01 Meet Your Host - Tim Curtis Aug 5 2021

Erik Martinez: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine, and I'm super excited to introduce The Digital Velocity Podcast where you will learn a lot about digital marketing and probably a lot of other things along the way. I'm here today to introduce my co-host Tim Curtis, President of CohereOne. Tim is a long-time friend and former client. We work on a couple of projects together and we decided to give this a shot.

So, like to take a little bit of time today and learn [00:01:00] about Tim. Tim, welcome to Digital Velocity.

Tim Curtis: Thanks, Erik. It's good to be here.

Erik Martinez: So Tim, tell us a little bit about your path in digital marketing.

Tim Curtis: So my path in digital marketing actually started, I would call it a little unintentionally. My initial path into marketing was through database and it was actually taking deep dives into large datasets, helping to kind of develop audiences for global marketing campaigns in Europe and in the United States.

As a result of that, I started getting into email and early pay per click. That was kind of an initial outgrowth as we were in the I'd call it the Wild West stages of early web development and e-commerce. That was really where I got started and just fell in love with it.

So everything I did from that period on was really all about connecting all of the different pieces of what I would consider to be a strong e-commerce ecosystem and connecting that with the larger ecosystem of a business and just had so much fun doing it.

Erik Martinez: Interesting. So tell [00:02:00] me a little bit about how your path to CohereOne and what CohereOne does and how that ties into digital marketing today.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. So, again, a little bit of a journey, a little bit of a story. Initially, when I started out, I went to my undergrad in marketing and started in international business and marketing specifically. So I was running country operations throughout Europe and the United States and Canada. Then of course also in Australia, but my path kind of continued to evolve, and I was working both from a data perspective, as well as a digital marketing perspective, and those two paths kind of converged, and I started kind of weaving in-between time on the client-side and time on the agency side.

 Fast forward to a few years ago, and I was doing digital marketing consulting for large enterprises and got a call from a good friend of mine who said, now don't say no.

That was initially how the conversation started. He said, we need [00:03:00] to tap somebody to be the next executive for this agency and consulting firm, and we think you're the, you have the right qualities to do it. So a little bit about that, CohereOne is a firm that got started in the early nineties under a different name, but it's kind of evolved over the years.

The focus of what we historically worked on was data, strategic data, and databases, et cetera, and really the largest expression of that was for direct mail campaigns, catalogs, et cetera. Over the years, as those have continued to be large focuses for the brand, now we're working with a lot of clients on helping to engage their larger ecosystem.

So for example, we're taking a lot of their digital marketing and the digital indicators and cues and feeding that into their offline marketing campaigns. So we're really optimizing top of funnel and bottom of funnel for clients. We also have strategic engagements where we act either directing all the strategy or we're also in roles of directing strategy.

Plus we're the de facto CMO [00:04:00] for the brand. That journey actually kind of culminated just in a good friend, a connection, and saying, hey, we think you're the right fit for this. So that's how we ended up at CohereOne. That really is the business of what we do today.

Erik Martinez: So, Tim, that's obviously a lot about your work background, tell me a little bit about something that nobody else knows.

Tim Curtis: One thing that most people are surprised to know is that I turned down very significant scholarship opportunities for vocal performance, and I did that instead to focus on studying marketing international business.

My goal had never really been to be a singer and to have the stage and the lights and et cetera, but I did come to a point where I had to make a conscious decision that that really wasn't what I was going to do, but I have found that all of that training and all of that background has certainly helped me from a business perspective because I do a lot of public speaking.

So, that vocal performance really was a [00:05:00] solid foundation upon which I could build a speaking career. So that's kind of one of those little things that most people don't know about. Every once in a while go out and do some singing.

Erik Martinez: So does that mean you'd sing The Star Spangled Banner for us right now?

Tim Curtis: I would not. but do thank you for asking though.

Erik Martinez: Oh, man. What a hater. All right. We'll move on.

So let's dig in a little bit and talk about your career in general. We've all had these interesting challenges through our careers that brought us to the place that we're at. Can you tell us a little bit about one thing that you wish you had known when you started your career?

Tim Curtis: Yeah. I don't know if there's one thing. There's a couple things that generally I've kind of bookmarked for myself, if you will. Just something that I remind myself when I think about career and as I've done speaking engagements. A couple of Bible lessons, anybody in their career, they're going to have setbacks.

I think there were times when setbacks, maybe company performance, et cetera,[00:06:00] and I've come to realize that those are really what I would call plot twists, nothing more. So I tend to not get so upset about setbacks. I tend to look at them a little bit more objectively. Second thing is a quote I've heard several times and I really have kind of made it my own, "Mistakes are tuition. Learn from everyone you make."

Those are really, really valuable lessons to me. The last ones I would say is things I wish I had known is be curious. Sometimes I think people get a little frustrated when why is he always asking questions? But if you don't lose that inquisitive nature about yourself, you'll go further in life and you'll go further in your career.

Then lastly, don't be afraid to ask the questions, but then listen. Don't always speak. I think that was a key learning for me from an early age.

Erik Martinez: We both run agencies of our own and listening is an important skill, right? Listening to our clients talk about their issues and their challenges and their successes, right?

We sometimes [00:07:00] focus overly on the negative and not the positive. So that's where some of that innate curiosity comes in. Tell us a story about a time where a client of yours came to you with a particular challenge and you had to dig in and find a solution.

Tim Curtis: So just a few years ago, we had a client that had some very, very significant business challenges.

They would classify their market as being highly disruptive. I would counter that. I think it's very difficult in today's world to find businesses that aren't in a very highly disruptive vertical, but in this case, they really felt like they were facing some major decisions.

They engaged us to get a better sense of what was happening with their customer base and essentially have a better understanding of if I had a dollar to spend, where would I spend it? So long story short, we spent a lot of time testing and validating a lot of assumptions with the client to determine what the right level of investment was and where that investment [00:08:00] needed to go.

Unfortunately, at the end of the engagement or the end of the study, the client said very insightful, but the CEO himself said, but I think I have intuition on this and, this is the direction we need to go. We actually laid out his vision and laid it against the set of data and understood the impact of that provided some revised what I would call proformas or forecast on what could happen potentially if those changes were made.

Unfortunately, in this case, the client did plow right ahead and within about eight months, the resulting changes had a cascading effect which ended in bankruptcy and dissolvement. So, unfortunately, it's not a happy story, but it's a story with a lesson that I think is important that sometimes the consequences are so grave that we really have to balance and be aware of our intentional [00:09:00] bias that we all carry with us.

It's hard to fight against that. When you're working with clients, you don't always know when you're engaging where or what that bias is, but you will uncover it. I think it's incumbent on those of us who now reside in an advisement capacity that we have to not only layout, here's a plan but also lay out what's at stake.

So that would be what I would say as a story of the potential effects of client engagement and the unfortunate side effects of when decisions are made that maybe aren't best for the long-term.

Erik Martinez: Let's dig into that. Over the years, you and I have talked about this concept of leading with bias, right?

I know when I talk to clients, we are all making assumptions all the time. I remember one of my first bosses way back in the day said, you never make assumptions, they're evil. I kind of countered with, but you got to make assumptions and then you got to validate them. You gotta [00:10:00] validate the truth.

I find that in our busy lives today, that more and more marketers don't necessarily take the time to validate their assumptions and that the underpinnings of their plans are actually working in the way that they are. Can you shed some more light on that? I know you're in discussions with CEOs all the time. What do those conversations sound like?

Tim Curtis: So what do those conversations sound like? There are some consistencies in the conversation. Obviously, the voices are often quite different, or quite desperate, but where I would say there's some consistency is in laying out what I would call some not warnings, but just some general knowledge when we're tackling assumptions.

We begin to see a bias beginning to creep into maybe a conversation or there's some strategic plans that have been laid out that clearly have an element of bias. One of the [00:11:00] things that I like to talk about specifically is something called Angel's Cocktail. It's probably something that people aren't necessarily aware of.

It's an area of neuroscience or psychology. The Angel's Cocktail specifically is a combination of dopamines, oxytocins, and endorphins, and when those flood your system and you're super passionate about something, it could be in those early stages of falling in love.

Well, the closer you are, the more over the top passionate about these things, then chemically, the less objective you are able to be. So oftentimes these companies and these executives have found themselves unintentionally neurologically and psychologically, walking into a predicament where they are setting themselves up for failure, because they didn't realize that the longer and more that they have built this momentum towards a goal that they wanted, the less objectively open they've been to examine those [00:12:00] motives and understand that chemically they're not really at a place to do that.

So when we talk about that with clients, it's important to understand the ramifications. These are very, very important issues that if we don't get right and we don't lay these out and have an honest conversation, then we're not putting our best work forward, and the client is not going to have the best opportunity for success.

So sometimes I think people envision these conversations with executives being around maybe a particular channel and sometimes that's true, but I've found that we have to typically have a larger conversation. Sometimes that also includes merchandise and maybe the effectiveness or lack thereof of their merchandising mix.

So all in all, pretty important conversations, but you really have to lay that groundwork if you really want to be successful.

Erik Martinez: So when you run into a CEO or a VP that has some of these preconceived biases, how do you attack [00:13:00] that and be like, hey man, we can't go down to the cocktail lounge and drink some of this Kool-Aid.

What evidence do you provide to help persuade them, move in a different direction?

Tim Curtis: Well, you have those conversations. Just like the Angel's Cocktail. You talk about what you're observing. If you find, and you do find this at times, that the individual across from the table is not willing or is unable to make the necessary adjustments, then it really becomes a decision on your part.

Are you going to roll forward with the client for an engagement if the very framework is not setting itself up for success? Now, a lot of times agencies will do whatever they can to grab an engagement, but I like to think that we're a little bit more objective about that, and we look, is the client going to be successful?

If the client's not, and they're really wanting to do a particular strategy that we see from a data perspective that it's not positioned well for [00:14:00] success, then I say it really then becomes a decision on our part on whether or not we're going to go forward with that engagement. I think it's perfectly fine to say, hey, you know what, that's not what we see and we're not comfortable going that direction. Perhaps there's someone that maybe is better aligned for your particular goals.

Erik Martinez: So that conversation got to feel pretty intense. I guess the thing that raises some concern or alarm bells in my head is what data are we using too? In digital marketing, many of us use Google analytics as our source of truth.

We know it's imperfect. Digital tracking while has gotten better, is still very suspect from time to time. How do you reconcile the fact that sometimes the data that we're working with relative to the assumptions that your clients are making are shaping some of the decisions that we're making as marketers?

Tim Curtis: You know well [00:15:00] enough that when we handle an engagement, we're not looking for Google analytics to necessarily tell us the truth, because it is largely directional. We will take a large export of raw data and then begin to work from that. We try to strip out the channel activity out of that, at least initially, in order to get a sense of what's happening. How many buyers are in this customer's database or in this 12-month database? Is that number shrinking?

Is that number growing? If we're seeing, for example, merchandise purchasing habits that are declining rapidly in what we call the hotline segment, which is a zero to three month or zero to six-month hotlines who are typically the best buyers, then we know there's some larger conversations that need to be had. It then turns to, you know, deeper dive.

Maybe it's a lifetime value study. It could be looking at particular channel activity, what's happening with the email program, et cetera. So we go back to a Google analytics for an example, or the web analytics platform of choice, and then we'll [00:16:00] begin to look at what we have from a data perspective, and how does that line up with the story we're seeing coming out of the web analytics.

 That's where you start to piece things together and it becomes a puzzle and slowly but surely a mosaic begins to emerge. It's not something that you can push a button and get. I think one of the things that we've got to remember with digital marketing is that a lot of digital marketing happens in a black box.

We don't have visibility to a lot of the algorithms, et cetera that are running, and that's a question for digital marketers. Those are things that we have to constantly question and ask is our best interest at hand within these algorithms. We do try to look at other pieces of information, primarily the transactional file, to look at what transactions are occurring, where they're occurring, how they're occurring, then through what channels are occurring and start to build a pattern of the interactivity between all those channels.

Erik Martinez: Interesting. Well, we kind of diverged from Tim Curtis and then to some bigger issues. [00:17:00] So I'm going to draw us back to Tim Curtis for a moment. Tell us a little bit about the types of tools and resources that you're using to stay on top of this game. We were just talking about analytics and that is just one piece of a very complicated puzzle that is digital marketing today.

What are you looking at? What are you listening to? What are you reading?

Tim Curtis: You said something there that spurred a thought in my head. I mentioned earlier about the two stages, the analytics, of course, what's happening in the data, and understanding that is key.

 I think the more important element really is not necessarily just the analytics, but it's the conversation and the thinking around what's at stake, which demonstrates a higher level of strategic thinking.

Really getting outside of the normal paradigms of thinking of channel activity or potential channel shift between two channels. So at the risk of sounding just a bit disingenuous here, I [00:18:00] really do tend to focus on a couple of things. The first one is podcasts.

There are a few podcasts that I routinely listen to because they help me think from new perspectives. I always kind of thought of them myself as masterclasses that I get to sit in on for free. I can't begin to tell you how many ideas were germinated or concepts developed from listening to those podcasts.

For me, they're really, really important to keep my vision focused, and that's what helps me to kind of think, all right, maybe I'm not thinking at this from the right perspective. Then I kind of go about it thinking from another angle.

Erik Martinez: So what's your favorite podcast to listen to?

Tim Curtis: You know well enough to know that I don't have one particular favorite, but I'll give you three. I'll give you three or four, I guess that I routinely listen to. The first is Consulting Success Podcast by Michael Zipursky. Michael brings on a lot of consultants like myself who talk about their journey, but also what's unique about their perspective. I really enjoy [00:19:00] hearing their work and what's happening with them, and how they think about problems.

Two other ones actually come more from the academic side. One of which is The HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I am a subscriber to Harvard Business Review and I find the content and the interviews, very, very enlightening and really again, makes you really think about issues.

The other is Knowledge at Wharton, and that is from the Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania. The topics are really sometimes all over the board. One of my favorites was one actually about antiquity, Roman antiquity. It was the great minds of Rome, Caesar, Cicero, et cetera. Just fascinating stuff.

Then one of the last ones that I like to listen to is actually with Malcolm Gladwell, it's called Revisionist History. It's really rethinking history from a different perspective. Again, it's all about thinking, positioning yourself to think.

 The other exercise, kind of see if I can explain this here, involves a bit more imagination. So a couple of years ago, Michael Watkins [00:20:00] published a book with HBR Press and I've got it right here in front of me.

It's called The First 90 Days. Yep. That's it. It easily ranks as one of the most influential books to my career and my career development. It's about essentially how to onboard in the first 90 days of a new job to ensure you're up to speed faster, you're transitioning as best as humanly possible, yada, yada, yada, but I've adapted it for further use.

So at least twice a year, I go in and I approach my executive role or a role with a client as if it's my first day today. Now it takes a lot of mental focus because you really have to re-examine the mundane and the status quo. You got to ask yourself, is this the most efficient way of doing this? You begin to see the organization with fresh eyes, you identify new areas of growth, places maybe that need to be cut back or optimized.

Erik Martinez: Tim, give me an example today that you're experiencing that's kind of [00:21:00] mundane and needs to be transformed within your organization.

Tim Curtis: So one of the things that came to mind one of the last times I did this little exercise was I was taking a look at the story we were telling with the data and how that story was being told, what dashboards, what visuals, et cetera. I put myself in the perspective, this is the first time I'm coming in, these numbers don't make any context sense to me. I don't have that context. Then all of a sudden I was able to view it differently.

I was able to view it as an executive who maybe doesn't have the same degree of data literacy that I have. What I found was in examining that the way that we were presenting that data at the time, some of those key salient points might not have been best communicated. So it was really going back to examine, what this piece of information here would have been better represented in something visual than it would have in terms of some type of [00:22:00] number on, whether it's on a presentation or a PowerPoint or something like that.

So that's an example, but if I had just done the mundane, I would look at those numbers and I wouldn't necessarily have gone through that mental exercise of taking all the context and stripping it away to understand, you know what, this really, maybe this isn't the best way to present this information.

Erik Martinez: Sounds like a free day in my house with my wife.

Tim Curtis: Well, there you go.

Erik Martinez: So Tim, who do you think are the most influential people in your career? Whose helped you shape where you are today?

Tim Curtis: Well, the first one's easy. It'd be my dad. Unfortunately, we lost him earlier this year. He's somebody who played a hugely influential role in my life. From the importance of character development and integrity to a love of all things history. He read just about every biography, historical account, spiritual memoir, whatever he could get his hands on.

It didn't matter. Some of these things were like phone books. That [00:23:00] devotion to lifelong learning, made him an incredibly well-rounded individual. The full impact he's had on his fellow man throughout his life, we'll never know, but yeah, I miss him.

He was a giant of a man, but his influence in those areas are things that I'll continue to carry with me the rest of my life and I'll pass on to my kids. Let's see, another one that I would say is someone that has influenced me, of course, some of these I obviously have not met, but would be Winston Churchill.

I have not met Winston Churchill. Yeah. That would involve a time machine, unfortunately.

Winston Churchill's life was obviously extremely interesting, but I really found his leadership, his writing, his speeches, especially as he was Prime Minister during World War II. That period of time when Great Britain stood alone versus The Axis, he literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Even when he faced sort of abandonment, even within his own cabinet, the courage of his convictions held him strong. He did not flinch staring Hitler in the eye. Of course, obviously, the rest is, as we say history, [00:24:00] but there's some incredible leadership lessons there. If you start to read the stories about what all was happening, you begin to recognize that he literally, at times, he was holding together the entire British government in order to get through those dark days of The Blitz.

When they did, when they came out of that, they had a fighting spirit that nobody in Germany, in particular, could match. So it really became a distinct advantage. I've always felt as if he's got some great history lessons that we could all learn from in leadership. The last one, I would say is kind of a twofer.

Erik Martinez: Doesn't that mean there's four Tim? You said three and now this is four.

Tim Curtis: Maybe I'm only following half of what they do, right. So half plus half equals one. Yeah. So we're getting into math. No, it would be Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive. Steve Jobs probably a bit controversial to say that, but I'm purely talking about the business context, not Steve Jobs the man.

What I learned from watching [00:25:00] Steve Jobs and the ascendancy of Apple, really was how, number one, he had an unwavering commitment of simplicity married to design. Period. There are so many well-known stories of Steve Jobs entering a room full of engineers who'd spent the better part of a year or two developing a product only for Steve Jobs to walk in the room, draw a very simple diagram on the front of the whiteboard or whatever, and then basically have them adapt their plans and renderings to that level of user experience and walk out of the room.

He was unwavering in his determination that he was not going to be influenced by the quote-unquote tech crowd that then began to complicate his devices and make them harder to use.

When you look back on that, you begin to see that that singular focus is really what helped Apple develop into what Apple is today. The other side of that is Johnny Ive. for those of you who don't know, Johnny Ive was a long-time [00:26:00] designer responsible for the creative direction of Apple.

Johnny did a great interview with The New Yorker and back in 2015, where he really stressed the importance, and I quote, "Consumers can feel when something is designed carefully, even if they can't articulate it." So I feel like, and I tell clients this often, we live in a time where design and then intentionality and form and function are supreme strategic advantages.

It doesn't matter if you're talking about technology or if you're talking about apparel. If you look at apparel and just the different types of fabric, the different types of fit, we're living in a period where the level of intentionality has never been higher. I feel like Johnny Ive taught me that you've got to be relentless in the pursuit of that right design ascetic, that right form, and function, particularly when you're dealing with anything that's consumer-facing. People are very, very particular.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. You know, Tim, that is a really, really good point. Everyone listening should apply that to your websites.[00:27:00] We have many, many, many, many, many examples, some that we've created ourselves that we're just sitting there and going, I can't believe I created that monstrosity because it is way too complicated for anybody to understand.

Tim Curtis: Yep. Well, and you think about that now, and you think about when for example, we're seeing clients create. They're now spending more money on these very highly emotive, very highly deriving print campaigns that are merchandising the products in incredible ways, and it's driving a high degree of qualified traffic to the website, and that website is either A, not optimized for that traffic, B is not really contextualized and personalized for the audience that's coming, or C just flat out stinks and is not set up for that level of design. Right away, you're losing all of that engagement.

Erik Martinez: Pop quiz.

Tim Curtis: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: Your favorite website?

Tim Curtis: Oh man. My favorite website.

Erik Martinez: Time to move on.

Tim Curtis: Apple.

Erik Martinez: I knew you were going to say that. By the way, [00:28:00] Tim where's Apple shirts all day long.

Tim Curtis: I do not wear Apple shirts all the time.

Erik Martinez: He has Apple branding on his forehead. No.

Tim Curtis: I will say I have now officially switched to pretty much everything in the Apple ecosystem. It just works better for my life.

Erik Martinez: We have this debate frequently. Okay. Least favorite website. Go.

Tim Curtis: Least favorite website? probably Drudge Report. I hardly ever, I probably haven't been there in six months, but it's hard for me to make sense of it all. There's just so many headlines and so many colors. It is what it is.

Erik Martinez: Favorite color?

Tim Curtis: My favorite color? Black. You know I was going to answer that.

Erik Martinez: I knew you were going to answer that. Some might say that's my favorite color as well.

So Tim, what do you like to do outside of work? I think I know the answer to this.

Tim Curtis: For a long time, I was a USTA tennis player. So tennis would have been my answer. I had an injury a couple of years ago that slowed me down a little bit. So now I really spend my time doing three things. Love to cook, actually have a huge [00:29:00] passion for cooking.

Erik Martinez: What's your favorite thing to cook?

Tim Curtis: Favorite thing to cook? It's probably either bulgogi, which is a Korean barbecue dish, or something Italian. Those are probably the two that I would probably say are my two favorite cuisine types to cook.

Beyond that, I would say, I work out a couple of times a week with a personal trainer. I really, really like that. That's something that kind of helps me reset and push towards a goal, which is good. Then the last thing is something that a couple of years ago I started, which was ancestry. Had a question, something came up about genealogy and I didn't have an answer for it.

So I remember asking my parents, hey, do you know anything about that? I realized that we didn't really know anything beyond just what, anecdotally had been told to us. So I kind of set out on a journey about six years ago. Fast forward and now I've got all sorts of information that goes back roughly a thousand years.

Made a lot of interesting discoveries and it's one of those things that when [00:30:00] you get into it, it just sucks you in. It's sort of a little bit of a mystery, but it's fun to do.

Erik Martinez: So are you a peasant or were you related to a Scottish or Viking Lord?

Tim Curtis: Yes, I was, as a matter of fact.

Erik Martinez: Tim, one last question for the audience. If you could do anything in a world with no limits on cost or whatever, what would that one thing be?

Tim Curtis: So I would move to Europe and study languages. Period.

Erik Martinez: Really?

Tim Curtis: Yeah, I would start in Barcelona because I have a deep love of Spanish culture and language. That was one of my majors in college and in international business. Then I would make my way around to France, Italy, Portugal, and Romania and I would get the five romance languages that stem from Latin. That's easily, easily the one thing I would do. Languages have sort of come easy to me. I actually did some study as well with [00:31:00] Korean.

Erik Martinez: Well Tim, we want to be respectful of your time and just have a couple more questions before we wrap this up. Tell me, in what we do every day, there's a lot of complexity and myths about what we do and the voodoo behind the scenes. What is one common myth about our profession that you would want to debunk?

Tim Curtis: So good question. There's probably a couple. The first one I would say maybe is a little bit more specific to CohereOne. As you know, we focus very, very heavily on data advanced audience development.

A lot of times that does end up in the offline channels catalog, direct mail, et cetera. I think sometimes when you start talking about data and real intense usages of data, there tends to be a mindset that okay, that's for either a database or that specifically going to feed into a catalog or a direct mail campaign.

 You don't realize that great strategic [00:32:00] data and a schema that really takes advantage of all of the segmentation possibilities, all of the digital indicators, all of that, is a springboard that can be used to supercharge. It's sort of rocket fuel, not only for your offline campaigns but for your online campaigns.

You can set up entire new email streams. You can break existing email streams into more highly contextualized streams, a drip nurture campaigns, et cetera. You can do things with custom audiences and display that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. You can use much more lucrative streams to really get hyper-personalized on your landing pages and on your site transforms. Don't think of data as just something that is in the backroom, with that visor on. It really is something that is then used as that proverbial rocket fuel, to supercharge your business. I wish people wouldn't think of it that way.

Erik Martinez: All right. Well Tim, if you had to leave our listeners with [00:33:00] one thought today, what would it be?

Tim Curtis: One thought today. Probably, are you aware of your own intentional bias? Are you aware of where it pops its head in or are you so passionate about certain areas that you could freely admit to yourself that you know what, perhaps I am not in a position to be as objectively observant as I could be?

If you can be real and honest with yourself there, and you have others that you can confide in and say, is this a vulnerability for me, you'll unlock opportunities for yourself in ways that you can't imagine, but as long as you continue to not necessarily be aware of those areas of growth or those opportunities for growth, you're limiting yourself, you're limiting your overall effectiveness and you're limiting your career effectiveness?

So if you can tackle those, then I think that's really where you'll begin to unlock potential for yourself, for your [00:34:00] client or for your company, for the long term.

Erik Martinez: Awesome, Tim. Well, if our listeners wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

Tim Curtis: Easiest way to connect with me of course, is to find me on LinkedIn. Fun fact, I don't respond to sales inquiries on LinkedIn because I just simply get too many of them, but if you mention you heard me on The Digital Velocity Podcast, that'll help you get through the filters

You can also reach out to me via my speaker site, which is timcurtisdcmp.com. I do a lot of keynotes and so typically that's where I do field those requests.

Erik Martinez: I honestly have to ask one more question. DCMP. What does that even stand for?

Tim Curtis: So DCMP, that is a certification I hold. It as a Certified Direct Marketing Professional, data marketing professional and that's a certification I've held for eight, nine years. Something like that.

Erik Martinez: Okay, well, Tim, thank you very much for your time. That wraps up this episode of The Digital Velocity Podcast. Tim and I are super excited [00:35:00] to explore with you the world of digital marketing and issues that surround our industry. I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine

Tim Curtis: and I'm Tim Curtis, CEO of CohereOne.