point earlier about, you know, marketing teams working with external agencies as well. Very quickly, those agencies will start working with them on Monday as well. So, outside of traditional in house marketing and in house brands, we've got a lot of agencies working with it as well. So we just onboarded a large agency recently that brought on a new client and that client was using Monday.

Gavin Watson: Bye bye. And they got exposed to it and started using it as well. A lot of the media work that we do with large retail organizations they're using Monday to manage and plan. So. The exposure from what they're doing at Monday is going to their brands, to their media agency, who are also using Monday as well.

Gavin Watson: It sort of builds out, yes it is, starts with a smaller team, but then we often find it just quickly evolves out from there. And again, it's just about everyone being on the same page and getting the efficiencies.

James Lawrence: Yeah. And proof's in the pudding, right? I think it's like, it's not like it's a nefarious play.

James Lawrence: It's the proof's in the pudding. And if people enjoy using a product and it helps, you know, solve challenges, then it's a good thing, right?

Gavin Watson: Yeah. I mean, definitely. Definitely. And I mean, I think. You know, the visibility and the transparency is key. I mean, I worked in at WPP and at the agency side and you see that I think now, because everything moves so fast, everyone wants transparency and visibility.

Gavin Watson: And that's both sides. That could be, there's a lot of rounds of amends and changes happening. Let's have a transparent conversation about it and resolve that because it's going to benefit everyone. Both parties or the speed and time that it's taken to do things. We need to look at that to be able to get things out quicker.

Gavin Watson: And so, you know, Monday's got the ability to bring that to the surface in a non intrusive way. And then you can add, is that in a meaningful manner?

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. I mean, obviously sitting with an agency cap on clients want collaboration. Can you, you can never communicate too much. Like I think gone are the days where there's this expectation where.

James Lawrence: You know, everyone's perfect and everything done is perfect. I think everyone has an expectation that you'll like some stuff. You won't like other stuff. Balls get dropped, but it's about honesty and owning that. And I think the more that two sides of the fence can actually see what's going on and can talk about it, the better the result, right?

James Lawrence: And the better the relationship that you have.

Gavin Watson: Oh, definitely. And I think the other important thing there is a source of record like Monday. Yes, is a great tool for managing processes and like we're saying CRM and stuff like that. But the most critical thing is having a source of record because employees move around so much, relationships change, stuff changes.

Gavin Watson: A source of record is so important. And that's what a lot of the marketers and teams we work with. That's what they're looking for. A source of record as well. Yeah, it makes

James Lawrence: sense. I think my very broad question earlier on, which was kind of more about the SMB, but then also larger businesses. I think we've kind of almost got there with some of the larger businesses, but I guess any other.

James Lawrence: Things that CMOs, non marketing stakeholders in some of those bigger businesses, like what challenges that we're helping to overcome here or obstacles that, you know, a solution like this is helping with?

Gavin Watson: Yeah, I mean, I think, again, if I go back to the first point that I made, going from a strategy to execution at the highest level, that really is what Monday is about and having a source of record for what's happening along that way, I mean, if I think about, Some of the other types of organizations that we work with, , they're using Monday across a lot of aspects of their business, from planning, from, you know, working on events, to working with sponsors, to working with, you know, what's a facility going to look like.

Gavin Watson: We've got manufacturers that are using Monday from a manufacturing perspective.

Gavin Watson: I mean, budgie smugglers, great Aussie icon brand. They started using Monday. Initiated a plan, their product development process. It then evolved into the marketing team. So if I think about, uh, a small humble startup business that started with, you know, one or two users using it to manage the process of creating and making the products and evolved into the marketing and then evolved into helping their international expansion.

Gavin Watson: So what are the different steps that we need to take? How much capital are we allocating to that? So, It went from being, yes, a point solution to being very integral in how their business works. Understanding the priorities and then understanding all the different things they're doing in an organization, that's where Monday's been able to come in and help them.

Gavin Watson: And with, say, like,

James Lawrence: Budgie Smuggler, how would their marketing team be using it? Like, it'd be just interesting to dig. into that, like, like how they use it in a

Gavin Watson: similar way and how they use it in a different way. Yeah. So with BudgieSmug it was really interesting use case.

Gavin Watson: I think about some of the things that are happening in the market for them and obviously the Matildas and stuff like that, wearing their garments. So for them being able to plan out where they're actually going to produce content and send the content is a key area where they've used Monday. Obviously digital marketing is a huge part of what they do.

Gavin Watson: So. Understanding the channels they're going to be pushing into understanding what content they're going to be pushing out. Interestingly as well, being a seasonal based business, like heavily evolved, obviously around summer and being an international business, they've got different campaigns. They're running at different times around the world.

Gavin Watson: So having that mapped out and planned is really vital to, are we bringing out a new range for this side of the world? Are we bringing out a different range for that side of the world? We've got to plan it in advance. So having that all set out. Knowing the tasks, knowing what's happening behind it, even potentially linking into inventory and seeing what's trending online and stuff like that as well, really is helping them plan out and then execute on, obviously, the marketing predominantly digital campaigns that they're running.

Gavin Watson: It's really cool. Can you talk a little bit about best

James Lawrence: practice or, in your experience, how you see the best performing relationships between senior marketers and non marketing stakeholders? Like, how are they working together, what kind of data is being presented to each and how technology can help with this.

James Lawrence: Cause I think it's, um, it's obviously a massive recurring thing on this pod is kind of how you deal with non marketing stakeholders. I think really interesting to hear about the best performing teams and how technology can kind of help with that.

Gavin Watson: Yeah, no, really interesting question. I sat with a large enterprise recently and we, and a lot of the C suite was in the room and the marketing team rightly fronted the conversation and said, look, A number of our executives here believe we're the colouring in room in the business.

Gavin Watson: That's what we do. We colour in pictures and produce stuff to the market. And that was a bit of awkward silence there to start with. But for them, the way they overcome it was just giving them the data. Like, I think once people can see the data and understand what's going on, they then feel more comfortable with something.

Gavin Watson: Maybe they're not accustomed to and understand. So what I mean by that is they were producing dashboards that they were sharing with the other executives to say, as the marketing team, here's how much budget. We are spending on what we're producing to support the sales and support the rest of the business for this quarter and for next quarter.

Gavin Watson: That was visually shown in a Monday dashboard and with that budget, here's what we're producing and here's how it's going to support the sales or the global expansion. You know, they had OKRs that they were running in their business or KPIs, so. With the OKRs we're working on, global expansion was one of those OKRs.

Gavin Watson: So as the marketing team, here's what we're doing to help support that OKR. Then from a sales perspective, it was amazing to see how the barriers quickly broke down because. In a lot of cases, I don't think it's resistance. They think it's just people don't understand and don't want to look like they don't understand.

Gavin Watson: So they'd made it real easy for those other teams to understand who, again, were very analytical in their approach and what they were doing for their part of the business. And they were able to look at those dashboards and then dig into it and actually get more meaningful where. It was actually interesting.

Gavin Watson: They started trying to give guidance on brand look and feel and it was like, hang on a sec. That's not what we, but at least they'd got into the conversation enough to understand and say, okay, I do understand why we're doing that. And wow, I didn't understand how much impact this is having on your resources because the other issue they had there was that.

Gavin Watson: They were asking for additional capital to go and work with freelancers because the volume of work that we're producing was so high. And it was like, hang on a sec, you guys just aren't getting enough output, but when they could actually see how much content was being produced and how much different streams of the business they were supporting, because there was that, but then there was also supporting internal stuff like internal pitch decks and proposals and stuff like that.

Gavin Watson: So it really exposed it in a quick and easy way that everyone could articulate to say, okay. We do understand a bit more now about what's going on. So again, it's back to that point I was talking about earlier. What is the data that you want to have visible? How do you actually get that done in a meaningful way that it's going to help across the business?

James Lawrence: Yeah, nice one. I want you to take your monday. com hat off for a second here, if that's possible. Um, I imagine there's gonna be a lot of marketers listening. And it's like, yeah, this all sounds good. Sounds great. You know, I've watched the 90 second explainer video, you know, a whole bunch of these tools over time.

James Lawrence: And I've come in and it's really hard to get systems embedded. It's really hard to get sales teams to work on. It's hard to get, you know, production or whatever it might be under one tool. There's going to be businesses there listening where it's, we're not moving off of industry platform X, which runs, All of our fulfillment or whatever it might be.

James Lawrence: So I think just more advice on combining tools and software with business processes and, and how do you get the best outcome. And so I think there's going to be some where you can drop one system in and potentially it does everything. And I think you're going to have others where for the technical or business reasons, you just can't.

James Lawrence: You're always going to have multiple. So we just like big picture advice for marketers listening as to how they actually can generally operate in a best practice kind of way. Cause it is so hard, right? All the tools sound fantastic and they offer all this amazing stuff and data is going to give you all this power to make decisions like you've never made before.

James Lawrence: And I think a lot of businesses over the last 15 years. Taking advantage of technology and systems, but then they're also drowning in a sea of, you know, deliverables and tasks and things that don't quite work and we're having to fall back on spreadsheets for certain things and so yeah, just general advice for marketers out there.

Gavin Watson: At the outset, you've got to have a champion. So either that marketer themselves or someone else within their team or within the business that's going to help champion. I mean, I see, again, if we go back to one of the points you raised earlier about, you know, Sort of land and expand that in most cases happens through a champion.

Gavin Watson: Someone brings it in for a reason. They then champion and support it going broad across the business or broader within their team. Again, in a lot of cases, I find that is the marketer. If it's in a smaller business or the CMO or the head of a department that's doing that, have to have a champion that's endorsing it.

Gavin Watson: It then really is about, if you go a step further from that, the current tools that they have in place. Which ones are working well? Which ones are critical? Which ones aren't working well? There's, there's always an area where things aren't working. Again, if I try and look at that in the simplest of terms, it's often that things are in spreadsheets.

Gavin Watson: So we've got data stuck in spreadsheets. We've got workflows happening in spreadsheets, which are then going into emails, which are then going into, Chats, which are then going into conversations or lost all over the place. So that in itself, there's not a tool that's kind of reply. Yes, we do have competitors that are doing that as well, but I kind of look at those two things.

Gavin Watson: And then it's really about where is the business trying to go? What does the business want to do? How's the business trying to evolve from where they are? I mean, an example I can give is Taronga Zoo. So Taronga Zoo. Obviously COVID hit, what are they going to do? What are they going to do? They obviously started running a phenomenal online program.

Gavin Watson: You can imagine all the tasks and stuff around that trying to manage that in spreadsheets. Yes, they've got other great systems, but Monday was brought into the business to help do that and run other programs. And it's expanded from there. It was a champion that really took that and ran that further and then got.

Gavin Watson: at their size, had IT involved and then sold the benefits of it. But I think if I go back to just summarize that, definitely have a champion. And again, the great thing is often it's the marketing lead or the marketer themselves understand what other tools are important to the business. And often that's there.

Gavin Watson: And then look at what other areas of the business, you know, you can get the capabilities from, and again, to the point I raised earlier, what you want to get out, what reporting are you missing? What visibility do you need? Because in most cases what happens from there is you quickly can work out what the workflows are that you want to work with, start with, and then obviously get value straight away from there.

Gavin Watson: I

James Lawrence: love that. That's a great, great response. I think you can, marketers can lean on that, on that kind of response, right? As to kind of, there's so much complexity in moving parts in a space like this, leaning on fundamentals. Now I want to take a bit of a segue, such a hot topic, listeners are very interested in it and how it's applying to their job.

James Lawrence: But yeah, AI, automation, like what impact is it having on your space?

Gavin Watson: Yeah, I think AI is interesting. I mean, it is interesting, but I think we're forced to say that now 100%. I was waiting for you to rise. Um, I think from my personal perspective and where I see it playing with Monday as well. It's a support.

Gavin Watson: It's not a replacement. So it really is about supporting and help enabling. What the individual, what the process is doing. It's not about replacing it. It is not about trying to replace. So an example of that could be a brief comes in. That brief has on it. We need a copywriter. We need a designer. So the chat bot that we've got in Monday or the AI Monday could look at the resources that you have and make a suggestion and say, based on that resource type that you need a creative resource or a copywriter.

Gavin Watson: Here's who you have in your current directory available. And based on the time that's allocated out, you know, Gavin and James are available today. James is built at this rate, much higher than Gavin. And Gavin's at this rate. As it

James Lawrence: should be. As it should be, exactly.

Gavin Watson: Um, and then give a suggestion around that.

Gavin Watson: Now, that's really powerful because a lot of what I've seen in agencies and even with teams today is that managing that resource side of it, and if it is a cost center where you're trying to make revenue out of it, Understanding that takes a lot of time. So that's a great enabler getting started with briefs or even helping pull from previous briefs and stuff like that.

Gavin Watson: Again, another great enabler. So what we're doing is Monday is we will be bringing out AI chatbots that will sit into different types of workstreams. So that's an example there around creative. It could be as simple as, you know, I see a lot of companies now struggling with all the assets they've got. Now, how do I go and find the previous campaign that we ran?

Gavin Watson: And the ones that had, you know, X, Y, Z, um, talent in them or whatever, use AI to leverage that. So, there's a lot of ways that we're using it. We're also using it for help and support. So, I was recently talking with our support team and it was phenomenal here the way that we can now respond to things in a much more meaningful way, leveraging AI to obviously give that support to customers in a, in a better manner and actually give better support around that.

Gavin Watson: So, I think within the product itself and for marketers and teams using it, it's definitely about helping them. Get more done and be more effective and then within how we support our customers, we're leveraging it from that side as well.

James Lawrence: Yeah, it's really interesting. And then in terms of monday. com, what's the kind of, what's the, what's the presence look like in Australia?

James Lawrence: I think you're based in Melbourne, in Sydney today, but what's kind of the presence and the, and I guess the, what does the future hold? Yeah,

Gavin Watson: so we've grown rapidly over the last, what, five years, you know, we started out with one individual, uh, MD, Dean, working out of his, uh, cupboard, as he likes to put it, um, and we're now 100 plus, so, you know, it's been extreme positive growth, positive in a number of ways, I think, in terms of how we've scaled as a team locally, it's been really positive, so a lot of the resources that traditionally sit at a head office level, They know to bring those locally, which is great.

Gavin Watson: And then even scale in terms of number of customers and volume of customers that we've got, I mean, we're operating across. Almost every industry I can think of in some capacity, we've got stronger footholds growing into industries that we're focused on, like retail, marketing and creative and manufacturing are key focuses, um, for this particular period of time.

Gavin Watson: And then in terms of our channel presence as well, so we have a large channel presence. So a lot of the customers that roll out with Monday, they either self serve themselves, they come to our internal support or they use that channel. Our channel infrastructure has grown. Got some fantastic channel partners who are there to help, you know, roll out customers.

Gavin Watson: I mean, I was on with one of our channel partners earlier this week who's doing a lot of work with the quick service restaurant chains.

James Lawrence: And

Gavin Watson: helping them roll out, store rollouts and store updates in Monday. So you think about something like that and you go, I'd assume there's pretty good processes in place.

Gavin Watson: It's all stuck in spreadsheets.

James Lawrence: It's automating

Gavin Watson: that and getting efficiency. So, I mean, the future for us, you hear it repeatedly. Again, it's one of those words. It feels like we're only just getting started. But I think now that We're becoming a multi product company and obviously focusing on a platform that can manage all those core aspects of work.

We've got a deeper local focus around CRM, so we've got a team focused on that. We've got a service product coming out, resources focused on that. We've got a development product for dev resources. We've got resources focused around that. So, we'll continue to grow and expand, but it's really about how can we keep serving the customers we've got, but also, you know, get that message out there that.

Monday is more than just a project management tool. It's becoming a multi product platform.

James Lawrence: Yeah, nice one. Mate, I finish, um, every episode. Of a pod with this question. What's the best piece of career advice that you'd give to a marketer? So think, just leaning back on all your experience and you've worked agency land, you've worked in client side, you've worked in tech.

So just, yeah, like what, what advice would you have to give to a marketer? What's that best piece of advice the best marketers do?

Gavin Watson: Yeah. I mean, uh, it's probably more broad than this and I try and say this to my kids as well. You've gotta fail to learn. I think so often, and in today's day and age. Rightly so, or want to be successful and make sure everything's perfect.

I think I started out like that myself as well as most people do failing at something and learning from that is our most important because you know that you can come back and keep going. That might be something very small, maybe something a lot larger, but I think if I could go back and give myself that advice a lot earlier, and even from a marketing perspective, I mean, I've seen it happen.

You know, numerous times and you learn from that and you pivot from that quickly. But if you're hanging on to it, trying to convert it and getting it to be positive, that can actually be a detriment. So I think Learning that failure is not a bad thing, but learning from it is, is one bit of advice I think is so valuable.

It's awesome.

James Lawrence: I think good, uh, not just good career advice and it's good life advice. And I couldn't agree more. And I think part of that sounds like, not condescending, but I think some of it does come with age, doesn't it? You kind of learn that you do, you do learn so much more from your losses than your wins.

Gavin Watson: A hundred percent. And I think obviously I spend a bit of time in startups and doing stuff like that. And I think that's what you learn very early on that. Even when you're going and seeking funding or seeking people to be involved, they're like, give me an example of where you haven't been successful.

It's actually really interesting because they want to know that you can come back from it. And I've seen some really successful marketers, really successful agency people actually admit it. So this is what I learned and this is why I pivoted to do things differently. Yeah, take a seat if you want to learn all about the mistakes I've made.

James Lawrence: Nice one, Gav. Well, thanks for coming on to the pod and sharing all of your wisdom today.

Gavin Watson: Nah, it's been a pleasure.