Scott Gillum: Spotlight on the expert

Our “Spotlight on the expert” series digs deeper into the stories of our expert contributors. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

MarTech columnist Scott Gillum runs his business Carbon Design from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He knew from a very young age that running a business was what he wanted to do. He just wasn’t sure what that meant. That led him on a circuitous path to learning a lot about business and marketing, and then having to unlearn some of it.

Q: How far back does the business thing go?

A: As a kid, I always dreamed of having my own company. I would wake up and remember having these very vivid dreams that I built a hotel or restaurant. I’d tell my mom about it, and she’s like, “You know, you should be an architect. You always think about building things.”

And so I always knew I was going to do something in business. So here’s my strategy in high school to figure out what I was going to do with my life: I was reading the Fortune 500 and I saw that most of the CEOs in the top 200 companies had their JDs.

And I thought, “Well, that’s it. If I want to get to the top with a company, I should go to law school because they all have their JDs.” So my college career was designed to get on the path to going to law school. I was a political science and economics major and I did two internships at law firms and realized, “Oh my god. I hate this.” So I got a bit smarter and realized what I really like is business, and it isn’t the law.

Got around to figuring out how I could go to grad school and get my MBA and get somebody to pay for it and that sent me on the path to where we are today. 

Q: I can’t remember any of my dreams from high school, but I’m pretty sure they did not involve starting a business. What attracted you to it?

A: What I liked about it was the problem-solving, figuring things out was the appeal of it. 

It wasn’t until I was 52 that I started a business of my own. With two kids in private schools or private universities. So the worst time to do it, but that’s when the opportunity was there, right? And the two years after starting the business were the hardest years of my life.

Part of the reason for that is that If you’ve been in a certain type of workplace for 30 years you’re accustomed to having a paycheck every week. You’re accustomed to understanding how you’re going to pay your taxes. How you’re going to get your insurance, right? All these things just happen. And you’ve been conditioned that way. It took two years of being an entrepreneur to figure out how to unwind that mental model of how I should think about making an income and a living. Figuring out there’s a different way that you can make a living.

That’s maybe the hardest part of being an entrepreneur. There are different ways that you can find insurance. You can figure out how to pay your taxes. But there’s a big hurdle for people trying to leave where they are working for someone else. In the current environment, where you’ve got a home, you got a mortgage payment, you got kids in college, to flip that upside down and become an entrepreneur, it’s very, very difficult.

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Q: What do you like about marketing?

A: I like trying to figure out why things don’t work. And so when I founded Carbon Design, I founded it because of two things that don’t work right.  The original idea for it was backward in terms of starting a business. I focused on the people and not the clients.

While I was working, I saw this next generation, the millennials, come in, and I came to the realization that their work styles are very different. And not in a bad way.

For example, I was doing a big rebranding project for a client. We just finished one phase and I was looking for the creative director and he was gone. We’re going to the next phase, and he was down backpacking through South America. And bells started going off in my head.

Q: Like that sounded pretty cool?

A: Yeah, I thought about the experiences I had when I was in management consulting. We would lose people when they became most productive. When they got five, six, seven years of experience under their belts, they would get married, and then have a family, and then we would lose really talented associates. They would try to come and work part-time, but they never felt like they could balance work life. They’re always feeling either like they were disappointing the client or disappointing themselves as a mother or father or whatever it is.

So the founding of Carbon Design was built around the idea that people really need a different way to work. They need to put their lives first and get that straightened out, then the work will come, and it’ll be really good. If you don’t have your life right, the work is going to suffer. And that’s the foundation of the company.

We’re on demand. We’re remote. We’re all freelance contractors. And you make your own time. You do work where you want. All we care about is your deliverables. Good quality work on time, it’s all we care about. So I started the company backwards with that. I figured if I get a good core base of people, then we’ll get clients and we’ll do really great work and we’ll retain them and get referred.

So the first question was really why aren’t people engaged in work anymore? If you looked at the Gallup poll before COVID, work engagement has never been above 32% in 20 years. I wanted to know if we can find a way to get people engaged again.

Q: That’s the first thing that didn’t work. What’s the second?

A: The second question relates to B2B marketing. There’s been all this investment in technology in data and insights, but performance hasn’t improved. Why? Why are we not improving performance? That got us on another journey, and we developed some proprietary, performance-based marketing tools. They allow us to understand people as individuals and to look at the softer side of sales and marketing. Because, if our job as marketers is to get somebody to take action, we have to understand their motivations and beliefs.

So we do a lot of psychographics. We use AI personality profiling tools. We know preferences in terms of content. We know preferences in terms of visualization. We’re starting to take in the people component, not just the title or a role. You add that in, you start to get better performance.

Q: What are you looking forward to in terms of marketing?

A: I’m glad you asked. We’re on our third version of an AI tool. And this one, I think, is really exciting and fun. We have built an AI tool called Cassidy. It’s a business development assistant and a project manager assistant.

The nice thing about this tool versus some other tools is that other tools are always prompt-driven. And the output was only as good as your prompting, and who has time to figure out what the right prompts are?

With Cassidy, you feed it knowledge. It sits on top of our Google Suite, on top of the knowledge and extracting the knowledge out of our drives. And it also reads our website, it picks up our tonality, our brand voice. So for me, what’s very exciting is that we are a business that operates with no overhead.

The way our organization is built, we’re very flat. We can scale up quickly and scale down, and we don’t have any overhead. What we try to do is we price efficiently, and we try to get most of the fees that we collect to our freelancers. So we have a model that means you make a lot of money working for us. 

Now we have an assistant to aid people coming to work with us. We plug them into our G Suite, and they know where to find this proposal or this project, We’re super excited about it.