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You've handed over responsibility. So why is everyone still asking you to make the decisions? And why, if you're honest, are you a little relieved that they are?
I'm Dr. Tara Vossenkemper, a consultant and group practice owner. On Integrity at Scale™, I teach, think out loud, and get into the practical and human sides of leading a business. That means roles, numbers, culture, and the things that keep happening even though you've already had that conversation. Three times.
Some episodes teach something you can use. Others take you into a decision I'm making in my own business, a pattern I'm noticing, or a question I haven't settled yet. You'll also hear conversations with other leaders and responses to listener questions.
I want you to leave with a clearer understanding of what's happening and something useful to try. Sometimes that comes with a great idea. Sometimes it comes with, “Well, shit. I do that.”
This was previously called the Culture Focused Practice podcast. All the earlier episodes are still here in the same feed, so you can keep listening right where you left off.
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@culturefocusedpractice
Explore the Model and Working Together: https://www.taravossenkemper.com/
Hey folks. Dr. Tara Vossenkemper here. You're listening to the Culture Focus Practice podcast. Thank you of course for joining me, hanging out with me for a little bit. So if marketing in your practice, I'm saying this to you, but I'm also saying this for myself, obviously has or does feel inconsistent or unclear or just overly dependent on you. It might not be a strategy problem, it might actually be an ownership problem. So we're gonna talk today about why marketing breaks down without clear ownership. And I'm gonna do this a little bit different than normal. So I'm kind of blending episodes, episode styles, I should say. I'll do some agenda here's a point, here's a point, here's another point. But I'm also gonna pepper them in with some kind of like owner's room style questions. It's really alive for me right now, this whole concept. For me it's like both, like there's this content educational component, but there's also very real and loud in my system. So I basically said, what the fuck? Let's just do 📍 both. We do have three items on the agenda. First is marketing without ownership, which we're just gonna talk about this. Second is what this role actually owns. And when I say this role, I mean a marketing strategist role. Third is why this role changes everything and let's just segue straight into it. Here's a question I'm gonna ask myself and then talk a little bit about, and we will follow up with some more specific details after that. So question to myself and maybe for you to reflect on for yourself as well. Where is marketing still shared instead of owned? This was the start of all of it, of this whole sort of deep dive, I guess, into marketing as like a system and who owns what metrics and what goes where and how are we maintaining it. Marketing for us is still a shared everywhere, like nobody is owning it clearly. There are a variety of marketing related things that are happening. My initial thought was that I would condense down our marketing system and then pass it to our integrator, and the integrator would be the one sort of pulling triggers on things that are happening. But what I realized is that the integrator doesn't own the marketing numbers. In essence, we're missing a key sort of function here. Who's responsible for client acquisition? Like the numbers actually, website conversion or number of inquiries coming in, or our SEO rankings. I don't think that should fall on the integrator. That doesn't make any sense to me because those are marketing related numbers. They're important too. But that would mean that the whole responsibility of marketing falls under the integrator that does not fit. That does not make sense for us, for where we are right now. Maybe at some point it did, but it doesn't right now. So marketing currently, for a very short time until we get this person fully onboarded, is shared everywhere, and I fucking hate it. Let's shift and talk about why is it really a problem that marketing is shared? There's a few reasons. I feel like you know this, but I'm just gonna say it anyway. If we have fragmented responsibility, we're gonna have inconsistent results. Nobody owns a number, so if nobody owns a number, then nobody is responsible or accountable for that number. If something is off, who do we go to? Who do we say, Hey? What's the deal with this number? Tell me the details, tell me more about it. For us that's what was happening. So let me backtrack a little. If we have marketing split across different people too, let's say, even then it's like, well, client care also doesn't own the number of inquiries. The client care owns the conversion rate, like from inquiry to intake, but they don't own website conversion. That's a totally different metric. These are two very different things. So who tracks the vendors? Who ensures that the outcomes for marketing are not just tasked, but there's ownership for outcomes. My point is that if it's fragmented responsibility, then you're going to get one, not clear focus, but two really inconsistent results. And if you get inconsistent results, if we take that a step further, then we don't really know what was effective either. So it could be that you tried one sort of marketing related venture and you don't see any ROI from it, but at the same time, you sort of let something else fall through the cracks. So then we don't know if that lack of ROI is about the marketing related venture not being effective, or if it's about that shit falling through the cracks. So that's like that fragmented responsibility. Again, we're not getting any sort of outcome or result that we can trust really. Another component to marketing without ownership is that the owner becomes the default bottleneck. This is exactly what happened for us. So even if I'm not the one doing marketing, I'm saying that in quotes, all of the marketing related decisions ultimately flow back through me. So messaging, vendors, budgets, direction, et cetera. Even if I pass this over to the integrator and I say, Hey, I want you to develop a whole like, annual plan of like all the shit that we have going on. For any group that we're launching, here's the cadence and the rhythm. We're looking at like six weeks in advance. We should be doing this sort of marketing for it. Then the integrator turns into the one that's focused on execution instead of being able to like outsource to the right people. But also is maybe in essence pulling triggers on stuff that she doesn't really understand, like it's not living inside of her. It's not embodied or like, integrated necessarily. She's doing what I'm asking her to do, but then I'm the default, A, bottleneck, but also the default owner, I think that it's actually one and the same. And then shit that needs to happen doesn't, because I'm not gonna remember, or I'm not gonna be paying attention constantly to marketing related things. Case in point, why we also need a marketing strategist role. If you are the owner and you have become the default owner of marketing stuff, and you are the default bottleneck. In essence, everything around marketing slows down, but I also think it ends up becoming really reactive. So if I have a vision, for example, a s part of the visionary, and trying to relay that to all the people and delegate things appropriately, and remove yourself from core functions, you want them all accounted for. If I'm then supposed to be the person who is ensuring that marketing is taking place, it's really hard to both like strategize a vision and then come down into marketing and strategize marketing around the vision, and then ensure that it's actually taking place. So marketing becomes really reactive. And what I will say to that is. For me, part of the bottleneck and sort of like slowing marketing down is that every time we would go to do something or we would start talking about something, I would always ask myself, okay, but why are we doing this right now? And to what end are we doing it? Like if we're doing it now, what's the intention? What's it connected to bigger picture? How are we like grounded in what we're doing? And it took me forever to really come down to an answer. And by that time, if I had the time to even think and process through it, it would be past the point at which we needed to respond to something anyway. It would just be late. I would slow down the whole fucking process because I needed to reground myself and why are we doing this and if we do this here, and what about there? And what about this? It just, Ugh, it was a mess. It's not actually a mess, but that to me feels 📍 messy. Owner becomes the default bottleneck. That's the second point. Again, marketing without ownership. This basically is also what I'm talking about indirectly, is that there's activity that happens, but there's no accountability. And this is exactly what has been happening. We've got blogs that get posted on a consistent basis. We have SEO that gets tended to. Certain pages might get worked on every few months or something. But we also make sure we optimize our blogs for SEO. We make sure that we're doing Google Business profile. We have a CRM, we have emails that we could be sending out. There's stuff that is, maybe happening and sometimes not happening, but for the things that do happen, it still is that nobody's responsible for the outcome. So let's say we're writing a blog, what's the point? Like I understand what it does for us on Google in terms of keeping us ranking and our websites alive. I get that, but then what? dot, dot, dot. Does this actually relate to more inquiries? Does this actually relate to a higher likelihood of clients being converted or inquiries being converted into clients? If that is not happening, or we're not tracking that, there's no outcome that we're like tending to or saying these things need to result in that outcome. Then there's all of this activity without accountability, which from my perspective, that is throwing spaghetti at a wall. It's really frustrating, like shaking my head at myself. Ah gosh, I just hate being in that position. It's funny too, 'cause I can see all these marketing pieces clearly, but bringing them all together into something coherent that aligns or overlaps with our vision and then also the accountability piece and the ownership. Something always ends up falling through the cracks. It honestly doesn't feel like falling through the cracks. It feels like there's too much for the plate, you know? I've got this on the plate, but then this edge over here, the other half of the plate is sort of like slime, like falling off the side, you know? 📍 Whew. Okay. Let's do agenda item number two from a real smooth segue, what this role actually owns. So owner reflection slash question slash prompt for myself: if I'm being honest, have I actually wanted to let go of this or have I just wanted it to get easier? Both. I want it to be not easy for myself. I want it to be clean and coherent is the word that keeps coming to mind. I want the marketing to be coherent. I want it to make sense in and of itself, but then also when it's, what's it called superimposed. When it's basically set on top of our vision, does it line up? And if the answer is yes, then to me that is easier. It makes sense. Like it's like, oh, this totally fits. I get it. It's clean, it's coherent. Boom let's go, you know, off to the races. But there also is this component of, I absolutely wanna let go of this. I think that partially, I know that I'm not good at it. Marketing is a maintenance based system. There are creative endeavors within it, of course, like we're trying new things. But ultimately it is about constant attunement to key metrics and outcomes. That is not something I do well. So marketing creative endeavors seem like fun. Like, oh, we could do this or we could try this. Or, what about this? That's all shotgun spray. That's spaghetti at a wall. The constant attunement, the constant attention to metrics and outcomes, y'all know that's the shit I don't fucking do well. I feel like that for me is like tried and true visionary. I'm not gonna maintain this. I actually wonder what people think about this. I think that people who aren't visionary, at least in some form or fashion, or maybe they're not close to somebody who's more visionary I wonder if people don't really understand how it feels for somebody who is more visionary to be tasked with an ongoing maintenance based system. It is truly, like my body is filled with drying cement. That's how it feels. Where everything in me is begging me to stop. It's like my body is battling me. My brain is like, we must do this thing. And the rest of me is like, fuck you, bitch. I am not doing that. It's so hard. It is so, so difficult to continue maintaining something once it's established. I love building shit. I love creating things. I like architecting, I like visioning. Once it's done, I want to step back and I wanna see it run. You know, I don't wanna be an integral part of it. I wanna be able to view the whole thing in its entirety. So anyway, that's me saying I have wanted to let go of it, but I also want it to be clean. And I also wanted to have integrity, and I also want it to align with our system, and I am not good at it. Even if I did try to keep a hold of it I'm just mm-hmm. Not, I'm not good at it. So let's talk about what this role actually owns then. This is super important, number one. The owner of this role, and again, for us, we're going with a marketing strategist, not somebody who's doing hardcore execution all the time, but somebody who owns not vanity metrics, real marketing metrics, so the number of inquiries who come through the door, the website conversion. Again, we are distinguishing between people come to your website and they turn into an inquiry. That's one type of conversion. And then also people who call in or submit a contact form and they turn into a client. So we have a website visitor or a somebody finding us to inquiry. That's the conversion that marketing would own. Like anybody who finds us, are they going to reach out to us? Second type of conversion from inquiry to intake that would be on client care. That's separate. So aside from the website conversion and inquiries, they would also own website performance. So are we ranking well? Are we healthy as a website? Are we loading fast? Do we have a certain amount of unique visitors in a month or in a quarter? Like all of those things. That would be the website conversion. What percentage of those unique visitors become inquiries? Also, reputation management. How do we seek reviews in a way that's ethical? How do we respond to reviews in a way that's HIPAA compliant? Basically the flow from the first touch point all the way to somebody reaching out to us. Client acquisition, almost the full pipeline, not the final conversion component. They own that whole system. Second thing, what this role actually owns this to me is the same thing as the pipeline, or maybe I'm just expanding a little bit. They own the metrics related to client acquisition pipeline, so the volume of inquiries, the website, conversion rates, SEO rankings, pipeline health, reputation management. So I think I said this already, not just vanity metrics, but legit marketing metrics. And they are accountable for movement of these numbers. This role for us will sit on leadership because they're owning a core function of the practice. They're owning inquiries like that is such a key piece to practice health. I mean, clients coming in, inquiries coming in is, akin to oxygen. I'm saying this because on a weekly basis when we have our L 10 meetings, they'll be reporting on key marketing metrics in our weekly scorecard, obviously for those who don't know, EOS, just listen to previous podcast episodes. I don't know which numbers. Just type in EOS, search that out, and then you'll hear sort of an overview of what it is. I'm not gonna get into right now is my point. The marketing strategist will own key marketing metrics and report on those on a weekly basis in our L 10 meetings. But it's not just reporting. This is where L 10 and accountability all come to life. They are responsible for ensuring that the numbers that we are seeing are moving in the direction that we want them to see. So if our inquiries continue dropping, let's say on a weekly basis. Then I'm gonna go to the marketing person or my integrator who's technically the one responsible for applying pressure if the numbers are dropping or not going in the direction that we want. My integrator, Taylor would say, marketing strategist this keeps dropping. What's the plan? What's going on? What's the diagnosis? We need to move on. This isn't okay. This is part of the, having a role in place and having a clear owner means that we can then put onus on them. This is your number to own and move, period. Third thing that they're gonna own, or some of the third piece, I'm sorry. Vendor coordination and alignment. So if we have a marketing strategist. This doesn't mean that they're gonna be the one doing every single piece or every single aspect of marketing related to the business. We're still gonna have somebody who does graphic design work for us. We're still gonna have somebody who does the blog posting and the Google Business profile posting. We're still gonna have somebody who does website updates. We're still gonna have somebody who does SEO work, but the marketing strategist will coordinate all of those efforts. So they're gonna say, SEO person, we're gonna push these two pages. I want you to optimize these two pages. Blog people. We want you to write posts related to this. Tie it back to these pages, digital person, we're gonna have you do this graphic design, we need you to do this. They're gonna coordinate all of those efforts, and it's all gonna be ideally in accordance with the vision and also still keeping track of the metrics and like the intended outcomes of those efforts. 📍 I am gonna keep going. That was agenda item number two. Third agenda item, why this role changes everything. I'm gonna be honest with you. I feel like this is really obvious, but I will still get into it. What would it actually change in my role and slash or my identity if I stopped being the one who holds this? I don't know why I chose this question 'cause it would free up space and time, it would relieve a significant amount of weight if I could go to a person and say, what the fuck is up with this number? Instead of being somebody who had to try to dig into it myself. It would be relieving. Like I would feel like somebody was helping carry the weight of this thing, who also was better able to carry it. Sort of like, um, you know, in those strong men competitions that gotta pick up those giant fucking boulders, they practice doing that. They squat down, they grab it, they like hoist it up, and then they hoist it up more and then they have to set it on top of that giant platform. Those guys are wild. It's so wild to see them. They are able to do that because of the ways in which they train and practice. I might have somebody doing, let's say gymnastics or like calisthenics or just general weightlifting. They would not be able to do the same thing, but they're also super fucking strong. So I might say, you know, a strong man's not gonna be able to hold a handstand and walk on his hands, or maybe he can't do the hanging rings, you know, where he like puts his arms out to his side and then brings himself up. They might not be able to do that like a gymnast could. My point is that training in your specific area makes you good at doing something specific. And so for me, that feels relieving. I don't wanna be good at this. I know enough to be dangerous with it, you know, where it's like, we could do this, I could do this. I understand that. That doesn't make me good at it. That doesn't mean that I'm actually good at doing marketing related things. And it for sure doesn't mean that I own it well, because I don't, and by own, I mean take accountability for the metrics. Like ultimately yes, they follow me because the default owner is me. Owner is the default, including the default bottleneck. But I'm not owning them well. I'm not holding myself accountable. So if I stop being the one who holds this. It would feel relieving to me. The change in my role would be I almost said insignificant. That was the first word that popped in my head. I guess I meant insignificant, like letting go of this doesn't feel like a big ask. It feels great. I would love to like pass it over. I'm ready to pass that torch, because the torch is like sputtering out. But the other piece is that it would honestly free me up to be more visionary. I think that's the other component to this, is that it doesn't just provide relief in the way where I'm like, oh, thank God I don't wanna carry this. I'm not doing it well. But it also allows me to step more into the visionary role, do more things that are like direction focused and culture focused. And I always think about the queen ant from the harvester ants where the pheromones sort of set the intention for the colony. It's not like they're micromanaging all of the movement, but they're like omitting this pheromone that says this colony is stable and healthy. I'm sure there's so much more to it than that. The more I can focus on being visionary, the more I can focus my pheromones metaphorically on the health of the colony and not just, we need to get marketing metrics and alignment. We need to focus more here. I don't want that frantic energy going anywhere. It needs to live in the appropriate place. So it would be relieving and it would help me step more into the visionary role. 📍 Okay. Let's get into a few more logistics about this though. Why this role changes everything. One, it moves marketing from task based to outcome based. Instead of, we're doing marketing, we're gonna try this, it becomes this person, the marketing strategist owns marketing metrics and whether or not marketing is working, God. Even saying that out loud is hell yes, so great. Oh my goodness. So incredible. That shift in and of itself changes everything. All of the behavior across the system, my integrator gets to be more clearly herself. My client care worries less about inquiries and more about conversion. My DCO is now focused more on utilization and more on session numbers rather than weaning more clients coming in. Everybody gets a hit of relief. And I think especially for my integrator too, and of course for visionary, which we just talked about, she also gets to step more fully into an integrator role. Which is, staying in tune with the core functions of the business and ensuring that everything is running effectively. Second thing, it removes the owner from operational decision making. I don't have anything to do with marketing decisions then. Let's say we sit down at the beginning of each year and we're of course, on a quarterly basis, we review our vision slash traction organizer, or our VTO, that's another EOS concept. Again, if you haven't listened to previous episodes about EOS, please do. But on an annual basis also, we are taking two days to set the vision. We're doing vision planning, which also includes updating the VTO. So when that VTO is established, and let's say we have a budget set for marketing, and let's say the marketing person knows, we have this plan for quarter three, we want this in quarter four. From that point on, they're basically the one deciding when we pull the trigger for what. What we should try next. They're saying, well, let's do AB testing with this. How about we try this marketing campaign instead, we should be starting this. They get to decide and if the numbers are moving in the direction that we want them to, that's exactly what we're wanting. We want the numbers to be moving, but there's also the integrator that's a part of it, and the visionary that's responsible for, of course, like setting the full vision. So marketing doesn't exist outside of the system. It exists within the system, but there's ownership, there's decisions that's like fully delegating, not delegating a task, but you're delegating ownership of this whole role, which includes all of the functions that we talked about. And then thus removes the owner. Sorry, to get back to the main point of that, lastly, if we're thinking about why this role changes everything, it protects and scales the system. Look, I will say this. I think this has actually been a global tr, well, I don't know about global, but national, for the US at least, there's been a decrease in inquiries for group practices kind of across the board for the past few years, like a slow and steady decline. That has been true for us too. And so when I think about protecting and scaling the system, I think there is stabilizing what is, but also scaling in the way that we want to. Scaling and alignment with the vision that we have as we grow marketing becomes more complex. Whenever we started, I think like how much I just went out and started talking to people, that was really for my own sake and for knowing people in the area. I wanted to know people in the area and then, indirectly, as a byproduct they also learned about me and so we had these working relationships. As we grew, of course, that slowed down. I removed myself almost entirely from that. As we continue to grow and expand and with a goal to scale, it's only going to be more complex and not necessarily complex like, complexity for the sake of complexity, but if we need more clients coming in, then we need more inquiries. And so our marketing efforts will need to increase, whether in scope or in depth or in breadth. I don't necessarily know, but there's going to need to be more of something taking place. So what we have done to date has been fine. It served us well. It will not continue serving us well. It will not allow us to hit the goals that we wanna goal. So the role protects the system and then again, helps us scale. So if we have somebody with an eye on the prize, like a finger on the pulse of all the marketing metrics, then they're the one that is ensuring that this system will evolve with us. So we have this person over here, any feedback coming in, like they will evolve with us in the same way. I always think about the living practice framework or the living practice that we're all sort of like, breathing together, you know, like inhaling and exhaling and getting more robust and sort of evolving as we go. We're adapting as we go. We need a marketing role. They will, in essence, be doing the same 📍 thing. Woo, goodness gracious, so much talking. Let's do recap. Marketing problems are very often ownership problems. Without a clear owner, marketing becomes fragmented and reactive, both of which suck. A marketing strategist owns the full client acquisition pipeline from inception all the way through inquiry. They don't own from inquiry to intake, and they don't just own the tasks. The marketing strategist role shifts marketing from activity to accountability through ownership, and they free the visionary from being the bottleneck. Praise Jesus. That is so incredible. I think that's all. That's really it. Honestly, for the rest of this, I wanna say thank you for being here with me. Thank you for being a part of my podcast ecosystem. Two things. One is, I have a download for you. If you don't have it already. I mentioned the Living Practice Framework. You can read more about it, and there's a little video and there's a framework at taravossenkemper.com/living-practice-framework-overview. That link is in the description if you don't wanna type it all out. Second thing, subscribe to the podcast. Not only are you able to catch new episodes as they drop and find old episodes, if you wanna re-listen, but also you help more people find it who need to hear it. So great seeing you and thanks for being here and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks, bye.