We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Laurel Mintz a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Laurel, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
We keep creativity alive at Elevate My Brand by hosting a weekly creative meeting with the entire team. Every person on the team has input on creative assets and development in process for every client because everyone has a different creative perspective on different things that different clients need. But before we discuss any of the creative needs on the client side, we host an internal creative exercise with the entire team. These exercises are super creative, silly, and fun. We have done exercises like telling a story using emojis. Since creativity is at the core of everything we do at EMB, we ensure that we fold it into everything we do on a weekly basis.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
At our core, we’re a marketing agency. I think marketing agencies are kind of a dime a dozen. But to say that we’ve been around for 15 years is really special. We’ll be 16 years old in February, which I can’t believe. Thank God for Botox in LA! The fact we’ve been around for so long tells people that we not only have clients who love what we do, but it also shows the world that we do great work and have a very special, unique team. On top of that, our process is proven. That’s what makes us special. We always say that we don’t take ourselves too seriously and that we truly, really, genuinely like each other as a team. We also have a no-assholes policy, so we try to work with clients and people within the team and on the client side that we genuinely like. Another thing that makes our leadership style and us unique is that we’re constantly iterating. We’re a pretty flat organization. A perfect example is that we’re working on a new product that Gigi, our Account Manager, came up with in our last quarterly planning meeting. She had this great idea that led us to start building a new product for clients who can’t necessarily afford full agency support. So we’re constantly iterating on new products and services to serve different markets, different segments of the markets, and to make sure that we can provide the services that we know the audience that we service needs at any given time. That’s the great thing about marketing: it’s always evolving and changing. There are new channels that come and go all the time. We are nimble and pay attention to what our audience needs and what’s happening in the market. We evolve really quickly and we listen to each other due to the nimble nature of the agency. That’s what makes us such an exceptional team and firm. Also, our commitment to working with diverse clients is really special. We’ve worked with over 350 brands and over 200 have been diverse-led. That’s an important, unique piece to us as an agency, and we stand by that model. As founders evolve and we see more diverse founders, the fact that we did that early and often, and how that’s core to who we are, I think that will continue to give us longevity in the space. So stay tuned for the announcement of that new product!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Being a lawyer and being trained in the Socratic method has been incredibly impactful throughout my journey. It meant that even if I didn’t exactly know what I was talking about, I always sounded like I did. I would go into meetings with people and brands that were much bigger than we had any business being in the room of, and we could close a deal. So that gave us access, and we got deals closed with some of the biggest brands in the world very early on that we frankly had no business being in the rooms of.
My team is also nimble and we never have too big of an ego. So if someone on the team or externally says, hey, what if we tried this? Or have you thought of this? As the leader of the team, I am never like, no, this is how we’ve always done it. We are always curious and looking to evolve and be better.
The third skill or area of knowledge is the area of play and fun. That’s what has made us successful over the years. Our clients really can feel that when meeting with us the first time. It’s part of our pitch. It’s part of the conversation. It’s certainly part of the work that we do in all of our sessions. We want to make sure that people don’t look at marketing like this really amorphous journey. We try to demystify the experience and even make it a little bit fun. Frankly, we want this experience to be fun for our teams. I would never want to wake up and go to work at a place that I didn’t want to go to every day and have a good time. Work is work. Let’s be very clear. But it doesn’t have to be a grind every day. And that’s something that our whole team agrees on.
The advice I always give to people who are early in their journey is that everybody’s faking it, so don’t be intimidated. I take calls from anyone who is early in their career, and it always amazes me because I’m on lots of stages. I give out my personal information all the time, and very few people actually respond to me. So the few that do, I tell them that they’re really special because the fact that they were able to get up the nerve to actually reach out means that they’re already a step ahead of the same people at their age and stage, right? Just having the energy and the nerve to pick up the phone and get over their fear is the best thing you can do. Be scared and do it anyway because everybody’s faking it. I’m faking it all the time. I just have more experience in faking it, so it seems I know what I’m doing more.
The other tip I would give is more tactical, which is something that we do every day at Elevate. It’s called the Assumptive Close. So when we are in a meeting with someone and think they’re going to be a client, we always put our next meeting on in the prior meeting. So we’re always assuming that we’re going to close that deal. It’s a great way to continue and push the conversation and the narrative forward effectively. Either if they’re not ready yet, or they’ll never be ready you’re getting to the yes, or no faster.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
My answer to this has changed as I’ve gotten more mature in my career path. Early on, I was all about the schmooze. My mindset was that I’m a networking girlie, and that is what I’m good at. I don’t need to know how to do numbers because that’s just not my jam. So, I’m going to hire for that. There is some truth to knowing what your skill set is and hiring for the things that you’re not great at. But I also believe you need to know a little bit of everything to be a well-rounded leader and entrepreneur. My business changed when I really started to dig in and understand. Early on in my career, I hired Karen, our bookkeeper. She’s been with me for 12 or 13 years. The company’s almost 16 years old now, so she’s been with me almost since day one. She would do all the books: accounts payable, accounts receivable, all the HR stuff, everything. The day that I started really paying attention to the numbers, really digging into the P&L, really looking at the expense sheets, really looking at our projections, that was the day that the business started taking off. As much as I said I wasn’t good at something, it’s not an excuse for not understanding how it works and not paying attention to it. So I think that it’s a little of both. It’s not that you have to be great at something, but it’s not an excuse not to know anything about it. You need to know how to do every step of the job to understand and know how to hire properly for every role. It’s really important to understand every layer of how the different aspects of your business work. Otherwise, you become obsolete within that business. And you can also risk someone being too dangerous in that category, right? They could take it and run with it and do something that, if you have no idea how it works, could actually do more harm than good.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.elevatemybrand.com
- Instagram: @elevatemybrandla & @laurelmintz
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurel-mintz/
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