From a podcast interview featuring Art Saxby, CEO of Chief Outsiders.
In this episode of CEO Growth Talks, host Pete Hayes sits down with Art Saxby, CEO of Chief Outsiders, to discuss the company’s journey since the 2009 recession. Art reflects on how Chief Outsiders evolved from providing fractional CMOs to adapting to the dynamic needs of mid-sized businesses. He introduces “Team Outsiders,” a new service designed to provide comprehensive support, and “Growth Gears,” an AI-driven platform designed to streamline operations and drive growth. Art dives into how these innovations help businesses manage risk while fostering growth in a rapidly changing market.
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“The integration of our Chief Outsiders fractional executive and Team Outsiders services through the GrowthGears OS platform represents a new step in the Chief Outsiders journey.” Art Saxby |
The introduction of Team Outsiders marks a new chapter for Chief Outsiders, enhancing the company’s ability to deliver executive leadership and tactical implementation.
Chief Outsiders has acquired a software development firm to create an AI-based process acceleration platform, GrowthGears OS, significantly enhancing client engagement speed and execution.
Midsize companies often face challenges hiring full-time executive talent; fractional CMOs provide an efficient, cost-effective solution.
Changes in buyer behavior, especially post-COVID, necessitate more sophisticated sales and marketing strategies.
Executive experience and structured processes are critical competitive advantages Chief Outsiders offers, setting them apart in the crowded fractional executive marketplace.
Follow Art Saxby on LinkedIn
Follow Pete Hayes on LinkedIn
[Episode Transcript]
[00:00:05] Pete Hayes: Well, hello everybody, and welcome back to CEO Growth Talks. I'm Pete Hayes, your host, and this month we are so excited, I'm just pleased to have my partner and our CEO and founder of Chief Outsiders, Art Saxby, with us. Art, welcome to the program. I don't think we've done this with you in a while since I've been the host, anyway.
[00:00:25] Pete Hayes: We're going to cover some bases today. We're going to just do a quick little history for those of you who don't know about Chief Outsiders. But the real reason we're here, Art, is you tell me—we've got an announcement to make, and of course, I'm aware of it, but we're kind of excited about this, aren't we?
[00:00:38] Art Saxby: We're very excited. You know, after 16 years of business—really, in some ways, developing and creating the fractional chief marketing officer business—we've added chief sales officers, and now we're ready to really almost relaunch the company with much, much more in-depth, full solutions. Wow.
[00:00:56] Pete Hayes: So it's almost 16 years.
[00:00:58] Pete Hayes: So it'll be 16 years in, I think, April—April-ish. Yeah. And I joined you maybe six, eight months, nine months later, and we've been together since 2009. A great time to start a company. If you ever want to really figure out how to make things work, do it during a deep recession.
[00:01:18] Art Saxby: You know, actually, I tell people it was the best time in American history to start a business.
[00:01:22] Art Saxby: Because there were no CEOs I talked to, no people I talked to, who said, "Oh, I don't need to listen to new ideas. Everything's working just fine." Now, there weren't a lot of people willing to invest in growth in 2009, or early 2010, but it gave us a chance to really have some discussions and talk to people about what was working and what wasn't.
[00:01:40] Art Saxby: When this big thing hits a company, how do they deal with it and how do they plan for the future? So yeah, it was a lot of good learning.
[00:01:48] Pete Hayes: Yeah. And when you started this business, you had an expression about this whole notion of—and we didn't even know if using the term "fractional CMO" was going to be the expression, since there were fractional CFOs and such at the time. What was the idea that spurred this forward? Why is it relevant to midsize companies?
[00:02:06] Art Saxby: It's really an interesting combination of two things. There are times when a midsized company needs to have a significant change in the way they think about their business—changing the way they go to market.
[00:02:16] Art Saxby: Maybe they're moving into a new market segment. Maybe their customers' behaviors have changed. Maybe a competitor has come in. Instead of just running the business day to day, they need something significantly different. Well, most midsize companies can't really afford to hire—and don't necessarily need—a real C-level executive, chief marketing officer, or a real C-level executive chief sales officer to come in and help them figure out how to take that vision and really change the organization, build that engine for growth, and make it happen. But there are times when they need that person.
[00:02:50] Art Saxby: So rather than hire someone—and either hire the person they can afford or hire someone that's way overqualified and can do it but then will be overpaid—by having a fractional executive, they can bring in someone who has been there and done that. They can work as part of the leadership team, usually one to two days a week over six to twelve months, to develop the plan, implement the plan hands-on, make it happen, and bring it to life.
[00:03:15] Art Saxby: That's where a company can leap forward beyond what their normal resources could get them.
[00:03:22] Pete Hayes: Yeah, and I love when you say, in the shortest form: the CEO has a vision for growth, but they're frustrated with their organization's ability to get it done. And just in most cases, that seat is open—the one that we're familiar with coming from large enterprises.
[00:03:39] Pete Hayes: There's a seat, and it's called "the person responsible for market insight and a market orientation for the whole company." And that's typically missing in midsize companies.
[00:03:48] Art Saxby: You know, there's a difference between running a business—you need a certain level of assets to run the business every day and then there are times when you need something majorly beyond that: looking out the window, seeing what's happening in other industries and how that can be applied, seeing what's happening in larger companies and smaller companies.
[00:04:06] Art Saxby: And how do you modify that? That's how we can really make a huge impact, and that's what's exciting about this business. You know, everyone in the company has come from very large corporations. All of our CSOs, chief sales officers, and chief marketing officers have held the role of VP of marketing or VP of sales at large companies.
[00:04:24] Art Saxby: They learned tremendous things. It's really hard to double the size of a Fortune 100 company, but you take that learning, not just the cool, creative stuff, but how to lead the company based on market dynamics, and boy, you can make a big impact on such a company. That's what keeps us excited.
[00:04:41] Pete Hayes: Yeah. And I want to apologize to those of you watching and listening to this who know all about the fractional space and fractional marketing officers and, you know, okay, it's not news anymore, which is part of why we've got news today. But, well, what happened over this period of time? I mean, the notion of a fractional CMO, and chief sales officer, yeah, that's a little more recent, that didn’t exist back then. But what’s happened in the last few years?
[00:05:07] Art Saxby: Well, there's been an amazing shift in our society, much of it brought about through COVID and the pandemic. A combination of every buyer in America, maybe every buyer in the world, changed their behavior significantly.
[00:05:20] Art Saxby: It used to be that industrial manufacturing firms would send an engineer into their client's factory. Many of those factories don't allow you to just show up anymore. People started looking at lead gen, demand gen, they were determining who they were going to work with long before they allowed a salesperson in the door.
[00:05:36] Art Saxby: The flexibility of being able to work remotely, the technology catching up with it, and the realization that many people don’t need to own all their assets or have them all live in their village and work in their building, has changed things. Sometimes, you can bring in the expertise you need now without owning it forever.
[00:06:15] Pete Hayes: Yeah, and more recently, my job at Chief Outsiders for the last 15 years has been to lead our marketing, which is an interesting thing. We've talked about superpowers—my superpower is that I’ve had over a hundred folks offering advice, some of the smartest marketers in the world, and that's just been fantastic. But what's changed as of late is there are a lot of people doing this, right?
[00:07:51] Pete Hayes: Okay. But the reality is our business has been less differentiated than it has in the past. We were unique. We were a unicorn in some respects. We were first to market. Now, maybe not so much. So, years ago, you and I wrote this book, The Growth Gears, and we more recently growth-geared ourselves, which we're always doing.
[00:08:10] Pete Hayes: But in this case, we really took a rigorous step through insight and strategy and now some executional things. Do you wanna share any of what we learned in our insight work?
[00:08:20] Art Saxby: Yeah, it's something that many, many companies go through. I used to say back in the old corporate world, if God wants to punish a company, He gives it 30 years of undisputed category leadership.
[00:08:31] Art Saxby: Because, unfortunately, it will suck the entrepreneurial life out of a large organization. Well, with a midsize company like ours, we had 15 years—14 years—of category leadership. Originally, we were the only category. There wasn't even a category. So a lot of that... But once we attracted a lot of attention, we—like any other company—had to ask, What are we doing really well?
[00:08:53] Art Saxby: But is that going to get us there? We took a few steps back and actually did the insight work. We paid outside resources to conduct strategy and insight work. Every organization has a view of itself, and sometimes, you need someone external to ask questions and help you understand what you look like from the outside.
[00:09:12] Art Saxby: We did the same with our own sales approach. We happened to hire a couple of our own chief sales officers and said, All right, I'm one of your clients as the CEO, and I want you to evaluate our sales approach, our metrics, our reporting—all of it. So there was quite a bit of insight work to look at. Now that we've attracted all this competition, what does the competition look like?
[00:09:34] Art Saxby: How are we differentiated, and what do we need to do? What investments can we make now to systemically and structurally move ourselves ahead—drive the business forward in a way that our competitors can't follow?
[00:09:48] Pete Hayes: Yeah. One of those things was our clients. We talked about competitors in the market, and our clients had, for the longest time, been asking us to do more.
[00:09:57] Pete Hayes: Okay, you've got the senior leadership thing covered, but can you help me? Besides your great network of resources that you bring to bear—which we do and will continue to do—but I said, Well, can't I pay you to get some of these things accomplished further down on the execution layer?
[00:10:22] Pete Hayes: Maybe we'll just start right now. What is that starting to look like? Where are we headed with providing additional kinds of resources?
[00:10:30] Art Saxby: It's really very exciting. This is really the announcement of Team Outsiders, where we still have our Chief Outsiders who are at the C-level.
[00:10:40] Art Saxby: They've all been that vice president—this is a chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, chief sales officer, chief revenue officer. They're there to help sit with the CEO, understand the CEO's vision, develop that engine for growth, and implement that vision in the organization and the marketplace.
[00:10:51] Art Saxby: In doing that, there's an awful lot of little things that have to happen. Sometimes companies have the resources internally, and we can direct them, manage them, and make it happen. Sometimes they need external resources. That could be someone digging into how they're structuring their CRM and HubSpot. That could be a very strong redo of their website, their digital marketing approach, or their content.
[00:11:10] Art Saxby: So there's an awful lot of implementation that needs to happen. Now, we have a full team of mid-level and lower-level implementers who are experts at all of these different things. But because we've got a C-level executive looking at the strategy and then selecting the right resources, they can bring them in and out as needed.
[00:11:46] Pete Hayes: Okay. All right. So there's the announcement. It was snuck in there, sort of. If you're familiar with Chief Outsiders, fractional executives, now there's another layer of resources from Chief Outsiders that we're calling Team Outsiders.
[00:12:15] Pete Hayes: These are folks that our clients—and frankly, our CXOs—can tap to bring into engagements to get things done at the doer level, in addition to the executive oversight and quarterbacking. It's not that we don't roll up our sleeves and do things, but this is to put firepower on the ground in our clients' businesses—make it convenient and easy with pre-vetted, pre-trained people.
[00:12:35] Art Saxby: They can continue. Most of our engagements with the C-level involve helping develop, design and build an engine for growth. Once it's running, that organization doesn't necessarily need to have that C-level executive—or certainly, as often—yeah.
[00:12:50] Art Saxby: So now, we'll be able to bring in these implementation resources who can keep that engine running much more cost-effectively and efficiently while still bringing in the best knowledge because they're working across multiple clients and throughout the industry.
[00:13:16] Art Saxby: It's that longer-tail implementation where, not only do you have an engine for growth, but that engine is running, generating results, and continuing to improve, all while maintaining executive oversight.
[00:13:18] Pete Hayes: I love it.
[00:13:21] Pete Hayes: Okay. So that's a really important component of the announcement we're making this week.
[00:13:36] Pete Hayes: There's one other thing, maybe it warrants a story. So back in the spring, I was introduced to some technology. I'd never seen anything like it. You and I talked about it, and it looked as though this was going to be a platform that would allow us to take The Growth Gears and energize it with technology, and, frankly, a ton of brilliant AI.
[00:13:56] Pete Hayes: It was a way of managing The Growth Gears process with AI injected at every opportunity. It took you about 10 seconds to say, This is awesome. We met with the business, fell in love with the people, and started a process that, surprisingly, ended up in what?
[00:14:07] Art Saxby: We purchased a software development firm precisely so that we could develop this software for us to use with our clients. What's amazing is that in all of the magical things we do with chief marketing officers and sales officers, they're all bringing their unique experience—their industry experience—and they're providing absolutely unique solutions for our clients. But in doing that, there's still a process. And what we've done is this software is a process acceleration platform. So it still allows the chief marketing officer and the chief sales officer to do the magic they do that's right for this company, but it puts it in a process that makes it easier to run the engagement and collect the information.
[00:14:51] Art Saxby: When you've got the information together and you've got the structured engagement, then it's really easy to apply AI to accelerate the speed, accelerate elements along the way, and provide a tremendous information and communication tool for the client so they can see and participate in this along the way.
[00:15:10] Art Saxby: So, it's a process acceleration tool with a lot of AI integrated to keep the company's information safe in context, but each element can build on itself. It's not just "let's look at here and how can we do it here, here, here?" It takes the insights and moves them into the strategy of the execution.
[00:15:32] Art Saxby: The AI elements accelerate how fast you can get to things because AI can get you 40% there, 60% there, 80% there—depending. Then they add the expertise, and you add that into the consistent client experience of seeing the process laid out, seeing the process happen, and being able to communicate more effectively and efficiently with the client, and we really think it's a game changer.
[00:15:56] Pete Hayes: Yeah. Everybody and their uncle is using AI to get things done faster and to get fresh insight from massaging data and whatever, but boy, if I'm a CEO, I don't want a third party, especially, using a chat engine and taking my data, and then there it is—out in the ether.
[00:16:20] Pete Hayes: And so we've self-assessed that we're right at the front of the market in using the top tools, and we will continue to do that. Like some other companies we know, we had a tiger team. We have specialists. We have AI innovation awards that we give out. We're so passionate about staying at the forefront of this.
[00:16:40] Pete Hayes: But the more you learn about AI, the more you recognize that to get the highest degree of value, you want AI applied to core processes, and it needs to be locked down and enterprise secure. So to your point, Art, with all of our client's information inside of Growth Gears, where AI helps keep things aligned and in an environment that can build off of itself in a highly secure vault—if you will—producing results faster, getting to outcomes faster, with a greater level of transparency into what's going on.
[00:17:19] Pete Hayes: This is the tool. We use This platform in every client engagement going forward, and we think it's a game changer.
[00:17:28] Art Saxby: It really is because everyone's using AI, and it's bing, bing, bing. This is a process acceleration tool to take the client from where they are to where they want to go in the implementation—organizing it in a process, organizing it in a flow, having a secured AI element that continues to look not just individually, but builds on each phase of the process.
[00:17:54] Art Saxby: It'll allow us to deliver value faster. It'll allow us to communicate better with our clients. It significantly reduces risk. That's really what it comes down to. Clients bring in a consultant, they bring in a chief marketing officer, they bring in chiefs—there's a significant investment, and there's a level of risk: "How do I know I'm going to get what I'm paying for?" Having a repeatable process based on the Growth Gears model, with the machinery of AI, significantly reduces risk because it speeds things up, delivers value faster, and increases visibility so the client can see what's happening.
[00:18:32] Pete Hayes: Yeah, and as our marketing team got ahold of this, along with the development team, they recognized something incredible.
[00:18:39] Pete Hayes: We've worked on the management teams of over 2,000 businesses, and we estimate that maybe that's about 5,000 projects—all of our approach to solving some of the world's toughest growth challenges in midsize companies. All of that exists in various places at Chief Outsiders, and we've curated much of that and have now linked it so our folks have ready access and the AI has access to use our best practices in ways that haven't been possible before—with AI and with the oversight of our executive leadership. Wow. These are exciting times, Art, and that's why we're here today, everybody. We wanted you to hear from Art directly.
[00:19:22] Pete Hayes: And, of course, I'm enjoying this time in the business like never before. This is a whole new Chief Outsiders, and keep following this LinkedIn channel and Chief Outsiders because we'll be sharing more and more about this. I'm sure you're curious. Some of you may want to become part of Team Outsiders—that's a select group of folks that we're tagging to join that organization.
[00:19:45] Art Saxby: Combining the two—having a process acceleration tool that our Team Outsiders are trained in: how to work with it, how they work within that structure, how they feed into that structure, how the work they're doing is communicated to the client so the client has visibility, how they leverage all of those tools. That's why it is such a fabulous package: it's going to speed things up and aid in communication.
[00:20:09] Art Saxby: It is a full solution—technology-based and people-based.
[00:20:14] Pete Hayes: Well, congratulations, Art. This is indeed exciting news. We've been working on it for months and are thrilled to bring it out to the marketplace. We expect it to change the trajectory of more and more midsize companies we have the opportunity to work with.
[00:20:28] Pete Hayes: I want to thank everybody on our teams that have gotten us this far, and we're looking forward to the years ahead with these new capabilities. So, Art, thanks for joining us today.
[00:20:37] Art Saxby: All right.
[00:20:38] Pete Hayes: Thank you. We'll see you next time on CEO Growth Talks.