00:00 Introduction and what Ask Marketing does

So Ali, Steph, welcome to the show. It’s very exciting to have you on here. I know we tried to get you on the last day we were filming, we couldn’t quite squeeze you in, so it’s great to have you here today. We’ll talk a little bit about what you’ve done for us as a business, which has really just been amazing. But before we get into that, Ali, why don’t you tell everyone exactly what Ask Marketing and what your VMM model is.

Yeah cool. So Ask Marketing essentially provides senior marketing strategy and leadership to SMEs for a fraction of the price of what you would pay for somebody in-house. So yeah, you’re right, Virtual Marketing Management, VMM, is something that doesn’t really exist in the Australian marketplace to date and that’s exactly what we’re trying to really bring to the market. Can you trademark that VMM thing, have you thought about that? I think maybe, yeah, it’s in the works.

00:55 The name ASK: Alexander and Stephanie King

And you have just gone full-time into the business having sort of built up to that. What I’d like, I want to go through both of your stories. And I think everyone needs to know you’re actually sisters, right? A-S-K. What it stands for. Oh my goodness, I did not know. Alexander and Stephanie King. Oh my god. It’s so funny. Not many people pick it but yeah. That’s really cool.

01:20 Steph’s story: from exercise science to marketing

So Steph, tell me about your story. I think everyone likes to hear how people have got to where you are. This business has been going for what, a year now, is that about right? Four years originally, and then the Virtual Marketing Management concept and side of the business is since last October. And you’ve gone full-time, yeah, what, the last two, three months?

Yeah, I have quite an interesting story. My background is actually exercise science, so very different to marketing. Started off studying exercise science. What is exercise science? That is a great question. So it’s kind of a combination, it’s kind of a pathway to either physiotherapy, or in my case I wanted to do dietetics. So nutrition, highly qualified nutrition that can essentially provide nutrition advice and meal plan guidance to people who are looking for that.

I think that kind of changed throughout my path. I got to the end and wasn’t sure where to go from there because I kind of turned off the dietetics train. Ali at that stage was well into her marketing career and I guess being so close as we are, we just started talking about marketing and I really found a love for what she did. So went back to uni, did a Master of Business majoring in marketing, another two years on, working full-time in a marketing internship role.

I think we grew up surrounded by entrepreneurs and business owners and that was kind of always our goal at the end of the day. We both ended up in marketing with quite complementary skill sets. I kind of have been working in the health science space in a marketing role for multiple years, combining both passions for health science and marketing. We kind of sat at the dining room table one day and thought, let’s do it, let’s do this together.

03:40 Ali’s story: hotels, Ingram Micro and 10 years in tech marketing

What about you, were you always marketing? No, so I actually did business for three years as basically a reason to get a degree that would enable me to kind of head into anything. At school I was really into food tech in Year 12 and won a bunch of awards. So I did business and then I actually specialised in hospitality and hotel management. I was working at Sheraton on the Park at the time, working as a leader of the executive club on the top floor. Basically I wanted to be a GM of a hotel. We’re really lucky as kids, Mum and Dad took us all around the world and Italy obviously was a favourite.

Working in them was very different. One Christmas Day I was asked to work. At this point our family was still living in the country, not in Sydney. Our whole family came to Sydney for Christmas and came to the hotel. I just thought to myself, what is this life? We’re so family oriented, we’re real morning people, and getting home at 3am from working was just not my kind of lifestyle. I just remember putting a plate down on this gentleman’s table and saying “Merry Christmas sir” and he completely ignored me. The real life Scrooge. From that day on I was like, there’s got to be something else.

I then finished my degree and applied for a ton of roles and actually landed my first role as a marketing assistant within the biggest distributor of tech in the world. Ingram Micro. I was running all the B2B marketing campaigns for Nokia, then became Microsoft, Beats by Dre, Samsung. I just basically found my feet and have worked my way up over around 10 years in marketing.

06:10 How Ask Marketing started as a traditional consultancy

Going back to Ask, that’s been going four years? Yes, but it didn’t start out in its current form. So how did it start? It started originally as quite traditional marketing consultancy. We were helping small businesses, and yes, we were executing, doing the work. You’re essentially selling your time, right? And that was the business for three years. So then we were looking for that kind of growth and how we were going to do that. It was hard to scale when you’re selling time for money.

07:50 The CMO problem and why VMM was born

So VMM as you’ve coined it, when did VMM come in and did it come in because you saw it as a way to scale or did it come in because you saw a gap in the market? Until October last year I was actually living overseas and have done kind of six months on and off for the last few years. So I had this perspective of what was happening in the market, Australia typically in the tech and marketing space being a little bit behind other parts of the world, particularly Europe.

It wasn’t about scalability, it was about seeing this huge gap in the market which was actually due to my last role before I took the leap, which was in a CMO, senior marketing manager type role in a fast-growth tech startup. I was brought in as that CMO being paid accordingly for that role and what that meant for that business is that they couldn’t actually afford to fill all of the junior executional roles required under me to execute on the strategy that I had ideated. Which meant that I became the most overpaid CMO ever, because I was working at that coordination level.

10:20 Virtual CFOs exist, so why not virtual marketing?

October last year I’m actually sitting in a hotel room in Sicily doing crazy hours. Stephanie and I had been talking about it for months and there was this huge gap in the market where you speak to any fast-growth tech startup or next generation business and they all have a virtual CFO, some of them have a virtual CIO, most will outsource their payroll. And this is all before COVID, right? So this is really something that we predicted and were seeing in other senior roles, but no one was offering virtual marketing management specialised in digital. Virtual CFOs have been around for years. Exactly. So it was a no-brainer for us.

12:30 Why execution should stay in-house

We combined that gap in the market with the knowledge that internally all these day-to-day executional type activities that you do in marketing should be done by an internal resource. By the time it takes for someone to ideate a piece of content that they need to distribute across various channels and develop that, if someone outside of the business is doing that and then delivering it back, it just isn’t efficient. You lose something in the transformation. Completely. If you’re focused on product and you need to know the product and the content represents what your product is, there becomes that gap between someone in-house doing it and someone outside doing it.

Coming back to Virtual Marketing Management, what Stephanie’s just described is this very clear belief that the junior executional marketer should always be in-house, employed by the business. What we layer on top from outside the business virtually as the senior marketing manager focused on digital is all the strategic planning, the campaign ideation, essentially what we would call a bible that we provide to the junior marketing resources, along with training and guidance and support on an ongoing basis.

15:00 Steve’s experience as a VMM client

I think what I love about your model, and you do our marketing as you well know, is that I’d never done any marketing before, right? So you guys came up with this strategy which was awesome, the stuff that I’d never considered. But then you’ve taught me, I’ve learned more about marketing than I cared to even dream about before. And you teach and you provide templates and you provide, you know, it’s incredible the service that you provide for the cost that you provide, I think is outstanding. This is why you’re on the show.

Also just having someone there that knows their stuff inside out. I’m paying you not a huge amount compared to what your value is, but because I’m only using a fraction of your time. I love the whole model, I think it’s incredible. And the huge benefit that you are now beginning to realise is how scalable your business can be right now, which you would never have been able to do otherwise. You’re not selling your time for money now, you’re selling your knowledge for money.

17:00 The training and empowerment difference

The training component really is the difference between a traditional digital marketing agency and Ask. People at agencies, they don’t tell you anything, they don’t want you to know anything because they want to keep you. We’re all about empowering and educating that internal resource to be able to go about their day-to-day job with the skills and knowledge they need ongoing. So they don’t necessarily need to work with us ongoing for months and months and years and years. It’s putting that value back in.

There’s definitely something in the mix that I can tell. I would love to break a story on Give It A Nudge, is this something you want to talk about? It’s in development. We’ve been trying to figure out how do we deliver that knowledge and value to more than just our immediate network that we can service. Secret stuff, all right.

18:20 The biggest challenge: educating the market

One of the things we’ve talked about a lot on this show with others is that the world has become less resistant to change and I think that’s here to stay because everyone’s been forced to change. So what’s been your biggest challenge in this business so far?

We obviously took the leap and the risk associated with that in launching the Virtual Marketing Management side of our business. Coming with that was so much education, and by education we don’t mean to the junior marketing resources that we’re often training, we mean to the market. We’re bringing something new that you think people are obviously going to understand straight away but that’s often not the case. Essentially what we’re providing is not an agency model and not an entirely in-house model, so it’s this hybrid that freaks people out. When you bring something new it’s like, what?

20:00 Going full-time and the emotional rollercoaster

What about the fact that you’ve only just gone full-time? I mean that’s a challenge because she’s in Sicily as she said earlier, you’re doing another job and you’re trying to build a business. How was that? Was there a point where you thought what the hell are we doing or where you were so overwhelmed but still pushed through?

Business owners have 30 emotions in one day and that was us. Up, down, side, side. But I think we never would have considered going into business with anyone else but each other. So I think that is what fundamentally makes this so enjoyable. As challenging as entrepreneurship is, we’re doing it together.

23:00 Defining growth personally and for the business

We are so grateful to be on such a steep trajectory, however the challenge we’re now trying to overcome is we’ve only just recently sat down and had a really honest and tough conversation about what growth actually looks like for us as a business, but more importantly, which is often forgotten, what growth looks like for you personally.

Does growth for us look like bringing on 15 more people? We’re a team of seven now. Does growth look like being a team of 15 next year and 25 the year after and 50 the year after that? Or does growth come in another way? And then from a personal perspective, do we want to manage people? Do we like managing people? What do you value within your lifestyle and within your business day?

I love you asking this so early because I’ve had a few different businesses and it’s not a question I asked myself when I was your age. I asked myself it now but I’ve been around a long time. The fact that you’re asking yourselves these questions now is awesome. You haven’t brought a traditional model to the market so why should you build it traditionally?

25:00 The white paper: surveying 100 SME CEOs

One of the things you’ve done that has blown me away is your white paper. I know the effort that went into that, it was unbelievable. So who wants to talk about how much work went into that white paper?

We took the opportunity in the midst of COVID, in April I think it was when we started, and sat down and went, let’s use this opportunity to research, also to validate our offering. We got primary research from 100 SMEs across Australia, asking the big questions about not just virtual work but about have you heard of virtual marketing management, what are the challenges you’re facing in your business right now that COVID has impacted.

It really was a validation piece to us. It was one of those things, we knew we were on to something with launching the Virtual Marketing Management side of our business in October, but it was really validating to get the feedback and then to take what people were letting us in on, all of these 100 CEOs of SMEs that we interviewed, and it allowed us to refine our offering based on that. One of the key questions was how are you managing your marketing function prior to COVID and amidst COVID, how has that shifted? Over 50% of the people that we interviewed were actually pulling away from their agencies and wanting a different approach.

We need to give credit to our incredible previous social media marketing manager Lauren, actually based in France, who probably spent four and a half months of time supporting the primary research and also the macro and global economic research that went into that. It’s been one of the biggest investments that we ever made into the business and it’s been absolutely priceless.

28:00 Changed belief: commercial relationships can be fully virtual

A belief that may have changed? The biggest belief that has changed and well and truly will continue to stay this way is that a commercial relationship, so a client to a consultant relationship, can be entirely virtual. A perfect example: Stephanie and I launched in Melbourne two weeks ago. The strategic partner and the incredible investment management company that we’ve partnered with in Melbourne, we have not met. We haven’t met the CEO, we haven’t met the head of operations. I engaged you guys before I met you physically, I was still overseas. Absolutely, and I didn’t meet you for ages.

29:00 Changed belief: training at home actually works

Being passionate about health and fitness, we are 4:30am wake-uppers. We were gym junkies, every morning without fail at the gym at five doing a weight session or a class. We never liked training at home. And now our routine has completely changed. We include that at least three times a week because you don’t commute, you spend 20 minutes driving to the gym, fluffing around, 20 minutes driving home. You’re so much more productive. It’s expensive. And I’m married to a trainer and a nutritionist and a physio, and Stephanie’s obviously an exercise scientist, so between our family we really don’t need to be paying a hundred dollars a week.

30:00 Book and podcast recommendations

Steph: A go-to of mine is Mind Muscle Project, which is actually hosted by the guy who owns the gym and who trains me. They get amazing guests on, it’s a huge show. And I actually didn’t know that they owned the gym, I just listened to the podcast first. The other one for me is Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations. I need to be calmed down often, so it’s kind of a slow-down piece for me to listen to.

Ali: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. I’m normally a fictional, swept-away-by-fictional books person, Jodi Picoult is my go-to, mystery murder. But yeah that’s definitely one to add to your list.

Steve: I don’t have a book but I’m going to give you two podcasts. What the Flux, which is five-minute business news every morning, absolutely fabulous. You often hear about some of the big M&A deals happening before they get released. And Catching Up with Carbs, which Dan Hakim runs from the CEO of Club of United Business.

32:00 Why you should work with or for Ask Marketing

You’re obviously going to continue to dominate and grow. When you are next looking to hire, why should someone come and work for Ask Marketing? A few things. We’re a high-performing team, incredibly organised. And we’re fun, we’re in this to enjoy ourselves as much as it is for business growth. Very patient with your clients too. We only work with people we genuinely want to build relationships with.

Well look, fantastic to have you on, it’s been an absolute pleasure. So much fun. And it’s also so good to see not just two female founders but two sisters doing it together. I think it’s such a cool thing. Thanks, thank you.