Canadianity and Consulting ft. Mike Macfarlane of 3MG Marketing
Join us for a trip to the great white north to visit our very favorite Canadian, Mike MacFarlane of 3MG Marketing.
Mike is the nicest person we know, the OG Eloqua power user (seriously he practically invented key functionality in the product), and an outstanding consultant.
Listen in to hear Mike's hot takes on Tim Horton's, his favorite wrestling subreddits, and why Sydney is not allowed to do any graphic design work ever.
Podcast Summary
Sydney asks Mike to talk about himself and his favorite part of Canada: he talks about being an enabler of MarTech and his experience in the industry. He started his career as a product specialist at Eloqua in 2006, and he has been in the MarTech space for 17 years. They discuss why Mike doesn't like to be called a consultant, and he mentions that the word has a negative connotation sometimes. Sydney talks about Mike's podcast and his consulting company, 3MG, and they discuss his recent collaboration with EMMIE. Mike shares why he decided to work with EMMIE: because he likes the opportunity to work with Sydney and Lauren, learn from each other, and grow their businesses together. They also discuss the competitive agency to agency relationship and how they can support each other.
The conversation turns to their experiences with communities and their reservations about being too vulnerable in those spaces. They also discuss their personal experiences in the industry, and Mike shares a funny and cool story from a conference in San Francisco in 2013-2014, where Robin Thicke was performing and Alan Thicke, his father, was quietly watching his son perform. As a fellow Canadian, Mike went up to Alan and congratulated him, and he played it cool despite people recognizing him.
Mike, Sydney and Lauren discuss upcoming conferences they plan to attend, including Collision in Toronto, Inbound, and MOPsapalooza in Anaheim. They also talk about their experiences with Disney and how their kids enjoy it. Mike mentions that his daughter is not interested in Disney anymore as she is getting older, while Lauren’s seven-year-old is also over princesses. The conversation also briefly touches on controversial celebrity cancellations, including Aziz Ansari's cancellation.
Mike then talks about four people who had a significant impact on his career. He mentions two people he worked with at Eloqua who were always looking out for him and provided him with opportunities to learn and grow. He also talks about a former colleague, whom he worked with at PathFactory and has since become his client twice. He describes Elle as one of the smartest marketers he's ever met, and they are able to talk "nerd" to each other in a way that they both understand. Mike also expresses his gratitude to his current clients who took a chance on him when he started his business and have stuck around. Sydney and Lauren express their admiration for the people that Mike has worked with and the positive impact they had on his career. In the next segment, they will get to know Mike a little bit more using the Christmas/holiday present philosophy, as well as the PFB on the streets topics: Chat GPT, Business travel, Remote work, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tim Horton's.
Full Podcast Transcript
Sydney: Hello and welcome to Pretty Funny Business, the podcast. I'm Sydney Mulligan
Lauren: I'm Lauren Aquilino
Sydney: Today we are very excited to have our very favorite Canadian with us: Mike McFarland. Lauren and I are so excited that you're here. We’d love for you to just introduce yourself and talk about what you do and maybe your favorite part of Canada.
Mike: My favorite? Oh man, those are a lot of loaded questions to start off. Hi everyone, my name is Mike McFarlane. I'm a Canadian, and raised in Markham, Ontario, Canada.
Sydney: Woohoo.
Mike: I am - I don't like saying the word consultant because I feel that's a dirty word in some way, shape, or form.
Sydney: Oh, that seems a much dirtier word, a drug.
Mike: So I would say I'm an enabler, I like working and helping people with MarTech and, I've been in the MarTech space now for 17 years.
Sydney: Wow.
Mike: I started my career at Eloqua in 2006 as a lonely product specialist, which was our support, which wasn't really support. It was basically consulting over the phone, because we didn't have documentation, we didn't have partners. If you wanted to update your Salesforce integration with Eloqua, I had to go talk to a developer. That's what it was.
Sydney: So you don't like being called a consultant because you are used to doing a job that's consulting without calling it consulting.
Mike: Yes. Yes. I don't know.
Sydney: We call you a product specialist
Mike: I don't know.
Lauren: Know what baby?
Mike: I don't know, maybe we'll dig into it, but just the word consultant I just think has a negative view on it sometimes.
Sydney: I feel we need to bring in a therapist for this conversation.
Mike: That's tomorrow morning
Lauren: And if there's a negative view, I need to know about it.
Sydney: Okay. Well, the most important things to know about Mike are that Mike is the host of the Indie Marketers Podcast, which is great. Give it a listen. Mike is also the founder of 3MG, which is his very own consulting company, even though apparently we're not calling it a consulting company. It's his products, his enabler association, product Enabler Association.
Lauren: His very own enabler.
Sydney: Mike is our very best Canadian / Eloqua friend. Two things that we are not: Canadian or Eloqua people. So we talk to him about Tim Horton's and what it's to be owned by Oracle and lots of other things that we don't know about. And that's really it. So Mike, you just started working with Emmie, which we're super excited about. I think that it is cool that we have more and more people like you, who also have their own business going, that are working through us as well. Why did you decide to join Emmie? We're definitely a hazard, if anything.
Mike: I honestly think it’s one big reason, or two big reasons. One is capacity and being able to work with your team, being able to work with my team, being able to help each other grow our businesses together which I think was really exciting for me. And you two just kick ass. I love it, and it's so weird to me that this little friendship, kinship, whatever you want to call it, is only a few months old. But I feel like I've known you guys forever and I think the opportunity to work with you guys and the opportunity to learn from you guys, this is something that was really meaningful for me in wanting to form this collaboration, partnership, whatever you want to call it, not partnership, but work together. And all the fun.
Sydney: Collaboration, all of it. All appropriate. I mean, I think the same thing for us. There's so much stuff that comes up that, you know we're not Eloqua people. And I love having you on board to be able to tap into when we need to. And, you know, I think that we've always, we're kind of, we're deconstructing the super competitive agency to agency relationship. There's just, there's plenty of work for all of us. You know, you have different specialties than we do. Anything we can support each other more than we need to fight with each other. Plus it's much more fun this way.
Mike: I agree. It's so much more fun this way. And especially with 3MG right now it's just myself and my wife. My wife Kim has her own book of business that she's running. I've got my own book of business that I'm running, but they're two very different things. Kim does a lot of social, does a lot of web design, does a lot of graphic design.
Lauren: Awesome.
Sydney: I go on Instagram sometimes.
Lauren: This is all very good to know, by the way.
Mike: Yes.
Sydney: We should have Kim on the podcast.
Mike: Absolutely
Lauren: Bye, Mike.
Sydney: Bye, Mike. It was fun being friends with you, but we like Kim better now.
Mike: Kim would actually love that. I think even before Kim and I started working together, it’s kind of lonely in the sense that you don't have that shoulder to tap on. You don't have those resources that maybe you would typically have at a company or at another agency where you don't have to be the master of everything. You can be the master of none and use people and get access to people's skillset when you need it. When you're doing this on your own, you have a certain skill set that you're running with, but at the same time, you want to be able to expand on that when your client's have needs. And I think, again, I don't look at us as competition. Clearly we're working together, but even if we weren't working together in that capacity, I would still love the opportunity to be able to tap you guys on the shoulder or tap your team on the shoulder and say, Hey, I don't know how to do this. I have an idea, but is there a way that we could work together to solve this issue together?
Lauren: I think too, a lot of us that have gone either freelance or independent, you know there's a crucial moment that pushes you in that direction. We've all had to make that decision: either you had the opportunity in front of you, something wasn't going well, or you just have had the dream to create your own thing and so you do it, and then you kind of have that “oh crap” moment where you're like, and now I'm alone.
Sydney: I created my own thing. Now. What?
Mike: Yeah.
Sydney: Oh no, I'm alone. You know, I think this is so interesting to me because this has been kind of our vision all along is, you know, make working for yourself not so lonely. Create the support that you have in other types of employment situations. And I feel this week I have seen it kind of come out in a few different ways. I was talking to one of our consultants yesterday who was working on something for a client and ran into something, the product doc was a little confusing and unclear and I hopped on a call with her and I was like, oh no, this is actually how that works. You know, if you need to exclude people from a nurture cast, this is how you do it. So they still get an email and she was like, oh, I get it. This is why being in a collective is great because normally I would've just had to spend hours figuring this out on my own and hope I got it right. I was like , yep, this is it. You saw it. That's the vision.
Lauren: There's amazing communities. There's no charge to be part of Emmie. Obviously we vet the people that that join, but there are free communities that you can go to, and pray someone answers your question, but what's kind of nice about going to someone in the collective is that because we're all interconnected even with operations and payment, Sydney still got paid to help that other consultant, you know? So even if there was something like oh, I have a question, by all means please charge me for your time. And then you're running your own business, you're making your own money, you're charging, it backs your clients or just deciding that you know, that it's worth it. But we had someone else who was like, hey I have this client but I'm gonna lose them. if I can't come up with the bandwidth for the next three months, I want to keep them, do you have someone that can step in? It creates this ecosystem. Not that's what I think that communities are, but people only have so much to give. They can't spend 100% of their time on it. Although, I don't know, maybe Sandy is doing it. I don't know. I know Sandy's, Sandy.
Sydney: I think he does it at the expense of sleep.
Lauren: At the expense of sleep, yeah. So he works during the day and at night he answers people's questions for free. But you know, it's basically a hope and a prayer that you get the problem that you're having answered in the community.
Sydney: I love those communities. I'm in way too many of them, but I also find it a little uncomfortable when you're in a client facing role to be too vulnerable there because all of your prospects are there too. And I don't want to fire off a question that sounds kind of dumb and lose my credibility.
Mike: I don’t think you would. I honestly don't think you would. That's just me.
Lauren: I dunno, she's got some pretty dumb questions, Mike. No, I'm kidding.
Sydney: Pretty dumb business.
Mike: I think one thing I've tried to be, at least with my book of business, is - I don't know if vulnerable is the right word but I'm sure you don't mean it this way either, but it's okay to not know everything and your clients know that you will not know everything. I think it's how you navigate that or how you navigate those questions that becomes: are you gonna try to figure this out? Or are you just gonna ignore it because you don't know it and you just wanna sweep it under a rug / pretend that question ever came up. But I guess you're right, there is a little bit of a fine line between putting yourself out there where your prospects are and them saying, or them seeing, hey this person's asking a question that
Sydney: I know the answer to
Lauren: I think there's a difference between your clients who know you or someone who only sees this one question you just threw down.
Sydney: Well, I also think those communities are getting so big and there's more and more senior people that are joining them, so in a pool of marketing ops practitioners, fine I might ask a question that they know the answer to. They also see me answer questions that they don't know the answer to and that's all fine. But if your first impression with a VP of Marketing Ops that happens to be in the Slack group is that they saw you ask a dumb question and then you're on a sales call with them later, they're gonna be like, hmm, I don't know. Anyway, that's my own imposter syndrome showing through.
Lauren: Yeah, you might need to.
Sydney: We needed a therapist on this one. We gotta call Holly. We gotta call Marge. Someone's gotta get in here. We'll put a pin in that for the next session. But Mike, this is about you. So let's get back to talking about you. We've talked way too much about ourselves and Emmie. We're super excited about it and super excited to have you part of it. I want to hear about some more of your experience. 17 years is a long time to be in MOPs. MOPs barely existed.
Lauren: You've seen it all.
Sydney: You basically created it. So great work! What in your 17 years was the coolest thing that you ever built or did at work?
Mike: Good question. From a professional standpoint, I think there are two cool things. Being so early at Eloqua allowed me, especially when I was in marketing ops, to kind of build stuff in Eloqua that would later become productized just based on how we built it.
Sydney: That is really cool.
Mike: The way you do lead scoring in Eloqua today is based off of the lead scoring model I built in 2009 or 2010. So sitting down with our developers and showing them how I built everything in program builder at the time. And then what is the rule logic? What are the recency and frequency elements that go into everything? And so that's kind of, I don't wanna say it's all of it, but it was certainly an influence on that. The other, well the other really, really cool thing I think was coming up with the contact washing machine. So I don't know if you've ever heard that term float around at all. It was this idea of data normalization and standardization. Before you had Clearbit, before you had D&B and ZoomInfo doing all this enrichment data for you. We built rules in Eloqua to standardize and normalize all of our data, which eventually turned into this thing in the Eloqua community, which eventually turned into an app that you could install in Eloqua to do some of this stuff.
Sydney: Yeah, but I mean, it's cool because it's been so long that you can really see the impact that it made long term.
Mike: It's cool to be able to say you had influence on something and a lot of it I think I was in the right place at the right time,, and I was always interested in tech. I went to school for marketing and to be able to work at a company where there were just a hundred people at the time, to see it go from that to almost a billion dollar sale six years later is crazy.
Lauren: I knew you were cool Mike, but I didn't know exactly what kind of celebrity we had in the room.
Mike: Oh, stop it.
Sydney: I know. I think it's really cool that Eloqua took user feedback and worked so closely with their internal team that was actually using the product. I wish other companies did more of that because I think it's a valuable.
Mike: It was a completely different time. I think when I first started, Eloqua was doing releases every two weeks.
Lauren: Wow.
Mike: And it would literally be a client asking for a certain piece of functionality. Product management would scope it, and then they would just go. Now that is good and bad, good for certain customers who are asking for things but bad because it can bloat and complicate things very quickly. So that didn't last forever. There were a lot of really good people at Eloqua at the time that spent a lot of time listening and talking to customers to get them, not only being evangelists for the platform, like Marketo and Marketo Nation. Same idea, but really listening to them to get their feedback on what they want to see in Eloqua, because Eloqua 6 was really built by engineers. It was really powerful and could do really cool shit, but what the fuck's an email brochure? What the fuck's the distribution? You had all these weird terms for things that clearly marketers weren't coming up with. And then Eloqua 10 rolled around and I was really fortunate enough to be close with the head designer of Eloqua and watching him build it from scratch, which was insane. But the feedback that they took and they would go on tours and talk to customers about - hey we're thinking about creating a canvas to create your campaigns that's drag and drop. What do you want on it? What do you want to see on it? How do you wanna navigate it? It was really cool. Really cool.
Sydney: I love that they just numbered the different versions of Eloqua. You know, I feel it's a little easier to follow with Marketo. What was the thing that, project O'Brien, that was one. And then Marketo
Lauren: Sky, Mm-hmm.
Sydney: Exciting and then kind of flopped. And then now we have the Marketo Engage, unified experience. That is becoming Adobe Marketo Engage. I don't know how I feel. Marketo 10. That's all I needed. Just so you know what I'm working with here.
Mike: I’ve thought that since I've gone out on my own, even just in roles after Eloqua, obviously getting more exposure to tools like Pardot, HubSpot, Marketo and all of that. And I remember being at Eloqua again back in the day when Marketo was really kind of coming up and nipping at Eloqua's feet. And Marketo at the time was like, we're a shiny new tool. We have the nice pretty UI, we have the nice drag and drop way of doing everything. It's 2023 and it doesn't look that much different than it did 10 years ago even. And same with Eloqua, I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But it's just funny how that changes over time.
Sydney: Yeah, I totally agree. I think the MarTech ecosystem has changed so much in that amount of time that the marketing automation platform is no longer the central system of marketing that it used to be. Now it's all like, what's your CDP? What's your data warehouse? Everything really, we only care about the CRM and what connects to that. So I don't know. It's been interesting to see this evolve. Okay, well my next question. I'm very interested in your response to, because we just went through this with our last guest on the podcast who was also a Marketo person. So we had a lot of shared business travel experiences at Marketo Summit and you know, we all, I think we all three had a story about the exact same party that happened at Vegas Summit in 2016 or something, but I had no idea what Eloqua’s conferences are like.
Mike: Not that different, in all honesty.
Sydney: What is the funniest story you have from a conference or work trip even?
Mike: I guess it's funny, but it was also really cool. So I think this was 2013/ 2014, and we were at a conference where Robin Thicke was performing at
Lauren: That was probably a big deal at the time.
Mike: Yes.
Sydney: Didn't he get canceled? Aren't we like, no, we don't like him anymore.
Lauren: Well, Emily Rani wasn't entrusted in how she was portrayed after that. I think.
Mike: Yeah, definitely canceled at some point. Cause he never really heard much. But Rob Thicke was
Sydney: baby too, isn't he?
Lauren: Yeah, Thicke.
Sydney: Thicke? Yeah. Anyway, go ahead.
Mike: So Robin Thicke’s performing
Lauren: What city are you in? Vegas?
Mike: In San Fran. So Rob Thicke's performing, everyone's loving it, having a great time and I'm just kind of standing at the back watching. I was working at Eloqua at the time and we had to make sure everyone’s customers had seats, so all that sort of stuff and do all that good stuff. So I'm sitting at the back and I look over to the right of me and Alan Thicke was there watching his son perform. That's all. He didn't announce it, didn't do anything, was just there because I guess he was in town and wanted to see his son perform. And so I walked up to him as a humble Canadian and said
Lauren: Is he Canadian? Oh, I didn't know.
Mike: I don't know if Robin is, but Alan, a hundred percent is.
Lauren: He's 100% Canadian. You hear that folks? Yes.
Sydney: Verified, a 100% Canadian. A purebred Canadian must be verified by another purebred Canadian. So Alan Thicke you have your purebred Canadian badge now.
Mike: But I went up to him after and was just like, I'm not here to have a conversation, I’m just a really big fan and congratulations.
Sydney: You really go up to him? And the first thing you said was sorry, because you're a bred Canadian. That probably made him feel really comfortable.
Mike: He was. People started to get wind that he was there. So a lot of people went up to him and he totally played it cool. Everyone was super respectful of the fact that he was literally just there to watch his son, which was really cool. So that was really cool. And I feel it wasn't the same conference. It was one, another one after, but this time it was in Vegas and I think it was Oracle and James Franco was
Sydney: Oh wow. That's a big
Lauren: Isn't he also canceled?
Sydney: I'm sure he is.
Mike: Must be Oracle just knows the right people
Lauren: They're like, hurry before he gets canceled.
Sydney: Maybe they have the insider tips about pre cancellations due
Lauren: Right? And then Oracle makes the cancellation happen so that no one else can have what they had.
Mike: He was there but he was also not there in the sense that he was definitely, I'll say, enhanced on something. And it was really hard to watch. I dunno if he may have been just been tired too. Cause he was filming somewhere in Atlanta. Came to Vegas, did what is ever he potentially did in Vegas.
Sydney: What? My agent wrote me into this stupid marketing conference. I'm in the middle of series. Isn't he a big method actor too?
Mike: I think so, so maybe he was going method
Lauren: What's his brother's name?
Sydney: Dave Franco.
Lauren: Yeah. Dave Franco. So Dave Franco, you know, is in my favorite movies.
Mike: I think those, those would definitely be the two big things that stick out to me. But I mean, every conference was just full of
Sydney: Chicanery.
Mike: shenanigans, especially in Vegas.And when I was consulting with an agency before, going to the massive clubs at Caesar's Palace and getting bottle service in a booth and living your best life
Lauren: That was the Nepo Baby VC, early Marketing Ops times.
Sydney: yeah. That doesn't happen anymore. But that was the good old days.
Lauren: We could try to bring it back.
Sydney: We could try, yes, Emmie bottle service. I do remember when, before I was ever a consultant, I had a consultant from Marketo Pro Services, and I was going to Summit and I was like, oh, are you gonna be there? And he said, no, they won't let me. I think even being the consultant that got to go to the conference is not a thing anymore. They're like, no we don't send the professional services consultants, we send the CSMs, we send the AEs, but if you're not there to make an upsell, then we're not paying for you to be there.
Mike: Yeah. It's cool that conferences are coming back now, I guess especially after the last few years. I think, I don't know when this is gonna get released, but Marketo's is next week, or Adobe is next week. But I think the last one I went to was in 2019.
Sydney: You were there.
Mike: Yeah. With Path Factory.
Sydney: Oh man. Oh, Path Factory. That's right. I was there too. I was super pregnant. My entire lower body was extremely swollen the entire time. And let me tell you what's not fun, being incredibly pregnant in Vegas. Lauren wasn't there because she had just given birth. So 2019 was a great year for us.
Lauren: I was incredibly pregnant in Vegas in 2015 or 2014. I can't remember when it was, before Marina though. It's not fun, no.
Sydney: We're going to MOPs Palooza this year, when is it? September.
Mike: November.
Lauren: November.
Sydney: November. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited about that.
Mike: I've got Collision in Toronto in the summer, which is a big tech conference. And then I'm going to inbound.
Sydney: Oh, you're going to Inbound? Inbound is actually the first conference I ever went to. It was really fun. It was so fun. Azi Ansari was a speaker. Malala was
Lauren: Also canceled
Sydney: Azizi canceled. Malala's. Okay. Malala's. Okay.
Lauren: I think Azi came back cuz he was maybe paused
Sydney: Yeah, I don't think he got full canceled. It was a, I think that was a little trigger. Happy cancellation.
Lauren: It was more like no one wanted to hear that story. Z thanks for that.
Mike: Yes,
Lauren: You go about your busy day.
Mike: Yes. Agreed.
Sydney: It was not. It was not the best use of my time where my brain sells a disease. I wish I could go back to a place when I didn't know that story. I hope that you learned from that. But anyway, I wonder who the big star will be at MOPs Palooza,
Lauren:It's us, the three of us. I'm hoping Mickey Mouse himself shows up
Sydney: Yeah, we're gonna be right by Disneyland. Yeah, it's in Anaheim. Yeah. So Lauren's a big Disney adult. I don't know if you know that about her Mike.
Mike: I have heard that. I think on previous podcasts you guys have mentioned that I've never been to Disney, which you're probably gonna look at me and be like, I knew that was coming. I knew that was coming.
Lauren: I know. Listen, Disneyland, Disneyland is fun. And I do it for its vintage nostalgia, although I didn't ever want it as a kid. I took my kids about five years ago but Disney World as an adult is next level because… I'm sorry, we're on Disney now. I will stop shortly. But they have food and drinks from every country, including Canada.
Sydney: but Mike lives in Canada, he doesn't need to go
Lauren: No, but he might need to go to Mexico and Germany and China and France and Japan and Italy.
Mike: It's true
Lauren: I'm missing some.
Sydney: Mm-hmm. Mike, you have kids, don't you? Do you have one?
Mike: I have a daughter. Yeah.
Sydney: How old is she?
Mike: She's about to turn 11.
Sydney: Never took her to Disney. She's almost 11.
Lauren: not interested?
Mike: not interested, but
Sydney: top priority.
Mike: She's definitely in a preteen phase right now, and I mean that in the best possible way. She's the best, but I think she's kind of past the earlier Disney stuff that she was really into. And the pandemic kind of threw a wrench into that time period too.
Lauren: Yeah, totally.
Mike: She would've been 7/8 years old, which is a nice time. You're gonna remember it and all of that. And now she's almost 11, I think she would still have fun, especially at Disney World, with more of the Marvel stuff and the Star Wars stuff at Universal with the Harry Potter stuff, but not the Disney Princess and all of that.
Sydney: Yeah,
Lauren: Honestly, even my seven year old's kind of over princesses.
Sydney: Oh, wow.
Lauren: Yeah. Sad. But my four year old, she's like, give me everything.
Sydney: Mike if it helps, the first time I went to Disney World, I was 15. I'm not a Disney adult. And I think that Disney adults are odd, but it was still, still fun at 15.
Mike: Yeah. I could enjoy it. I think.
Sydney: It's also so much money to spend if your kid is not 100% into it.
Mike: We've done trips to Mexico and the Dominican Republics
Sydney: Yeah. That's more fun.
Mike: And my daughter loves that. She just loves to swim. She loves that she get fancy drinks at the bar. She likes all that stuff.
Sydney: Love to get a virgin strawberry Daiquiri as an 11 year old and feel so sophisticated
Lauren: Can I have a Shirley Temple with two cherries please? Extra Shirley. Extra Shirley.
Mike: She's very much her mother's daughter when it comes to that. Kim is very much a fan of going down South
Lauren: I love that. Well, and you have to, you know what I mean?
Sydney: You gotta escape those Canadian
Mike: Gnarly.
Sydney: Well, last thing that we wanna discuss before we move on to some of our rapid fire is, of all the people you've worked with, in the last 17 years, who are two or three people that you would love to work with again? It can be former colleagues, former clients, former consultants, that you had, anything!
Mike: Number one on my list is a gentleman by the name of Chris Petko. Chris hired me at Eloqua as a product specialist, hired me into marketing operations. He moved into the Director of Marketing Ops and brought me up with them cause he was running the Support team at the time as well. And then brought me along when he started Eloqua Expert Services, which was the introduction to subscription model ProServe. I worked with him there as well. Without going super deep into everything, he is probably from my career, the most important person I've ever worked with because he's always given me, or he's always seen something in me. And I don't know if that's egotistical to say
Sydney: Only if you're Canadian.
Mike: Only if you're kidding. Every career he’s taken, he's wanted me to come along with him and give me that next opportunity there as well. I don't do this without getting hired at Eloqua, I don't know Marketing Ops and all of that. Without him hiring me as a Marketing Ops manager at Eloqua, running a professional services organization and managing a team. He was the first person to give me management experience as well, not give me, earn it, but just afford the opportunity to do that. And he's been along for the whole 17 years of my career. We still talk . Every few months we’ll just randomly text each other and all that. And he's just, I love him to death. He's awesome. One of the smartest people I know too. So Chris Petko for sure.
Another person who I would love an opportunity to work with again is Alex Shootman. Alex Shootman was the VP of Sales at Eloqua when I was there, but then also became the CEO of Workfront, after the Oracle acquisition. And he's now the CEO of, I can't remember where he is now. He's prolific, from getting people to do their best. He knows how to get the best set of people. When I left Eloqua, he spent two hours with me, wanting to understand why I was leaving. And not trying to stop me, but just wanted to know how he could, how can we do better? He's an awesome man. I haven't talked to him in years. He may not even remember me, but the impact that he had on my career in a very short period of time was definitely there. So that's two Eloqua people. I need a non-Eloqua person next.
Sydney: I feel all your stories have been so wholesome. Is this just what it's in Canada?
Mike: I dunno, maybe.
Sydney: You know it's very sweet, the Allen Thicke story, these two meaningful connections in your early career that just are looking out for, you want the best for, you wanna do the right by their companies. I love this. Maybe I should move to Canada.
Mike: Canada's fun. You guys should do a Canadian road trip up to the North and explore Toronto or any of that?
Sydney: We should do it.
Mike: Yeah, we're very welcoming people. Very welcoming.
Sydney: I love it.
Mike: The last person I would say, and I'm actually working with her right now, is Elle Woulf. And again, I've worked with her at Eloqua. She was in Demand Gen when I was in Marketing Ops but I worked with her at Path Factor. She was the VP of Marketing at Path Factory. I was running our Solutions team, but just very, so, very different teams. And she's been a client of mine now twice, since I started 3MG as well. And she's one of the smartest marketers I've ever met and just really down to earth. Easy to talk to and gets the nerdy stuff that we talk about and knows how to process it in her head. So it's like, I don't need to know all that nerdy shit, but I know what you're saying makes sense because of the way that you explained it, I understand the output that's gonna come from it. Her and I have always been able to talk nerd to each other in a way that we both understand.
Lauren: Talk nerdy to me.
Sydney: Coming soon, honey. Pretty funny business sticker near you.
Mike: She's been amazing. She was amazing to work with directly and she's been amazing to work with us as a customer, client, whatever you want to call, but it, I'm really fortunate, even just with all of the clients that I work with right now, that they took a chance on me when I started this thing and they've stuck around. A lot of my clients have been around since I started, which is crazy to think about and just being able to build relationships and friendships with my clients in a way that it doesn't feel like work and you want to do your best. Yeah, so those are the four. My current crop of customers, collaborators, and then Chris and Alex.
Sydney: I love it. That was great. I wanna work with those people now too
Lauren: Yeah, I know my list of people will be: I'm gonna list this person because they're fun and this person, because they were fun.
Mike: At the end of the day, and I'm sure it's the same with both of you as well, there has been so many people that I've had the opportunity of being able to work with, like really fortunate to work with a lot of people that are pretty well known now in terms of just kind of what they do. And it's what keeps me motivated to want to keep doing this and want me to keep learning too. Even doing this for 17 years, I don't know everything. There's so much I don't know about, even just MOPs, modern MOPs. A lot of what I know is based off what I started teaching myself 10 years ago when there weren’t communities, there wasn't a real philosophy around Marketing Operations.
Sydney: Building the plane as they fly it.
Mike: So trying to marry that, well it's modern MOPs with all the apps, integrations and different ways of looking at your data. And again, I don't pretend to know everything, but I think I have been really fortunate to work with a lot of cool clients that are teaching me a lot of this stuff too. So it's been really rewarding.
Sydney: Awesome. That's great. All right, next segment, get to know Mike a little bit more. We're gonna use the Christmas / Holiday present philosophy that all the parents out there have definitely been inundated with on Instagram / Pinterest. I know I have. Something you want, something you need, something to wear, and something to read.
So Mike, what is something you want right now? Could be anything physical, not physical, anything!
Mike: Something I want right now. Time. That sounds really weird, but I wish I had more time.
Lauren: To do. what? Because we need to make sure this is an I want and not an I need.
Sydney: Good point. Good point. Good point. Good point. Good point.
Lauren: So if it's more time to do something fun, that's fine.
Mike: Definitely, I want more time. I would love more time away from my computer, I guess. And more time with family, more time with friends, more time. Especially now with the pandemic kind of, I don't wanna say it's over, we all kind of treat it like it's over, but it's still kind of lingering or what effects are there. But, just getting back to the routines that we used to have maybe two or three years ago.
Sydney: Out in the world, seeing people, doing
Mike: Travel again, getting, yeah. Seeing people again, just being able to experience stuff again
Sydney: Yeah. I feel you. Okay. Well, time to do fun things. That can be a want. Something you need?
Mike: Something I need, oh boy.
Sydney: I know it's hard as a Canadian to so explicitly express
Mike: I think one of the hardest things when you work for yourself is taking breaks and just allowing yourself to take that break and not feeling guilty about it. And one of the things I really struggle with is , I don't like to say no, which is hard sometimes
Lauren: You and Sandy have that in common. I can say no. I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna help you, Mike, as your therapist. We're gonna find some time for you.
Mike: I need it to be okay. I need to tell myself it's okay to take time away. Even not just a day, take two or three days off and, don't worry about work and unplug as best as I can. I would say that's really what I need right now because, the last thing I want to happen is burn out.Because if I burn out, what happens? There's only me, so…
Sydney: Well, there's Kim
Mike: Not to be a downer with that one
Sydney: All right. Moving on. Something to wear?
Mike: Something to wear. Well, I just got my new wedding ring
Sydney: Huge. I know. How long have you and Kim been married?
Mike: We've been married for, oh shit, 15 years. Married for 15 together for almost 20.
Lauren: Wow. Okay. So is that a 15 year wedding ring or is that , I lost my wedding ring and so I had to get a new one.
Mike: I was significantly smaller when I got married. We got married when we were 25/ 26
Sydney: A fellow young wedding. How old were you when you got married?
Lauren: 22?
Mike: Wow.
Sydney: Sydney was almost 23.
Mike: Wow. Young weds. I love it. I love it. So over the years, the ring would get tighter and tighter and tighter on the finger to a point where I couldn't get it off. And the problem with that was that it was a tungsten ring, not a gold ring.
Lauren: Yeah, you can't cut those, right? Nope. It's on you.
Mike: Well, so I made the mistake of going on YouTube and trying to figure out how to remove a tungsten ring without going to a hospital. I tried soap, I tried putting the dental floss around your finger. Tried to get the finger as tight as possible so that you could get it off. Couldn't. So I found on YouTube a person who took a set of pliers and you could squeeze it enough that you would make a break point. Didn't break.
Sydney: then it broke.
Mike: No. Oh, Siri heard something there. But what it did was started to bend. Everywhere. So it was
Lauren: a square.
Mike: squishing my finger now, legit squishing it and I'm thinking I have to go to the hospital.
Lauren: you're gonna lose your finger,
Sydney: Yeah.
Mike: So panic mode is set in and I'm sitting there squeezing and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing. And then I finally broke it and I was able to break it off. And I remember just, I was sitting on my couch in my office here doing it. I remember just looking around being like, how did, how did that actually happen? That shouldn't have broken. I should be running to the hospital right now. So anyway, I broke it off. Stupidest thing I've ever done.
Sydney: Interesting that even in a country with universal healthcare, going to the hospital was not your first choice.
Mike: Well that’s cause now you're that story of the person going to the hospital because you did something stupid.
Lauren: a purposeful duplicate.
Mike: I accidentally shoved something up my nose. I accidentally got something stuck in my ear, those sorts of , things that you don't wanna go to the hospital for. I didn't want to go in and say, I watched a YouTube video and had to break a ring and it didn't break and now I'm afraid my finger's gonna fall off, anyway. Broke the ring.
Sydney: glad you have a new ring.
Mike: Yes. And got the ring last week. It's gold.
Lauren: I was gonna say, is it rubber?
Mike: Kim would not let it be, anything but gold
Lauren: Permanent? Yeah.
Mike: Cut it off again.
Sydney: Smart. That was a wise way to go, Kim. I like her already. I had to take my wedding rings off for both of my pregnancies and I did have a lady on the bus one time that stopped me and was like, I was with both of my kids. And she was like, are you married? And I said, yes. And she was like , where are your rings?
Mike: Geez.
Sydney: I'm nine months pregnant and they don't fit. And she was like, well, you gotta put those on or people are gonna think you're an unwhite mother. And I was like please stop talking to me.
Lauren: Worry about yourself. Worry about yourself.
Mike: Who says that?
Sydney: I think this is part of me not knowing how to say no. I have some sort of aura that invites people to comment on my life. Unprompted. I don't know. I don't know. But this happens to me all the time.
Lauren: In all of New York City, she thought this was shocking
Sydney: I don't know. It's messed up. It's super messed up. Okay. Something to read? What do you, what are you reading? What would you like to read?
Mike: I, you know, I’m not a reader
Lauren:Mike's not a reader.
Mike: I'm a reader when it comes to online content. I do a lot of Reddit,
Sydney: Oh, same. Favorite subreddit?
Mike: Ooh. Our squared circle, which is wrestling.
Sydney: Wait, what kind of wrestling? WWE wrestling, the fake kind.
Mike: Yeah. And then more, not, well, WWE is at the bottom of my list. More Japanese wrestling, independent wrestling, that sort of stuff.
Sydney: the Indie Wrestlers
Lauren: I was gonna say, this is a niche.
Mike: I go on the Toronto Mayple Leafs reddit quite often. They're the local hockey team here in Toronto.
Lauren: hockey.
Mike: hockey,
Sydney: Toronto, Maple Leafs
Mike: Toronto Maple Leafs
Sydney: Toronto, Maple Leafs.
Mike: Ontario, which is our provincial subreddit. So for your states, we have provinces.
Lauren: Yeah.
Sydney: I know that from the forms, it's state/province
Mike: Yeah.
Sydney: Conditional logic.
Mike: And cannabis always. So yeah, with a lot of, a lot of lurking and just reading articles there and reading comments and shit that. But I don't read a lot of books at all.
Sydney: You know what, I don't either, Mike, and my reading is even more embarrassing because I mostly read Facebook groups. I don't even use Reddit. Lauren: Yeah, Mike's is not dead embarrassing because Mike wants to read about his local sports and his local news.
Sydney: I'm posting Facebook groups, seeing people post memes about why modern farmhouse decor is ugly and why capitalism is crumbling all around us. You know, light lighthearted
Mike: I love good shit posting, , I love good shit posting
Sydney: shit posting.
Mike: I really want to get proficient with shit posting on LinkedIn because LinkedIn can
Sydney: Oh yeah.
Mike: and I do a lot of reading on LinkedIn
Sydney: LinkedIn is such a hellscape. It needs some shit. Posting to even things out.
Mike: Fuck, there's a lot of times where I end up deleting what I wanna write just because I need to just get it out.
Mike: But there's just so much, so much , just random bullshit on LinkedIn. Sydney: I agree. You know, I'm always like, I should post more on LinkedIn. You know, we're a business, but there's nothing for me to say here. This is not my arena.
Mike: There are lot of people trying to be very helpful with how to do stuff, but I don't know where to
Sydney: Takes a lot of time.
Mike: Yeah.
Sydney: Helpful content. Don't people pay me to create this kind of truly helpful content for them?
Lauren: Carrie Pickle's really good at content and the CS2 folks are really good
Sydney: go look at their stuff. There's some good content out there.
Mike: Yeah. Agree.
Sydney: I don't wanna rewrite this.
Mike: Agree. Totally agree.
Sydney: Okay, well we are almost out of time, so we are going to end with PFB on the streets. I'm going to give you some prompts and you are just gonna let it fly. First thing that comes to mind. Ready, for a dollar? Chat GPT?
Mike: Ooh, the next Google,
Sydney: Ooh
Mike: I'm already using it to help me solve Salesforce stuff, and it's so helpful, so helpful.
Lauren: I had it make me a packing list for my trip to Israel.
Sydney: That's nice. I had someone so I don't have access to chat GPT cuz I was too late of an adopter there and I'm not gonna pay for it. Someone asked cha GPTto write some code that I needed to display different Favicons on the website for Pretty Funny Business from Emmie Collective and posted it in MOPs Pros and Sandy appeared and was like, this is the worst code I've ever seen in my life. And then rewrote it. And it really reminded me of something that I do with Lauren, she has a much better eye for design than I do. It's just not, it's not here. I can't, I don't, that's why I went into Marketing Ops and not regular Marketing. You know, I just can't, the visual is just not there for me.
So sometimes when I really need something created, I will just make it. I'll absolutely put my all into it. But I know she's gonna hate it. But if she sees the bad thing that I need, she will go fix it. But if I ask her to make it, it will take a long time.
Mike: Got it. Got it.
Lauren: It's true cause I’m like, this thing cannot see the light of day
Sydney: This cannot see the light of day in the bud. I'm not doing it poorly on purpose. I'm just, this is not something.
Lauren: It's okay. You're good at so many other things.
Sydney: Yeah. You know, we don't all have to be good at everything. Okay. For a dollar, remote work?
Mike: Ooh, love it. That's the first thing I can't imagine not doing it now.
Sydney: When was the last time you had to go into an office? Every day.
Mike: Every day, 2019. When I left Path Factory, I worked for two different companies. One of them was based in Calgary and my whole team was based in Calgary and I was in Toronto and we had a shared workspace, but you didn't have to go to it every day. And then I worked at another company right after that, which I started the first day of the lockdown up in Ontario from the pandemic. So that was completely just remote the whole time.
Sydney: 15th start date. Oh, wow. Today is March 15th. Oh my gosh. It's pan anniversary.
Lauren: Was it March 15th?
Mike: I think it was
Sydney: it was March 15th.
Lauren: Oh my gosh I think it was but you guys were locked down for so much longer than we were, like so much longer.
Mike: We had just moved to our new house before the lockdown on a Friday, and then Saturday, Sunday, on the Monday everything officially was locked down and that's when I started my new job
Sydney: Wow.
Mike: It was interesting.
Sydney: Yeah. March 15th was the first day that all schools in daycares were closed in New York City.
Mike: Crazy.
Sydney: Dark. Okay. Moving on. Business travel?
Lauren: Sounded your peacock noise. Sydney
Mike: I would say important but not as fun as it used to be.
Sydney: Agree. No more bottle service at Caesar's Palace
Lauren: Not when you're paying your own way
Mike: It’s a lot different now. It's certainly a lot different. I've done a couple of business trips since I started 3MG, down to Boston and down to Atlanta. And it's different when it's your thing that you're going to, I feel a lot better about that. But if I think the old days of consulting or even just when I worked at different companies and going to Vegas every year for conferences, going to San Francisco every three months to see clients, it's just not as exciting as it used to be cause it just becomes more familiar, I guess.
Sydney: How many times can you really go to Vegas and have a good time?
Mike: Well a lot
Lauren: The limit does not exist for me.
Sydney: We just, we have such different tastes and fun. It's amazing that we have a business together
Lauren: You can do anything you want in Vegas. It's all there.
Sydney: I hate it so much.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Sydney: I can almost get there on Disney World. But Las Vegas
Lauren: Vegas is even better! I'm so sorry for whoever has done this to you Sydney, we will rectify the situation.
Sydney: Okay. Instance migrations? His eyes got very big. This is not a video podcast, Mike!
Mike: Okay. Instance.
Lauren: Just say no,
Mike: No, I've said yes quite a few times in the last few years. You think you know everything going into it from the last time you did it. It's never the same. It's never as easy
Sydney: It's like having your second kid. You know? You think you're gonna be great at it cause you've done it once before, but that's actually the worst part. This time you think you know what you're doing and it is its own unique special nightmare.
Mike: And it's different doing it. I've done it when I was on the agency side and you had a team of people to help port everything. If you needed to recreate stuff and upload stuff and all that, you had a team that could, you had multiple people. Now when you do it on your own, you have to wear multiple hats
Sydney: Now you have the team of Emmie, you can offload all of the migration prep
Mike: Touché
Sydney: We're here for you Mike.
Sydney: I think that's appropriate. Okay, we already talked about this one a little bit, but I'm gonna do it anyway. LinkedIn?
Mike: Oh boy. LinkedIn. I can't quit you.
Sydney: I think that's perfect. I think we gotta leave that.
Mike: Yeah, I'll just say I can't quit you.
Sydney: Okay. Instagram?
Mike: I was not on Instagram until Kim started our3MG account, and she does a lot of the, the social
Sydney: Kim.
Mike: But I've got to play around with it too, and it's a lot different than when I used to have it on the personal side, then I just got really tired of seeing, this is gonna sound really bad too. I got really tired of seeing the best of people and not seeing the reality of a situation. So you only ever seen the best, it's a minor flex type thing, I guess.
Sydney: You know, Instagram was really the best in 2012 when no one gave a shit about it and it was just you were uploading a blurry, shitty picture from your iPhone of your dinner and putting the Valencia filter on it, and it got one like, and you just didn't care. It was awesome. Now there's a lot of work that goes into it.
Mike: I certainly appreciate the amount of work more than ever after watching Kim manage it for us
Sydney: Kim does a good job. Your graphics are always on point.
Mike: Well, she's a graphic designer by trade too, so
Lauren: You got any hot tips for my friend Sydney Kim?
Sydney: I think I'm beyond help. This is just something I have to outsource, you know, it's like washing my hair, better spent elsewhere. You know, I don't like washing my own hair. I'm not very good at styling it, so I just outsource that task. It's just something I believe in. Okay, last but not least, a special edition for our Canadian friend, Tim Horton's?
Mike: Overrated.
Sydney: Hmm. I've never been to Tim Horton's and I feel I maybe missed the wave if now it's not gonna be good.
Mike: Yeah, it was, it's it back in the day, when it was a true donut shop, it felt very uniquely Canadian. And I know I still try to pair the idea of Canadian with Tim Horton's and I get that it's fine
Lauren: If I had another daughter, I would name her Canadian. I think
Sydney: I was just thinking that the next time we do PFB on the streets with whoever it is, I'm gonna put Canadian on.
Mike: Yeah. Overrated. I'll just leave it there. It's not as good as it used to be. They're trying, they're just trying to be too much now.
Sydney: Yeah,
Lauren: Honey, aren't we all?
Mike: they got bought by the company that owns Wendy's
Sydney: Oh really?
Lauren: It's an Ohio company. It's American. It's not even Canadian anymore.
Mike: Anytime you see a Wendy's, there's always a Tim Horton's, either connected to it or right beside it.
Sydney: KFC, Taco Bell
Mike: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Sydney: That's sad. Hmm. Frosty. And a donut, though.
Mike: Yes, I would agree.
Sydney: Well, we've taken too much of your time already, Mike, we just, we have this problem. It's not really a problem, but anytime the three of us sit down together, we just go way over. We have too much to talk about. It's too fun. We're having too much fun. So I will cut us off here. But thank you so much for taking the time to join us today on Pretty Funny Business. We will certainly have to do a sequel at some point in the future and hopefully invite one or more qualified mental health professionals to help us unpack some of the things that we say.
Mike: I'll ask my therapist tomorrow.
Lauren: This is not a bad idea.
Sydney: All right. Bye.
Lauren: Bye. Good luck out there, little podcast.
