Marketing is a vital part of the business. As such, there are so many subject matter experts that claim they have the best practices. However, when everybody's doing best practices, they all end up doing basic practices. Working his way around that by understanding how things fit holistically, Jason Cormier co-founded Room 214—a growth studio that helps bring coherence across an organization's brand marketing and sales efforts. In this episode, he joins Jaime Zawmon, Founder and President of Titan CEO, to share how he is helping businesses achieve that while taking us across their shift from digital marketing to growth and coherence. He also talks about the role of human intelligence, the iterative growth in digital, and the value of data gathered from customer conversation. Plus, Jason also shares some of his best leadership lessons, emphasizing how, at the end of it all, it is the people that leaders should take care of.

---

Watch the episode here:

[embed]https://youtu.be/FgDaQWYUeKk[/embed]

Jason Cormier, Cofounder of Room 214, with co-host Jaime Zawmon, Founder and President of TitanCEO

We are joined by Jason Cormier. He's the Cofounder of Room 214 and my co-host, Jaime Zawmon. She's the Founder and President of Titan CEO. Jaime and Jason, welcome.

Thanks a lot, Bob. I appreciate it.

We talked a little bit before the show. I am fascinated by what you do. If he could tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

The name of company is Room 214. We are what is called a growth studio. We help bring coherence across an organization's brand marketing and sales efforts. We have a digital marketing agency background. A lot of folks come to us for those kinds of services. We've migrated a bit outside of what you would probably consider as traditional digital marketing and social media. Real quick to finish the answer to the question, the clients that we serve vary quite a bit. From funded startups to Fortune 100, across multiple industries over the last several years.

The question that comes to my mind is you've migrated a bit from digital marketing to growth and coherence. Paint me a picture of what that looks like.

When you look at digital marketing, in particular, and what you understand about marketing in general is that when everybody's doing best practices, what they're doing is basic practices. What you learn pretty quickly is what worked last season doesn't necessarily work this season, or what works for your competitor doesn't necessarily work for you. What happens is you get a bunch of people in marketing that are frustrated over time. They're working their butts off. The chief marketing officer and the chief revenue officer, these two roles these days, there's so much responsibility on their shoulders to increase leads, increase sales, whatever the case may be.

The problem is they keep running up against the same walls. There are a lot of great subject matter experts in digital marketing and a lot of great marketing agencies out there, but what we found over time, and this is the migration, is that understanding how things holistically fit is where that's going to be most helpful to people. For example, this concept of coherence. If you look at a CEO or even ask a CEO, “Where's there coherence in your business?” You might get a deer in the headlights look from them. If you say, "Where is the incoherence in your business?” You're never going to hear the end of it. A lot of what we've done with this migration from a marketing agency to a growth studio is we've recognized that if we can bring coherence across an organization's brand marketing and sales, this is something that is missing. This is something that will make a tremendous difference in terms of their growth.

The term I always hear is alignment. It's pretty hard to be aligned if you don't even know that you're misaligned.

[bctt tweet="When everybody's doing best practices, what they're doing is basic practices." username=""]

In order to act quickly, you have to be aligned deeply. In order to adjust often, you have to be aligned deeply.

I would imagine that message resonates well. You’re a combat information center, former Navy guy, and the difference between data and an actionable intel, there’s a wide gulf between the two. It sounds like this is an iterative event of what you did in the Navy.

There are some interesting connections for sure. The interesting thing about data is companies have invested so much in data. It's almost like there are good reasons for it, but quite ironically, as a company that comes from this digital marketing background, what we've found is that the data is always flawed. What happens is organizations have first come up with data initiatives, investing in a lot of this data. They've hired expensive data scientists who ended up spending all their time fixing the data and making the data make sense. It's funny, we say that the data is always flawed. What's ironic is that the most important data we've been able to collect comes directly from customer conversations, not from web analytics. I'm not saying web analytics aren't important or advertising data sets and all that. That's important, but more people stake their reputation on that. They've rolled the dice and I'm afraid that they've lost in a lot of cases.

To finish up the thought, in the military world, there was a focus on human years and years ago, where you had actual human intelligence on ground in country. The human intelligence world thought the simple fix was data. They spent a great deal of time, effort and money on trying to do the data capture, whether it's signals, intelligence and others. The reality is without the human side of the intelligence, the rest can lead you astray. I'm an old intel guy. It's an interesting parallel.

When I was in the Navy, my ship was a taxicab for Marines. We had Navy SEALs onboard. We would be cruising about a mile from the beach. We knew what the weather was, yet these SEALs would depart our ship a mile to the beach. They would be hanging out on the beach, getting beat up in the surf for hours. The whole idea was you needed someone to be there. You needed human intelligence in the trenches or on the beaches. You couldn't say, “The weather forecast is this. We know everything we need to know.”

The interpretation of the data by a human, he says, “Yes, I appreciate that.” Maybe it challenges my thought process, but it matters to crank it through a human or two to find out. I was reading some of your work. That's what struck me as I was reading that earlier. Jaime, I’m sorry. I'm back down the rabbit hole again.

Congratulations again, Jason, for being recognized as a 2020 Titan 100. I'm holding up a copy of the Titan 100 book in which Jason was recognized and profiled. This platform recognizes Colorado's Top 100 CEOs and C-Level executives. Jason, as part of the series, I always like to ask our Titans, what characteristics do they believe it takes to be considered a Titan of industry?

[caption id="attachment_5646" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Room 214: In order to act quickly and adjust often, you have to be aligned deeply.[/caption]

A Titan of industry, thanks. It's an honor. I love being part of the whole Titan community. It’s awesome. I’ve learned a lot as a result too. For me, it's been a lot of leading with humility, understanding that I don't have all the answers as someone who leads a company. That was a huge part of why we adopted open-book management and have done a lot in that area, getting more minds on the problems. Curiosity, I can't say enough about that. If you think you've arrived, you are wrong. Especially with my industry, things change so quickly. I have to rely on curiosity to make it so that I'm spending time looking at the right things on behalf of my clients.

Those are two huge things. Generally speaking as well, from a values perspective, acting out of love instead of fear. It's easy to get into a mode of cover your ass with marketing in particular. People want to know, “What's the return on this? Did this thing that we did, did that actually work?” Sometimes it works great and sometimes it doesn't. Being very upfront and honest about that in an industry that's probably full of a lot of snake oil too. Our mantra is creating valuable relationships. There's no substitute for that. People want to buy from who they know, like and trust. You can't fake that. That's probably it and all those things.

It’s a profound thought. As I know you, because I've known you for some time, you lead with humility. Your whole statement around acting out of love and not fear is something that is painted on your office walls because I have been to your offices before. I love that statement. I wish more people would act out of love and not out of fear.

To think about that point though, it takes an extraordinary amount of courage to function from that place because there's risks there.

There is a risk. The idea of open-book management, for example, is part o