Chapters

0:00 Welcome Mike Linton
3:26 Beginning the non-linear path and seeking a P&L
4:39 The CMO journey begins – BestBuy, eBay, Farmer’s Insurance, Ancestry.com
8:17 Mike makes CMO’s
9:30 CMO Confidential is born
11:07 Marketing curriculum in higher ed needs a review
14:00 Jobs are like train stations
20:00 Throw down field, else you never get the experience

Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Mike Linton, Creator and Host of CMO Confidential. Mike is a 5x CMO of companies including BestBuy, eBay, Farmer’s Insurance and Ancestory.com, and has served on numerous BOD’s.  He has boomeranged back to Cleveland, OH and is planning his next career move.  In our chat, Mike shared several great points of advice including:

• His thoughts on making deliberate career moves, taking risks, and capitalizing on serendipity
• Seeking a P&L to manage and following the money
• Opportunities to improve curriculum in higher education to address leadership and conflict management
• The mission behind the CMO Confidential Podcast

From Brand Manager to Boardroom: The Evolution of a Marketing Leader with Mike Linton

[00:00:06] Ron Laneve: Hello and Welcome to Episode 24 of the Bell Falls Search Focus On Talent Podcast. I was lucky to meet today’s guest just a couple of months ago through a mutual friend. He is an executive marketer who has boomeranged back to the Cleveland area. When we met for breakfast, I think we very quickly aligned on the powers of networking and our mutual interest in helping other people grow. He started his career as a Brand Manager at Procter and Gamble, and then went on to become a five time CMO of a few brands that you might’ve heard of before. Namely eBay, Best Buy, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com. He has been on and continues to serve on the board of directors for several prominent companies. I am thrilled to introduce to you today, the creator and host of the CMO Confidential Podcast, Mike Linton. Mike, thanks for being here with me.

[00:00:59] Mike Linton: It’s great to be here. Ron and I wish my parents could have heard that introduction. I’ll play it for them. My dad would appreciate it. My mom would actually believe it all. So it’s great. Thank you. Alright. Was I close? Oh yeah, you were super close. You got everything right there, but yes.

[00:01:13] Mike Linton: All right. It was so well done. Thank you.

[00:01:15] Ron Laneve: Thank you. Yeah, appreciate that. Like I mentioned, as a lifelong Clevelander and as a person who spends my time in the recruiting space and thinks I’m decently connected, we’re lucky to have you back here and I’m looking forward to seeing, what you continue to uncover.

[00:01:30] Ron Laneve: As we talked about, one of my main motivations for doing these conversations is to illustrate the nonlinear path of individuals careers. And, although I introduced your background in some detail, I’d love to hear, your story of how you got to P&G and how you moved up to CMO of all those different companies, how you got on the board of directors for the different companies you’re on and for my audience, just illustrating that would be great, cause I know along the way, random events happen. And in hindsight, you look back and you’d be like, Oh, that was the trigger that, caused this thing to happen or the next thing to happen. So can we start there?

[00:02:05] Mike Linton: I’ll give you a top line sentence.

I think careers are a combination of planning, skill set development experience, and then I’m just going to call it for lack of a better word, serendipity. Which is hardly ever linear and a lot of the events that happen the magnitude of the event is unclear. Especially the magnitude of saying no or saying yes when you get opportunities is really interesting. And even sometimes the opportunity is. Very serendipity based, but again I’ll say it’s planning, serendipity, experience and skill set that does it.

[00:02:37] Mike Linton: I’ll say, I went to college not to be a business person, I went to be a famous writer. I was running a newspaper and I realized I like running the newspaper even more than I like having my own column, which was just devastating to me as a, I want to be big time journalist.

[00:02:50] Mike Linton: And I thought that’s business, I crashed tech there and then I went to grad school against the wishes of my parents. So I went straight to grad school and then on the way out, wanted to go where general managers were made. I went to from Bowling Green State University and Duke and got my MBA at Duke.

[00:03:06] Mike Linton: I was lucky enough to have a couple offers out of grad school and I took the Procter offer, which was the lowest paying offer. But I took it because they let me sit through a class on how they evaluated advertising. I thought in these three hours. I learned more than I learned in my whole advertising class in grad school, which I thought had been really good.

[00:03:26] Mike Linton: I thought I have to go here. It’s training. It’s real training. They train the hell out of you. At the time, they trained you pretty much every single day, mercilessly. I left there to get a P&L because they’re like, God, I need a P&L if I’m going to be a big time manager. so I went to Progressive and then I got this P&L, and I had no idea what it was.

[00:03:42] Mike Linton: It probably took me six months to figure out where everything came from. Totally different culture. It was Progressive before they were doing all the advertising. Those two experiences changed me a lot because I realized there’s a number of different ways to do business and you have to figure out how your company works, not how you work. Then you have to put yourself in a company.

[00:04:02] Mike Linton: Okay, then I went to change her paper as a general manager in towel and tissue, which would bring Brawny Quilted Northern Bath Tissue. I was a marketer and then a general manager there. That was really hard. It’s very tough business, huge amount of capital unions involved. And then we got new leadership. I didn’t know what to do. I left and ended up taking a career mistake. It was my first ever head of marketing job and that’s that was the head of marketing at Remington Shavers. I liked it so much. I bought the company for people that are old enough to remember that. That’s Victor Kiam.

[00:04:39] Mike Linton: I took a private equity job. I didn’t understand private equity. I didn’t do my homework on the CEO. After a year and a half, I got a chance to resign or be forced to resign. So I resigned and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought I’ve ruined my career. That’s when I got the call to go to Best Buy. At the time Best Buy was $8 billion just in sales in Minneapolis. No Best Buys within driving distance of where I live. So I drove to Circuit City Crazy Eddies, nobody beats the Wiz.

Now I’m gonna do all my homework. You can talk to a store manager or assistant store manager if you work hard enough. I called the headhunter, which is Korn Ferry, and said, if I go here, I’ll be dead in two years. Long-term for these people is a month. Meanwhile, all my search firm friends, other than Korn Ferry, a lot of them were trying to talk me out of this. Going consumer goods people are killed in retail, and they’d go down the list of people that had not made it more than three years.

Ron Laneve: Is this before e commerce?

[00:05:33] Mike Linton: Yeah it’s before e commerce. E -commerce is just an idea then. Korn convinces me to take the interview and I take it. I go 4 times and I take this job and it’s Camelot. Have a great boss there, Wade Fenn who buys into the whole vision that this is going to take a long time. I get to build the department from scratch. I manage the inside agency and also the call centers. So I create the whole consumer interface. Because there’s Pillsbury, Mills, Fallon, Target, I assemble a team that, where eight of that team went on to be CMOs. We have a great time. We do Reward Zone we help expand Geek Squad. The company goes on a tear and goes from 8 billion to over 30 billion in the time I was there. We cover the U. S. basically. The company launches Bestbuy.Com. It was a blast.

[00:06:22] Mike Linton: Did that almost eight years and got recruited out to go to eBay. Went as a general manager, then became CMO.

[00:06:29] Mike Linton: To me, if you’re not at the big kids table and you don’t have control of money, where money moves. You don’t have your own capital. You do not have control of the media and the advertising. You’re not really in the job. You are doing the job for whoever is telling you what to do. And that at the time was the eBay job. That was when the market melted down at the big bursting of everything in 2008, 2009. And I laid off 60 people in a day, left eBay, wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Luckily, I was on three boards then and went did a startup for a year.

[00:07:04] Mike Linton: Then through Facebook and a car accident, got connected with one of my old friends who is now at Farmers, but is one of my old Progressive friends. And because of the car accident, because of Facebook, and because I used to write a little column for Forbes.com, I end up as CMO of Farmers. It’s a long story, but the story is, this little network thing, this is a gentleman, Jeff Daley. At the time, I hadn’t talked to him in probably, 15, 16 years. We connect on Facebook as early, very early Facebook days. Because I’m writing this column for Forbes called the CMO calculus that he reads. We’re connected. That is the serendipity of the job.

[00:07:44] Mike Linton: Then I went from there to Ancestry as CRO, I got raided by a CEO that knew me. And then after we sold the company from one PE firm to another, left Ancestry and decided, probably time to come back home, home to Cleveland, at least for most of the months. Some of the months I might go somewhere warmer, but, and now I’m figuring out what exactly is next, but it’s nice to be home.

[00:08:06] Ron Laneve: Like I said, we’re glad to have you. That’s for sure. I’m going to try my best to keep you here more months than none. Tell me about CMO Confidential. So somewhere along the line, you started that. Why’d you start that? Tell me about its mission.

[00:08:17] Mike Linton: Okay, so here’s my thing about being a CMO. If you’re coming out of consumer goods companies where marketing is fully understood and it’s viewed as a growth tool for the company. A lot of stuff that you take for granted isn’t available in other companies. A lot of companies consider marketing a cost item or a line item, particularly a lot of tech companies, or just either an acquisition vehicle or part of sales.

[00:08:43] Mike Linton: I think that’s really the wrong way to look at marketing. I think you should be looking at it as a growth engine. Fourteen of my team have gone on to be CMOs. When I look at a lot of the CMO job specs and the way companies manage CMOs or just whoever’s running marketing,

I think it is the least consistently designed, structured, managed function in the C suite with the most varied set of expectations by far. It is also sitting there in the front of all the technology, all the expectations, which are very inconsistent, and it’s usually right between the company, the customers and the technology. I think it is definitely a challenging job.

Then now you’re going to throw in an AI and all the socio political stuff that’s happening. I think people aren’t talking about that. They’re talking about how to do better CAC or brand briefs. Or they’re talking about all this stuff that is the tactical part of the job. If you can’t do it, yes, it’s important, but that’s not the thing that makes you a good CMO.

So I started CMO Confidential with my friend, Jeff Culliton just for kicks.

[00:09:51] Mike Linton: And now it’s, I guess we have over 60 episodes, one a week, we have a network. So all you people listening, subscribe to CMO Confidential. I did it for the function. for the people in it and also the people that interface with it, whether it’s the boards, the CEOs or the agencies, and it’s designed not to tell you the, gosh, this is what the CMO does. It’s designed to talk about the issues you want to talk about, but can’t. So it’s been a blast.

[00:10:18] Ron Laneve: I watch it and I’ve been fascinated by it and the variety of people you’ve had on and the topics that you’ve talked about with them. It’s it’s definitely entertaining and useful.

[00:10:27] Ron Laneve: That parlays very well into my next topic. It’s interesting as you described when you came out of college, you seem very focused on knowing what you were going to do next, at least how you were going to start your career. Fast forward to today, as you look, or you mentioned AI, you mentioned, all the different technical aspects of digital marketing. I know you’re very passionate about curriculum in the higher ed space as it relates to marketing. So maybe we can bundle all these things together? How would you advise individuals, whether in college or not, that are beginning to enter the workforce and thinking that they want to be in the marketing field, how would you advise them to best get themselves prepared to be the most competitive in this space? Now going forward.

[00:11:07] Mike Linton: One of the things I think that is super important for anybody that wants to be in the top management of a company is you got to remember, and I’ll just use the CMO job as part of this. I’m stealing this from Jim Stengel or Anthony Lucio. It’s 90 percent leader, 10 percent marketing or 10 percent chief. And the thing I think that is not being necessarily taught in the school set well is leadership, and I don’t mean this raw leadership of stuff.

Leadership is a lot about soft skills, making choices, managing conflict, and what I’m going to call endless curiosity for the next thing and that is, in my mind, there’s an awful lot of kids coming out of school that I see, they know the tactics. Or they know the concepts and the concepts are great. But when you’re a CMO, for example, you always have way more ideas than you have money or people. You have to pick those ideas and let down the ideas that aren’t getting picked in a way people aren’t hating it on everyone else. You also have to manage the money because you’re probably going to have three to four times more ideas than money.

That teaching of conflict, soft skills management, and the conflict you have with other areas of the company or how much money you’re going to spend or long and short term in the company. Those are things not taught very well in school in my mind. There is no concept you can lay on that. You have to practice it.

[00:12:33] Mike Linton: And then you can look back in the history of technology and just say mobile, digital, the digital revolution, the data revolution, there’s a revolution every five years. You can’t not play in that. You have to have some part of your function and ideally you understanding how that’s going to impact your customer and your company and where you’re going to be in the middle of that technology. Sometimes you don’t have to play, but most of the times you have to pay attention and then you have to decide, what am I going to watch if I’m not on the front end of it?

[00:13:05] Mike Linton: So I, I think that’s where the schools maybe are not teaching as much as they could. I think that’s why the case study method is super important. Because it teaches you how to manage those things versus manage the execution of what you have to do. It’s hardly ever the execution that gets you, yes, it can, but it’s all these other things.

[00:13:25] Ron Laneve: Gotcha. How about for experienced people? I’m sure you’ve done a lot of interviewing over the years. You’ve been on both sides of the table.

[00:13:32] Ron Laneve: We’re in a very interesting market right now, where from my perspective, supply and demand has changed pretty significantly. I’m talking to candidates that are trying to compete against hundreds of applications all at once. Get in the interviewing process and then get through the interviewing process.

[00:13:45] Ron Laneve: What have you seen? You have a couple anecdotes to share on maybe memorable experiences you’ve had with candidates over the years that have really differentiated them from someone else, and or what would you suggest somebody right now to? Get 1st in line?

[00:14:00] Mike Linton: Bill Heery when I was really young, beat this into my head. He’s an executive search guy in Connecticut, which is

jobs are like train stations and trains stop for you because you have proven skills and, and you’re unique over time. A lot of candidates don’t really have the skills they have, or they haven’t proven them.

The older you get, the more you have to have proof that skill. Also you have to prove that you have the flexibility to move. This is particularly true in some of the tech companies.

If you’ve been in one company 10 years, yeah, they can tell you that it’s really important that you do the budget for the ninth year and that you manage the budget for the ninth year. You are learning nothing new, I’m telling you. At the margin, you’re learning how to manage your company differently, but you are not learning how other people do budgeting. The more you do the same thing, the less you are learning.

Two don’t fake yourself on skillset development. If you get one person reporting to you, that is not people leadership, but you’ve got it, you have all these people coming in, and what I would say is when you’re sitting on that train station and you think you have these skills, you need to look around at who really has them.

Cause if you’re sitting there and you say, I have people leadership, cause I’ve been in this one company five years, I managed the outside agency and I managed one person. You do. But the person next to you has probably managed like 20 people and three agencies. You’re not even making it out of the pile.

Don’t judge experience through your own eyes or the eyes of your friends. Judge it through your paper. No one is out there saying, I’m not creative, I’m not analytic, I’m really bad with people, I’m not a good communicator. If you don’t have real proof points, you’re not getting through.

Then the other thing, have you done enough different stuff that you’re not on a train station with a thousand other people? Let’s say you’re coming out of finance and you’ve done FP&A For 10 years in one company. You’re sitting there and if you’re looking around that train station and there’s somebody that’s done it in three companies in three years and has been promoted, you’re not even near the top of the pile. So are you aggressive enough to manage your own career?

We did a whole show on this called “Could I, Should I, Would I leave?” Then the other thing for me that happened that worked out in that career we talked about earlier is. What I was able to say, rightly or wrongly, was look, I’ve changed industries a lot, and every time I ended up getting more responsibility. And also I managed to get someone out of my team every year promoted into bigger jobs or bigger things. I can switch to your industry. Or I can probably figure out, hopefully, what’s going on with your board work.

But the older you get, the more you have to prove it versus say it. the biggest mistake people make is thinking they’ve done it or thinking the one thing they did back in five years ago is truly analytic proof. No.

[00:16:54] Ron Laneve: How did you switch industries? Were you recruited from one to the next?

[00:16:58] Mike Linton: I was recruited, but look, I didn’t know what I was doing. This happened by accident. So I wanted the P&L and I wanted to go to the West coast or the East coast or somewhere like that. The only company that would give me a P&L when I was, gosh, I think I was 29 or 30 as a brand manager was Progressive.

[00:17:14] Mike Linton: And they gave me a P&L and people. So I moved back to Cleveland. Cause I’m like, they gave it to me. No one else was sitting here. Here kid, let me give you a P& L. I didn’t realize it right away. Cause what I realized this is really hard. I don’t understand the company. It’s super culturally different.

[00:17:28] Mike Linton: But what I realized is the amount I learned by having to do something totally foreign and also realizing, gosh, the thing driving the business my business at the time was accounting, negotiation, and claims. Then also the call center and how well we actually underwrote stuff.

[00:17:46] Mike Linton: And I thought this has nothing to do with what was driving the business at Procter. I really have to think about how other functions work and actually think about where the business works and I realized changing industries had also made me so uncomfortable and forced me to learn new stuff that I should do that whenever I got the chance. So I did.

[00:18:07] Ron Laneve: Gotcha. So changing industries was a result of pursuing a very specific interest in that and developing your career, not, Hey, I want to go in insurance next. I want to go in manufacturing.

[00:18:18] Mike Linton: I want to go No, because, no, yes, I wasn’t, like most kids wake up and go, I really want to be in insurance.

Honestly, I’ll tell you what I’ve also found is, Some of the businesses that look so exciting and beautiful aren’t. They are beautiful if you’re a customer, really exciting. But they can be brutal places to work and terrible training.

What I realized is and I obviously didn’t see this in the beginning, but I did start thinking about it later as I’m going to go to the place where I can make the most impact and learn the most regardless of the industry. And it’s situational. It is completely situational.

So certain companies in certain industries might look good, but they’re not going to let me do anything or they’re not going to do anything. Other companies, they’re going to let you do something that gets you that experience that someone wants.

[00:19:06] Ron Laneve: When you made some of those moves, did you ever take a step back in compensation or level or title? Because I hear all the time. I’m not going to talk to the next role unless it’s a Director title or it’s a VP title or and I think that just that’s just the wrong way to think about your career.

As opposed to your point is illustrating exactly what I like to talk about is go build the functions, go build the base of who you’re trying to be. everything else will just work itself out.

[00:19:32] Mike Linton: look, when in doubt, I would always want more title and more money. Sure. But I think the thing I always wanted, and a lot of times I took less money or I trade off money for stock.

But what I wanted is a chance to do something that I could put on the resume where I knew it was going to be something that where I learned something and it was going to be noticeable and also it could fail. Look, I’ve had to close plants. I’ve rolled out products that sucked and had to call them back. I wrote a product of progressive that sold nothing.

[00:20:03] Mike Linton: But then on the other hand, I got to do stuff like, at Best Buy, we figured out how to trade marketing for music, and I ended up doing deals with the Rolling Stones, and Usher, and Elton John, and some other folks, and at Farmers, we got to smash 14 websites into one which is, those are the kind of skill sets, or things you get to do, not that often, and so I would look for chances where somebody actually was going to give me a chance,

I’m going to use a football analogy to throw down field, knowing that sometimes that would be an incomplete or even worse than the intercepted pass.But if you don’t throw down field ever for real, you really don’t get the experience. I think a lot of people will write up in their head that they are getting some big experience and they will not look at it against who the other people they’re playing against.

For the job or again, or even what the experience is that they’re gaining.I love the throwing down field and incompletion analogy again, as opposed to I got a VP title now and I managed five people, so I moved up.

I’m better than I was before. One of my favorite interview questions is what happened at the company because of you, because you were there, what did you see in the marketplace or the company, and then what did you change that helped the company grow sales profit, or ideally both?

[00:21:24] Mike Linton: You can’t say I got promoted to VP or SVP or anything. I really want you to tell me what you did. then I’m going to unwrap how hard that was because the company said, Hey, Ron, we have this idea, do this and build this plan here and roll it out. You say, and so I did what the company told me.

[00:21:42] Mike Linton: Yeah, you’re going to get a lot of execution credit. You’re not going to get a lot of vision or strategic credit from me or my team. I tried to only to hire people that they’re going to see the field and draw up plays to go downfield. They’re not going to say, I ran the play the coach gave me.

[00:21:57] Ron Laneve: Perfect.

[00:21:58] Ron Laneve: Love it. This is a very loaded question, and I’m asking it for a specific reason. I know. You’re good at teeing them up. What can I say? It’s like you do a podcast and interview people all the time.

[00:22:06] Ron Laneve: That’s what, it’s what kind of feels like. So you said, hey, I want to, I wanted to make a move to go get P&L experience. Yeah.

[00:22:13] Ron Laneve: Why?

[00:22:14] Mike Linton: Oh I was at Procter and you are the hub of the wheel there. I love the brand management job and Procter was fabulous, but I was not in control of pricing. I was on safeguard. Liquid soap was coming on. Safeguard was a drug. I wanted to get a antibacteriologist person. There’s very few universities that have that. I convinced the agency to take some ad money and hire someone from the University of Texas. And the company wouldn’t let me do that because obviously you can’t have brand managers running around hiring people. then when dial came out with a liquid soap everyone’s like you got it.

[00:22:46] Mike Linton: You got to do this really fast. I was really frustrated by that because I thought I want to be running the business really and I want all of it. I don’t want just the end of it, including pricing and raw materials. I want all the overhead allocated to me. then when I got that, all the overhead allocated to you.

[00:23:05] Mike Linton: Oh my God, there’s so many little pieces of overhead. What I learned at Progressive is you’re really paid off your P& L. so you have to figure out where all these things come from. It’s not so easy. But I wanted that understanding cause I thought in the end, they only give you marketing money for you to drive sales and profit.

[00:23:24] Mike Linton: You can talk about all the marketing mentors you want, like awareness, consideration, brand power, all this stuff is great in the end, if you’re not driving sales and profit, it’s not going to, I thought I really need to know all about this, like with it as the only currency or the main currency.

[00:23:40] Ron Laneve: All right. Last question. What do you want to do next?

[00:23:44] Ron Laneve: Right now I have a portfolio of things, which includes the podcast and a board. I would love to add stuff into that, including more boards or I’m doing some consulting. I’m also, I’m shutting no doors on anything cause I just really enjoy business.

[00:23:59] Ron Laneve: And I’m figuring it out as we go. But I really enjoy the business stuff and it’s a blast. I appreciate the question.

[00:24:06] Ron Laneve: Mike, I appreciate your time. This has been a pleasure and I’ve learned a lot and I can’t wait to share this and look forward to meeting up again soon.

[00:24:13] Mike Linton: Oh, look, it was great.

[00:24:15] Mike Linton: I’m happy to come back anytime you want. I appreciate you having me on the show. Thank you very much.

[00:24:19] Ron Laneve: No worries. Talk to you soon.

[00:24:21] Mike Linton: All right. Bye bye.

 

 

February 1, 2024