What's up, DTC. Pod?

Today we're joined by Nigel Thomas, who's the founder of Alpha Inbound. So, Nigel, I'll let you kick us off. Tell us a little bit about how you guys work with brands and how you got started with Alpha Inbound.

Yeah, let me just interject there for a second. I am actually not the founder. That's Josh Graham, and he's our head of strategy. He gets our partners amazing results. I just get to talk about it on podcasts. Obviously, I do things behind the scenes, but I'm actually the CEO of the company working on the business development side. But I'm very heavily involved in the fulfillment. We have a very, like, a tight knit small team.

So again, our communication is something that separates us to all these other agencies. And that's why, even though I'm the CEO and I'm not necessarily in the ad accounts all day, every day, I still feel like I have that wealth of knowledge. And I don't know about yourself, but this is incredibly impactful when you talk to founders and you can really understand and obviously go into the back end of their business, which we'll talk about today, all the different areas. And the last thing I'll say on that and how we approach everything we do and this encompasses our whole strategy, is we think macro, not micro. So, ROAS, that's a micro thing. We talk about macro. We're talking about everything across the business. Sure, we're a marketing agency.

We want to talk to you about supply chain. We want to talk to you about customer service. We want to talk to you about all aspects of your business because we know you're going to look at your business like that as a business owner. So we want to be on the same page length and then ultimately, obviously, we're going to be more of a valuable asset for the company, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and that was one of the reasons that we were interested in having you guys on today to talk about is I liked your perspective. That's the way we think about building businesses. And I think when you think about building businesses the right way and not just saying we're an ad agency and focusing on scaling up one specific channel and letting that drive growth, but as opposed to building a whole holistic approach out, like we're all about that. So in this episode, one thing I want to do is kind of break down your frameworks for how you approach working with different brands and what that kind of process looks like to lead to success. Right. So why don't we just start from the perspective of who are the types of brands you work with and what kind of got you started in building out your own philosophy for working with these brands.

Yeah, 100%. And by the way, before I dive into that, just on your note, from the business owner perspective, and I think a lot of marketers can learn from this and especially other brands using agencies, I have a theory and I don't be interested to hear your opinion, Blaine, on this, which is most marketers, they enjoy marketing. Of course they do. They enjoy creative, they enjoy the ad spend, they enjoy scaling the accounts, all these sexy kind of things in business. Now, marketing is an extremely important aspect of business, but it's only one aspect of business. Operations, finance, recruitment, all of these other things are extremely important. And from the conversations I've had, and I don't want to put people in a box here, but a lot of marketers, one, they don't have the knowledge of those other areas of business. But the thing is, even though they're exposed to that a lot because they probably work in the, like see these different departments and talk to those people, they don't necessarily enjoy it.