Aaron Burnett | CEO, Wheelhouse DMG | Achieving Success with MedTech Marketing, First-Party Data Strategies, & Generosity as Company Culture

Aaron Burnett, founder and CEO of Wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group, delves into the unique marketing challenges faced by the MedTech industry. He discusses the critical importance of continuous messaging and creative iteration in data-constrained environments, highlighting how accurate first-party and zero-party data strategies can drive performance in highly regulated markets like healthcare. He emphasizes the need for proprietary data solutions to stay compliant and effective amidst evolving privacy regulations. Reflecting on his personal and professional journey, Aaron shares practical insights on optimizing marketing strategies for better business outcomes while maintaining a culture of generosity and helpfulness.

Guest links: www.wheelhousedmg.com | www.linkedin.com/in/aaronburnett | Aaron@wheelhousedmg.com | https://youtube.com/@wheelhousedmg

Charity supported: https://www.feedingamerica.org/ 

Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at theleadingdifference@velentium.com. 

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Host: Lindsey Dinneen
Editing: Marketing Wise
Producer: Velentium

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Episode 050 - Aaron Burnett

[00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.

[00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.

[00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.

[00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.

[00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.

[00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and today I'm delighted to introduce to you my guest, Aaron Burnett. Aaron is CEO and founder of Wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group, a sought after digital marketing agency based in Seattle, Washington, that helps brands thrive by solving their toughest digital challenges.

Every point of Aaron's career has been marked by his ability to leverage technology and his own creativity to drive growth. He has propelled Wheelhouse into working with some of the world's most innovative healthcare and medical device brands for more than a decade, consistently delivering exceptional business value through a combination of deep healthcare marketing expertise, purpose built technology, and creative capabilities. Most notably, Aaron and his team have developed technology and services that guide digital strategy for clients such as Providence, Fred Hutch, Delta Dental, and NASA.

Well, welcome, Aaron. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm really excited to talk with you.

[00:01:47] Aaron Burnett: Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you as well. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:50] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. Well, if you wouldn't mind starting off by sharing a little bit about yourself, your background, and what led you to MedTech.

[00:01:59] Aaron Burnett: So I'm CEO of an agency called Wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group. It's a 14 year old agency. We provide performance marketing for privacy first industries. We have a particular concentration in medtech and healthcare, and have had that concentration for the last dozen or so years. We work with very large health systems like Providence, we work with some of the largest health insurance systems in the U. S. as well as large to mid size medical device manufacturers, and interestingly, we've also worked with NASA for the last six years, which is in neither of those markets but is interesting and complex and is NASA, and we get to do things on a scale that you don't get to do anywhere else.

We're probably a little bit different from most other agencies, first in that everything that we do is attuned to privacy first industries. So we are, because of our long standing relationship with healthcare in particular, accustomed to working in environments that are highly regulated. So being attuned with HIPAA compliance and implications on third party tracking, working with much less data than you would work with in a typical e commerce or B2B lead generation sort of a situation.

And so we have folks who are deeply expert at working in those markets, know them well, have an orientation toward performance marketing, which is what all of our clients want. They are diverse, but they're unified in that they want us to achieve an outcome with business value. It's important. It's lead generation. It's a transaction. It's something that has tangible value that can satisfy a chief financial officer. So deep expertise.

We also have developed our own proprietary technologies and methodologies that help us to deliver performance marketing in these markets. So you know, in a highly regulated industry, you can't just use platform data for audience targeting. You don't get a lot of that data. You can't use platform data for optimization. You have to be very careful about what you collect and what you share and how you evaluate and commingle and analyze that data. So we've created our own HIPAA compliant data warehouse and a BI practice on top of that allows us to bring in not only platform and analytics data, but also CRM information so we can integrate it in an API level with CRM systems and first party data.

So we get a lot of insight. We can see the entire user journey, customer journey, prospect journey in the context of our analysis in this platform and not share data with anyone else. So we never fall afoul of any regulations. And then our analysts can identify insights and then activate those insights in advertising platforms in sort of an air gap situation. We never have to share data.

We also provide creative, but it's creative in the service of conversion rate optimization. So it's performance creative. We're not going to develop a new advertising campaign or a new branding strategy, but we are highly adept at figuring out how to get creative to perform, which is increasingly foundational to driving exceptional marketing outcomes.

Now, because so much advertising is algorithmically driven and because in the absence of audience targeting, it turns out that creative variation and a really broad set of creative variation is kind of the new way to target an audience. So if you have 15 variations on a particular creative and they're attuned to different audiences and different messages, you can in some contexts rely on the platform algorithms to find your audience for you through that creative. So we're attuned to delivering that way.

In terms of my own background, I started as a marketing exec. So I was a VP of Sales and Marketing with AT& T Wireless, worked for some other telecom and software companies, and started consulting and helping other folks with marketing, and found that I was good at and loved digital marketing, starting with SEO and then moving into the other disciplines.

And the thing that I loved about that and that I continue to love about it is that it combines creativity, the art of marketing, with a definitive outcome which you don't get in traditional marketing. So it's there in the data, whether you did it or you didn't. And that's quite satisfying and also create security when you're working with clients.

We can, at the end of a quarter say, "Listen, you're up 85%. And here's how we did it." And that creates certainty around the value of the relationship. It creates longevity in the relationship. We strive very hard to develop long term client relationships. I think our average tenure is about six and a half years now. And we find that just continuing to deliver and continuing to clearly explain what we've delivered puts us in good stead and makes for a nice, stable, and growing business.

[00:06:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. Well, first of all, congratulations on that business that you've successfully launched and is going strong. That's awesome. I know that's no small feat. I know a lot of our listeners can relate to that too, of being that CEO and taking on that incredible new job opportunity, and how many things you learn and the day to day ups and downs of entrepreneur.

[00:06:57] Aaron Burnett: That's right. You get an opportunity to make a new mistake every day.

[00:07:02] Lindsey Dinneen: Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. But that's a good thing. So that's fantastic. Thank you for sharing a little bit about that. So going a little bit back into some of your personal background, and then I'm delighted to delve into the company as well and what you do. But in the growing up, did you have an inkling that marketing would be the thing for you, or did this sort of grow out of schoolwork, or what was that thing that said, "Oh, I think I know where I want to be?"

[00:07:30] Aaron Burnett: I figured out where I wanted to be by figuring out where I didn't want to be first.

[00:07:34] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh.

[00:07:35] Aaron Burnett: So no, the thing that I wanted to be, from the time I was seven until I was in the middle of college, was an attorney. Then the notion that I had of being an attorney was you would fight for truth and justice and fairness and all of those virtues, sort of a cinematic version of being an attorney. And what changed my mind was that I paid my way through college by working in restaurants, and in a particular restaurant in which I worked-- it was a fine dining restaurant-- there were a lot of attorneys who came in with clients or came in after work. There were also a considerable number of law school students during the summer who were taking a breather and recovering before they went back again.

And I got really consistent insight and advice, which was sort of distilled. The law school students said, "Yeah, we used to think that's what this was for too. And that was beaten out of us by the second year of law school. That's not what this is for." The attorneys who were successful, particularly financially successful, they were focused on transactions and they were very conventionally successful and very apparently miserable.

Then the other thing was that I came to believe that being an attorney would draw out the very worst in me. I'm a little bit competitive and I really enjoy arguing. I couldn't see how that was going to be good for me, a marriage, or being a good father, or any of those sorts of things. So, I figured out what I didn't want to do first.

And then when I graduated from college, I had studied communications and then I also had studied political science and eastern philosophy and religion. And after college, I was aware that I wasn't ready to get a job, because I had no idea what that job would be. So, I went backpacking in Southeast Asia. I bought a one way ticket to Bangkok. And the plan was that I would travel for three years, and I would see in person some of the things that I studied. I would learn more and think more and get more clarity as to who I was and who I wanted to be.

But that plan changed when five months into that trip, I met a woman on an island off the coast of Malaysia at a beach party during Ramadan when everything else shuts down at sundown and the only thing to do is to hang out with other backpackers. And we met and stayed up until three in the morning talking and both of us knew, like, right away, "Oh, you're the person." So we spent most of the next seven days together. Got engaged at the end of those seven days. Got married three months later in New Zealand. She's a New Zealander who was headed to Europe. And then came back to the U. S. so that she could be in the U. S. for the two years that required to establish permanent residency.

And I started working for a telecom company in a temporary role. I worked there for three weeks as a temp. I was hired as an employee into the marketing department and discovered that marketing was an aptitude and something that I really enjoyed. I was also in a really fast growing company. It was a cellular company, part of Macaw Cellular at the time. And kind of the ethos there was, "Doesn't matter if you have done it, because nobody's done this stuff before. If you can do it, and you show aptitude, we're going to give you a shot."

And so I got to do all sorts of things that I had no business doing, but that I succeeded at. I built a call center. I built a marketing organization of 75 employees and ran that for about three years. And I ended up becoming VP of Sales and Marketing, about seven years into that stint and just discovered that I love marketing and I particularly love marketing the intersection of marketing and technology.

I love the tech part. I love developing new technology. One of the things that I did there was to develop a call completion platform for the network that we worked on that had a significant impact on revenue and a decrease in cost. So I loved identifying technical solutions and then activating them from a marketing perspective.

What I also discovered, though, when that company was acquired by AT& T was that I didn't like really big companies, where you got to be VP of something very deep but very narrow, which is how that was going to turn out. And so I went from there to a series of smaller and smaller companies. And the closer I got to entrepreneurship, the happier I became, and the more at ease I became until in the year that my first daughter was born, in a job that was going super well-- I joined two years prior, the company had increased its customer base by about tenfold, things were going super well, it was five minutes from my house. It was easy, I wasn't stressed, but it was also super bored.

I quit and started a company, and from there went into, I made all of the first time entrepreneur mistakes in that company. I left that company. Actually, that company left. That company didn't succeed.

[00:12:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, no. I'm sorry.

[00:12:34] Aaron Burnett: It was great. I learned a lot. I also learned that I loved that and then started to consult and learned that. No, I actually love technology and marketing, but I love more helping people. That feels really good to me. And so sort of fast forward a few years. I created Wheelhouse for a couple of important reasons.

One is I wanted to create the agency that I always wished I could hire when I worked for other companies. And what I wanted out of an agency partner was that it was partnership. It was somebody who really did have my best interests at heart that didn't deploy an account manager on me who is constantly looking for opportunities to monetize the relationship, who was playing this sort of kabuki theater where we pretend we're friends, but really it's about the change order, which felt bad on a soul level to me. And I also wanted to create this sort of place I always wanted to work.

[00:13:29] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.

[00:13:30] Aaron Burnett: I worked in larger and larger companies-- and actually this was true in venture backed companies as well-- in most instances, what I discovered is that people were asked to be someone different at work than they were at home. We have a set of values that we all agree to societally. We believe in being helpful and generous and kind. We would help anyone on the street if they asked us. If a friend called, and asked for help, you wouldn't figure out how you were going to get paid for that help. You wouldn't be playing the angles. If you were doing something with a friend, if you were coming to an agreement, if you were writing letters to an exchange of letters to agree on plans, you wouldn't be crafting the language, looking for the way that they might transgress, and you could take advantage of them.

And yet, I found lots of instances where that was true in business, and that didn't make any sense to me. So I wanted to create a place that I wanted to work where the same values that you uphold that you believe in that are healthy in your personal life are the values that you adhere to in your professional life as well. And so the core values that have informed and continue to inform the way that we behave here are in part traditional. Integrity and stewardship are there, but so too is helpfulness and generosity and joyfulness.

We say to every prospective client, every current client, everybody who works here, "We exist to be helpful." That helpfulness is not constrained by a piece of paper. If a client asks us for help, we will help first. We'll be generous with our time and our expertise and our resources. We'll almost certainly do work that we're not being paid for explicitly. We'll look out for our client's best interests, but we'll look out, we'll ask them to look out for our best interests as well. And we say that explicitly.

And my experience is that in almost every instance, if you remind people of who they are at the beginning and that, "Hey, this is a personal relationship here. I know there's a contract and it's a business contract but as a person with my business I'm helping you as a person to achieve your aims as well. And anything we do that's detrimental has a personal impact and anything we do that's additive has a personal impact. And I'm going to try to make this the best experience for you and I'll rely on you to do the same with me."

You know it creates a much healthier relationship, and that's part of the reason we have such a long client tenure. Our clients very quickly know, "Oh, you're on my side. You're going to help me. I don't have to walk around with one hand holding my wallet. I don't have to worry every time I call and ask for help. I don't have to review my SOW."

[00:16:06] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.

[00:16:06] Aaron Burnett: Pretty quickly get to a place where neither of us remember what's in an SOW. And we're only going to go back and look at it if something really gets to the size that, "Oh no, that definitely wasn't a part of this initially. We should talk about this being a separate thing." And quite often, it's the client doing that, saying, " Doing this thing, we should pay you more for that."

And I love that. I see that as an indication of health. We do other things that are unconventional as well. We do have an account team. They focus on hospitality, not monetization. And one of the metrics that we track internally is laughter. So if we're in all of our client meetings, we're listening for laughter. We're not scoring it. We're not trying to make it happen X number of times, but I see the presence of laughter as an indication of ease and trust and health, and we really care about that, and so we invest in it.

[00:17:02] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Oh my goodness. I love all of the culture that you have so meticulously crafted, and it's so interesting because as you were talking about it, I was thinking how you had mentioned early on career wise you were saying, "Well, I, I learned by discovering what I didn't appreciate." And I'm wondering then if part of the culture that you have so carefully developed and cultivated over time is also partly, "Oh, I see what hasn't worked very well in the past. So now I'm really focusing in on something that is aligned" to who you are, obviously because you're the CEO, this is your business, but also just, "this is what works well for our client relationships and everyone who works with us."

[00:17:45] Aaron Burnett: Yeah, that's true on a number of levels. It's true in that, at times we see the way that other agencies or even writ large, other service organizations behave. Sometimes we bump up-- actually frequently we bump up against other agencies, particularly in large client situations. And we're really explicit in saying we're never going to try to poach business from another agency because we just don't think that's very nice. You have to behave in a very mercenary way to make that happen. You have to undercut someone. And so instead, we talk about creating the conditions that make people want to work with us. So we'll work hard to create the conditions that show us to be expert and clearly demonstrate the value that we can deliver, but we're not going to say, in contrast to those people over there.

[00:18:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes.

[00:18:32] Aaron Burnett: And there's a difference. And so, we come back to our values on that. We also, you're right in that the impetus for the culture came from me, but I also have a strong belief that everyone who comes here should add something to the culture and they are free to express the culture in their own way. Some of those ways might not be comfortable to me the ways that I would think you might go about doing this, but they're great for other people, right? And there are things in the company rights that are kind of like that where I know a majority people love this thing. It's important culturally. It doesn't do anything for me, but that's okay.

And then we also have learned-- I joke that you get to make a new mistake every day and that's a joke. It's also pretty true. I make lots of mistakes. I have made cultural mistakes over the years that were very well intentioned and have been costly, either financially or culturally. I think that, you know, there are byproducts of a culture like ours that are behavioral. If you're going to be helpful and generous and pursue joy in your daily work, then the byproducts should be that you also are, you know, kind and gentle, and that you extend grace to people when they mess up.

And those are great things, but taken to extreme, they also can be damaging things. And there have been times when I've taken them to extreme, when I thought with a, let's say an employee who wasn't performing well, but I had a great deal of empathy for. I would want to give them many chances and think, "Well, surely, okay, if I explained it one more time but different, or if someone else gave them clearer direction, or we did something else, we're going to get there from here." thinking, "Well, this is very kind to them. I'm giving them more runway. And it's good culturally as well. This is the right, sort of the moral decision to make."

And in retrospect, that was totally wrong. It wasn't actually kind to them because we also communicate frequently. They knew where they stood. They knew they weren't performing. And this just extended the non performance in a lot of instances. It was also not kind to their team members because they had to fix the work or do the extra work. It was frustrating to them to see that their merit wasn't held in higher esteem, treated differently, that they were getting less attention than a person who was underperforming. And it took a long time for me to learn that. Other people told me I was doing that wrong for years.

And in fact, there's a great book that we have used, that you're probably familiar with, called "Radical Candor" that really speaks to the importance of being quite direct, but in a kind way. And there is, there are four quadrants described in that book for different sorts of styles. And there's one just for me, I think, called Ruinous Empathy. And that's where I lived for a while. Super nice, very empathetic. But sometimes a bad result.

[00:21:34] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. It's a great book. Highly recommend it for anyone eager to improve communication and how to give feedback and whatnot.

[00:21:42] Aaron Burnett: Right, yeah. We call it telling the kind truth. You can say a hard thing, but in a nice way.

[00:21:49] Lindsey Dinneen: Indeed. Indeed. And we all need that. We need that personally. We need to be able to give that. So that's incredible. So, now, specifically with medtech companies-- which I know you've chosen to really spotlight in addition to your healthcare organizations that you work with-- what major challenges or common challenges do you see medtech companies have when they're starting to think about-- well, maybe they haven't even gotten to a really good marketing plan yet because, you know, at first maybe they're just building, building and they haven't even thought, "Oh, I'm not quite sure how we're going to communicate about this." But just in general, what are some of the major challenges or common challenges that you see MedTech companies having with their marketing and how can you help? How can we help?

[00:22:30] Aaron Burnett: Yeah. Huh. There are a couple of key challenges. One is figuring out messaging that resonates and drives performance. And a mistake that we often see is that messaging is viewed as static rather than iterative. It has always been the case that constant testing has real value, outsized value, particularly in digital advertising. It is exponentially true today that constant iteration and tweaking and tuning in messaging and in creative is absolutely essential to driving performance. And what also is true is that messaging and creative increasingly help you find your audience.

So, if you're in a company that is highly regulated, that is governed by privacy regulations, that is perhaps governed by HIPAA regulations, you're significantly constrained in the data you have access to, the things that you can track. In the main, you can't really use third party tracking. It seems every week there is some sort of new announcement that further restricts the data to which you have access.

The latest announcement is Meta declaring that they are targeting sensitive industries and categories. And that in targeting those industries and categories, they're going to block certain types of data, and the data that they're blocking in the main is conversion data. And so, you're blind with regard to whether anybody actually did the thing you needed them to do. Did they sign up for a trial? Did they complete a lead form? Did they ask for follow up?

If you're using a conventional approach to those sorts of things, if you're using certainly their tracking, which I hope nobody is doing anymore, then that data just goes away on some date. But as you lose fidelity of the data and as you take into account sort of the more meta issue, not Meta the platform, but the global issue of cookie deprecation and privacy settings in browsers and the fact that already about 40 percent of the third party data that you would have gotten through browser signals is gone. You've lost fidelity.

So the way that you find an audience now, particularly in a data constrained environment, is through what you put into market. It's messaging variation, and it's through really significant creative variation, not one ad, two ads, three ads, like old school conversion rate optimization, but 15 ads. 15 different creative concepts with variation of messaging that look very different.

And as you do that systematically over time, you allow the algorithm to both optimize performance, and those algorithms work very well now, but increasingly-- and this is particularly true again on Meta which we find to be really powerful when done well for medical device clients-- you find that you don't just optimize the creative. In that optimization, the creative finds your audience for you. You're able to tune your creative to the audience that performs for you and continue to iterate in terms of both audience targeting and creative.

So first there's, there is a need to test into all of this. And there is intensive testing at the beginning of the process, but there's continuous testing, perhaps at a lower velocity or intensity, even as you go along. It doesn't stop. You don't get to a point where, "Oh good, we're on cruise control. We've got the ad that works. We've got the PPC that works. Everything is working well."

It's just constant iteration because it is algorithmically driven and because in the algorithms, you know you can think of this in terms of social media. In social media, I think people are familiar with algorithmic fatigue. If your algorithm in a personal feed on a social platform didn't change, didn't refresh fairly frequently, you get really bored with what you're seeing. The same is true in the platforms. And so we find creative fatigue, even with creative that performs super well, happens fast-- like a week, ten days, something like that. And the fall off isn't subtle. It's you're going along and you do that. It's a big drop. So it's constant iteration.

The second thing that we find is a lack of, I was going to say a lack of sophistication with regard to data strategy. It's actually more often the absence of data strategy. I think for a long time data strategy didn't need to be foundational to marketing, even to digital marketing. If you think of digital advertising or even organic forms of digital marketing, the platforms did the work for us. You targeted audiences in the various advertising and social platforms. You got all your data through analytics. You could see what was happening in search through search console. Perhaps you use some third party platforms as well.

But what is true now in a data constrained environment is that the most important signal, the signal that delivers greatest value, isn't the signal that's in the platform. It's the signal that's probably in your CRM. It's the one that tells you that a lead converted, someone actually went into trying a device, or they actually became revenue generating. So you need a strategy at a system, at a platform level, to bring all of that data together and to normalize it in a manner that enables it to be evaluated and analyzed as a corpus of data that enables you to see the entire user journey.

You need a strategy around naming conventions in advertising that allows you to bring that in a way that can be integrated with CRM data and other analytics data or other platform data. You need a first party data strategy, because in a data constrained environment, in a tracking constrained environment where you can't rely on third party data in the same way, audience targeting and even optimization now rely substantially on first party data. It's the data you own that you have permission to use, or on zero party data. Well, you can't put that in a public database. That has to go in a purpose built data warehouse that has been developed for privacy sensitive industries.

And so, in our case, we created a HIPAA compliant data warehouse and a BI practice on top of that that gives our analysts the ability to view the customer journey in entirety, to see people as they move through sort of the prospect funnel, and to optimize for the conversion step that isn't in the platform but delivers business value. And then to use the insights that they glean there to optimize in a platform without sharing data, which is the key.

You're able to know, and this is something for people to remember, despite all the increased privacy regulations and constraints, as a website owner, as long as you have the right data environment, meaning the data you collect is in a HIPAA compliant environment, if you're governed by HIPAA, certainly in a privacy sensitive environment, even if you're not, you can collect full fidelity data regarding what people are doing on your site. You can't share it with a third party platform, you can't send it to Meta, you can't send it to Google, but you're able to know everything that you knew before, so long as you collect it in the right way, and evaluate it in the right way.

And our experience is, the privacy regulations, despite being uncomfortable and alarming and forcing a lot of intense activity up front to create a new systemic approach, new infrastructure connections and new data strategies, actually yield a much better business outcome. We can drive better performance with first party data. We drive more business value with first party data than we did when we were doing it the easy way and using platforms for targeting and optimization.

[00:30:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, so your company really helps to bridge the gap between what maybe, if you're not into the nitty gritty details, say we're speaking with somebody who's developed a device what they may have learned as, as far as like Marketing 101, but it is so different when you have, like you said, very specifically protected industries and they have a lot of regulation and we have to be really careful with how we talk about things. So your company is really helping bridge that gap between what we may have all been taught and kind of know in the back of our head versus here's the actual reality of the situation today. And you're keeping on top of all of those regulations.

[00:31:08] Aaron Burnett: True. And then, you know, because we concentrate on the medical device industry, we also are highly attuned to what language we can and cannot use. And we know, alright, we need creative variation, but we also understand that we can't just test anything. That we need to be very careful with language, we have to use language that's approved, it needs to come from certain sources and not from others. If it's new it has to go through a certain approval process. So, we end up creating a lot of efficiency by simply knowing how it all works and having a lot of experience with needing to create new ad variations that win easy approval and can very quickly be put into market.

[00:31:50] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, of course. Now, you know, in working with MedTech and you've chosen again, some very specific niches, which I love. Have you had any moments that really stand out as, "I'm working with this client and I am in this industry and I am realizing, 'Wow, I am really in my element.' I am here for a reason." It just sort of stands out at this moment that matters.

[00:32:15] Aaron Burnett: Yeah. One of the clients we've worked with for a very long time has an insulin monitoring and delivery device. We worked with them when they were sort of mid sized, but also kind of looking for market fit in their digital marketing was dormant. Almost dormant. I'd put it on the verge of dormant. It wasn't doing well. So, we started on a series of projects with them, and they started quite small, and very quickly were able to deliver a lot of performance for them.

So, the first year, we increased lead generation by just under 500 percent for them, which was super meaningful and exciting, and enabled us to start this very long term relationship that is broad and multifaceted now. What I've loved about working with them, and we were talking about this when we first got online, is that the people who work there really care about the people they serve. And as a matter of fact, there is almost a universality in that the people who work there either have close friends or family members who deal with diabetes. And so it's not a commercial endeavor. I mean, it is, but it's also a very personal endeavor and they're aware and convinced-- and I think they're right-- because I also have a close family member who uses their device, that their device makes such a difference to the quality of life for the people involved.

The difference that I've seen in this family member is that she went, I think, from being aware, moment to moment, "I'm diabetic and I need to keep track of this, and there are some things I need to do at certain points throughout the day," to "That's not really a main thing I have to think about. I mean, I have to be kind of aware of it, and, you know, I've got an app on my phone, and I do have this device, but this is not something that is at the forefront of my brain. I can think about other things, and this is very much in the background."

And that's a really big deal. And we feel the same. I know I have been to public events. I went to a high school play and one of the performers was very clearly wearing this device and not hiding it. It was super visible just a part of her life, not anything she felt embarrassed about. And I felt proud of that, even though I have, I play such a small part in that. But, just felt proud that she felt comfortable, and she was a lead in a school play, and it was a good play, and a big deal, and there were hundreds of people in the audience. And so, to see the impact of something like that, and to have confidence that the work that we do actually makes a positive difference in the world, is soul satisfying.

[00:35:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that story. That's, that is really special and impactful. And I always think, you know, we don't always get those moments of realizing the impact of our work. I agree with you, even in the small, like, "Oh my gosh, I had a tiny little piece to play in it." But it just makes you think, "Oh my goodness, what I do really does matter. It does make a difference." And so to get that opportunity to have seen it in action and in such a positive light is incredible. So yeah, I appreciate you sharing that.

[00:35:29] Aaron Burnett: It's comfortable. It feels so good to market for clients when you're sure that what you're putting in the marketplace is really good for them. And what you're trying to do is just make sure they're aware of this good thing. That's so different than marketing for a client where you're sure they want to make more money and you're not sure that anybody who buys this thing-- does it matter? Does it not matter? Does anyone really need this thing? You know, that's a very different feeling than being confident that the thing you're promoting will make a positive difference in their lives. So, yeah.

[00:36:09] Lindsey Dinneen: Amen to that. And that's a really interesting thing about marketing that can be divisive a little bit among people who aren't as familiar with the industry or as comfortable. And so it's really nice to know, you know, marketing can, and is very often, used in a very positive way to highlight the important things 'cause you know, as I try to remind my lovely engineer friends is you can make the most wonderful thing in the world, but if nobody knows about it, that's that. You know, that you're just, you're stuck. So, so it is important to have marketing and to have that bridge that gap and make it known. But to just know, like you said, that it's going to make a positive impact is just wonderful. So yeah, I love that.

So pivoting the conversation a little bit, just for fun, imagine that you were to be offered a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be within your industry, it can be totally separate. What would you choose to teach?

[00:37:07] Aaron Burnett: Oh, the power of culture.

[00:37:09] Lindsey Dinneen: Ooh.

[00:37:10] Aaron Burnett: And if I had to focus more specifically on the power of generosity in business. My experience, our experience throughout the history of this company, is that helpfulness and generosity are our BD strategy. We're not trying to convince anybody of anything. We're trying to give as much away as we can be as generous as we can. And we find that if you help people, if you are generous and if you do it without expectation-- and I can't fully explain why this is true. I have some guesses.

If you help people without expectation, you just help them because you're helpful, and that's the right thing to do, and you do that for a person, that good things happen out of that. I think I can explain it. I can understand it more mechanically. I might bump into you. We may or may not know one another, but we get chatting, and you tell me you've got a problem, and I know the answer to that problem. It's also a service that I offer. And I could certainly play the angles and try to get an engagement to get you to pay me for that service. I could just help you. And you may or may not ever become a client, but I've helped you.

And my experience with that is that we've gotten referrals from people who have never been clients. And sometimes those referrals occur years later, like long enough that we only vaguely remember who that person was and what we did for them. But I think that being generous, you can't tell someone to trust you. But you can behave in a trustworthy way. You can't tell someone in a way that inspires confidence, "Look, I'm gonna look out for your best interests. I'm not gonna try and pick your pocket." But you can behave that way. And you can communicate it with your actions.

So, I think it's interesting to consider what business and society would be like if the orientation was toward generosity rather than the orientation being toward protection. When we write SOWs, for the longest time we wrote the most naive SOWs. And we did it intentionally. A, because, practically, we're a small agency working with big clients. And if somebody wants to take advantage of us, they probably can because I have a limited attorney budget, and I don't really want to spend my budget on that anyway.

But the other reason is that I that seems to have integrity with what we say. We're going to be helpful and generous. We're going to do work you're probably not going to pay us for. We'll look out for you. You look out for us. We're not going to get you with business terms. We're not going to squeeze you with scope of work, that sort of thing. So, let's not kid each other. Let's not now create this document that's super conventional and has five pages of terms and conditions and that sort of thing.

It's honestly only as we've worked with larger and larger organizations where their legal teams won't let them sign an SOW that's as goofy as ours were. You have to have certain terms and conditions, and if we don't provide them, they send us theirs. We don't like theirs as much as we like ours, so. Yeah. Yeah. So I think generosity is a tremendous engine for very healthy business growth and very healthy personal relationships.

[00:40:30] Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely agreed. And how do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world?

[00:40:36] Aaron Burnett: As kind.

[00:40:37] Lindsey Dinneen: The world needs a lot more of that, so I'll take that answer any day. And then final question, what is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?

[00:40:50] Aaron Burnett: Oh, I have two daughters. Yeah.

[00:40:54] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, excellent. Oh, that's wonderful. Family is important and special. That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much, first of all, for your incredible insights today, for your generosity, to your generosity of your time with us and diving into some really specific areas that, that med tech companies can think about, can be aware of as they're even seeking somebody to help them with their marketing. I really appreciate you being open and willing to talk about some of those those nuances. So thank you very much for that.

We are so honored to be making a donation on your behalf today to Feeding America, which works to end hunger in the United States by partnering with food banks, food pantries, and local food programs to bring food to people facing hunger and also they advocate for policies that create long term solutions to hunger. So thank you so much for choosing that charity to support. And gosh, I just wish you the most continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.

[00:41:55] Aaron Burnett: Thank you. I really appreciate it. You too. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it.

[00:41:59] Lindsey Dinneen: Good. Absolutely. Well, and thank you also to our listeners for tuning in. And if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.

[00:42:14] Ben Trombold: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium. Velentium is a full-service CDMO with 100% in-house capability to design, develop, and manufacture medical devices from class two wearables to class three active implantable medical devices. Velentium specializes in active implantables, leads, programmers, and accessories across a wide range of indications, such as neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, cardiac management, and diabetes management. Velentium's core competencies include electrical, firmware, and mechanical design, mobile apps, embedded cybersecurity, human factors and usability, automated test systems, systems engineering, and contract manufacturing. Velentium works with clients worldwide, from startups seeking funding to established Fortune 100 companies. Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.