We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lee Roth a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lee, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The Actionists is a marketing consultancy that brings a business growth mindset to brand building and marketing.

The Actionists was built by former marketers Pio Schunker (ex Coke/Samsung/Ogilvy) and Lee Roth (ex Coke/PayPal/Wieden) who saw there was a lack of strategic muscle in agencies as agencies get more junior and in the consultancies who delivered analytics without the thinking that goes with it.

The Actionists model brings together former CMO’s, CSO’s and Executive Creative Directors in a way that is codified, efficient and results oriented.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I originally went into advertising by chance. I was studying at Salisbury University and the Dean of the Business School, Dr. Beebe and I were discussing a potential internship opportunity I was offered by Disney. He quickly advised me not to do it (your working at the park at minimum wage) and offered to make an introduction to an alumni at Ogilvy & Mather – a big advertising agency in NYC. I was later offered an internship and then a job, and that’s what brought me into the industry.

Today, my partner Pio Schunker and I built The Actionists because we didn’t think marketing was working hard enough to drive business results. We built The Actionists, a marketing consultancy to make marketing more actionable to the business. We’ve had the pleasure to work on some iconic brands solving all kinds of marketing strategy challenges, from building growth strategies for Colgate to creating brand strategies for Newell Brands to developing marketing capabilities for Kimberly Clark.

We’ve built a model that removes all of the bs associated with the marketing services industry and replaced it with codified solutions, expert talent, all done at speed.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Most entrepreneurs fail before they succeed. I fortunately followed this formula. I say fortunately because every experience in my career has taught me valuable lessons that I use today. My first business Consider & Done was an advertising on demand business that eventually failed. A few lessons I learned:

1. Partners – ensure you have the right partners that have the same level of commitment and hunger/hustle as you.
2. Capital – whatever capital you think you need, you need more. Much more.
3. Patience & impatience – you need both. Patient – it takes time for a business to grow. It will not be an overnight success. Plan for that. Impatient – hustle like you never hustled before. Use your impatience to keep pushing to grow faster, smarter and better.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met my cofounder Pio Schunker at Ogilvy & Mather (although he didn’t remember that encounter) through a mutual friend. We got to know each other at The Coca-Cola company where he was my boss. Pio led marketing communications for the Coca-Cola company in the US. Besides being my boss, I always had deep admiration for him as being the smartest marketer I’ve ever met. He has an intellectual curiosity, amazing creative instincts and a drive for perfection that I hadn’t seen before or since.

Over the years, we went from boss/employee to friends with a mutual respect. I consider myself very fortunate today to call Pio my cofounder, but more importantly my friend.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theactionists.co
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theactionists/

Image Credits

Alice Agnello