One big part of starting a business that some tend to forget to consider is selling it off. While it may seem such a heartbreak to exit a business you’ve worked so hard to build, it is nevertheless an important aspect of success. In this episode, Michael Zipursky is joined by Alex Langshur. Alex is currently the EVP, Global Google Practice Lead at dentsu international. Prior to that, he was the founder and co-CEO of Cardinal Path. He shares with us the journey that led him to where he is now, from building his former company to deciding to sell it off. What was the mindset it took for him to build multiple businesses? How do you make businesses with partners work? How was his company ultimately acquired? Alex answers these questions and more!
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I’m very excited to have Alexander “Alex” Langshur join us. Alex, welcome.
Michael, I’m pleased to be here.
You are the lead of Dentsu’s Global Google Technology Practice. Formerly, you were the Founder and co-CEO of Cardinal Path and the past president of the Digital Analytics Association. You’ve taught Digital Marketing and Analytics at the University of British Columbia. You’ve been retained by Google to train and coach others in the agency management space. You worked with many well-known large organizations, like Amgen, Bridgestone, Cisco, and a whole bunch of others.
I’m excited to dive into your story of how you got to where you are. How do you build up Cardinal Path? How was it ultimately acquired? What you’re doing now? We’re going to learn a lot from them from your journey so far. Why don’t we start before you even get into the world of data and analytics, you were looking for gold. Can you talk about how you got to that place? I’d then love to transition to figure out how you got from looking for gold to digging in data and analytics.
I grew up in Montreal and have always been somebody that enjoyed science and the outdoors. Geology as a profession seemed to be the perfect marriage of science and the outdoors. Most sciences came super easy for me, but the only subjects I had to study for were Math. I wanted to avoid as much Math as possible because I was lazy. There wasn’t a tremendous amount of Math in Geology to deliver the stat. I did that, graduated, and moved to Northern Canada to look for gold for seven years. I was very fortunate and got promoted pretty quickly. All my peers basically said, “You’re young. Get out because it’s a hard life to be a geologist. You’re away from family for a long time.” I heeded their advice and recycled myself into a different career.
When you say that you got promoted, why was that? What do you think you were doing that caused you to be promoted?
It’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that question. At that time, It was an industry where you paid your dues. You’re a geologist, a junior geologist, a project geologist, a senior geologist, and went up until you reached the exploration director. I got to be the director of the exploration for Eastern Canada for a company called Black Minerals. I was 28 years old. I believe that it happened because I had this innate ability, which I didn’t realize at that time, but I’ve since realized that. It’s one of my superpowers, and that is I can explain complicated concepts relatively easily using metaphor.
You don't find mines at the surface anymore. Those have all been found. You find mines underground. The only way you can get underground is to drill. Click To TweetWhat happens in that industry is you all would have projects. You’re all trying to buy the funding so that you can do the exploration on your project. What I used to do was I used to present my projects, and the way I would present them would make people feel, “There’s a mine there. We’ve got to fund Alex’s projects.” As a result, I had a lot of work going on. We had some discoveries and that’s what led to it. It was mostly because I was able to communicate my ideas in a way that people understood, and that made them think that I knew what I was talking about.
You mentioned the tough business or tough line of work. You got recommendations or suggestions to get out while you were still relatively young at that time. I have the image of it might be cold or hot, or there are bears out there. It’s a tough environment and line of work. Is there anything that you think helped you or learned during that time that you were growing and building multiple businesses that gave you an advantage or an edge from a mindset perspective or a worker, a discipline or commitment, or anything that resonates for you?
As a sidebar, you’re not going to see a bear because they smell you and are getting out of the way. You have the mosquitoes, the black flies, the deer flies, and the horse flies. They are terrible. I was much more scared of them or disliked them. It was a couple of things. Number one is you are spending your day collecting data. When you’re in the woods, you’re hammering rocks, looking at the rocks, and identifying what type of rock it is, the type of structural impacts over the rock, and the type of alteration. You then come back at the end of your day. The packsack is full of rocks. You plot where you were and what type of rocks.
You assemble your data, send some off for analysis, and you can look at their mineral composition of them, etc. What we’re doing is we’re playing with large data sets. I’ll share this with you. When Steve Jobs was giving the commencement speech at a college, he said, “You can never connect the dots looking forward. You can only look back and say, ‘I see how that all connects together.’” This is one of those stories. I’m dealing with datasets. I have to be self-driven because you’re in the woods alone. The weather might be terrible, the black flies might be awful, and you’ve got to walk through swamps.
You’ve got to have that internal drive because you might want to say, “I’ll put my packsack here inside and find any outcrops,” but you won’t find a mine because unless you do the work, you won’t find the mine. There was a lot of that involvement. Self-drive, and that was there. Ability to be critical with the data that I was looking at. The rocks I was collecting, should I take that? You can only have so many rocks in your backpack because of the ability to present your ideas and synthesize large volumes of data sets. All of that helped the analytics space. From an entrepreneurial perspective, you were selling your ideas and knowing where I needed to spend my money.
The thinking that I always had was you don’t find mine at the surface anymore. Those mines have all been found. You find mines underground. The only way you can get underground is you have to drill. If you have a budget, I thought you had to put at least 80% of that budget towards drilling. If you didn’t do that, you weren’t going to find a mine. The discipline around the business side of it too is how do I use my budget to its most effective? I was super disciplined about that. That will help.
I find that fascinating. I took a lot from playing a lot of sports when I was young into the world of business and that drive, commitment, and dedication to ensuring that you don’t give up and keep going. You had a lot of that as well.
I’ll add one more thing that is important. I know it’s going to come out sounding all wrong. I’ve been living in the States. I’m a little bit more comfortable saying these things, but people would say to me, “Alex, you’re a good geologist.” I would say, “I don’t want to be a good geologist. I want to be a lucky geologist because lucky geologists find mines because there are a lot of good geologists who never find a mine.”
The other thing is that business and entrepreneurship are tremendous work. I say to my kids, “You got to do the work to get to the train station.” There are going to be trains of opportunity that come in, so now, which train do I get on? I’m not sure. That’s where the luck comes in. You got to get yourself to the station to get on the lucky train because some trains don’t land at the destination you want them to. That’s luck, and some trains do.
This is not a question that I had thought about before, but since you’re bringing this up. In your experience on that point specifically, is there anything you now do from a filtering decision-making process that has helped you decide which train to get onto? You can’t get on all of them, as you mentioned. Some are more likely to lead to a positive impact or the result you want. Is there anything you do when weighing your options that’s helpful?
The number one is who. Who else is on that train? I learned a long time ago that every Hewlett needs a Packard, every Lennon needs a McCartney, and every Jobs needs Wozniak. There’s this aspect of teamwork that’s super important. The people that are going to be on your team and who else is going to be on that train are critical. Let’s take that another step further. I would say 3 B-players might equal 1 A-player. Probably it’s more like somewhere between 3, and 4 equals one A-player. It’s not that you have people, but you’ve got the right people. Our mission aligned with you that had the same values and vision.
At Cardinal Path, John Hossack, a great friend I knew in the industry, approached me and said, “I got this crazy idea about doing a roll-up.” I talked to him, and he named the other people and said, “Those are good people.” I realized there was a train of opportunity. I’d done the work to become known in the industry to have these connections. He told me, “Who’s going to be on that train? I’m getting on that train.”
You talk about 3 or 4 B-players equaling 1 A-player. This is an important concept for everyone reading who has a team or is thinking about building a team. Is it possible to take a B-player and support them or work with them to become an A-player? Have you found that if somebody is a B-player, they’re a B-player for a reason, and some limiting factors will hold them back unless they make a change internally themselves? That’s a sign you can support them from being a B-player to becoming an A-player?
I’ll say that it’s probably more about me that I have not been successful in converting people from B to A. People can become A-players. There are a couple of conditions that are required. The first condition is that they’ve got to feel the trust, security, support, and significance. In other words, you put the responsibility on them. If somebody isn’t willing to assume the mental responsibility and run with it, they’ll never be an A-player.
You got to get yourself to the station so that you can get on the lucky train because some trains don't land at the destination you want them to. Click To TweetIf you give them the challenge, smart people will rise to that challenge and figure it out. I shouldn’t say smart people because I think most people are smart, but people who have the grit to say, “I want to do this.” They’ll get switched on by that. People that aren’t ready to be part of the A-team what they’ll do is they see that challenge. It’s not that it’s in the too-hard bucket, but they might not want to do it. They’re willing to work hard, but they don’t want that other thing.
When I talk about A-player, it’s not that you can do a ton of work. It’s like, “I can give you the parameters of what needs to be done. I could tell you the target we’re trying to reach and you’ll figure out the rest.” I don’t need to do much more than making sure that you’ve got support, resources, funding, and direction. I will give you air cover. I create the conditions for your success. That’s on you as a leader. You’ve got to create the conditions for those people to be successful.
If you’re not prepared to do that, they’ll never become an A-player. The other part about it is that it’s on you to recognize if the experiment isn’t working out. As I got more seasoned, I realized that it’s an act of kindness to take somebody who probably won’t be an A-player out of the position where they’re going to feel overwhelmed, not delivering, losing your trust, or any of those things. We often make the mistake of like, “This person did this well. Let’s promote them.”
I’ll go back to my geology experience. The only path for progression in your career as a geologist was into the management track. If you are a fantastic geologist, great with the science, good with the ideation, good with the data analysis, good with coming up with ideas and explaining the science behind it, and figuring out if you’re great and you found something or you did something great, the only way it can be promoted was into management.
They would get promoted to management where they had no training, no inclination, no desire, and were disastrous. From a de-motivation perspective, the impact on the organization as somebody who doesn’t want to be there but is put there because that’s the only way they can get promoted is terrible. You have to recognize that some people can be an A-player, but maybe not within a team environment. They might have to be an individual contributor. That’s on you to figure out what is going to unleash somebody’s superpowers. There are those who are never going to be, but they’re going to be solid B-players and make stuff happen. You need those two.
Now, let’s transition to your Cardinal Path, which you started in 2011 after bringing a few different companies together. At a previous company that you had started, you were a co-CEO at that time. I like to better understand that dynamic. When you have two people driving the business forward, did that work well? Any lessons learned? Any advice that you would offer somebody that has a partner? I don’t know if you were equal ownership shares or not, but how do you make that work? Any advice if you have a co-CEO or two partners running a business? What did you learn during that time?
When we rolled up Cardinal Path, there were five partners, not equal, but five partners. We all assume the title of senior partner and a role of everybody could voice their opinion. Once we made a decision, you had to disagree and commit. If you disagree, that’s fine, but you have to commit. If you weren’t going to be able to commit, that was going to be an issue. All I can say is I went from being the guy in charge of public insight, who made all the decisions, to being a partner amongst 1 of 5.
The immediate sense that I had was a massive relief because suddenly, all the burdens that you have, like hiring, promoting, finding clients, figuring out pricing, doing contracts, doing marketing, following up on sales, dealing with your technology partners, and all that stuff. I was able to distribute that and have conversations at my level with partners. It was enormously wonderful to lift a weight off my shoulder. That’s number one.
At some point in time, because of a number of different changes in the business, we went to a co-CEO model. Initially, I was somewhat skeptical that it would work. I sat down with my co-CEO, and we had an honest conversation. We’ve had a super-duper honest conversation about how we’re going to make this work. Being a CEO means that you can delegate many things, but you can’t delegate the position, title, and role that a CEO has in a company. You can’t delegate the leadership dimension behind how people look up to you.
We divided the tasks. I said, “You’re going to do that. I’m going to take care of this, but we are going to do this together. We’re both going to be responsible for culture, pushing the name out into the world, and our relationship with our parent company. We had some things we were both responsible for and things that we divided. It worked super-duper well. Why? I’d had five years to build a level of trust with Corey. One of my proudest professional achievements in my professional career is that we made that relationship work extremely well. We disagreed. It’s not to say that it was all smiles and giggles, but we disagreed. Those disagreements made the decisions better.
I want to ask you about your clients now and even the later years of Cardinal Path. Before the acquisition, you work with larger clients. When you started, I’m probably guessing a group of smaller clients that you built up. When you look at the differences between what you did as a company to land smaller clients compared to larger clients, I’m asking this question for the consultants joining in with us who might have some smaller clients but want to move up. They want to land higher value, bigger dollar clients. Any advice that you could offer, principles, approaches, or ways that you all conducted business, that you found was essential or critical to be able to land and service those larger clients?
That was an extremely deliberate decision that we made. We recognized that one larger client would power growth in the organization. We could start to devote a resource to it in a consistent way. We recognize that having a larger client became a proof point for us to create other larger clients. We understood that the company’s structures from sales and marketing through delivery and operations to finance, billing, invoicing, and legal, needed to shift to deal with larger commitment. To give you an idea. Once you start working with some of these larger enterprises, we’ve had some of them that have asked for a 180-day net. It’s usually the invoice, and 180 days later, they’re going to issue their payment, which is going to come to you 5 to 15 days after that.
You look at that and go, “That’s weird.” You have to have the financial wherewithal to deal with that. Plus, if you’re going up that market, they’re going to ask for financial and insurance guarantees. They’re going to want to be able to inspect your time sheets. You’re going to have to have systems of record that can be opened. There are all kinds of stuff that they’re going to ask for. You have to be operationally ready to deal with that. It wasn’t the easiest transition. We made conscious decisions about how we were going to do that. We beefed up and built the client service team and bought an ERP system that enabled us to go from CRM to billing.
We sell services in the United States and Canada, some in Europe, and different taxation regimes in the US. Nexus issues from that. We wanted to have all that standardized on a platform to enable us to scale. In 2013, we decided to buy NetSuite as our enterprise planning system that went from CRM, the first opportunity right through to bill going out, time tracking, project management, and everything in between.
If somebody isn't willing to assume the mental responsibility and run with it, they'll never be an A player. Click To TweetIn 2013, we decided to buy NetSuite as an enterprise resource planning software, which was a massive investment for us. It represented 30% of our year revenues to purchase that, if not a little bit more. It was definitely more by the time it was all finished, but we could never have scaled the business without it. It would not have been possible. The other thing was that this is where luck comes in is we had very early on decided that a Google bet was a good bet.
We immediately jumped on the Google bandwagon hard. That was important because it was a bit of a cottage industry, particularly Google Analytics. We were one of the largest, if not the largest, GA supplier that there was around. It enabled us to make that statement, which became a proof point for getting called into RFPs.
We used to say, “Three for show the rest for dough.” We agreed that we’ll never go negative, never zero, but go down on that margin to land a marquee client. With a clear expectation that we’re going to turn case studies and do marketing materials around the fact that we land that marquee client because they’re the ones that then enable you to go into others, and you can point to them.
When you say that you’re willing to bring the margin down, was that through discounting like a lower fee, or was your staff up even more? What do you mean when you say that you’re willing to go down in the margin for that client?
We’re going to deliver a level of service which was not commensurate with the budget of the project. If you’re shooting for a margin of 35% or 40% on your service business, we might go down to 5%, which means we could overinvest in that client.
Everything you’re sharing here is fantastic and very valuable. You talk about terms that some of these larger companies and clients would say, “Net 180.” How did you deal with that? For those who might be confronted with something similar, what have you found is a good way to push back on that to not necessarily accept that, or in your experience, do you have to accept that if you want to win the business?
There are some companies that do. The very first message here is that procurement is never your friend. When you start dealing with large organizations, you’re starting to deal with procurement. Procurement has one goal. That is to drive down the cost of the services and products that they buy. The other thing they have to remember about procurement is that they never have to stick around for the impact of their decisions. They can go for a lower-cost provider and don’t have to worry about it because they said, “We saved 12% on this from last year. Your client is the one that’s unhappy because now you’re into these difficult conversations where they’re saying, “I want you to do this,” and say, “I want to say yes, but I can’t” because you didn’t pay for that. The budget doesn’t count for that.
It sets up a bad dynamic. As a general rule, whenever we were presented with terms, which we consider to be serious, we would say, “No, we can’t accept that, but here’s what we can accept.” I’ve seen a 180. Those are rare. I’ve seen 120, less rare. I see a ton of 90. Whenever I see 90, my default is to go to 45. The other thing that a lot of procurement will do is say, “We’ll pay in 30 if you give us a 2% discount.” That’s a bad deal, by the way.
You have to have the cash reserves A and B, so cashflow is king. Secondly, we did this thing where upon contract signing, the DocuSign ink is dry. We issued the first invoice because we’re delivering services, so we pre-bill. If you then pick the other way of post-bill, you deliver services for 30 days. You use the invoice that goes out maybe on the 40th day, and they have 45. You’re basically in 90 days, so they’re all ready. If you issue the first invoice upfront and structure the contract to say that, you will get paid. If it’s 90 days to get paid two months down the road, which is about the same. There are ways of approaching that problem set. If it’s at 45 days and you do a pre-bill, you’re ahead of the game.
How did you deal with client concentration risk? As you started going from smaller clients to larger clients, some companies face this challenging place where they take on this large client and are excited about the win, but now that’s 50% or even 60% or 70% of their overall revenue, and if something changes inside of that client or the engagement, they’re in trouble. How did you navigate that? What do you think about that plan for that? What was your experience with client concentration?
When I was running Public Insight in 2005 or 2006, I had one client more and more. They ended up representing somewhat like 80% of the book of business. That person left the company, and the new person said, “No, thank you. I don’t need your services.” That was my rude introduction to client concentration. That was a lot of sleepless nights. That was a tremendous amount of stress on me, my wife, and the company. If the client is asking for more and more, which is a good thing, it means that you’re delivering. The way I want you to reframe that is you’ve got a certain degree of pricing power that’s being created there.
As a company wants more, you can structure your deals to say, “If this is a six-month minimum, I need three months before you cancel the contract. Whether or not you use the time, there’s a minimum bill that you’re going to pay every month.” For example, we had one client that was looming to become a top ten. By the way, it’s always top ten that I worry about.” I try to break it up from my top 10 to 20 and you have this tail. Perry Marshall talks about the 80/20 rule. He’s absolutely right.
If you’re looking at your top ten, we always want to try and structure it so that there is a minimum fee that they’d have to pay. Whether they use the time or not, they have to pay that minimum. What it did was it incentivized them to use the time. It also made I had a certain cashflow. When you have a certain cashflow that you can count on for a certain amount of time, it enables you to hire. The key thing is that you want to hire more and put some money into sales to grow more of these other clients.
I do want to get into the acquisition of your company, but before doing that, you talked about how you decided to go all-in or go big on the Google Analytics platform. To some, to become the leading edge and the top company reselling sounds very exciting. There’s a lot that can come with that, but it seems like could also be a little bit risky or there could be some potential downsides to that. I’m interested to know how do you think about that? There are many different analytics tools that your prospective clients may want to use.
The thing about being a CEO is that you can delegate a lot of things, but you can't delegate the position, title, and role that a CEO has in a company. Click To TweetIf you are dedicated to pushing and getting the most out of Google, how do you think about that? How do you position that? How do you still go out and win business when the company that you may want to win business from is using another analytics tool or want to bring in some other analytics tools that aren’t part of your core? What do you think about that?
The danger of any company is to drive you too much. At CP, Cardinal Path, I would get emails and outreach daily, “We want to be a partner.” My answer to that is fewer and deeper. I want fewer and deeper partnerships. By deeper, I mean, “I am willing to invest in this partnership by getting my staff certified and training them up by understanding the value proposition and building some strong sales material on it.” I need you to help me get my staff certified. To invest in that certification training, I need you to invest in a go-to-market strategy. I want to see how you’re supporting me as a potential partner. If I don’t have priority around that, it’s not going to happen.
First of all, is your partner willing to invest? Secondly, is your partner willing to bring you leads? If they’re not willing to bring you leads and there’s no clarity and hands on the table around that reality, no. When you start using that as a filter, it narrows down the potential partners. The other one is that it never hurts to go with a market leader as far as I’m concerned. Certainly, Google was one. We were also an Adobe partner for many years. We let Adobe go. We made the system focus on Google. There’s no shortage of other tools out there. You have to pick the horse.
That’s such a powerful plan. I’m a big believer in less is more. You mentioned Perry Marshall and Richard Cautious’ work as well. This whole idea of complexity doesn’t scale so powerful. You mentioned one point there around the partnership, which would be helpful for people to clarify. In the case of Google or the core partner, there’s an expectation around leads. If you’re going to invest in and represent them and sell their product in the market, you’re expecting it. It sounded like I wanted to clarify that Google would send you a certain number of leads. Is that a written expectation that “This is what we expect? This number of leads from you monthly annually.” Can you give some clarity on how you set the expectations around lead flow coming from that partner?
To be clear, things have evolved a lot since we started partnering. In the early days, there was a lot of lead flow from Google, but Google doesn’t do that anymore. We understand why and that’s okay. The thing which I’m looking for is what’s our go-to-market together? What’s our joint marketing plan? What will you invest in to help us achieve those sales targets, and let’s hold ourselves accountable to those sales targets?
The other thing is you want to make sure that your partner doesn’t have, if you’re doing the services, isn’t and has no intention of building a consulting arm. That definitely means they’re going to need to work with service partners. That’s a super important one. If they might say no, that’s okay, but the most important thing is clarity. I need to know where I stand.
I’m going to say fast forward in the story a little bit, but we’re going back to time still for you, which is around the acquisition. This global conglomerate owns hundreds of different brands, and you’ve mentioned they’ve consolidated down more. In 2016, they acquired Cardinal Path. The two questions that I have for you on this, Alex, are looking back, are there certain things that you did that you feel contributed most to the success that Cardinal Path had that ultimately made Dentsu interested in acquiring the company?
The general rule of thumb is 20/20, 20% revenue growth and 20% EBITDA. You want to see your top-line revenue grow at 20% a year, and you want three years about a minimum. You want to see that 20% drop into the bottom line or more. Anybody who’s going to buy you is looking for what’s your potential earnings growth and what’s your margin against that? If you can’t get those two things for three years, unless you’re in a super hot space, it’s going to be hard to sell, particularly for consulting services business. It’s 20 on the top and 20 on the bottom. It helps to have a strong brand. In our case, we pushed hard on the brand and our association with Google, which put us onto the radar and enabled us to say things like the world’s largest reseller was called Google Premium and then Google 360.
We won a couple of awards, and so that helped as well. The big thing was that we wanted to demonstrate that the financials were where they wanted to be. We were in a market that was growing and where we had a great skillset. The senior leadership team, not just the owners, were top-notch because that’s what they’re buying. If it’s a consulting services company, they’re buying the people. The ability to create the revenues you expect from the historical revenues is tied to the people and what they’re capable of doing. That’s where the deal structure becomes important.
How much time passed when you started to think about selling the business? Were you preparing the financials, and we’re going to get the 20/20 3 years in advance or 2 years or a year? How far in advance were you preparing the business to sell potentially?
We formed Cardinal Path on March 8th, 2011. We sold it on March 10th, 2016. When we came together, we had this fuzzy gauzy idea that we were going to build something of value and sell it in five years. That was what we said we were going to do. It’s like, “We sold in five years.” That was the plan when we bought the company together. The first couple of years were hard because we had to align culture, systems, and approaches. We cycled through a couple of salespeople, sales leads, and marketing leads. We had to get a CFO, and I will say that one of the most important things you can ever do is get yourself a CFO.
Greg Dos Santos was our CFO that was brought in early on and instrumental in giving us the financial discipline and rigor that is absolutely required. When you are putting yourself out to acquisition, they start doing their due diligence and are going through the books, if your books are not super clean, you’re going to be taking points off the deal. Super clean books matter. We started to structure the business by layering in the operational stuff to make it clear that anybody that’s buying us, we had built for scale. You said earlier on complexity doesn’t scale. We reduced the number of partners, focused on Google, and built systems. The very first value at Cardinal Path is that process that’s strategy free.
If you’ve got a process in place, strategy can do what it needs to do, and you can build against that, but you need a process. We were very processed-focused because we wanted to scale. I can tell you that we were bought at a certain price point. By the time we finished the earn-out four years later, our revenues were 15 to 20 times higher. We pushed that hard. Going back to the sales, 20 in the top and 20 in the bottom, systems in place, the right team because they’re buying a management team.
The other side of my question around the acquisition is that you’ve passed the four years of earn-out now you’ve gone through it. In hindsight, is there anything that you would do differently around the sale? If somebody were also looking to sell their consulting business, would you say, “Make sure you’re careful about deal fraction or earn-out?”
If your books are not super clean, you're just going to be taking points off the deal. Click To TweetGoing back to why I wanted to talk about Greg for a second, one of the things that Greg did was make sure that things were set up to make it easier to sell. There are a lot of levers that you can pull there. The thing about it is that if you’re planning on selling, the first thing they’re going to do is look at the books. If you did any hanky-panky in the last year or two with the books or any things that are a little like moose shifting dollars here, they’re going to see that. It’s going to erode their trust in your management. What he did was he started to structure everything well. We were doing a lot of training.
We had a very big train line of business, and one of the things that he said was, “Let’s move the train line of business into a marketing expense, which shifted everything.” It was important, which was completely justifiable, by the way. We use that to drive a lot of leads, but it was an important shift from a book’s perspective because it made the books look that much better. If we had done that the year before we wanted to sell the company, it would not have been so good.
I want to ask a couple of final questions here before wrapping up. I appreciate all this, Alex. You are the global lead for Dentsu in the area of analytics and so forth then you manage Google. I can guess that you have a pretty demanding schedule. You’re busy. You have a lot of things going on. How do you think about getting a lot done but still being present for your family? I know you have two sons. From your experience and everything you’ve gone through, are there any principles that have allowed you to achieve, whether you want to call it balance or the right lifestyle compared to time on business?
I’m going to answer that super honest here. I was diagnosed with adult ADHD. It’s been a huge unlock in my life. I always found it difficult to put boundaries because I would get sucked into something, or it would take forever to get something going with it. I bounce around. There’s a great book called Tiny Habits that you can pick up. Another one is called Faster, Better, Smarter by Charles Duhigg as well. Essentially, the idea is that you have to own your schedule.
You can’t let anybody book on top on you because what happened in your day will get frittered away with stuff. If you ever were to look at my schedule, I’ve got 2-to-3-hour blocks almost every day called Focus Time, which is where I use that to focus on a problem. You can’t focus if only you have these half hours you’re there. That’s one thing, manage your schedule. Secondly, urgent and important. If you open up my little notebook every day, at the top of it, it’s marked important and urgent. It goes into one of those two columns. I don’t do it if it doesn’t go into 1 of those 2 columns because it gets delegated.
It’s either urgent, which I’m going to do, or important. I’m still going to do it, but maybe not as quickly. If it’s not there, somebody else is doing it. Delegation becomes super important, and you have to have that discipline. The other thing that I don’t know is if I was super successful. You should ask my wife about it, but I’m very blessed that I have a fantastic relationship with my wife and a partner who took on a lot of the stuff so that I could build a company. Having that type of partnership was important. At the same time, I never send emails on weekends to staff because I want them to know that the weekends are theirs.
I tried never to send emails at night because I wanted them to know their nights were theirs. We need that downtime. If we’re going to perform at our best, an elite athlete, if they are off on the ice and they’re off and rest. You need that rest cognitively, physically, and emotionally that you need it. Managing those kinds of boundaries is super important. I won’t say that I was super great at it, but I worked hard.
The highs of happiness are always faster and shorter-lived than the lows of depression or sadness because, as humans, we overweigh the negative and under weigh the positive. Click To TweetYou’ve achieved success. You’ve built now these multiple companies and had them acquired. I would imagine that there was a nice financial outcome from that. We see this destination and want to make a bunch of money or accomplish whatever we want to accomplish. Often the focus is on the destination, not on the journey. When you look back, having accomplished what you have accomplished because here you are now, you’re still working at Dentsu.
You could be sitting on a beach or doing probably whatever you want, but you’re still doing so. Anything that you think about, like, “I could have approached a little bit differently or thought about the journey, or maybe I shouldn’t have worked as hard.” Any thoughts that you feel might benefit others and be able to tap into your experience?
The greatest gift I’ve been given other than the birth of my children is my brother, who is my idol, giving me the gift of meditation or introducing me to meditation. It’s been something very fundamental for me and why I bring this up is because if you look at the hedonistic treadmill. They call it the hedonic treadmill, which is people that win $1 million, they think, “If I win the lottery, I’ll be happy.” They win the lottery, go up in the happiness curve, and go back down to where they were before. It’s this idea that we have a happiness set point. The highs of happiness are always faster and shorter than the lows of depression or sadness.
As humans, we overweight the negative, and we underweight the positive. It’s our inner critic at play. The hedonic treadmill is that we always think happiness is if we get that car, that house, or that job, make that money, or what have you. Honestly, I was so focused on the destination that I didn’t enjoy the journey as much as I should have. I always felt we were on the edge of disaster and the brink of greatness. Those two things can’t be true at the same time. I wished that I had a little bit more belief that it would all work out because I would have enjoyed the journey a little bit more.
On the other side, I will say that I find myself to be very fortunate. Things worked out spectacularly well, and I’m deeply grateful for that. At the same time, now, instead of that sense of being pushed to make things happen, I feel drawn to what I can do. When we’re on one side of that event, we feel pushed all the time. It’s hard to feel pushed all the time. It’s mentally wearing. What I would say is to be kind to yourself and know that there are very few people that are the hunter-gatherers that eat what they kill.
If you’ve been in business and success in business, there’s more in the kitty than what you had to take out to run the business. If you’ve been doing that for three or more years, give yourself a big ass pat on the back because very few people did that because 80% of most businesses fail before three years. The other thing is to take a moment to step back and ask yourself, is this still the right pathway in the sense of, “Should I look at merging with another entity? Should I think about something differently?”
We tend to keep on keeping on. It’s not bad, but it’s hard when you’re on that treadmill to take that perspective. It’s COVID, so you can’t travel and do that other stuff. Two is that I feel drawn. There’s a huge challenge that I want to take on here. I feel I’m drawn toward that. Three is the ability to work without the stress of if things go south. Now, it’s for enjoyment and purely itself. In that sense, it’s all the skills in the toolset that I built up over the years that I cannot play with.
Alex, I want to thank you so much for coming on and spending some time with us here. I appreciate everything you’ve shared and for giving us a glimpse into aspects of your journey. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, your work, and everything that you have going on. Where’s the best place for people to go and learn more?
My LinkedIn profile, I’m going to start to publish a lot more to that profile. You can follow me on Twitter @alangshur, and my LinkedIn profile is Alex Langshur. For your readers, first, we’re going to be launching a site within the Dentsu framework that’s going to be focused on Google. I’ll be doing a lot of thought leadership in that space too. I also do a lot of business coaching. If you’re interested in that, I’m more than happy to help out. I’ve got a number of clients which whom I’m working with. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn, and I’ll respond.
Alex, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Michael, for the opportunity to do so.
Important Links
- Dentsu
- Cardinal Path
- John Hossack
- NetSuite
- Greg Dos Santos
- Tiny Habits
- Faster, Better, Smarter
- @alangshur – Twitter
- Alex Langshur – LinkedIn
About Alex Langshur
Formerly the founder and co-CEO of Cardinal Path, a Merkle company, Alex now leads dentsu’s global Google Technology Practice. In this role, he brings together the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) leadership and capabilities from across all markets where dentsu operates. He is focused on building a globally consistent, integrated, and world-class suite of Google services that will deliver the full power and capability of Google’s martech stack to clients. Since joining the denstu/Merkle family in 2016, Alex has helped lead dentsu to its #1 position as the world’s largest reseller of Google Analytics 360.
A successful entrepreneur, CEO, teacher and committed lifelong learner, Alex is deeply focused on building a modern-day global consulting service that is obsessed with creating client value while driving sustainable growth. An early proponent in the importance of consent-based data collection, he believes that putting user needs & privacy first unlocks more of the data that leads to deeper, longer lasting, more valuable and respect-based relationships between brands and customers.
Alex is past-President and Director Emeritus of the Digital Analytics Association, has taught digital marketing and data analytics for the University of British Columbia, and has been retained by Google to deliver training and coaching on agency management in the Americas, Europe, and APAC. He is a graduate of McGill University and holds an M.Sc. in Earth Sciences from the University of Ottawa. He lives in Boston with his wife, two sons, and golden retriever.
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