How to be a great Chief Marketing Officer with Steve Boehler

On Top of PR podcast How to be a great CMO with guest Steve Boehler and show host Jason Mudd episode graphic Steve Boehler discusses what the CMO job consists of and what characteristics make a great CMO.

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Guest:

Our episode guest is Steve Boehler, Founder of Mercer Island Group. He’s worked with well-known brands such as Tide, Pringles and Jif.

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Guest’s contact info and resources:

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Episode recorded: Dec. 23, 2021

Episode notes:

Hello and welcome to "On Top of PR". I'm your host, Jason Mudd. And today, I'm joined by Steve Boehler of Mercer Island Group. Steve founded Mercer Island Group more than 30 years ago and leads marketing consulting teams for diverse clients, such as Microsoft, Nintendo, and sprint. He has an impressive track record of brand management and launching major brands, products for brands like Tide with Bleach. Steve, welcome to the show. We're glad you're here.

I'm absolutely delighted to be here, Jason.

And today, we're talking about what makes a great chief marketing officer or CMO. And I think just for full disclosure to our audience, I wanna say we're recording this on December 23rd of 2021 and it'll air sometime in 2022. Steve and I had the pleasure of meeting through several agency management institute workshops, where Steve and his team are always sharp and smart and love some of the insights they share with other agency owners. And so I thought for sure it'd be helpful to bring Steve Boehler onto the show today to share with our audience what makes a great chief marketing officer. And we were just talking before we press record, Steve, about how we need, the world needs more chief marketing officers, so talk about that a little bit.

Well, the world definitely needs more great CMOs. And the CMO position is one of the toughest jobs imaginable these days. It's a job with low tenure rates relative to the rest of the C-suite, relatively high turnover rates. So the average is 10 years under three years, much lower than the rest of the C-suite. The job is so difficult because not only does the great CMO need to partner with the rest of the C-suite and be totally aligned with what the C-suite needs to accomplish for the company, but they also have to individually be a really strong partner with a number of key functions. And so on a daily basis, they've gotta partner with the sales department in most companies to put points on the board. In a modern organization, they typically, have a hand in or are leading some kind of major transformation effort to modernize the company, which means often they're partnering with the IT group. They often are in charge of the overall customer experience, which means that they have a hand and have to partner with operations and with field activities. And so it is just, it's a crazy, crazy hard job. And by the way, because business is so tough these days, their department, their specific marketing organization, is inevitably expected to put more points on the board and do more work with the same budget or a lower budget. And so this is just a, it's a very, very difficult job.

It sure sounds like it. No doubt about it. And Steve, I think just so our audience has a better understanding of who you are and what you do, why don't you give them a two or three-sentence summary of Mercer Island Group and the services you provide to chief marketing officers?

Sure, sure, sure. I was a Procter & Gamble brand marketing person for a decade earlier in my career. I went off and was both vice president of marketing of a division of Weyerhaeuser corporation and then division president. And then started this company, as Jason was saying, about 30 years ago. And Mercer Island Group, we have three major practice areas: we have a marketing strategy practice that does what you'd expect, a marketing strategy consultant to do with big organizations, we have an organization effectiveness practice that helps activate those marketing strategies. Often we're working with national or global clients to reorganize or redesign or modernize a marketing department. And finally, we have this practice that basically is all things client and agencies. And in that practice, we work daily on helping big clients find the right agency, motivate the right agency, negotiate contracts, onboard them, evaluate them. And we also work with agencies to help them present themselves better to clients. As I was saying earlier, I think I have absolutely the best job in the world. I love working with clients. I love working with agencies. It's hard to imagine more fun than working daily with CMOs and agency executives.

Nice, well, I imagine, based on those four kind of focus areas that you, three or four focus areas you just outlined, you probably do a lot of CMO confidential or CMO confidant as well, where maybe you're playing part therapist and part advisor?

Well, we do. No one really is ready to be a CMO in 2021, or as we enter 2022, because if the breadth the job has these days and it's also an incredibly stressful job. And so at any given moment in time, it's normal for a CMO to not feel like they can get it all done, or to feel confident that they even have the right roadmap in place to tackle what they need to do and to do it in the kind of prioritized way that allows them to get their job done. They're all working like 70 and 80 hours a week and having trouble keeping up.

Yeah, I can empathize with that some weeks for sure. Wow, yeah, yeah. Well, I tell you--

But yeah, but at least you're at billing.

Well, what's interesting to me is I think some people really don't realize just how many hours those roles. And I think you could fall into situation no matter what type of organization you're in, whether it's for-profit, non-profit agency, government, et cetera. You have to be careful to set your own boundaries because you could be putting in that many hours every week, whether you're driving yourself to do that or your management style is driving you to do that for sure, so yeah.

And often what we find is that because they're so busy, they have trouble finding the time to do the couple of really giant things that would help them actually be a little less busy, get their life under control. So one of the first pieces of advice we give to CMOs is to ensure that they put enough effort and enough time into building effective proxies for themselves. And that doesn't mean having a bunch of mini-mes running around, but it does mean having your direct reports and other executives in the organization that handle marketing be knowledgeable enough, have similar values, have similar ways of evaluating what's a good idea or a bad idea, or a good plan or a bad plan so that you can have confidence that they can actually run off and handle things. So it doesn't mean just delegating; it means building people in a way where you're confident that they are going to represent the company and the organization the way you need them to. And that takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of role modeling. So it means that you've gotta have people in meetings with you, and you have to be consistent as the CMO about how you evaluate things and how you work with other people so that people see on a daily basis how you operate and how you behave, which is probably the best way to train there is.

Yeah, for sure. I remember early in my career, someone did me the favor pointing out that I was very good at delegating, but not necessarily delegating authority, and decision-making, and responsibility. So I'll delegate all day long but I wanted to still have some control, and that's when I realized I wasn't being as efficient. So what are other ways that you're finding CMOs struggling, Steve?

Well, I think there's, as I was saying, there's so much going on. So the technology is changing every minute, the consumer is changing every minute, there's this been, this COVID thing that's been going on, right, that might've, you might have heard about. And all of that stuff has taken a lot of old rules of marketing and PR and shifted the playing field as we've been trying to play the game. And CMOs have that challenge on a day-to-day basis. And one of the ways to, so there's things that the CMO has to do to keep up and to keep, help their company keep moving. I mentioned earlier that this notion of partnering with the C-suite and the other key executives that run functional organizations that were, that are really part of the marketing ecosystem or that marketing is part of their ecosystem like the product group, operations, sales, et cetera, they also, marketer, CMOs, they need to be really mindful of how they partner with their agencies. Because the agencies are seeing a lot more change than the marketer is because the agencies, on a day-to-day basis, are folks that are dealing with a wide range of clients and they see a much wider range of issues, and much wider range, frankly, of successful solutions. And so learning how to partner effectively with your agencies becomes a real ticket to how you can keep up as a CMO, how you can succeed as a CMO, and how you can make a little more time for yourself and sort of build in an insurance policy for that big investment you have in marketing.

Yeah, speaking of insurance policy, I've sometimes mentioned to people that hiring an outside agency is sometimes like an insurance policy. In other words, you bring on an outside agency, you give them this responsibility, this focus. And if that program fails or doesn't work, you got a little bit of a scapegoat to buy you time to try to do it again, right, versus if you tried to do it in-house where you had sole responsibility and oversight and complete control and it didn't work, you might be vulnerable there. And so that's where we found a lot of times. A client, a CMO will come to us and say, "We've got this big initiative. I can't own it, but it has to be high-level." And so ultimately, we end up working directly with the CMO to make sure it gets done and done well and done right, because it's the pet-project or the CEO or something. And we're so laser-focused on that because our whole engagement is based on getting that done versus an in-house employee might be playing tug a war between their existing role and other things.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. So outsourcing really select key efforts where the CMO can work directly with an agency is a really practical idea. I also think that the CMO of today needs to be really thoughtful about when they engage in an agency and how they engage in agency on an ongoing basis like an annual retainer basis or an annual plan. One of the things that we found is that often the CMOs team isn't really ready to accept all the responsibilities of managing an agency to the best of its abilities to get that incredibly important return on agency investment that the CMO and the company needs. And so there's a handful of things we suggest to CMOs if they really wanna succeed, if they, let's say they need an agency, and they need an ongoing relationship, or let's say they've got an ongoing relationship and it's not working so well, there's a handful of things I would suggest to a CMO to, as an insurance policy to make sure you get it right. And so here's some things to do before you cut the cord on the old agency or you hire the new agency. I think number one is immediately launch some kind of a 360 evaluation of what the agency's doing well and what the agency thinks you are doing well as a client, and the opposite, of course. What are the opportunities for improvement? Often one of is that we find is that the client is the client's worst enemy on getting great agency work. They may have folks that are not trained properly on how to work with an agency. The agency may not be briefed properly. The agency may not be given timelines that make sense to get good work done. The evaluation process inside the client may be a bit messed up from the standpoint that the people evaluating the work may not know how to evaluate the work. They may not know how to give constructive, effective feedback. There may be too many approval levels. There may be junior folks killing good ideas that perhaps the more senior clients would approve and that results in extra work for the agency and, of course, can be really sorta debilitating to the relationship. So that notion of making sure that you're a good client before you fire the agency, I think, is just one of the core things that's a responsibility of the CMO. I think the second thing they have to do is to make sure that they have a good, some kind of fine approach to training their people. Working with an, it's a people business working with agencies, and for marketers and agencies together. And there's both soft skills and hard skills. And it's really incumbent on the CMO, a modern CMO, to make sure that their people know how to both run the business, build the business, and work with all their partners to do that. And there's both art and science to that. And so making sure that there's an emphasis there. And this training in big companies today is often a lost art. 30 and 40 years ago, there were much bigger training budgets for marketers. And so today, I think the smart CMO knows how to carve it out, make sure there's training, and of course role models, how to do these behaviors. And I think the last thing I would suggest is to make sure that the CMO has a top-to-top connection on an ongoing basis with their agency so that they can talk, they can talk on a daily basis with the Jason Mudd, for instance, their PR firm, to make sure that everybody's aligned, that both parties know what's changing in the business, that both parties know what's working and not working, and it's a collegial approach of, it's a collegial insurance policy to making sure that things work. And if they're not working, to make sure things get fixed.

Yeah, I completely agree. And so many of the things you're talking about resonate with me, including, just recently, we came up with a really big, great idea for one of our clients. And when my team presented it to mid-junior level people, they weren't happy with it. They just thought it was off target. But it was so big and expansive that I think it scared 'em off a little bit. So we encouraged them to take this to their leadership team and see what their reaction was. And the appetite and the situation turned around 180 degrees very quickly. It went from, "This is a bad idea and we don't even like it," to, "Okay, now our leadership team wants to know how quickly we can get it off the ground."

Right, right. Well, and often, and there's, this can evolve. So one of the things, if a CMO doesn't think they have effective proxies, maybe they know they don't have effective proxies. Then one of the things we recommend is what we would, something you'd call the must see call. And this is a routine call, could be every couple weeks, maybe once a week that's not that long with the agency where if it's something the CMO has to approve, the CMO gets to see earlier versions at approximately the same time as the rest of their team. The CMO and their team are on the call. They see it, and maybe they huddle afterwards before they give feedback so that the rest of the team sees how the, sees and hears how the CMO reacts. Maybe you get back on the call and maybe a more junior member of the CMOs team actually then delivers the feedback, but based having heard the CMOs position. And what this does is it helps develop those proxies so that the rest of the team sees how, in experiences, how the CMOs evaluating things and how the CMOs delivering reactions to the agency.

Yeah, I like that. Steve, let's take a quick break and come back on the other side with more questions with Steve Boehler from Mercer Island Group, as he's answering good questions and thoughts on how to be a great chief marketing officer.

[Presenter] You're listening to "On Top of PR" with your host Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted advisor to some of America's most admired and fastest growing brands. He is the managing partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social, and web strategies for national companies. And now, back to the show.

Hello and welcome back to "On Top of PR". I'm your host, Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations. Today, I'm joined by Steve Boehler, who's out of Seattle and with Mercer Island Group. We're talking about what it takes to make a great CMO. And Steve, thank you for being here and sharing your insights with our audience. And so I'm just thinking back, we've talked about a lot of things in the first half of this segment. I love the idea that you're kinda saying, "No one's quite ready to be the chief marketing officer." And so what triggered in my mind was kinda imposter syndrome when we talk a lot about that internally. Just make sure that people know when they have doubts about an idea or about their role and their value to the organization, that we're constantly affirming the value they bring and telling them that you've gotta get past the imposter syndrome so you can really be your best self. Steve, do you sense that's what's happening with a lot of CMOs when you said nobody's quite ready for that role?

Well, I think, in many cases, it is. And I think one of the issues is that CMOs, because this job is impossible, frankly, the modern CMO job is just an impossible job, there's impossible expectations, the expectations change every day, the needs change every day. And so it's really important for CMOs, new CMOs, young CMOs to get the job and to allow themselves to be themselves. It's okay for them to be fallible. It's okay for them to not have all the answers. They need to have confidence in what they know, though, and have confidence in how they approach things. And they really have to go back to the basics. And one of the keys to having that confidence is to go back to the basics and be principled about how you think about business. And so you might, you probably, over all those years, have developed a belief in customers, and managing customers, and understanding customers. You probably have a belief in how to, what makes for an effective marketing plan or how to evaluate a marketing plan. You have those beliefs in place. You've been trained for years how to do it, you've been doing it, so just, we wanna use that as a ground floor on how you approach your business on a daily basis. And then when you face those new challenges, and that'll help, by the way, help you be more confident. But as you approach new challenges, allow yourself to be honest when you have no idea, and ask questions, and listen, and reach out to people that should know and do know. And for example, lean in and build yourself a good network of folks that have related experiences or also are CMOs so you can ask them questions about challenges you've never faced and get some quick advice. The fact is almost everything has been faced by somebody and most CMOs face the same kinds of challenges on a day-to-day basis. And so if you're faced with a challenge, somebody's already done it, somebody's faced it, they've solved it, they've succeeded. And the odds are if you are a CMO, you've got a bunch of years under your belt already, and you probably know somebody that's handled all of those challenges. So make sure that you're confident enough to live off the past and use, leverage all that stuff that you learned before you became a CMO. And be confident enough to admit to yourself when you don't know and ask for help.

Steve, I love that. And that's one of the benefits of being involved in agency management institute for my agency, as well as PRSA and their Counselors Academy. You have a network of peers that have done it before, willing to help you. And previous episode we did with the guest was talking about the idea of make friends with your competition. And I completely agree with that, because they might end up hiring you one day, or acquiring you, or vice versa. There's no reason to be adversarial. Stay competitive, but you don't have to be adversarial.

Well, that's a great point. We at Mercer Island Group, Robin and I, the partners, we definitely believe in a world of abundance. We don't really think we compete. I mean, of course, every now and then we'll be dealing with an RFP that's, where multiple consultants are pitching the same business. But in the grand scheme of things, it's a small world. It's getting smaller. And there's a lot of business out there. And so being a manager is a good thing.

Yeah, I agree. Steve, you were, you and I were talking previously, how might a CMO best engage the rest of the organization from their seat?

That's a really good question. So I think part of it relates to, and there's an internal to marketing part of that, and then the rest of the organization and the company part of it. I think it's really important for, on the, when you're thinking beyond marketing, for the CMO to have really frequent touch bases with the other key players in the organization. So one of the things we recommend to a new CMO is, in the first month or so, to make sure that they get to have lunch or coffee with all of their peers. And it's mostly a listening exercise. What's working well for the company? What's not working well? What are their impressions of marketing? What do they think marketing could do better? What do they think marketing is doing really well at? How can marketing partner better with their part of the organization? And if they do that with their peers in the C-suite and if they do that with their other related entities, other functions around the company to start, they'll have a sense of what's going on. People will be pretty honest and pretty clear about what their expectations are and what they think about the marketing organization. I then would make that a habit. So you do it early on, but then you keep doing that. And I know CMOs are all pressed for time, but it's really, really important to know your peers in an organization on a personal level so that, and to build in the time to hear about their business. And so whether it's monthly, every other month, I really encourage the CMO to take the time to have that lunch meeting or that coffee meeting with all of their peers, and constantly update themselves on the business, their functions, how they can work better together, and just what's going on in their lives. And this is so important because down the road, at some point, there's gonna be a fire, or there's gonna be a big disagreement between the two functions, between marketing and some other organization. And you want to have that personal connection with your peer when that happens. And it really helps make it a much more enjoyable and successful experience if you can see each other as people and basically friends in the business and partners than if you feel like you're adversaries.

Yeah, I love that. And I think no matter who's listening to this, what level they're at, like you said, get to know your peers and the other departments and divisions of the corporation and that'll, that can be your peer group as you mutually rise to the ranks in the organization. Or people may go to other jobs and be like, "Man, there's this really smart marketing person. We need them here too." So I could just see the personal and professional benefits of that.

Now, within the marketing organization, let me add something. Within the marketing organization, within the CMOs organization itself, one of the misses often of the CMO is that they don't put enough effort and process into making sure resources are aligned. And by that, I mean the marketing organization is expected to accomplish stuff that the C-suite expects, that Wall Street, or the ownership expects.

[Jason] Sure.

It has a role to play in the success of the company. And so there's an alignment issue there. But making sure that those expectations, as well as marketing specific KPIs and expectations are aligned all the way down to the activation level is something that often is a failure in marketing organizations. So what that means is that the market, the CMO needs to make sure their organization has a prioritization process that accounts not only just for the out-of-pocket budgets, whether it's advertising and media pass-through budget, or if it's the PR budget, agency budget, but also they know they have a sense that everybody, all the staff in marketing know their role, know how that role adds up to those bigger objectives that the C-suite needs marketing to accomplish, and that there's clear linkage between those two levels from all the way from activation all the way up to the C-suite so that every penny in every hour, to the best of your ability as a CMO, your marketing organization, your marketing people are spending their time rowing in the same direction.

That's good, that's good. I know we wanna talk about how might marketing departments accomplish more with the less time and limited resources. Did you have additional tips for that? Or did we cover out already, do you think?

I actually think that resource alignment piece is job number one. And what happens is, and what we see, I see this all the time with CMOs that even some of the best CMOs do not have an effective resource prioritization process in place that they can actively oversee, that, where they're actively engaged in making sure that what they know the C-suite needs and what they need is actually happening at all levels of the marketing organization. And by doing this really well, by the way, you're gonna increase the job satisfaction of everybody in marketing 'cause they all have a role to play in driving the whole company.

So who's doing that well, and how are they doing it, Steve?

Well, there are a handful of companies that are doing it really, really well. And it's mostly done well if the CMO is really engaged. And usually there's an annual process that goes in that relates to the annual budget where it's part of the buildup for the budget, the marketing organization first agrees with a C-suite on what their contribution needs to be and what they need to be accomplishing, what the budget should be. And then every level of the marketing organization it has to build plans based on those specific objectives. So that it's really a tightly-knit relationship between activation and what the C-suite's expecting. And then what we recommend and, by the way, that plays itself out to agency budgets and agency staffing and what the priorities are and work with other agencies on a monthly basis. We then recommend that these things be looked at on a rolling basis, quarterly. Things change. The marketplace changes, competition changes. And so marketing has to play its role in keeping its finger on the pulse of what has to happen to the company, how well the company's doing, what's happening in the industry and the marketplace. And the way to do that, the best way to do that is make sure that resources are aligned or realigned as appropriate. And so you've laid it out for the year and you have a sense of what the right staffing is, you're not overworking people, people have the right priorities, but then there should be a process quarterly where it's looked at, again, in case there are changes and updates need to be made.

So many times I hear high-level marketing people say, "I don't have time to plan, 'cause I'm so busy doing things." And I'm like, "Well, if you had a plan, you'd have a priority, and then you could eliminate." And I remember, that's one of the things we did to survive the Great Recession, is we looked at what do we do best, what's clutter, get rid of the clutter. And suddenly we weren't going to every networking event and we weren't trying to be at all these different places, instead we were finding our sweet spot and focusing on it. And I found myself having dinner with my wife and kids a lot more often.

Oh my gosh, I hope that went well.

Yeah, what is the saying? No strategy and a lot of activity, right?

Yup.

And so one last question, then we're gonna let you go. You mentioned employment satisfaction. And that triggered to me companies are struggling to recruit and retain employees right now in the middle of the Great Resignation. On top of that, corporations are feeling pressure to make sure they're hiring a diverse workforce and looking at equity and inclusion. So that just adds even more, I think, difficulty to an already difficult marketplace, but it's so important and critical. What are your thoughts? Who's doing this well? And how are they doing it right? And what advice would you give to the chief marketing officers that are tuning in?

Yeah, those are really good questions. I think the chief marketing officer has to make both diversity/inclusion a priority, as well as make the job satisfaction of their people a priority. On the diversity and inclusion side, I'm constantly in meetings where people essentially throw up their hands and say, "Well, there's nobody like that that I can hire." And my reaction is you have to look harder. And so what that means is you, instead of the job spec being so narrow and so specific where you think you're hiring somebody that's already done it before, you find somebody that may not have done it exactly, the job exactly before, but clearly has been successful in some fashion.

Right.

And give them an opportunity. And so this is all about opportunity. We wouldn't have anybody in the C-suite that looked different or acted different if this hadn't happened sometime in the past. And today, it's far too easy for the C-suite to look around and see a bunch of white guys, right? And so it's up to the leadership of big organizations to put a stake in the ground and say, "We're just going to do it. We're gonna force the issue. We're gonna find people that we can hire, that we can then train up and they can work their way into the right jobs." And we've actually, we've done it ourselves at Mercer Island Group. We haven't found that we've had to sacrifice any quality whatsoever. People may come to us with different backgrounds and viewpoints, but they have incredible strengths that they're bringing along with 'em based on their own personal experiences. The other question you had was about job satisfaction, and I think that's incredibly important. I think, oddly enough, the two things that I think are most important that the CMO can control about job satisfaction of their people we've already covered but in different areas. I think this notion of prioritization and making sure that resources are aligned properly is one of the most important ways that you can ensure that your people have high-level job satisfaction. Because what happens is in many organizations, people, a lot of the stuff that is on their plate is on their plate because it was stuff that was always done in the past. And then every new initiative gets thrown at them and thrown on top of it. And so at the end of the day, what should be a 40 or 50-hour week job ends up being a 70-hour week job with incredible stress loads when half of that job is unnecessary. And so the notion of making sure that they're doing the right stuff, that they're focused on the right stuff, the stuff that are really is gonna impact the business is a really important responsibility, I think, of the CMO, which goes back to that whole prioritization discussion we had about the CMO and resource alignment. I think the other thing that the CMO has to do is to role model simply better behavior. CMOs, not all of them, but many simply need to behave better. And what I mean by that is they need to be more respectful. They need to show up on time. If they're not gonna show up for a meeting, they need to tell people in advance. They need to listen to their people. They need to, when they're interacting with their people, they need to ask questions, listen to the answers, request follow-up, and then follow-up on that. And if you do the ask, listen, request, follow-up, you're engaging with your people, and you're engaging their brains and their talents, and you're not simply mandating decisions or mandating workloads. So I think the role modeling factor, it becomes incredibly important for CMOs. And we see this every day, that the absolute best CMOs in the world, people like Dave Kimbell at Ulta Beauty before he advanced to be CEO, these are the, these folks in all of their meetings are respectful. They listen. They ask questions. They make sure their people aren't working, aren't overworked. They make sure that the priorities are in place. And when he was promoted, Shelley Haus was right there ready to become CMO, and she has the same sort of operating philosophies. And so this, it's so important because we're in, it's a people business, we're working with people on a daily basis, and we have to remember that these people have lives and they have their own hopes and dreams and we wanna, if we want them to help support us and help us succeed, we have to help them succeed, enjoy their lives, too.

What a thoughtful insight for us to end on, Steve. I really appreciate that. That was very good. If somebody tuning in, a member of our audience wants to get connected with you and Mercer Island Group, how, what's the best way for them to reach you?

Well, the websites www.migroup.com. Anybody can email me whenever they want, steveb@migroup.com. My cell is 206-650-3759. Happy to talk to anybody. I love marketing. I love the world of CMOs and agencies. And I am blessed to be in this business.

That's great. And Steve, what an incredible amount of transparency, giving out your phone number and, or your cell phone and your email. Thank you for doing that. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure.

I would just say to anybody that's tuning in that enjoyed what Steve had to say, their newsletter is very good as well and they're always posting thoughtful blog content and occasional videos. And I know I look forward to seeing what they're putting out there and attending the different workshops and events that you guys are doing. So, Steve, thank you for all the help. You've been both here and now, and in the past to me and my agency. We really appreciate you

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on, Jason. Best of luck next year.

Thank you. We're really glad you were here. And with that, that's another episode of "On Top of PR". Appreciate you tuning in and allowing me the opportunity to help you stay on top of PR. If you found this episode beneficial, please do us all a favor and share it with a peer or colleague you think would benefit from tuning in themselves. And with that, this is Jason Mudd from Axia Public Relations. Thanking our guest, Steve Boehler for being here and sharing his smarts with you today. And we wish you the best and keep moving forward.

[Presenter] This has been "On Top of PR" with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And check out past shows at ontopofpr.com.