Ep 392: He Bought A 7 Figure Agency With No Money Down Business Acquisition Deal with Clayton Pritchard

Say the first piece is to think about like how well the business is doing today and what's the impact you think you could drive. So for me, again, if I wouldn't feel like I could have made a positive impact on the business, then it wouldn't have been as valuable to me.

So I think that's the first piece: is there something you're like, you know what, that's the thing that the current owner- maybe they've just been in the business so long that they sort of are blinded because it's been fine the way it's been going, but maybe it hasn't.

Take, like today, a lot of people like, well, if I put AI on this, then I could sort of optimize efficiencies and work better. If you've got a business owner that's been in business for twenty, thirty years or something, probably, especially with a small business, they're probably not adopting that at the rate that they should be. And so is that something where you think, you know what, there's a relatively easy lever that I could come in and do to increase that efficiency?

Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast, and today we're speaking with Clayton Pritchard. He is the CEO and new owner of Olivine Marketing, which is a B2B marketing agency servicing SaaS and tech companies from Seed to IPO. And he's a former marketer at Meta and LinkedIn.

And Clayton worked with Olivine as a contractor before leaving the business on a trial basis as a CEO late twenty twenty five. And then he acquired it from the founders in April twenty twenty six. And under his ownership, Olivine is now, you know, growing at nearly double its original first-year target.

And in this pod, we talk about his acquisition, how he got into the position of being able to acquire the business, and why he started working with the business. We also talk about if you're in an employee role for a business, where you can be more online with your role and maybe even acquire the full business or a portion of the business instead of looking for another asset to buy completely separately.

Just an option and a thought process. And we talk about how he valued the business, how much he paid for the business, and how he structured the acquisition. We talk about a little bit about due diligence and what he thought and looked at.

And then he shared his advice for somebody who is thinking about buying a portion of equity in a business or acquiring the full business they already work for. We also talk about what he's done to grow the business prior to the acquisition and then also post-acquisition, and then what his next steps would be in further acquisition. So, growing the business by acquiring other marketing agencies and/or leveraging what's already in the business to get scale.

And there's so much value in this podcast episode about acquiring a business and about growing a business. And if you're looking at acquiring a business, well, I mean, you already are why don't you dramatically decrease your risk of buying a lemon by getting my judo in the frame?

It's what I use; it's what my clients use. And it's not only made people millions of dollars, but it's also saved people millions of dollars, and it's free. And there's a link in the description for you.

Enjoy the pod.

Playton, welcome to the pod.

Hey, thanks.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to chat, excited to see and learn about your acquisition. And firstly, congrats to you.

Thanks, man. Thanks.

Yeah, it's been a few months now. We did it in April. So it's been a little bit of a whirlwind. But yeah, it's been good.

Still fresh, which is really cool. And I wanted to ask you how you bought a business before this, or thought about even buying a business before this?

I haven't, and to be honest, I wasn't thinking about buying a business when this opportunity popped up either. So the way that kind of came about for me I so I business acquired at Olivine Marketing; we're a product marketing agency. The agency's been around since twenty sixteen. And I already knew the founders.

They both had gone on Ashley Wilson; she founded a company called Mom, which she actually sold. In addition to Oliveyon, she sold Momentum earlier this year to Salesforce. I met her when she hired me as the first marketing hire there back in 2022.

And then Rachel Lambert, she also has a business called Dinner DNR; that's like a white-label dinner club for content creators. And she launched that, I think, in 2022, 2023, something like that. Originally as a different business and pivoted last year. But anyways, they both had these other businesses that were taking their attention the last few years.

And so they were looking to be able to focus more on those businesses. And so anyways, last year, around this July of last year, Ray reached out to me, Rachel. She reached out to me, and she was just asking a question about marketing for dinner, some growth marketing questions. And then kinda at the end of the call she was like, Wait a minute, would you like to buy Olivine?

And so that was how she approached it. She'd already been talking to business, I think PE firms primarily, to sell the business. I think she maybe had talked to a couple other people that were sort of product marketers as well. But I wasn't looking; I didn't realize the business was for sale.

I wasn't wanting to buy a business. I had just kind of gotten into, hey, I'm gonna be a product marketing consultant, and I'd started my own L L C for myself as a consultant actually just a few months earlier. So that was the first time I quote-unquote owned a business, and then she reached asked me about that, and it felt like a good fit.

Yeah, it's so cool. It's normally the easiest transition 'cause there's so much trust in acquisition where somebody works for the brand prior to it. It's normally a model of ascension as well, which is really cool. A lot of brick-and-mortar businesses do it. And it's just not too many people do it in the online business space, I feel like.

Yeah.

We will work for businesses, online businesses, and just see, okay, I'll work for these guys until I find something better or different, and don't stay with the company too long because, you know, life can change so much and so fast, and there's it's easy to find other opportunities with more money or better conditions or whatnot.

So it's really cool. And I the r that's one of the reasons I wanted to share, like share your story on this pod, is because I think there's so many people out there in my atmosphere that are or audience that are thinking I want to buy a business and they might be working for a business already that's partially online that they are like looking for something else outside, but there might be a role within that company that like, hey, I could get more online exposure of working online and not so much from the office, and then slowly.

Worker, how can I acquire a portion of the company, invest in it that way? Which is a fascinating way to go. And did you have any equity, or were you just, like you said, were you just a consultant?

No, yeah, I was just a consultant. yeah. So I actually hadn't done a ton with them. And when I joined Momentum, which was Ashley's business, I was technically a client there. So I was the first marketing hire, employee eighteen. And so we needed we had some other needs for like help with content writing and sales enablement and all these other sort of things. And so I was a customer of theirs then, and then when I left Momentum, I started to do some consulting. I think I did two projects with them.

Over the course of a couple of years. I kept in touch, though, with the team, obviously. And so when they were looking to reach out or when looking to acquire the business, I was someone of the people that she had thought about. But yeah, I was not; I didn't even realize, as I said, I didn't realize the business was for sale. I think, as you said, it's one of the- it's, I think the story behind my story is almost like keep good relationships.

And sometimes, like, obviously it's not every time, but sometimes something can come from that because as long as you're sort of like building your network and having a giving sort of piece to the way that you're doing that, I think people will look to you as an expert.

And I think that's one that's the reason, right? It worked for me. If she didn't really think of me as like a an expert and like a good person, then she wouldn't have been interested in selling it to me because she definitely could have made more money selling it somewhere else.

But part of it is they wanted to make sure the company was gone to a good home, so to speak, as well.

This is gonna that's gonna be my next question: why didn't they go for more money with a private equity firm? And it sounds like it's just that they wanted to maintain the level of commitment to the client results, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, so they specifically said Ray said she didn't hate anybody on the team enough to sell to private equity. And so that was, like the just wanted it actually to be, didn't want somebody to be extracting from the business. She apparently they talked to some people who just wanted to redirect the domain to to their website or some to bi another business or something.

They'd always been about the people of the business. And so they wanted to find a good outcome for the team as well. So one of the things that we did in kind of that vein is, before I acquired the business, I actually stepped in about August of last year to, like, be the leader. So they had already been sort of mostly checked out because they had other venture backed companies that they were leading.

CMO leader, or do you mean like general manager?

Like basically acting CEO. Yeah, okay. Yeah. So it was like, hey, what would this look like if I took over the business?

Was this before they mentioned you buying it? Or yeah?

No, that was like part of it. So some of the behind-the-scenes really is that they obviously sp put spent more time on the new businesses; Olivine was in a downward not like it was still doing well, but it was in a downward growth trajectory. And so the question was like, hey, is it the market?

Is it just that product marketing agencies don't work really well now? Or is it because we don't have a marketer leading things? So they had an operations team that was handling, say, the sales and marketing and everything else other than the actual client work, which they had a they had product marketers and designers and whatnot, of course, continue to do that work. But the leading of the business was an operations team that didn't have a marketing background.

And so the hypothesis was, hey, if we get a somebody who has a history in product marketing, who can build credibility and build trust through that sales process because of their experience, who can talk to that more, who can be be the face of the brand, I felt the the operations team sort of felt like it would be disingenuous for them to be on LinkedIn posting about product marketing, being active.

Going on podcasts or whatever to sort of be the face of the brand because they aren't they don't have a product marketing background, they're not the ones doing the work, they're not an owner of the business. So it just didn't feel right.

So hey, if we bring somebody in who can be the face of the business, who can be part of these sales processes and kind of account management, what does that do? And so the impact was pretty much immediately we saw an into an uptick in business. And so even this year, we so we ended last year on an upward trend, and so far this year we're on track for almost fifty percent year-over-year growth.

Awesome. And so it's my original hope was something like twenty, twenty-five percent because I figured there'd be there's obviously some learning of the business, but it's been great so far. And so I'm excited to see; this will be our biggest year since twenty-three, I think. Or maybe twenty-two.

So yeah, it'll be great. Thank you.

I mean, just like it sounds like they've done so well already with setting it up and getting people results and they just didn't have somebody in that seat with the expertise that you did or you do have, which continues to grow now and like the uptick before the end of the year is, you know, within five months is awesome and then looking at already halfway through the year fifty percent year on year.

Which is so cool. What did the acquisition look like in terms of how you paid for it, I guess? Open to you sharing how you valued it as well and how they valued it. Because you're still pretty young in your relationship with them.

As you joined in July, in August you came in, and they offered you a Why don't you buy this and you stepped in as a CEO, and then I guess it's that when they started you still charts and due diligence- and how did it work?

Yeah, I mean, so I would say, if anything, so like I joined Momentum in early twenty twenty two. I started working, and so I started working with all of my team at that point. So this had been a relationship for what's that, three years before they reached out. I consulted with the business a couple of times with clients.

I had written for the blog and the newsletter in the past, and so just sort of stayed engaged with the team. I also actually was back consulting with Momentum again the last sort of like almost two years. So I had stayed even more engaged, I think, stayed engaged with Ashley and then also with the Olivine team. And so that's really like that building that relationship was the key piece. I mean, Ray even mentioned that that obviously we that that they thought I was a good person, a good marketer, because Momentum brought me back again later, and I continue to work with the Olivine team.

The team liked working with me. And so, I hadn't been leading the company. So I wanted to see for myself, hey, do I like doing this? That was also another part of the test. Do I enjoy this part of the job, or do I just really want to do product marketing? And so leading an agency isn't going to be a good fit. Do I do the team members there; do they like me too? That was something definitely Ray and Ashley were thinking about because again, they wanted to give it a a good the company a good home.

So that was the reason we had that starting point. Really by October, we could already tell there was an uptick in momentum from sort of really July twenty ninth or whatever that thing is when I first stepped in. So beginning of August till October. And so that worked well there. The piece that I was also gonna share, we Yeah, we saw an increase in the really the conversion rate of the leads.

So one of the reasons the business is something that I was interested in, it just drives inbound leads. It's got a great inbound lead engine. What I have not done is I've tried a little bit of outbound on LinkedIn and other places. It doesn't work. I can't figure out yet what the trigger is to know that somebody needs a product marketer, a product marketing agency.

The founders knew nothing about growth marketing. They've said that themselves, but they happened to be the number one ranking for product marketing agency. They built a lot of content marketing, and so they built a brand in the product marketing space.

And so they are we are listed highly by AI agents when you search today. So we do really well on organic search, especially for the most important terms, the broader term of a product marketing agency, and also positioning and messaging.

And then we also do really well on AI. So when I ask people today, most of the time they say they found us in Claude or something like that. And again, that wasn't anything that I've really done yet. We're trying to build on that and make sure we don't lose that, and try to build on it.

But really, it was all the work that they had done to build the brand to be one of the first product marketing agencies, really, to build a lot of content and goodwill in the industry, so now we just get leads that can convert better.

With me in seat, and that's able to grow the business. So I obviously have a goal where we're trying to drive more leads and do stuff to do that. But the first step last year was: can we just improve the conversion rate without even doing anything? And the answer was yes. And so that was the sort of ticket that, like this this can work.

Yeah. I love that that marketing approach so much better than outbound anyway, because you're doing cold, you're it's it's coming from more of a desperation vibe of I'm wanting to grow this business and I want you as a lead and I wanna make money from you versus if you're just really good and you're just putting out great content, people make people find people that want you are gonna find you themselves and then they make a decision. But it just sounds like that to bridge that gap to get a higher conversion rate.

Maybe you guys had such great content, but you weren't actually sharing and capturing with the audience as well as you are now, the how to make the transition to like, Hey, you can do it yourself too, hey, let's work with us sort of thing. My assumption from the outside-in listening, anyway.

It was that they got enough sales calls. They just weren't converting the sales calls. And I think, as I said before, I think it's having somebody who can speak with credibility on this is how I've done product marketing before, this is how we'll sort of tackle it with you- that's been s obviously super important.

I've also done sales earlier in my career too. One of my first roles was ad sales at Twitter. I actually, one of my very first roles was working at a marketing agency where part of that I was doing sales as well as it wasn't it was growth marketing, not product marketing. But that experience as well, I've been able to bring in where we've we changed one thing, for instance. Instead of putting together a proposal as a doc form with an S as a like a SOW.

We put it together first as a deck. It's a simple thing, but it converts much better. It's easier to talk through. People are able to digest it better. So, like, that's part of like telling the story, putting it into a better proposal, a better pitch, really. And it's not anything fancy. We actually have a lot of work. So there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit in our pitch and proposal process. But that in and of itself definitely helped.

On the initial call, scheduling the next call before we got off. So, scheduling: we have the discovery call; let's make sure right then we schedule the proposal call. And then later I started to say, okay, now we're on the proposal call; let's schedule the check-in call. So let's just keep scheduling the next call until the next call is when we're closed. Now we're ready to move forward.

And so that's helped a lot with keeping in touch because people like to ghost. The other thing is, they wanted I've made them- like, they have to show up to the call, not have to. If they push hard enough, we'll give them the proposal without showing up to a call. But they used to just send that over async, and of course people just see it without the context. They don't respond.

Go away.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. What I love is helping people. I've done sales, and I'm still in sales. Taught so many sales team is what I love and works really well is that between calls is just give them a bit of homework. And that homework typically is going through a couple of videos, and those couple of videos just happen to be case studies of, or maybe two or three of your best case studies, and that does a lot of heavy lifting, right?

I remember when I was doing sales calls for this brand, I used to just get people on and then chat to them and then try to book them into a next call. And I didn't really have this when I first started; I didn't really have a big bank of case studies as I do now. And as soon as I started adding those things in, it just adds like, people see themselves in those other people's shoes, in their other people's products and go, Okay, this is what you've done for that. This is what I want for me. And they start selling themselves. They do it does the heavy lifting. I do want to get back to the, yeah, acquisition.

So you jumped in, CEO, started, yep, you know, helping out and doing really well with this in like two, two and a half months since you've done that, and then what did the chat look like in how you were going to acquire it? Like what sort of funds, what was the structure? If you're open to sharing, how much you bought it for or how you valued it, that'd be awesome as well.

We did it as a percent of revenue for the first two years. So that's the other thing that made it a no-brainer for me, of course, is there's super low risk. So at the end of the day, if I'm trying to be a consultant, product marketing consultant on my own, and nobody's looking up Clayton Pritchard and coming in as a lead. But they are looking up all of my marketing.

And so, at the very least, I've got a website with a lead form that drives leads, even if it's just for me. Even if I had to sell, get rid of all of the operations team or any of those sorts of things, which, like, we haven't had to do because we're growing.

And so for me, it was super low risk to take that on because I am only paying basically if I drive revenue. And then for them, there's a lot of upside, right? Like, for the business was going the opposite way; now we're growing.

And for instance, I told them they get their fee basically biannually. So we told them that they were gonna get what they were gonna get at the end of June, and I got like, wow, and that's a nice surprise, and like all those, so for them it was it's definitely exciting and a good upside, and it also gives them some incentive to obviously continue to do a little bit of helping and things for me because if if they're able to drive more business and stuff then they get that kickback.

Yeah. Yeah. And then as far as valuing the business, I don't know what they sort of were getting from other people. I know they would have they said they could have gotten more, but as I said, they wanted to find a place that obviously gave them a good exit while also giving the business and the employees and everybody else a good exit.

So that was the important piece. We shared enough release that we did, a two-million-dollar business. That's technically the sort of like the peak a couple of years ago. But I think we'll be back there probably next year if I'm being honest. And we're doing pretty good already, getting back up to it.

And congrats. And so when you say two times revenue, did you start how did you start paying that out? Did you do it as an earnout? Was it per month? Like how did it how did it work?

It's not two times revenue; it's a percentage of revenue. But on the inside, we're putting that money aside so that we've basically put it in a savings account, and then we pay it biannually. So we just paid at the end of June, and then we'll pay again at the end of December. And it's just based on bookings, basically.

So the business is paying, or so the money that the business owns, like, say you're the new money that the business owns, goes directly to them biannually.

Yeah, I mean, technically tax-related, it's like my so the way we're actually doing it is that I'm just having our accountant hold the money and then just pay them so that I don't have to worry about it. But my tax accountant would definitely make sure that I know that it's money it's technically money that's going to me, and then I'm paying it back out to them.

So I'm gonna get that; one thing for me is that I have to get I get taxed on it as like income. So I have to make sure that I'm, like, paying attention to that because it's not income that I have. But the good thing for me is there's no money out of pocket money, obviously. And then I only pay that if we if we actually make revenue. And so it's been good to do it that way for sure.

Yeah, it's such a good way to go. It's good; it's good for their distribution as well, tax-wise too. Asset allocation, which is something that I definitely t like talk with my clients about is like you want to make sure the asset allocation is good when you're buying a business for the seller for tax reasons and they can help them and it can help you by being very clear tax wise across the board and both sides are seen from the IRS or whatever country that you're in now.

Yeah. How did you go with what sort of due diligence did you do? Because you're already in the business, you're already acting as CEO. What did you do to think about risk, and what did you check? What was there? Were there any alarms?

Was there anything you, like, had to s have some tough conversations with them about? What did it look like? Because it's very different to not being inside the business and having to order that. Like you already have all the data.

So yeah, yeah. I mean, they shared it with me before I joined as well. They'd shared the last few years of PLs and whatnot. And so again, that was another thing that was helpful for those first six months: okay, well, I see that it looked really good a few years ago, not quite as good the last couple of years.

What could I sort of estimate out? And so those first sort of six months were helpful to do that so that I could start to look at, okay, especially once we hit October, once we're sort of hitting the stride of the changes I made.

What sort of growth rate should we expect? And what can I look at for next year? I mean, one of the things that had to change is the business's margin had to go up a little bit to be able to take the revenue distribution. So we're eating some of it for now, just so that we're not getting too expensive. But I'm definitely charging a higher mar a slightly higher margin than they were, at least at the end of things, to be able to make up for that business expense.

But there wasn't anything, I think, that was, like, alarming. As I said, it would have been alarming if I hadn't come in and managed and seen the growth. I would have been like, okay, why is it going down? Do we think we can I mean that was those were all the questions.

Do we think that we can reverse it back the other way? And so that's one of the reasons that we came in and tested it out. I so I and I think it was good, honestly, on both sides because they wouldn't have wanted to go through the headaches and all this sort of stuff if they weren't gonna get some sort of return.

And so they wanted to be able to see, am I gonna be able to change the growth rate of the business so that a percent-of-revenue deal would actually work out for them. If I came in and things went the other way, or they stayed stagnant or whatnot, then they'd be like, Okay, well, I'm not gonna get any money out of this.

So I should sell it. If I wanna sell it, I should sell it to a PE firm or whoever else is gonna actually give me some sort of guaranteed money. But now they can see that, okay, the business is gonna be worth more at the end of the sort of two-year engagement that we have than it was when they sold it to me.

Yeah, and you're both incentivized, like the more it grows, the better for you 'cause you're the owner of the business, and then the more it's good for them because the more money they're gonna make. And then when you say percentage of revenue, I didn't touch on this or ask last time: what percentage of revenue did you do you pay annually?

Yeah, I don't want to get into specific numbers, but but I I think one thing that it is that we did talk about that we should share is that it's not a percentage of profit. And the reason for that is I could obviously do whatever I wanted over corporations significantly yeah. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Increase your corporations significantly, get great growth, but have a very s small margin and pay next to nothing for the business.

Exactly. That's totally, and I can pay myself a lot of the, like, I am, I do, right? I'm a consultant on the project, so that's one of the main ways that I personally earn revenue from the business is through that.

And so obviously I could have just jacked that up and made myself more. Or whatever it is. So there's a lot of trust between the three of us where I wouldn't have done that, and they probably wouldn't have; they would have probably trusted that I wouldn't, but it's a lot more predictable and safer for everybody to have it.

On revenue. And so I had to do some math to understand, okay, what are our expenses today? What would they need to what would they go to in the future? What could the business hold? So there was some negotiation on the rate there.

At the end of the day, I thought they were being pretty fair. And so I didn't push back too much. I basically just wanted to make sure that we did the math that the business could afford the rate that we were talking about.

And it probably could have still worked without increasing the margin, but it's definitely more comf a little more comfortable by, like, slightly increasing the margin too.

Cool. Cool.

So for somebody being approached by their boss or the owner of a business as an employee to possibly buy the buy into the business or buy the business to own it. Or for somebody thinking about, Hey, how do I buy the business that I'm in, or buy a portion of it in equity? What advice would you give?

Yeah, I would say the first piece is to think about like how well the business is doing today and what impact that you think you could drive. So for me, again, if I didn't feel like I could have made a positive impact on the business, then it wouldn't have been val as valuable to me.

So I think that's the first piece: is there something where you're like, you know what, that's the thing that the current owner- maybe they've just been in the business so long that they sort of are blinded because that they've been it's been fine the way it's been going, but maybe they haven't taken, like, today.

A lot of people like, well, if I put AI on this, then I could sort of optimize efficiencies and work better. If you've got a business owner that's been in business for twenty, thirty years or something, they're probably, especially with the small business, they're probably not adopting that at the rate that they should be.

And so is that something where you think, you know what, there's a relatively easy lever that I could come in and do to increase that efficiency? So I would say start there first on, like, what is if you owned it, what's the thing that you would make better than it is today? Especially if it's that. Like, I'm owning a percentage of it. If I, as an owner, am gonna give it up, what's the thing I'm getting for giving up?

Some of it. Obviously, you're gonna pay me some, but that amount of money I'm giving up is sort of long-term revenue or sort of profit sharing or whatever it is. I'm giving that up. So the idea is that I'm gonna end up making more in the long run because of the incentive.

Yeah. What's the incentive for that employee as the owner of the business? What's the incentive that they're proposing?

Yes, you'll get money for the valuation part, but then what's the incentive? And then also, if you're buying it outright, like you might look at the business and be like, hey, like, you know, yeah, maybe maybe we just like the incentive is like I can add value to this like you do, like and R. Yeah. Buy the business. They make more of an egg more out of an exit than just staying in the business and it running currently as it is.

So it's a massive win for both sides.

Yeah, I think the other piece, even if you are gonna buy it outright, is whether there's something you can find, you know what, I think it's maybe undervalued with the new leadership or the current ownership because they're not doing things that could be done.

Because you wouldn't you'd obviously, I mean, it's the same as buying a house. I'd like to buy a house at the bottom of the market, and then immediately everybody wants to move where I am, and so the values go way up, right? Like you what are you doing that's gonna drive more value for the business?

And so if you're if you see something that you're able to do there, I think that's also a signal that you should talk about it. If you think, you know what, this business is super efficient and there's no sort of like increase in growth, well, the value to you is gonna be less.

And so yeah, I think that helps as they think as you think about how much I'm willing to spend time and money on it. It still may be, I mean, if it's a great business that just br makes money, that's good, but you're probably you're gonna end up paying more for that than you would for a business that maybe is doing well.

Profitable but is not doing as well as it possibly could.

Yeah, I love that. And you could also, I think, just thinking about it, the people that are maybe not in the financial position, or the business may not be in the financial position for them to actually buy it. Maybe you could stage it in a way similar to what you guys did without realizing it is work: just go to your boss and be like, Hey, I think we're underleveraging this. Like, I would like this role.

And you're incentivized with more money, a better role, and then you see some growth in the business, and then everybody sees, okay, this is working quite well. And that could just be one stage closer to an acquisition, and you slowly work your way up to owning the full business or some level of equity involvement.

And it's but it's it's really the only way that you can do this, and it's the same with just even being an employee, is like what value are gonna are you gonna bring to the company, to the business, and that's what I say to people that are applying for jobs is like you can't just send like your resume and say, I've got these skills and credentials. It's like they really want to know how much more money you can make for the business. Mostly anyway.

Yeah, I think sort of in a similar line, like some examples there. When I was w consulting with Momentum, I wish I had known they were gonna sell to to Salesforce because less than a year beforehand, I switched my contract to where a third of my sort of monthly that I was getting, I wasn't gonna I was like, you what, I don't need the cash as much as like the potential payoff if they the business is doing well.

The potential payoff if they end up IPOing or selling or whatnot. So I actually took one-third of my, like, monthly, and I said, let's just put that into a stock option. And then that ended up paying off. And I think it sort of also makes me think about a much more famous option of Steve Ballmer.

I think he was his like original deal with Microsoft was that he was paid on every lead. Well, they didn't have enough money to actually pay him, so they started to pay him. He put a different contract where he was getting stock instead, and obviously that's why he's a a multi billionaire and and everything today because of that. And so I think that's another way to think about it. Like, if you can, if you think the business is good, you can save the business money by saying, you know what, just give me whatever stock options or percentage of the business or whatever if I hit certain goals, or instead of a salary or instead of some of the salary.

And that's a way to allow you, without putting money out of your pocket, to start to take some ownership of the business. But also, again, it gives incentive back to the business. So it gives incentive to you from the business owner that, well, if the business is going well, that's worth more.

So you should be doing a better job in order for that to be worth more. So I think that it's both there. And that's the way I reason I did it at Momentum; the marketing team had a fine budget, but not a massive budget as a Series B startup.

And so it's like, you know, I'll stick around; I'll be able to stick around a little bit more if, as a consultant, I give some of my money back; they're fine. They don't it's not a big deal for them to give the stock options. And ultimately that ended up paying off a lot more in the end because of the happy actors' exit there too.

Yeah. It's so cool. I'm one last question is just, yeah. I guess you didn't think about buying the business. But what's your next- what are you thinking about next? Like maybe once you've paid off the business. Have you thought, like, hey, like this is interesting? Do I step into a bunch of different agencies and act as a consultant, and then ma maybe see if it's worth it inside buying it?

Some of the brands that you work with.

Yeah.

Or are you just focusing you want to focus on the business? Like, what do you think is your next sort of move after these two years or one year is up?

Yeah, so I think there's a lot of defin I think definitely there's lot of growth in the business itself. The market overall is pretty large. Think about marketing agencies generally. Huge. I think there's a lot. So today we focus on product marketing, like customer research, competitive research, persona development, positioning, messaging, sales enablement, but we also do brand, so like logos and rebrands, design, those sort of things.

There's more if we wanted to; we could expand more into the growth marketing side, which I actually think, as a product marketing agency, making sure that you are driving demand in a way that represents sort of your brand voice and your positioning and all that sort of stuff. I think there is a unique angle that we have there.

So we could expand that way. I don't even think we have to in order to build the business. There's, again, converting more of what we've got today and driving more leads; I think we can do a lot there. I look at what the fee is that I'm giving to, or like paying as my f as my fee to the founders. I'm like, man, it'd be great to have that to be able to invest back into the business on ads or anything else.

So I think there's a lot that we'll be able to do there. I do know that it's not really something I'm thinking about right now, but there are other product marketing agencies, some of which I know are open to acquisitions. I'm not gonna name names 'cause of the private conversations, but that's something that potentially we look into to sort of consolidate the industry a little bit.

They have they also still maybe even keep the brands different or whatnot because they obviously also have brand recognition and SEO traffic and all that sort of stuff too. Under the hood, it doesn't really matter if it's one brand or the other. Maybe we sort of like niche them down into different things, whether it's like the types of customers they do or the types of work or any of that sort of stuff.

But that’s something that would be potentially interesting as well, to sort of expand in that way, because there is a lot of work out there. I think product marketing in general is one of those spaces that I don't expect AI to really fully take because it's super strategic, like the business strategy. And so there are pieces of it, like writing website copy. If you've done the hard work of building out the positioning and messaging document. It's sort of like your design system.

You know how you can give Claude a design system, and it can do a pretty good job. Again, it's not as good as an actual designer. It can do a pretty good job there. I think there's something similar on, like, copy that, if you've got a really good messaging system that you can sort of take some of that out.

There are definitely pieces to improve the efficiency of competitive research and customer research. But ultimately it's going to be this thing that's going to be super important. It's a lot of the role is even that I tell people they ask, like, how we can go faster. A lot of it is managing stakeholders, getting alignment, and, like, pushing people forward to sort of make decisions. Even if you had AI give you your messaging, you'd still have to get the leadership team to all agree that that's right. And so there's definitely a strategic role for us to play as experts in that process and stuff too.

Yeah. I think humans are the ones that they'll trust the most to have those stakeholders make those important decisions. For sure. Yeah, it's fascinating. Like you said, like this acquisition of some other agencies in product marketing agencies. You know, I like the idea of keeping them separate but having economies of scale with the team.

So each of them has their own branding and message, and the delivery is a bit different for the different versions of the agencies, but you've got the economies of scale, which makes those businesses' profit margins even more profitable, and you're acquiring market share at the same time.

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. But yeah, Clayton, I'm super happy for you. Congratulations. I'm excited for your growth story and what's going to continue to come as well. But yeah, where can people find out more about Olive? It's- you pronounce it Olive Iron Marketing, right?

Yep, yep, olive vine, like an olive vine. Yep. So yeah, olivine marketing dot com as a great place. to f obviously to to find out more about the agency.

Find me on LinkedIn: Clayton Pritchard or Olivine Marketing also on LinkedIn. I one of the things, one of the things I'm doing is making sure that I'm being active, sharing insights with the community. So definitely if you're looking to learn more about product marketing as a function or sales enablement, branding, etcetera.

Check me out.

I'll put links to that in the show notes. Clayton, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the story. As I said, I am excited for you. And everybody is listening. Thank you for listening. I'll see you.