To grow a business, ‘meet the people’ in an authentic and resonating way
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Tim Ringel is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meet The People, which serves large companies like Ford and Moët Hennessy. He built the company from nothing to over 500 people in less than a year.
In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, the serial entrepreneur talked about how he managed to build multiple businesses himself and how he’s helping people with their own brands through “programmatic advertising”.
Image from LinkedIn
Tim’s Beginnings
Tim was born in Germany. When he was 21, he built his first business and was lucky enough to sell it after 12 years. That brought him to Paris, where he built another business. After selling that, he went to New York — and that's now six years ago.
He lives in New York with his family. He’s building businesses, and Meet The People is the fifth business he’s building in the advertising space. Besides the advertising space, he’s also a very active investor in venture capital, specifically in early- and late-stage start-ups.
Tim started his first business, knowing nothing about business. He was 21 and was still in college whilst working as an Information Technology (IT) Administrator in a large bank. He knew computers well and was a coder by heart. He got his first personal computer when he was 11 and had locked himself away to learn and teach himself coding.
When he started the business, he and his business partner were more on the coding side and less extroverted. They had no idea how to win a client’s side. It was a hustle: On his part, he had to do cold calling and send letters.
At that time (around 1998 and 1999), there was no LinkedIn. You had to work really hard to convince people that you are an upcoming, innovative company that, at least, can help them solve something.
During that period, what was most successful for him was sending people a letter stating that they were making mistakes somewhere on their website — and then calling them afterwards and asking his way up from the reception desk to the Chief Marketing Officer.
Also, as he was building a digital marketing agency, he found his way into publications by having a disruptive thesis around the industry and what's going to change — how the internet and how people sell products online will change.
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LinkedIn is the biggest networking and sales tool in the world right now. But if you have a few thousand followers on LinkedIn, you could get tens and hundreds of enquiries every day on the platform. It's quite terrible, and it's a lot of spam.
For Tim, something authentic and different will resonate really well, especially when you're an upcoming company because it shows you care. Especially when it comes from you as a Founder, it will show you really care about that first client. You really care about that first win. You really care about creating an individual solution depending on what your company does.
It is the hardest to win the first client, and many people rely on LinkedIn. But for him, a personal and authentic touch will go a long way.
Preserving Authenticity Within a Large Organisation
So far, the largest organisation Tim has created and run was 3,000 people in 69 offices around the globe. On a scale like that, as a CEO or a Founder, you can't know everybody anymore. At that point, it will be difficult to lead without authenticity down into your organisation.
The 3,000-people business he ran was one brand globally. And it came out of multiple acquisitions and organic growth. What they at his current company, Meet The People, are doing now is a replication of that. However, they keep each brand they acquire independent within the structure.
They own them, but each has its own DNA and authentic approach to talking to clients. He also isn’t the only CEO in the business. Each of these lines of business has its own leadership team that can talk to clients as CEOs as a part of the company, the equity structure, and the story. And this creates authenticity towards clients and personal touch.
However, keeping personal authenticity depends on what kind of clients you go for. If a very large company talks to a very large company, then you don't necessarily need that personal touch. You need it on the top because you’re both corporates. Your large-scale client will have a very professional procurement structure process.
When you’re making a difference — when you're smaller and hustling and building — that’s when a personal touch is important.
It isn’t necessarily about the scale of your business. It's about what kind of clients you want to work for and where you want to grow with them. Even in a large assignment, a personal touch can go a long way. For instance, if who you’re talking to is a Vice President or Special Vice President for Marketing, that personal relationship is still very important.
For his business, Tim’s vision is to have multiple brands and leaders within the business that win businesses and talk to clients with a very personal touch.
Keeping the Culture and Brand DNA
Going from zero to 500 in 12 months is astounding in terms of people and talent acquisition. The trick is how you create a culture. In their case, they have multiple brands, and each has its own culture.
Image from Unsplash
The growth hack he’s using (which is actually a simple growth hack to get to scale) is that he’s buying these companies. He’s acquiring them and giving them a larger platform to operate on — including financial and human resources infrastructure, amongst others.
This means that these businesses already have their own culture. In fact, one of those businesses is 40 years old. If you go there, introduce yourself, and say, “I have these brilliant ideas about how you should work,” it won’t work.
It's very important they keep their DNA. What Meet The People does is help them to work together on client opportunities. And that's where their vision comes in.
When you're a small company, you have two options. You can either build a very clear vision for your team that people can rally behind or you can create an “enemy,” as Tim describes it. Creating the enemy is picking a competitor you want to beat in terms of winning businesses or being better.
Though it’s ultimately subjective, it helps people rally behind something that might be blurry. If you are a young company, you know where you want to go, but as an entrepreneur, you can't exactly describe the vision of what it will be.
For example, when Google started, nobody knew what they were trying to do, and it was difficult for Larry Page and Sergey Brin to explain their slogan: "Don't be evil.” It's emotional, but what is it? What does that mean? How do you rally behind that?
Building a clear vision or creating an enemy is the growth hack that helped Tim create culture and rally people. Then, at some point, you have to step into a bigger mission and vision.
Ushering Talent and Client Growth
In his role as CEO and Founder of Meet The People, Tim has the luxury that their companies operate semi-independently. They have their own book of business; they do their own marketing strategy — how to win and go after certain pieces of business.
Apart from talking to potential clients, drawing from his 25-year experience in the industry, his job is much more about talking to founders of companies. And that deal flow of bringing new potential companies into their group solves two things: It solves talent growth and client growth.
That, in turn, allows him to offer more services. He tries not to bring companies into Meet The People with the same services they already have — he tries to add new services for a fully integrated marketing strategy and structure.
His main job is finding cool companies and great entrepreneurs with whom he shares great chemistry. He travels a lot, meets many people, and goes really deep. He even met some of the founders 12 to 14 times before they decided that he would propose to acquire or buy the company and have them come with him.
Different Sources of Capital
When Tim talks to startups, no matter which industry, he always hears people saying everybody needs money and capital when building a business.
His best advice as a senior entrepreneur is if you don't need capital, that's the best business you can build — because it's going to be 100% yours. You will have full control. You won't have to report to anyone but yourself. However, it also means you're pretty much alone and isolated from the world.
Image from Unsplash
But if you need capital, there are four different sources.
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Business Angel Capital. It’s very emotional money and network-related — small tickets that will ideally give you a strategic advantage. They come from great advisors. They're seasoned entrepreneurs who will help you to get the minimum viable product (MVP) into the market. These people are very emotional. They don't invest in a great business plan. They invest in the idea. The money from them comes with the need to manage emotions and relationships.
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Family Office Money. It’s similar to the first one but is a much bigger ticket and has a much bigger longevity (usually a 10-year horizon). Sometimes, they don't even want their money back; they live on dividends. These are professional structures, but you ultimately talk to the patriarch. It’s the person whose return expectations are not 100x. They want sustainable business models that support entrepreneurs at scale. However, this is not the first kind of capital you raise.
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Venture Capital. Here, it’s all about the story. In the early stages, it can be smaller tickets (say, half a million dollars); in later stages, it can be hundreds of millions of dollars. Venture capital expects that your vision allows a 100x return. It’s why they buy into the entrepreneur combined with that vision. Venture capital only works for certain business models that can return 100x.
You have to have a moonshot vision that can significantly disrupt an industry or create a new product that can offer this return because private equity money is deployed. And they don’t deploy it to just five companies. They deploy it to 20 or 30 companies. They know the failure ratio is 90%, so three companies have to make the entire return. If they don't offer 100x, they'll never make their return on investment (ROI).
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Private Equity Money. Capital sources all look the same in the way that cash looks the same, but they taste and smell differently because the expectations are different. And private equity money doesn’t necessarily care about the vision. They care much more about whether there’s an established industry that you are disrupting. Because if the industry already works and you can do it better, you don't need to reinvent the wheel completely. You’re not creating a new category. You're basically disrupting an industry where the vision is a little less important than the potential financial return.
Private equity does not expect 100x. They expect a 4x or 5x. Therefore, you must be positive on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA). Private equity would say something like, “Let's build that rocket ship” instead of going to Mars. They would prefer to do the infrastructure, which entails very different return expectations.
In Meet The People’s case, Tim raises capital from private equity because he knows that a service business with intangible assets (i.e., people) is not a 100x-return business.
What Is Programmatic Advertising?
Tim is a programmatic advertising expert. And there are two most important theses from his perspective.
Everybody has a tendency to be on social, but social is difficult organically because it’s very algorithmic and difficult to beat. Especially on new platforms like TikTok, a million views won’t get you any sales. Therefore, he’d advise focusing on organic channels first.
His thesis is that if you can't make it work on search (a.k.a. Google) on an ROI that you need for your business or for your MVP to be successful, you will never make it on social. Because the social ROI is always worse than the search for ROI. Why? Because search has intent data, whereas social has network and social data.
If you can't acquire traffic through organic search, you can do it with paid search. You can do it with a hundred bucks a day or even a month. You just have to educate yourself. Keep in mind that if you can't make the ROI work on search, you will never make it work on social, display, video, YouTube, or any other channel.
So, number one is do search first — and do it well. The second is don't try to acquire your customer twice.
Start with a loyalty program immediately, especially when you're consumer-facing or direct-to-consumer (D2C). Otherwise, you're going to pay ransom to the big tech platforms every time you want to reacquire the customer even though you already know that customer.
Image from Unsplash
What works is the combination of search first, then loyalty, rewards, or something that allows you to communicate with existing consumers again (e.g., through promotions, email marketing, or whichever free channel).
Tim always tells startups that they shouldn’t come to him for a social strategy until they have nailed that. If they have nailed that, social is the next scale.
Insightful Words for Fellow Entrepreneurs
The number one piece of advice that Tim would give to people who want to go noticed is to be yourself. If you have to change who you are, you will not enjoy the journey.
The second one is, it’s on you. It’s on nobody else. You shouldn’t say, “Oh, they didn't do this or they didn't do that.” It's your fault. You are the founder. You are the entrepreneur. If you don't work hard or don't do it yourself in the beginning, nobody will do it.
As he learned, you have to have that network authenticity. Helping people is how you build relationships; it dictates how your network will work. You shouldn’t be burning bridges for the sake of making your point.
These are basic behavioural things that will help you be more successful because you're going to meet people again. You will meet them three or four times in your life, and they will come back for more when your business is bigger or when you start another business.
Moreover, he doesn’t like when people say you must follow your passion. Yes, it’s technically true, but it doesn't mean it's easy because you love it. It's a hustle. You have to get up every morning. You're the first one in the office. You're the last one to leave. If you’re not physically in the office, you have to work hard on platforms like Zoom. If you don't do it, your people will not follow.
To learn more about Tim Ringel, follow him on LinkedIn and Instagram.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by rawpixel.com on Freepik