OneTenHundred

Eric (00:01)
Hey everybody, my name is Eric Boggs. Welcome to 110 100. It's the show about founders, how they got their first 10th and 100th customer and what they learned and how they changed along the way. Today we're joined by Lindsay Groepper. I met Lindsay as employee number one and president at Blast Media a long time ago. I know her now as EVP at Panblast, a subsidiary of Pan Communications. We'll get into all of that.

Lindsay also has the distinction of being the longest tenured RevBoss customer. recently completed consecutive month number 101. So Lindsay, thank you and welcome.

Lindsey (00:36)
It has been a long run with us and you are part of our growth journey, like a big part of it. So excited to be here and so glad that you've started this podcast. It's long overdue.

Eric (00:47)
Thank

Thank you. Well, I'm not fishing for compliments, but I will accept them as they come. So you joined BLAST in 2005, according to my crack research team. Can you take yourself back to that place? What were you doing before that? What got you to that situation? yeah, give me the sort of the birth story, I guess.

Lindsey (00:50)
you

I love

talking about this because I am going into celebrating my 20th year working with the same people, which I recognize is an anomaly today, for sure. But it was really, it was truthfully a leap of faith. I was living in Chicago working for a big global agency called Fleischman-Hillard. We, you know, between Edelman and Fleischman, we were always one or two of the top global PR firms. Loved my job.

Eric (01:22)
Yeah.

Lindsey (01:38)
first job in PR, but my husband at the time was looking for work and found a job that he wanted in Indianapolis. And I said, no problem. Indy's a little bit closer to my family. Like we can go there. And Fleischman surprisingly, because I was a no one, said, you can telecommute. You can live in Indianapolis, telecommute. Like, you know, was a thing back then. Zoom was.

Eric (02:00)
In 2005,

wow.

Lindsey (02:02)
So like

basically I have to come to Chicago for a couple days every two weeks. I was like, sweet. You know, I mean, I was 25 years old. I was like, this is a nice deal for me. But I had already lined up this interview with this company called Blast Media that didn't even have a website. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to just hold this interview and go. And at the time it was the two co-founders, hard stop. They sold me on their vision. And I was like, you know what? I'm 25 years old. If this doesn't work out, there will.

there will always be jobs. So I ditched the safety of Fleishman-Hillard, bought in on the vision as the first full-time employee of this company with no website, and fast forward, I'm about to celebrate my 20th year. So indeed, the gut instinct was right on this one.

Eric (02:51)
Pretty good bet. Geez, Luis. 20 years. My wife and I recently celebrated 20 years of marriage last year. you know, I know what that's been like and work is a different kind of hard. Yeah. Did the company have customers when you joined?

Lindsey (03:03)
Both hard though.

Yes, so the two co-founders had come from another PR agency and as part of that deal, they took some customers with them. fortunate from that standpoint, but I do remember my first client, which might have been one of the first new clients, because I started only a couple months after Blast Media was founded. And I came from...

Eric (03:30)
Wow.

Lindsey (03:37)
Okay, number one, I was young. I came from an agency where I was doing all sorts of things. I mean, I was working on Nike. I was working on, you know, Abbott Labs. I was working on some consumer tech, but I was thrown into tech PR with Blast Media. So my first client was a company that provided, it was on a disc and it was...

Eric (04:01)
Hahaha

Lindsey (04:03)
I mean, dating myself, right? mean, SAS didn't exist. Nothing was in the cloud. So that's not true. Salesforce was around, there were things in the cloud, really, really early. So it was a disk, literally, but it was a cyber protection for your PC or for your Mac. And I remember being like, I don't even freaking know what an operating system is. Like, are you kidding me?

Eric (04:11)
Yeah, it was early, early, early days.

Lindsey (04:30)
I was thrown into a trade show, I'll never forget this, my trade show in Philadelphia. It was with the founder of this company. I'm like working their booth. And I mean, you talk about like fake it till you make it. I mean, I had no clue what these nerds were talking about, zero. But I was, you know, feeling press opportunities and doing the best that I could. Luckily the client was like literally an absolute angel. But I learned a lot really quickly.

from that standpoint and my partner Mindy was doing sales for the agency at the time. I mean, literally phone, email, anyone that she could find in the technology space whose check would clear. That was basically our client filter is did their check clear? Let's go.

Eric (05:18)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so you were primarily in a service delivery role in your initial set of responsibilities. How long did it take for you all to get to a point where there was initial scale or initial repeatability, the proxy for that, customer number 10, or whatever makes sense? How long were you in that like...

Lindsey (05:33)
initially. Yes.

Yeah.

Eric (05:52)
as long as the check clears phase and what did it take for you to get to the next level.

Lindsey (05:54)
Yeah.

I would say once we got out of our first office, so our first office was, it was literally a favor from a friend of our co-founder. He had office space and he was like, dude.

Yeah, we got nothing. You have four cubes. Can we get these four cubes and we'll just work out of your office space? It was like part of an architecture firm was in it. I mean, there was all sorts of different, there was someone who loved taxidermy. there was, I shit you not, there was a stuffed bison and a polar bear in this office. And I mean, there was like, it was insane. So we were in that office space for like,

less than a year, but we ended up hiring a couple people. We actually hired a controller. So our invoices were actually going out on time and we had hired a couple of people. I'd say once we graduated and actually could afford office space, we moved out of there and got our own lease and in this wonderful, lovely building that we were in for, gosh, at least.

I mean, over 10 years. I feel like once we could afford office space and actually pay rent, that's when we reached a level of scale and at least some level of predictability with our client base. had somebody doing sales full-time. We had someone managing finance on a part-time basis. And then we had a team of account people. So it took, I mean, I would say about a year before we felt like we were in a good

Eric (07:34)
Okay.

Lindsey (07:36)
a good groove. We had more, we had at least 10 customers by then.

Eric (07:37)
That's pretty...

Yeah, that's pretty quick, but that also doesn't

sound surprising. It sounds like Mindy had a little bit of a rolling start with the founding story. How did that make you feel as a 25-year-old?

Lindsey (07:48)
Yes, yes, for sure. Yeah.

It was awesome. I mean, we think back about it now. Like we just laugh. Like we didn't know what we were doing. You know, it's like none of us did. Mindy was the same age as me and then our co-founder was in his, you know, mid thirties and we just were doing the thing and my god, Eric, it was so fun. Like it was so much fun. We wish we would have written a book along the way. Cause we were kids, you know, like just.

Eric (08:12)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lindsey (08:23)
with a dream and a vision and it wasn't that really far, it was a pretty, I guess, near-sighted vision. It was like, okay, we're good today, what are we doing tomorrow? And the next day, and the next day. It wasn't like in 10 years we're gonna be here. It was like, who knows? But we made incredible friends along the way and in the early days it was scrappy and we wouldn't have kids and so we're just working till.

7, 38 o'clock at night, because what else do we have to do? And you know, just everybody's bought in. So it was incredibly fun. And to work with two people that are still my best friends today, like we got so lucky to find each other that like I do not take that for granted. And I know that that is not normal that to have, you know, three partners that have stayed together and still like each other for almost 20 years is pretty insane.

Eric (08:52)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. At what point did you start to narrow your focus on service and target customer?

Lindsey (09:30)
Yeah, so we were always PR for technology companies, but for the first 10 years of our business, we were both consumer tech, so gadgets, headphones, Bluetooth speakers, you name it, as well as B2B tech. And this makes me sound like such a dinosaur, but the beginning of our agency, it was pre-iPhone and pre-social media. Which sounds like that should be like 50 years ago, right? But it was...

Eric (09:59)
Definitely wasn't, yeah.

Lindsey (10:00)
It

was not. But the path from awareness to conversion was super short compared to today. So PR had a different value, specifically for the consumer tech clients. It was impulse buy, you were featured in whatever, and people would buy your shit. I don't need to go into the whole how the world has changed and buyer's journey and all the different areas of influence, but what we started to realize quickly as media changed and different channels became available is...

PR didn't work the way that it traditionally had for the consumer tech companies. And so we started to bring on some digital ad folks. We had social media. had somebody, you know, we had someone running like a specific YouTube practice. And all of sudden it was like, who are we? And I remember I had moved into a sales role at that point and I was president of the agency. And it was like, it almost felt like a...

Eric (10:47)
Yeah.

Lindsey (10:55)
you know, like a Chinese menu. It's like, you know, they would say they want one thing and then say, you know, and then, and then, and then, and I'm, you know, I'm trying to piece it all together and all of a sudden, you know, I'm trying to split 10 grand a month into 10 different people, our profit was shit. So I literally remember sitting, I was in an airport with Mindy, we were traveling somewhere and we just had the like very real conversation of like, what do we want to do? Like, who are we? Because all of the sudden,

Eric (11:09)
Yeah.

Lindsey (11:25)
We were a lot of things to a lot of different people. And I wasn't passionate about it. I my passion's in PR and storytelling, and so is Mindy's. And right around this time, too, our digital ad team was not surprising, because it was literally at the advent of that channel, was growing, and had a lot of revenue in it. And it was at that point in time, the 10-year mark, where we said, Kelly, one of our co-founders,

is really into the digital ad side of the house. We ended up taking those people and those clients and doing Instacompany, creating another agency called StatWax. We sold that company three years ago and had a really great run, but decided that we are only going to focus on PR and specifically for B2B companies because that those types of companies, were number one, SaaS was just emerging and we realized a lot of our

clients were in that emerging space. But on the B2B tech side is where they paid us the most. They stayed on longer because they knew it was more like an education play. There wasn't this justification of like, well, I've spent X amount on Facebook as it yielded this ROI. Why am I spending money on PR for my headphones? So we drew a line in the sand at the 10 year mark and we literally have never looked back.

Eric (12:47)
Yeah, it's a pretty common theme that in my personal experience and working with lots of founders that when you're there during the as long as the check clears phase, it's really scary and unnerving and it can take a lot of courage to get to the point where you say no to revenue.

Lindsey (12:59)
Yeah.

Yes. And that took 10 years. I mean, it really did.

But we drew a very, very firm line and said, we are not going to stray from our focus. And we literally have not. And to your point, it's scary. Because when we made that decision, 30 % of our clients were still on the consumer tech side. And we said goodbye to those.

clients and didn't let anybody go. So you don't have to be a mathematician to know the level of pressure that puts on then the sales side. But it was a leap of faith and it was scary to do that.

Eric (13:52)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Let's talk about a little further down the road. You got something that's cooking, you got a focus, you've got a message, you've got a target set of customers where you've got traction and repeatability. What did the team look like at that point and what was working in terms of your go-to-market?

Lindsey (14:21)
Yeah. So we had built out teams with a lot of middle managers and I'm going to asterisk that because I'll come back to that later. And it worked well. We had a pretty good delineation of who did what in roles. know, an agency model is not one that we created. There are plenty of agency models that you can mimic and try and form your agency around. So we had

a handful of VPs and then it goes through a director and on down and our titles have been all over the place the last 20 years. You invent all sorts of things, you're like, what does that even mean? But we had someone dedicated to sales and marketing, we had somebody dedicated to finance and operations.

Eric (14:58)
Yeah.

Lindsey (15:12)
And then we had dedicated people or client relations managers. And one of the things I think we did really well at the middle stage is define swim lanes early. And that's a hard thing to do. I grew up in the client relations side. And so when I moved into the revenue role, it was difficult for me to see things that were happening in any other sort of lane.

and not jump over the rope and get in there. It's difficult. You have to find good people and trust them that they're maybe not gonna do your way. That's okay. But that their way, you know, their way works and you you've scaled an agency as well. So I know you know exactly what this feels like. Ugh.

Eric (15:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

very hard to watch either

from afar or even watch up close knowing like I wouldn't do it that way. And sometimes you have to let the mistake happen.

Lindsey (16:07)
Yes. And sometimes it is like, sometimes I'm like in my head, like, I knew that, you know, but it's, know, it's like a minor, minor fail, right? Or like a minor, it's like no big deal, but lo and behold, there were also way more times where I'm like, man, I wouldn't do it that way. And it turned out great or was just fine, you know? But I do think that's one of the things that we did really well early on was define swim lanes for our leadership team.

and everybody focus on what their area of expertise and the value that they bring to the agency, stay focused on that. So that was something that worked really well for us that I would recommend as tough as it is when you get to a stage where you have well-functioning teams and good managers and other good leaders as the founders, you've got to let go.

as hard as it is and let other people rise to the top.

Eric (17:09)
How would you say you changed personally over a 20 year marriage?

Lindsey (17:16)
Man,

I wish you could ask the people I've worked with for as many years. that's a really good question, Eric. Let me think on that. How I have changed personally or from a leader standpoint or just any and all of it?

Eric (17:33)
all of it, whatever comes to mind.

Lindsey (17:34)
Yeah, yeah.

I know you said your goal is to make your guests cry, and I'm not going to do it because I'm not a choir.

Eric (17:42)
It's a stretch goal, it's a stretch goal to make a guest cry.

Lindsey (17:44)
I'm not

a crier, but I will get personal with you. I, you you hold, I was 25, now I'm 45. You can imagine a lot, you know, that was pre-kids, right? I had, you know, wasn't, obviously wasn't a mom at that point, different priorities and, you know, fast forward to where I am today in my life. So it's like, I can't say that necessarily like work has changed me.

because I've been fortunate where I found a place early on in my career that allowed me to be me and that gave me a ton of autonomy and trust and as a result, I've been like, loyalty has been the fabric of my relationship with many. But over the course of 20 years, I mean, I have certainly changed a lot. Having kids, as you I'm sure can relate, certainly has you look at the world

Eric (18:28)
Yeah.

Lindsey (18:43)
differently. It's interesting, it's like a double-edged sword, because on the one side it gives you more patience, because you sort of understand as you're hiring people right out of school, you sort of understand where they are in their lives and maybe how they were raised, and you have a bit more of this motherly or parental feeling towards them. But on the flip side is you have very little time for bullshit. It's like, I...

I don't, you know, I have a finite amount of time before I turn into a taxi for my other job as a mom. Yeah, and so it's like you just make decisions. I feel like I make decisions a lot quicker and I am much better at prioritizing, but I do feel like I almost have less patience in some areas just because I don't have the time. I'm moving too fast and have, again, a finite amount of time.

Eric (19:19)
exactly my second full-time career.

Lindsey (19:40)
unlike when I was 25 and working till 8 p.m. because what else was I gonna do? I'm like, if I'm not out of like, literally if I do not leave at 4.02, I'm screwed. Like, I know exactly how much time. And then the other thing too is just being more comfortable with like what your boundaries are as a human in general. I was not good at communicating my boundaries and

Eric (20:02)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsey (20:10)
like what I was willing to accept and not willing to accept. And this isn't, you know, not necessarily that there were people at work that were like pushing boundaries, but you talk about clients, right? It's like, you have clients that will really overstep the boundary that you've set.

Eric (20:27)
Yes,

you can get bulldozed very easily, particularly in a service-based business.

Lindsey (20:30)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. And working in tech, we also worked with a lot of males. And so over time, I certainly have changed in that aspect of understanding what I am willing to accept and not accept and being an advocate for our teams in how to handle those situations. Because it's not easy. whether you're female or male, you're on the client services side, right? You all are in client service.

And it, you you grow up with this, this idea of the customer's always right. Well, I'm here to tell you that is bullshit. No, they're not.

Eric (21:07)
Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know that that's

been a hard thing for us to learn and a hard thing for me to teach. It's like they hired us because we know best, tell them what to do. And you know what? Sometimes just do it and then, you know, tell them, oops, I'm sorry, I did the right thing. Right. Like apology, you know, apologize for not getting their feedback. Like that's way better than getting pushed around, being passive, etc. That's one of the things that drives me crazy.

Lindsey (21:13)
Right?

Yes.

Right.

It's hard though,

right? mean, especially when you're younger, it's like, you know, I'm, and two, if, you know, I mean, you're at 25 and you're dealing with a, you know, 50 year old male CEO who has an, you know, type A personality, it's like you, you have, your confidence has to be pretty damn high to have those conversations. And fortunately, that's not something that I really ever struggled with, but it is, that is an area that I've improved and been able to,

perfect as the years have gone on and can mentor the younger team members that we have and how to navigate those situations.

Eric (22:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. If you could detach yourself from time and speak to 25 year old Lindsey at her first or second week joining this company without a website, without an office, without much of anything, like what would you say to her?

Lindsey (22:33)
man.

I would, what would I say to me, is your question, what would I tell myself in that same situation, like joining Glass Media, or just like in general, what would I tell my 25 year old self? Yeah, I would say don't worry about the plan so much. Is, you you are.

Eric (22:52)
What would you say?

Lindsey (23:02)
I'm assuming this is the same way. I have twins that are in high school and I'm assuming that they hear all along as you get into college, like, what are your plans? What do you want to major in? What are you going to do after school? What do you want to do for your life? And you feel like you have to have the answers to that and have this path. And what I would say is, don't worry about the path. Do what makes you happy.

And if that makes you money initially, cool. If you're just getting by, okay. But don't worry about, so don't worry so much about the future plans and the path. Make the best decisions that you can for the day because I will tell you, what I would tell myself is there will always be a job. It might not be the job.

And if you're younger and listening to this, it's like, I got super lucky at 25 to find my career and my people and my passion. That is not normal. And so embrace the struggle that you're on. And it is totally fine to have no idea where you want to be in five years. Do what makes you happy. Chase your passions.

and just live in the best decision that I can make for today without so much like debilitating anxiety around like, but what's it gonna be in five years? And am I saving money? And I'm supposed to buy a house? Like, don't worry, that all will come in time, but live in the moment and do what makes you happy.

Eric (24:33)
Very, very well said. I love hearing people that have had a lot of success in their career and in their life talk about luck because it's a big part of it. Let's leave it there. Lindsay, this was really wonderful. Thank you for doing this. Last question for you. I'm repping the Steely Dan today. Give us a music recommendation to listen to later on.

Lindsey (24:47)
you.

Hey, let's film.

I have been in a very like calm, peaceful era right now and this is not a new artist, it's just who I'm listening to a lot right now which is Ray LeMontagne. Are you, I don't know if you're familiar, you're nodding? Yes. No way.

Eric (25:11)
I have an autographed poster of Ray LaMontagne somewhere

in my house. Yeah, it's a long story, but my wife ran the front of house for a big theater at UNC Chapel Hill and I've met some pretty crazy people and she's met way, way more pretty crazy people. He's wonderful. He's so good.

Lindsey (25:20)
Okay.

Yeah. Yes.

I, that is just who I'm listening to right now. So if you haven't listened to Ray Lamontagne, it's a very good morning or like rainy afternoon type of listen. And if you just like whatever you listen to and you say like Ray Lamontagne radio, you'll also get a lot of really cool, similar artists. So that is my artist recommendation for right now. It will change next month, but that's it for right now.

Eric (25:53)
Yeah, awesome. Well, that's a good one. Lindsay, thank you very much.

Lindsey (25:56)
This was so fun to catch up. really appreciate it. know, mean, Eric, I'll talk about myself for an hour if you want me to. mean, are kidding? It's great. Thank you so much.

Eric (26:08)
Yeah, thank

you. All right, I'm gonna hit stop now.