Real Career Stories: Entrepreneur to Fractional CMO

real-career-stories-entrepreneur-to-fractional-cmo

[[p]]Curious to know how others got to where they are today in their career?&nbsp;On the&nbsp;[[a href="http://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/podcasts" target="_blank"]]DMI podcast[[/a]]&nbsp;we get to chat with all sorts of digital marketing professionals - but their career journeys are all unique.&nbsp;[[/p]]

[[p]]In this clip, Peter Murphy Lewis explains his fascinating career journey, from starting his own travel company in South America to transitioning into a role as a fractional CMO, helping other businesses grow and digitalize. He has interesting insights on the most in-demand marketing skills, and offers advice for young marketers on developing adaptable soft skills over technical expertise alone.[[/p]]

[[p]]Listen to our full&nbsp;podcast with Peter where he explains [[a href="https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/podcasts/podcast-110-what-does-a-fractional-cmo-do-strategic-pete" target="_blank"]]what a fractional CMO does[[/a]],&nbsp;or watch it&nbsp;[[a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh2NwbDPAvA" target="_blank"]]on YouTube[[/a]].&nbsp;[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (00:06)[[br /]]
So I would love to hear more about your career, your background, like how you arrived at doing this, because our listeners will be curious. They may aspire to be where you&#39;re at. And I&#39;d love to know how you got there. What is your path to today?[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (00:21)[[br /]]
The abbreviated version is in 2007, I started my own company in South America. I was an academic prior to that and I couldn&#39;t get a job with anybody else, no one would hire me. And so I started my own company, created a bicycle traveling company that really took off quickly, had well-known customers like Paul McCartney and Aerosmith and...[[/p]]

[[p]]Beyonce and got in The New York Times. And then we built three or four more brands out of that. We did golf tours. We did high end excursions to Atacama and Easter Island and Antarctica, you $5,000 to $15,000 per person. And so we kind of grew from like a grassroots bicycle company to a high end luxury package. And that company I just sold this year, 2024, and that using my own money,[[/p]]

[[p]]to grow my travel companies and brands and HR and scaling to four cities and hitting seven figures and 50 employees, that&#39;s where I learned my marketing chops. Now, the transition into what a fractional CMO is, I started helping other people solve the same problems that I solved in my travel company. Like, how do you digitalize...[[/p]]

[[p]]a brick and mortar company. I started working with banks, right? I helped banks become newly chartered and I&#39;m on the board of a bank that is pretty big, $750 million &nbsp;in assets. So that kind of experience that I first got my chops with then translated into helping other people. And then I started to realize, you know, like I don&#39;t have to run my other company, I can sell it. And now I can just help other people make money. I mean, I always I say when I&#39;m not on camera, and I won&#39;t swear to your audience, but I say I&#39;d love to help people make a lot of effing money.[[/p]]

[[p]]And that&#39;s kind of my passion. And when you have skin in the game, because I usually negotiate contracts, I usually negotiate contracts around my performance. And that allows people to trust me and pay a higher price as a bonus, but engage more quickly.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (02:24)[[br /]]
So you learn all about marketing by running your own company, right? Tell me, do you remember any of those early mistakes? Like what were the kind of biggest mistakes, big learnings, let&#39;s call them, in those early days?[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (02:28)[[br /]]
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.[[/p]]

[[p]]How much time do we have, Will?[[/p]]

[[p]]I&#39;ll start off with the embarrassing ones. My new kind of catch phrase in the last week or two that I&#39;ve learned about myself is my only real currency in life Will is vulnerability. I don&#39;t have a lot more to add to the team or the plate and other than vulnerability. So let&#39;s start off. I can remember at about month six, firing our first secretary/executive assistant.[[/p]]

[[p]]by sending an email to my boss, or to my boss, to my business partner named Joel (Joel). And I said, Joel I&#39;m coming into the office today at two o&#39;clock. We have to let Maria Jose go. You know, she hasn&#39;t done this, this, and this. She hasn&#39;t answered these emails. Well, I put her in CC. And when I show up to the office, she says, Peter, I got the email you sent to Joel I&#39;m aware it&#39;s my last day.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (03:31)[[br /]]
No[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (03:41)[[br /]]
It still hurts today. That was in 2007. It still hurts today. I can, I can tell you the amount of times that I&#39;ve negotiated poor contracts with marketing agencies. I&#39;ve got a good one. I screwed our traffic so poorly one time Will, I don&#39;t know what I did till this day. I did something with telling Google Analytics and telling search, Google Search Console that most of my traffic should be focused in South America. And so then it started to lower my rank[[/p]]

[[p]]and focus on people who are searching for me in South America. All of my clients were from North America and Western Europe, all of them. So it took me about six months to see my traffic go from 5,000 unique visitors per month and it tanked to 1,500 and I lost, I don&#39;t know, maybe $200,000 of revenue just because of an SEO traffic mistake. But I have another, I have 15 more lists if you guys wanna feel better about all your mistakes that will make you be like, man, Peter&#39;s stupid, I won&#39;t hire him.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (04:38)[[br /]]
No, but it&#39;s good, it&#39;s good because I think I talk a lot about imposter syndrome on the podcast. I talk a lot about this, just the insecurities of being a marketer because there&#39;s no rule book. There&#39;s no perfect way to do everything. it&#39;s rough and dirty and grubby out there and you&#39;re just scrabbling around, aren&#39;t you? And yeah, your hands get dirty and you mess up and you break things and that&#39;s okay. And so it&#39;s nice to get people like yourself who are clearly very successful[[/p]]

[[p]]talking about that to make people feel... because there&#39;s a lot of cliches in that, know, fail fast, break things, but no one really talks about the gory details so much. So it&#39;s nice to hear that.[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (05:21)[[br /]]
Yeah, I was fellin&#39; fast and fellin&#39; forward before Silicon Valley was tellin&#39; us that that was cool, and I wasn&#39;t doin&#39; it on purpose Will.[[/p]]

[[p]]And what I would say to that is beyond that from an advantage is I surround myself with people who have different life experiences and think differently than, than myself. I think.[[/p]]

[[p]]Well, I&#39;ve never taken a marketing class in my life. I&#39;ve never taken a business class in my life. I studied sociology, Spanish, and political science for my masters. So I learned everything kind of on the go, and I try to surround myself with people who are similar. I think that if I met somebody just like myself from Kansas in the middle of the United States, they&#39;re going to be able to offer only 10 % more[[/p]]

[[p]]to my approach to helping my clients than what I already do. But if I find a version of myself in Kenya or Cyprus or Germany or Pakistan, they approach things so much differently, not just because we have different, you know, psychographic approaches or, but mentally, like I went to, I think one of the most fundamental kind of steps in my life or how I connect the dots to who I am.[[/p]]

[[p]]is I went to a boarding high school three hours, two hours away from my parents with 160 students in high school in Missouri, poor city, 2000 people, right? Like we&#39;re not talking about a prep school. Nobody wore a tie. The teachers were making a little bit above minimum wage. But out of those 160 boarding high schools, 60 of them were international students.[[/p]]

[[p]]And those kids were all smarter than me because they were living in their second country at the age of 14. And I was just leaving the state at the age of 14. They already spoke three languages. They already knew how to talk to a dumb American, me, and I didn&#39;t know how to talk to them. So I don&#39;t think that this is about money. I think this is about a framework. It&#39;s like speaking in second language.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (07:27)[[br /]]
Wow, interesting. So do you then believe that marketing, the sort of marketing channels, the marketing skills are all quite easily teachable? And I think what I&#39;m hearing is that the soft skills or the motivation, the personality type, you look for a certain kind of person, because that&#39;s maybe less teachable, particularly in six months.[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (07:40)[[br /]]
Yes.[[/p]]

[[p]]Mm-hmm.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (07:55)[[br /]]
And then you just give them this kind of opportunity to soak up information about marketing. Because yeah, I think I agree with you. A lot of marketing is very quickly learnable, isn&#39;t it?[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (08:06)[[br /]]
Yeah, yeah. So I think you got your spot on. So I do my hardest to filter out the people who don&#39;t have the soft skills for remote A players, ambitious, people have a chip on the shoulder. Ideally, they failed once or twice. They&#39;re vulnerable. They can learn publicly. They&#39;re aware that what they don&#39;t know, what they don&#39;t know, they ask questions that I try to figure out before[[/p]]

[[p]]they ever get accepted to work with me and be an intern or apprentice. I don&#39;t care if they have ever written a blog, if they even know what paid performance campaign is. I don&#39;t care if they don&#39;t use social media. I don&#39;t care if they only watch YouTube. I can teach them about LinkedIn, how to write a blog, how to write a newsletter, how to analyze HubSpot pipeline, how to determine what&#39;s broken by becoming an SDR and listen to a sales call.[[/p]]

[[p]]All of those things can be taught to anyone who has the soft skills. I always say the best generalist marketer is someone who should have been a psychologist, but they realized that they didn&#39;t wanna sit in a couch all day and they wanted to make money for themselves, make money for someone else and solve problems. But that&#39;s kind of what a psychologist is.[[/p]]

[[p]]I[[/p]]

[[p]]So the example of the SEO person, the intern works on my team right now, he&#39;s gonna laugh when he sees this. He&#39;s not a native English speaker. We taught him to write an SEO optimized blog in English and his first one,[[/p]]

[[p]]he did it on time and did it well and wrote 2,500 words and it was, we published it with minimal editing, probably an hour of editing from my senior content writer. And he&#39;s like, I love writing blogs. I&#39;m like, buddy, man, it&#39;s November 2024.[[/p]]

[[p]]I don&#39;t know what&#39;s gonna happen to blogs. I&#39;m glad you learned it. I taught you this because you need to be able to write this in case this matters a year from now and you need, you had to follow a diligent way to follow a process. But I just wanted to make you go through the grind so you were empathetic with how hard these other people are working. How about this? Do you know anything about videos? No, I edited a video one time in college on Instagram for one of my classes. I said,[[/p]]

[[p]]Can I see the video? He showed it to me live in my interview. And this was before he became an intern. And he showed it to me. So once he finished the SEO blog, my team&#39;s like, what should we do with this guy? And I said, you know what? He showed me the edited video and he was empathetic. He was funny. He was psychological. Like he made me laugh. I don&#39;t think he has any experience with editing video, but why don&#39;t we train him? Right now[[/p]]

[[p]]He spends 10 hours a week only editing videos and it&#39;s gonna make him so much more valuable because he understands pain points, he identifies emotional, he&#39;s figuring out how to optimize it on YouTube with thumbnails and when is the break and a 60 second reel which is discoverable to pull him down to more middle of the funnel. He&#39;s gonna be smarter at YouTube than I am in two months and he was an intern a month ago.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (10:59)[[br /]]
Hmm.[[/p]]

[[p]]What skills do you see being most in demand in digital marketing?[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (11:23)[[br /]]
Let&#39;s start with, I&#39;ll say quickly the foundational project management. Like every single marketer I work with, they&#39;re struggling with project management tools, updating, doing Gantt charts, fulfilling things on time. So start with that. If you, if you don&#39;t have that, like you can&#39;t apply with me. But more evolved, like where you&#39;re, what&#39;s going to translate into money and to outcome, right? Like PPC is something that I will overpay for. If somebody[[/p]]

[[p]]is better at PPC strategically speaking, not technically speaking, strategically speaking, like I&#39;ll overpay for that. Video right now, right? Like everything that I am doing for my clients involves some type of visual asset, some type of video asset, YouTube or LinkedIn videos or LinkedIn webinars or those types of tools I still hire for. And same with graphics, right? So like I have,[[/p]]

[[p]]My most recent hire was a graphic designer and I just went straight to Colombia. I find Colombians inexpensive, really creative, smart, organized, easy to get along with. And I just reached out to 10 people on LinkedIn and I said, I&#39;ll pay you for this test. Will you do it? And I said, I&#39;ll prepay you. And I prepaid the person and the person did it and she&#39;s still with me for over a year. Now she&#39;s helping me design my book that I&#39;m about to publish. Same thing with YouTube. So I found a YouTube[[/p]]

[[p]]editor, I went straight to LinkedIn, I found people and I just went straight for that. So for me, beyond generalist right now, it&#39;s PPC strategy, graphic, right? And a time when everything&#39;s doing everything in AI, if you can stand out and not look like AI, and then video, those are the three things that stand out for me. Everything else, I feel like I can teach.[[/p]]

[[p]]Will Francis (13:02)[[br /]]
Yeah. Yep.[[/p]]

[[p]]What advice would you give your younger self when getting into marketing or business?[[/p]]

[[p]]Peter Murphy Lewis (13:22)[[br /]]
Well, I think I&#39;ll try to answer it in two ways. So when getting into business, I started my first business in the travel industry and I would think twice about what industry you&#39;re going to get into, what offer, what service you&#39;re going to offer, what product you&#39;re going to offer. Okay. I wouldn&#39;t do travel industry again. It&#39;s seven days a week. It&#39;s being disruptive. in order to scale, you have to hire more people. so[[/p]]

[[p]]you know, don&#39;t make the mistake I did when I was 27 years old. I chose an industry where I had to make more money. I had to hire more people. I was highly dependent upon seasonality. I was dependent upon, you know, crime and reputation of the cities and countries that I was involved in. So the first thing is slow down and think about the industry before you invest money and create a team. Right. If you&#39;re a freelancer, like that&#39;s, that&#39;s not the issue, right? You&#39;re, you&#39;re crafting &nbsp;your, your art and your skill and your science.[[/p]]

[[p]]Now to answer your question more directly around kind of as a marketer, you know, I think it would be the same thing. And I&#39;m glad you asked me, right? Like what would I tell my younger self? Because I don&#39;t really feel comfortable giving out advice around things that I&#39;m not confident about. So I&#39;ve probably come off because my voice and my excitement come off as very opinionated. I think you guys have heard all of my opinions. I don&#39;t have a lot of other strong opinions.[[/p]]

[[p]]But the one piece of advice that I would give my younger self as a marketer, and this is not because I want anyone to come apply with me or anything like this, and I told my wife about four or five years ago, I had something happen with my business that made me think that I was gonna lose everything. And I told her, said, if I lose everything, I want you to remind me of the following. I can work at Starbucks three days a week. I wanna find the smartest person[[/p]]

[[p]]that is gonna open up their door to me and show me how to be a smarter businessman, a better leader, better at finance, a better industry, I&#39;m gonna go do an apprenticeship. And she said, you have my full support. I started this internship program when I was 27. And when I almost lost everything when I was 30, my plan was to go back and be an apprentice again. So I would, if you feel like you&#39;re struggling, you&#39;re stuck either you&#39;re stuck as a business person.[[/p]]

[[p]]If you&#39;re stuck as a freelancer, find 10 hours in your week and find somebody smarter who&#39;s going to open up the door and just be vulnerable.[[/p]]

Real Career Stories: Entrepreneur to Fractional CMO

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