Why Being Unapologetically Yourself Drives Success | Chris Suchánek

Chris Suchánek: [00:00:00] I'm only concerned with the people on the court. I have other team members that are on the bench, but while I'm on the court, I'm very hyper-focused on the people on the court. The people on the bench are there and I get that. But if you're in the stands, you got no say. If you're on the bench, I'll talk to you when I get out from the court.

But while we're on the court, these are the only people I care about. And sometimes you run a company and you know, not everybody's on the court. I was on the court and you can encourage them to be on the court. You can ask them to be on the court. You can try to train them to be on the court. You can build systems and protocols that force them to be on the court, but at a certain point you got to just say, ‘Hey, you don't want to be on the court.’

Nick McLean: Welcome to Ambition. I'm your host, Nick McLean. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work on an album that wins a Grammy? Well, today's guest is going to tell us. I'm sitting down with Chris Suchánek, CEO and co-founder of Firm Media, a niche marketing company serving over 200 surgical providers based in Southern California.

I came across his profile and was impressed by [00:01:00] all the great things he's done in the marketing space. And the variety of businesses he's involved in. Chris shares how he focused his business to serve with expertise, his priorities in building a culture, and what it looks like to lead from a place of integrity and awareness.

From working with rock stars to surgeons, Chris has discovered what it takes to make it big. While staying true to who you are. 

Today, we are sitting with the CEO and co-founder of Firm Media, Chris Suchánek. Chris has done a lot of great things in the digital marketing space and has a really interesting story, partially about how we got into marketing and how we got into this particular niche.

So Chris, to kick things off, would you mind just telling us about yourself and for [Firm] Media and also how there might've been a transition from music to the business world involving Google? 

Chris Suchánek: Sure. So my name is Chris Suchánek. You mentioned I'm the CEO for [Firm] Media. I'm also a little bit of a serial [00:02:00] entrepreneur.

My wife and I own a couple of restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area. We also own a little nonprofit in here, that operates here in Southern California, and then also, out in Mexico, we do some work in Mexico. I was in the music business for about 10 years. So about 20 years old, I entered the music business as a musician.

I was able to record a couple albums. Not even really one-hit wonders. They, they, they got a little bit of regional success and what ended up happening was in the local music scene in the sort of late eighties, early nineties, if you had a record deal, then you were officially the one that was further along in the business than all of your friends.

So because I had done that and I had been in a couple of studios and worked with some engineers and worked with some producers, I had a little bit of street cred, I guess, at the time that helped me to sort of start working with other friends, bands, and people were asking me to go in the studio with them and be a producer and be, you know, whatever.

And, along the way, what I figured out was, as soon as I got into the studio, I realized that I didn't want to be a [00:03:00] musician. I wasn't really a musician at heart. I loved being a songwriter. But I also, wow, when I was in the studio, I liked that part. And then I realized I liked the title of executive producer because now I'm just looking for the money and I'm not even having to spend like – physically work in the studio.

Right. So when I realized that I was good at being an executive producer, which really meant in the long run, that I was good at sales. I jumped into that and I started executive producing albums, over the course of about a decade. I was fortunate enough to get some funding from a couple different major-label sources.

I was able to release 35 albums in three countries. And one of those albums, I know I didn't write the music. I want to be very clear about that. But, one of the albums that I was fortunate enough to be able to work on won a Grammy. The story that I tell is at the age that the team of people that were working on that record won a Grammy, they were, we were going to work on Monday and we knew that we were pretty good at what we did.

And [00:04:00] then we were told Monday night that we won a Grammy and we came to work on Tuesday. The change in the team of people was measurable. Now I was too young to know what that meant. And as I got older, I realized, Oh, being a part of a team and doing really great work and then being told that you've now touched greatness changed me from the inside out.

It made me someone who only wanted to do things that were great. It's made me very hard to work with and very hard to work for over the years. But it's also made me very proud of what I do. So the internet comes along, sometime around the early two thousands, the internet becomes a thing instead of people downloading, or instead of people sharing music on cassettes, tapes, and messengers, running them around Hollywood to deliver them to people.

People start sharing music via download. Napster comes along. Most everybody knows that story and what, but what ended up happening was major labels stopped giving money to independent labels. So this, paycheck that I had that was coming in for about a decade went away and I had to [00:05:00] get a real job. So I went to work for the two gentlemen that bought the domain names plasticsurgery.com and cosmeticsurgery.com that gave me an introduction into working with specialty medical practices. I got to go work with about 700 to 750 plastic surgeons nationwide. And I realized very quickly, this was a time where plastic surgeons had their own TV shows. They do now too. But back then it was like the swan and the doctors and Dr. 90210, and stuff like that. So there wasn't. A big difference between working with rock stars and working with plastic surgeons. And, and I was able to make that jump. And so I got a bird's eye view of what it was like when you on the domain name, plasticsurgery.com and there's no Google, this is pre-Google.

People just searched plastic surgery.com. So a million visitors a month went to that website. And when a million visitors a month went to a website, you learned a lot about traffic and behavior and behavioral insights that you couldn't get from analytics back then. So that just gave me a bird's eye view on how to [00:06:00] do this.

I, 10 years later, started firm media about 16 years ago with 2,000 of Vonage phone line and a business card for my kitchen table. Today it is, we do digital marketing for plastic surgeons, oral surgeons, basically anyone who cuts specialty medical med spas, for 200 practices nationwide. It's about 40 employees here in the Southern California office that do that.

And then some vendors and strategic partners sprinkled around the country. That's the story. 

Nick McLean: So that's a really interesting story. One topic or theme that we come back to on the show is the decision or the path that the company or the founder takes towards specialization, focusing on a niche versus being more generalist. 

You know, hearing your story, the, the path to go down a, or to target a niche, you know, the medical business seemed to almost be made for itself because those were your, you know, first to know domains that you work with. I wonder though, as [00:07:00] you gain that experience and whatnot, was there an appeal or a draw to try and ban beyond medical because you thought, well, if I know, if I know all this about medical, I can apply that to, to any industry or whatnot. Or did you have the discipline to say, I know, I know medical, I'm going to stay in, in this niche for better or for worse?

Chris Suchánek: It's a good question. Although it seems like that decision was made for me to stay in specialty medical or plastic surgery that's not the case. I worked for a company in the plastic surgery space. I was their basically operations manager for about I worked from wherever I started all the way up to that position, and I was there for about eight years, maybe.

And I left there with no compete, and I chose to value and honor that no compete. So I didn't work directly in the plastic surgery space. Now, I had plastic surgeons who knew my name, and they would call me, and they would ask me to do marketing for them, so I was working with them. So when I first started Firm Media, we did legal, medical, and dental.

Also, I broadened [00:08:00] it to professional services. There's a piece of information that's very important here. I left the company that I worked for in June of 2008, making the most money I'd ever made in my entire life. The market crashed in October. So I jokingly say that if you were a professional service provider who wanted to buy marketing from me, I would have also wrote in car washes to the service agreement just to make five extra bucks a week, because no one was buying marketing in June of 2008.

So it was very rough. So I went out with a very broad category, which was professional services. And what I ended up with was realizing that there's a specific subset of professional services that was better for a marketing agency at the time. And it was a highly, it was a super technical process. I took a list of all of our clients and I went into the conference room and at the time we had a whiteboard in the conference room and on the conference room whiteboard, I wrote the name of the [00:09:00] client.

Then I wrote what they did, whether it was financial services, real estate, plastic surgery, oral surgery. And then I wrote 1 dollar sign, 2 dollar signs, or 3 dollar signs. And then I wrote a happy face or a sad face. And what I came up with at the end was basically higher-end professional service providers paid more money and were generally happier with the services.

What I believe to be true about that was that marketing agencies that any industry where the money passes through the individual's pocket before it comes to the marketing agency is a very, very hard person to do marketing for. So your average real estate agent is like, is kind of paying you out of their pocket.

Okay. They don't have a marketing budget. They don't have a marketing person. They generally have a different set of expectations for what marketing should do. I wanted to work with people who didn't have, who had a different, who that had that more established higher-end set of sort of marketing prowess, right? So that left me with legal, medical, and dental. And so we went down to legal, medical, and dental. And then what I realized is when I narrowed the niche [00:10:00] like that, we kind of blew up. So then I went, let's just go specialty medical. So we went plastic surgery and dental kinda. And, and when we went plastic surgery and dental, we blew up in the oral surgery market.

And that was just being in the right place at the right time. Oral surgeons have a tendency to, I mean, you got to watch trends and you got to watch the market and you got to watch what's happening to make these decisions, right? Plastic surgeons and med spots, it's a no-brainer. They're cash pay service.

They do marketing. We do marketing for them. When we're doing marketing for them, they know we're doing a good job because there's, I guess, technically butts in seats, right? But on the oral surgery end of things, they were insurance-driven. But they started doing things like dental implants, full mouth restoration.

This stuff's not insurance-driven. They now needed someone who could market them direct to consumer, which was a different market for them. And I'm now, I'm getting people to show up in the search engines for – I often say there's no harder phrase to get on the internet than breast augmentation, Beverly Hills unless it's injury attorney, New York.

[00:11:00] But when you can do that for a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, you can be pretty rest assured that you're going to be able to get someone to rank for dental implants in Des Moines, Iowa. And so we, that was a natural progression for us to move into that space. So niching down super important for us. 

Nick McLean: It's interesting that a lot of areas I would like to explore further in, in that answer that you just gave, one of which is the concept of luck versus hard work in terms of if you think it was more luck, more hard work – if you think that's a stupid question. And for some people, it's an interesting question, but I mean, what can you really do with it?

So you think it's more luck versus hard work? I don't really care because how can, how can I grow from that? But what I think is potentially helpful is thinking about how you view opportunities and how you think about being able to have the foresight to recognize something as an opportunity versus just seeing an opportunity and letting it go by the wayside.

I'm specifically talking about [00:12:00] your, comment about oral surgery and being, being in the right place at the right time. Sounds like luck to me, but I would make the argument that maybe there's a little bit more there than just purely being in the right place at the right time. 

Chris Suchánek: Yeah. And I don't, I don't know how much, like, I guess over the years, people I've had a reputation for people thinking I was lucky, right?

Like I got in the music business and then I got a record deal. And then from the, I got like funding from EMI Music Publishing. Right. And my friends were like, ‘yeah, man, every time that guy, like he figures out a way and the people just give them stuff and so on and so forth.’ And I actually bought into that for a long time because when I was younger, I really believe I bought into my own persona.

Right. Like there was this character that I was in the world and that character was known as like lucky and he could make things happen. And so when somebody said that about me, I was like, okay, so I'm fortunate. I like see me as fortunate. And I rode that wave as long as until I didn't you know. I just don't believe it anymore.

Here's the bottom line. I got a record deal because I was stupid enough [00:13:00] as a kid, or smart enough. My father told me once if you're going to be in that rock band, then you do something every single day to make sure somebody knows that rock band exists. So I would get up in the morning and write, I would draw a picture of the band logo and tape it in the front window of the house so when people drove by they could see it.

And then, when I moved out and got my own apartment, I said to the general telephone company that my name was the name of the band. So it would be in the phone book. So every waking hour, I did something to move the needle that eventually moved the needle. Now I'm not going to say that you need to go do those things to, to make it happen, but nothing about that has changed in me since the very beginning.

So is it luck or was I just doing a lot of things to be at the intersection of opportunity when it arose, right? You've also had to make some very strategic decisions along the way. We talked about niching down. Here's an interesting piece of information. So I was doing plastic surgeons, med [00:14:00] spas, some dentists, and some lawyers when firm media was about seven years old. It's 16 years, 17 years old now, right? It was about, so about seven years old. And I played in a band with a guy who moved to Denver, who was doing it for an oral surgeon in Denver. I had an oral surgeon in San Francisco who was a friend of a plastic surgeon that we were doing marketing for.

So I was doing marketing for the oral surgeon in Denver, the one in San Francisco. And my business partner at the time went to get his wisdom teeth pulled to somebody in Los Angeles and they hired us to do marketing for them, which is an oral surgeon in Los Angeles. So I have three oral surgeons that I'm doing marketing for.

This woman comes along and this woman says, I want to start an organization called the Institute for Dental Implant Awareness because dental implants is becoming a very competitive space. So she calls her board together, which were five people on the board, and says, you see where this is going, right?

There's five people on her board. And she says, [00:15:00] who do you use for marketing? And three of her board members are the three oral surgeons that we do marketing for. That's pretty lucky. That's pretty lucky. Then she said, Hey, I want you to go around the country and speak to all of these people who do oral surgery.

But I had already had the prowess and the ability to go. I knew what to talk about and when to talk about it. So, I had to seize the opportunity. I had to get on airplanes. I had a lot of long nights. I had things that didn't pay that I had to do. Right. 

Nick McLean: Yeah. But it, it, you know, it goes back to the comment that you made about your dad, which I think is a, I mean, was your dad a brilliant marketer himself?

That suggestion or mandate that you tell everybody about your band? I mean, that's a great idea and one that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily think of on their own, you know. As it relates to how you got some of those clients. I know you told those folks what you were doing.

I know you told other folks what you were doing as well, specifically as it relates to, to oral surgery and whatnot. And so here's another example that I could make the argument that that lesson that your dad instilled in [00:16:00] you about letting people know what you're doing, you know, benefited you at Firm Media.

Because like I said, I'm sure you were out there telling everybody what Firm Media was trying to do. 

Chris Suchánek: Well, that and I take it very serious. I told you a little bit ago, I have a, I have a podcast, and the essence of the podcast, there's a couple of things that I do that are very particular to. I think where I'm at in the industry, we're a predominant agency in the specialty medical space.

So plastic surgeons, oral surgeons have gone over that, right? For instance, a little while back, I was afforded the opportunity to write for agency life and agency marketing for Forbes magazine. So I start writing, I have a couple of PR people here at the office and they're like, you need to be more general about what you're writing about, right?

Like we want you to write in a way that's like, so more Forbes readers will be interested in it. And I said, no, I'm not going to do that. I mean, I do specialty medical marketing. I'm going to talk about my experiences in specialty medical marketing. I'm going to write to [00:17:00] my clients in Forbes. That one thing that I did, basically some of the largest organization, I had to make a decision based on my own personal – my mantra is be unapologetically yourself.

And no, when something works for you and does not work for you, and if it works for you, then you're on that, you're on the right path. So I live my whole life by that. And when I got to that point in life, I realized that that was the most courageous thing that I've ever done. And I've done some pretty courageous things, but at all costs, I'm unapologetically myself.

When someone says to me, write about something that is more general. So you'll appeal to more people. And I think, no, I'm writing to my clients in Forbes. And what ended up happening was my clients read that stuff. And then just last week, I got an email from the largest med spa organization in the country saying, we read your article in Forbes. Can we push it out to all of our clients? 1,000 med spas nationally. Of course, I'm going to let you do that, right? 

Nick McLean: You know, I don't, I don't know that is sure. Maybe it takes a [00:18:00] little bit of courage, but also I think it takes your marketing savvy, if you will because I think you can make an argument that you should have gone broad so that it would reach more people and again, not, not to help Forbes, but to, but to help yourself.

However, you had the foresight to know that, no, that general article isn't going to help anybody or any of your potential clients. And for that reason, you needed to keep the message tight. 

Chris Suchánek: And there's also this idea that there's 7,000 plastic surgeons nationally, probably the same amount of oral surgeons, even twice as many med spas, right?

There's an audience for this. There's an audience for what I'm talking about. 

Nick McLean: Another comment you made about was a self-deprecating comment, I guess, about how your technical process that you use to settle on dental, plastic surgery, and legal. You know, I think that folks that will, will use a simple process in one very important area.

We'll carry over [00:19:00] that philosophy throughout other areas of your business. And I think that could be a potentially very important, especially to a marketing firm, because at the end of the day, what are you really selling? You're selling what's up in your head. And if you're not able to demonstrate a clear value proposition or a clear strategy, my perception is that it's going to fall on deaf ears.

So my question to you is, you know, is that desire to attack problems as simply yet as thoroughly as possible? Is that a pervasive theme within your, within your culture, within your service offering? Et cetera, et cetera. 

Chris Suchánek: It's a good question. The short answer to that question is that is not me. I have to hire people to do that.

So I'm a systems and protocols. I refer to myself as a systems thinker. So if you present something to me, the first thing I do is try to break it down and figure it out. I have a podcast. There's [00:20:00] an episode brief that goes out. We asked three specific questions and like everything is done.

It's hyper-organized. But it's done in a way to bring out the maximum amount of creativity. And I don't know if that makes any sense, but I also find that that's my idea. I am not the person company-wide to be able to implement that stuff or write the playbooks or do any of that. I know what it's supposed to look like.

I know I have to, I have to know what to ask for and then I have to know when I'm getting what I asked for. I don't know if that's helpful, but that's how it works for me. 

Nick McLean: No, that's great. I just want to make sure I fully understand it. So if I understood you correctly, you might not be the one that writes the process.

However, you know what the process needs to look like and for it to work for that particular use case or that particular scenario. Is that correct? Accurate. 

Chris Suchánek: Sure. Sure. And processes are interesting or an interesting animal. Sometimes processes are in place. I think the analogy that gets used often is like [00:21:00] McDonald's, right?

Where it's: we built this system where we could create the same burger over and over, and we knew what to charge for it. And so on and so forth. And I think that's great in theory. And I think most young entrepreneurs, even people that go read sort of the E-Myth Revisited, which is a really great book when you're starting your first business. They're like, okay, systems and protocols. I need to put all that in place. And, you know, I need an org chart and I need job descriptions and all that stuff is super great. Sometimes systems start to override critical thinking and sometimes owners of businesses. This is interesting because firm media grew to a place where it just kept breaking.

It would get to so many doctors and would break. [Then] get to so many doctors and would break. And it wasn't because the people that worked here weren't good. The systems and protocols. I didn't really have a space for higher-level critical thinking, which is I think where you go from good to great, in my opinion.

And so I've had [00:22:00] to: one, hire some different people; and two, build protocols that had an expectation built into them that critical thinking needed to be applied, especially in marketing or creativity. Right? Like we're not talking about a cheeseburger here. 

Nick McLean: It's tremendously helpful and I'm glad you went down that path because one of the concepts that we explore with a lot of guests is the need to implement processes and procedures if you are going to scale your business and burst past certain plateaus.

However, there's this dichotomy or these competing forces that for many businesses or many business owners, feel like processes and procedures, or at least dampen the entrepreneurial spirit. You know, as I have heard your answers, it sounds like there are a number of processes and procedures that you follow.

How do you feel like that has hampered the entrepreneurial spirit and what else do you have to [00:23:00] offer or what other thoughts do you have to those that are maybe reluctant to implement some processes and procedures? So the machine doesn't break whenever you hit 10 million in revenue or 20, or maybe it's only two or three.

Chris Suchánek: Yeah, I absolutely love this question. Absolutely love this question. First of all, this may not apply for everybody. But I believe to get something, sometimes you got to do what you don't want to do to get what you don't have. And I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to, you know, if I wanted to be an intern for something to get a job somewhere and it meant I had to sleep in my car for a little while, then that's what I'm doing.

And we're just in a day and age where that's not really on the agenda for most people, but I will do it. I would do it. So when I had got to the point where firm media needed to build systems and protocols, I started writing systems and protocols. I started writing playbooks. That's not my forte. Okay.

But they needed to be there and I needed to do something I didn't want to do for more years than I wanted to do it [00:24:00] until we could get big enough to hire somebody who was very good at doing it. And much more agile at it than I was, because like I said, what I ended up building was a system that didn't really give the space for the demand for critical thinking.

I'm trying to be careful about that because I built systems that, yes, that's the answer to the question, but is that the best answer to the question is what I really needed to know? And so now there's systems and protocols with an expectation for critical thinking and that's, like I said, that's different than making a cheeseburger.

Nick McLean: Absolutely. Switching gears a little bit, you know, certainly implementing the processes and procedures in companies and protocols, as you call them, that implies that a business has different needs or there are different tools that the business needs as it grows. As it relates to you personally, though, I've heard you say that you're unapologetically yourself.

How I could interpret that is that your leadership style hasn't really changed [00:25:00] as the company has grown. Would you agree with that? Or would you say that you have had to adapt your leadership style as the company has grown? I 

Chris Suchánek: do not agree with that. My leadership style has not changed because when I started the agency, I was younger, I was, I was 30-something years old.

I was couch surfing. We rented an old mechanics garage and it was six dudes sitting in there violating HR with every conversation. And then we started hiring people and had to start learning to be more respectful. And then I started to have, there was a certain point where I realized – I better take this serious.

And so I think the first four or five years, there was one leader that, you know. I wanted to be a social entrepreneur and there was like, you know, triple bottom line. And I mean, and I was young enough and gullible enough to be, I trying to be all those things. And it's cool because I started a nonprofit and the nonprofit came out of it.

My wife wanted to start restaurants. We started restaurants and now there's this like a mini well-diversified thing that's gone on because I did the [00:26:00] right thing for the wrong reason. But then I had to grow up and I had to realize that these people were hiring me. I had an agency and, and no plastic surgeon on the, no plastic surgeon, no one who went to med school for all those years to go into business cares at all about my ping pong table or my scooters.

And so I just started abandoning that whole concept of agency life. Just, I don't have any room for that stuff here. We're here to do business. 

Becoming unapologetically myself is the latest phase of my development. So it's pretty new. It's about 24 months in the making. And what I realized was I stopped, look, I started this agency at my kitchen table with $2,000, a phone line, and a business card.

'Cause I had a dream and a vision, maybe not a dream, but a vision. It could be done better than it was being done. I had all of this real world experience in the music business where I had worked with companies like EMI and [00:27:00] Warner Brothers and MTV and worked with their marketing departments. And then I got a job working in the Wild West at a digital marketing agency with no systems and no protocols.

And I was like, look, I'm, I can do this better because I've worked in an industry where adults go to work to do this job. And then I started an agency and I fell into a lot of traps that the agencies fall into. And about 24 months ago, I walked into Firm Media and I said, ‘I think I'm going to quit.’ And my CFO said, ‘Whoa, that's.’

And I just said, you know, we do a lot of good work here. We've done some really good work. We were agency of the year in 2015 by the American Advertising Federation. We won some sort of award for our websites. All of this really great stuff is happening, but it's, it's all good. It's not great. It's not great.

And I don't, I don't like, I'm tired of getting up every morning and carrying this heavy load to do things that are good. So I don't want to do it anymore. So over the last 24 months, we've separated ourselves from probably 10 or 11 different employees and probably equally as many clients. But I'm [00:28:00] also coming to work every day and just being unapologetically myself.

This is the way this thing needs to be run. I have a passion for this thing. If you work here, I want you to buy into this passion and you don't have to buy into it the way that I buy into it. But, I often say to work together right now, your ladder and my ladder need to intersect. Our ladders need to intersect and it needs to be a win-win situation for multiple gain.

And then I will do whatever I have to do. I will do whatever I have to do to make this the best place for you to work. 

Nick McLean: Well, I think that's a great answer. Something that I talk to business owners a lot about is this idea that a lot of times a business will get to a certain point with the founder or the current owner.

And the business is going to largely stay the same size with that owner unless the owner adopts a new philosophy or the owner exits the business and brings somebody else in. Going through this process yourself and actually having the clarity of mind, [00:29:00] the introspection, if you will, that you need to start doing, you need to start running the business differently.

If it's going to get back on that growth track, what advice do you have to other business owners that perhaps aren't as willing to look inside themselves and analyze the situation and instead might be blaming external factors? I know that's a very broad question, but I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Chris Suchánek: Well, nothing is ever anyone else's fault, but my own, even if it's something somebody else did and I let it go on too long. So I always start there. People often say every problem has an, is an opportunity. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard that quote and said it myself or even posted it on social media.

But there was a day where I was being chewed out by a client and thought to myself, this is actually an opportunity to change. So there's a difference between pushing out a quote and actually having the life experience to know: this is a problem and I'm turning it into an opportunity. So I had to [00:30:00] become that now is the time for me to not be, I need smarter people than me. Helping me build the right systems and protocols here. 

In the last 24 months in line with being unapologetically myself, and also being in the music business, my team and PR started this thing they call the Red Chair campaign. So right now, if you Google me, and the reason that I know this is because my team has said in the last 24 months, my team started a PR campaign and they told me that approximately 100 to 125 people a month used to search, used to search “who is Chris Suchánek” and land on our website. Now 500 people a month search that. In the last 24 months, I mentioned that I started writing for Forbes. I'm working on a relationship with Brains.

Right now, um, I actually passed on a relationship with Inc. because they wanted up to 11 articles a year and I don't have the bandwidth, so I'm going to take that up in April. I think I'm going to try to reapply for that. So there's all that. This year, I was asked to be [00:31:00] the keynote speaker for the American Society of Plastic Surgery annual meeting, which is three hours of time on marketing on a stage, which is multiple stages, but three hours of time on the stage.

I need someone here, not necessarily to be the CEO, but literally, you know, a couple of people here to be the driving force. So I can't do that anymore. I often say, right now or lately, I've been saying, you know, I've worked with musicians for a very long time and this is the first time I got to be the rock star.

So I think it's in my wheelhouse. We'll see. I'm doing it cause it feels right. It feels like it's me. So – but it doesn't afford a lot of time to be maybe the CEO, but not necessarily the decision maker that I used to be. 

Nick McLean: Well, as CEO, I guess the position that I would take, you have to be, you have to have parts of driver to achieve the goals, execute the strategy, but also to some degree, you're the chief salesperson for the company.

I have to think, generally [00:32:00] speaking, there are fewer people that are going to be able to get on that stage and really impress them with your ability to know who their client base is, who their customer base is, and speak their language and, and, and let them, you know, let them draw their own conclusion that this is the right approach.

As opposed to you being in the office, creating those processes and procedures, and driving people to a deadline. I mean, not, not dictatorially. So, but still, you know, we have deadlines and whatnot. So I have to think that you're making the right decision to focus on the areas or the functions of the CEO, where you're going to perform best and bring in other people to the areas that perhaps are a little bit easier and have more candidates that could fill that role.

Chris Suchánek: Yeah, absolutely. It feels right. And it feels like the right time. It does. There's just so many amazing things happening for the agency right now. And a lot of it is that in some areas I stepped forward and in some areas, I stepped back. One of the things I think is really important is you [00:33:00] said, which sparked my attention a little bit, you said few people, I'm paraphrasing, but few people could get on the stage and help them understand that, you know, their client base is, I think that's what you said, right? 

Nick McLean: Yeah. Something similar. Yeah. 

Chris Suchánek: Okay. So there are a lot of years in the past where you would ask me to be on the stage and that's not what I would have got up there and done. I would have, you know, tried to be hyper charismatic and whatever, and probably done just fine, which is over the years I've done delivering information, maybe even delivering some value, but most specifically trying to buy their trust.

And there's a certain distinction for me recently because I recently, one of the last articles I wrote is, agency, specialty medical marketing: selling agency work value versus trust. 

I believe that the industries are changing. I believe that most of the digital marketing agency industry has been driven by trust.

[00:34:00] So sales reps, drinks, get to know people, same as the pharmaceutical industry, it's all trust, trust, trust, right? Private equity is entering the spaces. People are trying to sell their companies, realizing that they don't have the EBITDA they need. Then they're realizing I can't retire. Then they're coming back to their marketing agency and saying, ‘Hey, I'm What do you really do for me?’

And how do you move the needle on my top revenue drivers? Okay. Now there's a market sophistication shift happening. You don't need to trust the trust comes. That's fine. But let's sit down and let's talk about your end goals. Let me tie you to your top. Let me tie my work to your goals around your top revenue drivers.

And let's start having that conversation. Now, the only reason I got to that place is because I started that podcast. And when I started that podcast, I realized I'm connected to the top 1 percent in the industry. And I've been here for a very long time. 25 years I've been going to those trade shows.

Almost everybody knows my name, but I don't really know them. So I started a podcast so that I could make it okay for the top 1 percent to start having a conversation. And when [00:35:00] I did that, it opened my eyes and my understanding of what to talk about on stage. In a way that's meaningful and useful. So I had to change.

I had to truly want to deliver value to somebody. And that wasn't always who I was. So yeah.

Nick McLean: I mean, it's an interesting story and something that I think a lot of people can take away from. It's that whenever you are, whenever you're growing as a company, whenever you're growing as a leader, that you do have to adapt, even if it's not just what you want to do.

And I'm not talking about, I don't want to, you know, clean the toilets, or I don't want to be the administrative person because I'm not good with the details or whatever. It's the understanding that your clients, and their clients, need something different from you that requires a little bit more effort.

Dan, what you might have delivered at a baseline, if you will, it's not that you're not [00:36:00] good at it, but again, it's just, it requires a little bit more effort for you to take the time to go through that process that you did. Instead of just getting up on the stage and being the rockstar, you know how to be the rockstar.

That's probably, that's probably requires no, no effort for you. It's an interesting story for others to hear how it has worked for you. And I would just encourage them to think about that and apply that to their own businesses as their company plateaus or bursts past plateaus and reaches new milestones.

So we're approaching the end of the show. If you have time for one more line of questioning, I would appreciate it. 

Chris Suchánek: Sure. 

Nick McLean: So a recurring theme that we've talked a lot about with different guests is. The culture of growth within the firm and how certain certain types of growth culture doesn't really work in the long term and they've had to retool what that culture is now I've just been very ambiguous.

Let me give you some specificity. Really what it, for many [00:37:00] companies, what it was at the beginning, it was, we're going to, we're going to grow revenues and we're going to grow clients month after month after month. However, what was happening is that there was burnout both in terms of the employees because there was that constant need to land 10 customers this month and 12 and 14 in order to keep up the growth.

However, they realized they had to shift to a focus on not just growing the number of clients, but improving the actual service or product that they provide. There was still this emphasis on growth but it wasn't just on revenues. It wasn't just on clients. It was about, we want to be the best service provider to our clients.

Do you feel like either you personally or firm media has gone through that shift in growth cultures if you will? 

Chris Suchánek: You were going through right now. I think that's never-ending, but it's interesting because that is the essence of what we're going through right now. Right? This is [00:38:00] where a company goes from good to great.

We are very good at what we do. Very good. Over the, when you start winning awards for the stuff that you did, there is no agency, there is no agency in the two specialty medical verticals that I talked about the big ones that were in, with massive annual trade shows. And that I know of that can say that they were named agency of the year by a reputable organization, right?

I think that when we were called agency of the year, we were very good, but we weren't great. And when somebody starts to be told that they're very good. They go to work and think that they do very good work. It's not great. And not everybody on the team is willing to make the jump from good to great.

Some people come to work and they're like, good is good enough. And, but when you get large enough and you don't know the people and you can't afford to have the relationship with them, there's a lot of clients to stay with for a minute. Cause I've known them for 20 years, but I don't know everybody that's been with us.

And if we don't do great work for them, they'll just leave. [00:39:00] So now I need people that understand a sense of urgency to apply critical thinking to things, to show up prepared for the meetings, to understand that the client's time is important, to understand that our clients went to school for longer than most all of our family members combined.

To hang a shingle to build a business. Then they're either operating on and changing the lives of other people or driving biz, they're driving the lives of 10, 11, 15 people that work for them. So we have someone in the office here. It's like, ‘Oh, I'm just posting on social media for them, or I'm just doing SEO for them, or I'm just designing a website for them.’

We're not just anything. We're a crucial piece of someone's dream. And. If we don't get our head around that. And so what I'm saying is not everybody gets to stay when you start to make the jump from good to great because there's a crucial understanding there. 

Nick McLean: You know what's interesting is I think that a lot of [00:40:00] times momentum can be a company killer if you will. And you've demonstrated just in this short time that we've been talking, two instances.

Where you changed either your company's momentum or your personal? The first one, when you said that you were known as the lucky guy, I think that could be a self. Perpetuating philosophy, you decided, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to adapt that anymore. I'm going to make, make my own luck, so to speak. And here with the company that you mentioned how, you know, being very good is not great.

And you know, the old adage, good is, is the enemy of great. You know, the final question that I want to ask on this topic though, is – a lot of times change is hard whenever there isn't the clear understanding that change is required. And for your company, I could definitely see how people would be like, or think to themselves: why, why is Chris doing this?

We are a really good firm. We've won all these awards. There's no need for change here. We should just, we should [00:41:00] just stay the course. Now I realize that you mentioned that a couple of folks have had to, you know, pursue other opportunities or whatnot. But how did you motivate the team to influence them to think that very good is not good enough when our potential is great?

I wish I could say that I was able to motivate the whole team to do that.

Chris Suchánek: I don't know that that's possible. I think sometimes in a leadership role, you just have to start making a hard decision on the direction we're going to go and know that we're going to hike that hill and some people can't hike it.

And we're going to do everything we can along the way to help you hike the hill until it's obvious that we can't carry you up the hill. And I really, I mean, I think when you want to go from good to great, the main thing I'll tell, I'll tell you when I decided that I was going to start being unapologetically myself, I had to check the people pleaser at the door.

So that might not be the answer you're looking for, but I can tell you that what happens [00:42:00] is there's some people that are not going to be motivated to do it. And then there's other people that are going to be super motivated to do it. And sometimes the motivated people on your team are going to help motivate those other people.

And sometimes there's going to be people that just feel like, I don't want anything to do with that. I'm leaving. And that's okay too. That's okay too. I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage to initiate change and then let it unfold. That's what I think. I think I saw this video, two things by Kobe Bryant that I think. I'm not a basketball fan, but over the years I've become a fan of Kobe's ability to motivate people.

Right. And I saw one video of him where he and I'm paraphrasing again, he said something about, people call me a ball hog. And he said I'm not really a ball hog. He said I'll pass to people when the situation is right. He said, but I'm here to win the game. If the option is to pass to you. And I saw what time you came to practice and I saw what time you left.

And I know that you might not make the shot. I'm taking the shot. So take that for whatever it's worth, but that's something that I've implemented. And the other thing is, [00:43:00] he said, there's, I'm on the court with a series of people and this I'm hyper paraphrasing, cause I think I've made this my own thing over the years, but, some variation of this, I'm only concerned with the people on the court.

And then what I took that to mean is yes, I have other team members that are on the bench, but while I'm on the court, I'm very hyper-focused on the people on the court, the people on the bench are there. And I get that. But if you're in the stands, you got no say. If you're in the bench, I'll talk to you when I get out from the court.

But while we're on the court, these are the only people I care about. And sometimes you run a company and you know, not everybody's on the court. I was on the court and you can encourage them to be on the court. You can ask them to be on the court. You can try to train them to be on the court. You can build systems and protocols that force them to be on the court.

But at a certain point, you got to just say, Hey, you don't want to be a 

Nick McLean: A lot of wisdom there, whether it's, it's your own or, or Kobe's just, really, a lot of that resonates with me, and I'll tell you, it's not an answer. It's not that I was looking for a specific answer or I wasn't because what I firmly believe is [00:44:00] just like people have different mentalities of whether or not they want to be on the court or not, you know, your approach is going to resonate with some people and it's not going to resonate as much with other people.

And I think that's a big part of how you learn from stories is, is taking the stories that are meaningful to you. Okay. and trying to use those to influence how you view the world, how you view your team, and whatnot. There are some people out there that would take that story about the people on the court and whatnot and think that's a terrible management philosophy.

And that's fine for them, as long as they don't try to be two people who sometimes implements that policy and sometimes don't. So my final comment, and of course I'll give you an option to respond, but my final comment would be What gets me excited about a business owner's ability to lead is whenever the same type of answer is used to address different questions.

And I have seen that throughout a lot of your questions, these, these common themes about knowing yourself, about being [00:45:00] objective about who you are versus who you aren't. And I have to say that, that, that has to be refreshing to your team. But also, I think it avoids ambiguity, and I don't think there's any room for ambiguity whenever you're trying to make the leap from very good to great.

So that's my two cents. 

Chris Suchánek: I appreciate that feedback, Nick. I really do. You said something earlier about how, you know, that analogy of the ‘being on the court’ might change, repel some people. And I think here again, we're going to revisit that same theme. That's the essence of being unapologetically yourself.

I believe that there is something in the world that is there for me. And when I'm not being me, I'm not repelling the people that aren't for me. And I'm not attracting the people that are for me. And when I'm a hundred percent me when I'm unapologetically myself. I'm attracting what's for me. What's for me is going to help me accomplish the things that are at the core of who I am and what I want, which is the essence of sort of, you know, the secret, right?

I believe that being [00:46:00] unapologetic to yourself is actually part of the big-picture goal. 

Nick McLean: Well, Chris, thank you so much. We've gone a little bit long, certainly want to give you the opportunity to tell folks anything that you would like to tell them any questions I've missed, or I should have asked.

And certainly where they can learn more about the company if they would like to. 

Chris Suchánek: So I'm a little bit of a social media personality. So @suchamedia on Instagram. I'm also on LinkedIn at Firm-Media, is that firm-media.com, which is a domain that you can visit all of the social channels for [Firm] Media exists on.

But I personally am always open to anybody who has sort of mentorship-related questions who are interested in just fire those through. I'm not on LinkedIn a lot. I am occasionally, I have a theory that the world is tired of being sold to, and I think marketing is going to change in the next five years because of that.

We can talk about that somewhere else. But, uh, as a result of that, I don't. like being sold to. So I'm, I'm on the channels that I want to be [00:47:00] in most of the time, which is stuff like Instagram and stuff like that. 

Nick McLean: That's great. Well, Chris, really appreciate it. Really enjoyed the conversation. And I think our audience will too, and not just enjoy it, but be able to learn from it.

Chris Suchánek: I appreciate the time. Thanks for having me on, Nick. 

Nick McLean: I admire Chris's accomplishments and his humility, despite it all, the advice he shared from his father really resonated with me. If you're going to be in that rock band, then do something every single day to make sure somebody knows that rock band exists. Firm Media built its success by finding its niche and capitalizing on it.

Chris's tough love as a leader created a space of motivated employees that want to be there and want to see the company grow, get clear on your business goals, and do just one thing to move the needle every day. This is where amazing results begin. If you were inspired by this episode of Ambition, please share it with a friend or colleague.

Thanks for [00:48:00] listening.