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

Alright, Roger thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One thing we always find fascinating is how differently entrepreneurs think about revenue growth and cost reductions – both can be powerful ways to improve profitability. What do you spend more of your time and energy on?

In my marketing consulting business, it is easy to quickly get more overhead than you have revenue. Gaining long-term clients is the goal as that will lock in more consistent and dependable revenue. Bringing on new business is expensive and time consuming. It is best to try to grow revenue with the current client base while scaling overhead to meet this demand.

A business owner being able to scale is essential, but scaling too fast can lead to cash flow problems which lead to a world of other internal issues. Being able to operate lean is essential when a young or a small business who needs to remain agile and able to be flexible. If one project is not working, or the revenue is not what was expected, than it is important to seek out that next project before you hit a decline in revenue.

Cutting costs is something I rarely focus on, if I have to cut costs than I need to evaluate why I was bringing on these costs in the first place. Bringing on a resource for a project is one thing, but if still using the resource afterwards and not getting the revenue to replace it would be when I most often will cut a cost. For example a staff or software that was helpful for that contract, but no longer valuable for others.

Having a low overhead and maintaining low costs has been a priority, but i have not had to do a lot of cost cutting since I focus on getting revenue in vs squeezing every penny possible.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My service is digital marketing consulting and is an evolution of my degree for Marketing Communications from Emerson College. After graduating in 2010 with a degree on print, outdoor, tv, radio as the main focal points of advertising I realized I needed to get to the future of advertising.

Now I am focused on innovative tools and techniques to help clients expand their reach, improve messaging, increase lead / revenue amounts, and support overall efficiency in marketing operations.

Many of the small to medium size businesses do not have the budget or team to operate more complicated marketing strategies and the addition of my support am able to execute at a far higher level without having the costs of a full-time employee. Often just a single person is not enough to complete a marketing campaign, so being able to build a team of contractors and internal staff is essential for marketing efficiency.

SEO, Email Marketing, Blogging, Form Collections, Video, Social, Paid Ads, Cold Outreach, and other inbound / online strategies are my specialty and i’m always excited to try out a new option for my clients.

Every first consultation is free and I can guarantee that we can come up with multiple solutions and improvements to their marketing efforts in 30 min or less.

One of the main differences, is that I am able to quickly insert myself into the majority of marketing teams to find value and fill in gaps, due to my versatility and overall understanding of the current marketing landscape.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Early on in my career I was working on a startup idea and business with my future marketing agency co-founder. We had a great idea , we were obviously still ahead of our time for the technology adoption and were not ready to seek our first round of funding.

While we had a working and installed prototype with solid business plan, we decided that it was not the big idea we wanted to run with and wanted to focus on what was creating capital in the short term.

I had a few small client projects and was slowly building that consulting business, which helped fund the start up. We instead focused our efforts on scaling the services and clientele of the agency. We then merged with another agency to create a bigger and stronger agency. It all was able to compound on itself and build until we found models that were successful.

While there is less of an upside potential with marketing consulting, it gave me the flexibility to learn and grow out of college, instead of having to push for a large cash infusion. This type of longevity and pivoting was something that continued to be a theme in the consulting business and it has continued to evolve into the business it is today.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Many times in my career I’ve been reminded of the value of a filter. In my first real suit and tie internship I had to have a sit down to go over what is appropriate office language. Then later in my career, as a manger I reacted poorly to an unfortunate situation, and caused a significant backlash in the company.

I have to remind myself to not respond quickly and to digest before responding when it is a particularly sensitive topic. Often we are reactionary in our language and that can not allow us to respond in the way we wish we did.

Especially once you are a manager of others, what you say can be taken very different than you expect and amplified. You must work to have the emotional intelligence to pause and react positively or to at a minimum help re-clarify your communication in a calm tone. You may slip up in conversation, it’s how you handle it then after that truly matters.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tower.agency/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogertower/

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